Getting Used to Living in China

Getting used to living in China takes many days and many events:

• Survived the Chinese New Year handing out many red envelopes and eating out with the families. Sammy has received almost ¥2,000 (~$330) from families and friends, so she’s happy and she’s keeping all her money herself. This is not family money!
• Survived the extreme cold weather. We have been told that the weather this year has been extremely weird. Normally, it would be cold around the Chinese New Year and then soon after that, the weather would turn warm and nice, especially around March. Well, CNY this year had been quite warm (in the 70’s) and very pleasant. However, soon after that, several cold fronts moved in and the weather had been very cold. The last few days have gotten a little warmer but not too much sun still. This has been extremely difficult for us to get used to, especially moving from Chiang Mai. How I miss the sunshine there!
• Getting Sammy to a new school. Right after the CNY, Sammy started school in Zhuhai International School (ZIS). It’s in Zhuhai, a town next to Zhongshan, on an island. The school building was a former hotel. Sammy takes the school bus every day and it’s about 40 minutes from where we live. So far, she seems quite happy there. Her class only has about 8 students including her. At first, we were worried about the quality of the education as it seemed very similar to the Chiang Mai school, but we met with her teacher a few weeks ago and she seemed to have a handle on things so we’ll see how things go later.
• Falling sick and getting better. Shortly after the CNY, Sammy got a fever, and it reached almost 104F at one point. The temperature subsided after a few days but the cough continued for a few more days. A couple days after Sammy fell sick, Gary got the flu too, and his was much worse and it lasted about 2 weeks! He just felt better about a week ago. Luckily, so far I seem to have escaped the flu myself so I am keeping my fingers crossed.
• Surviving a car accident! Yes, another one. We hadn’t had a car accident in the U.S. for many years, and two so far in less than 6 months, one in Thailand and one in China. The new car we bought had barely gotten 200km and we were on our way to get the license plate put on (last Friday, March 14) when we were hit by another car from the right hand side when we were trying to exit the highway. Both car doors on the right side were dented. Even though the driver who hit us were speeding, it was 100% our fault (and responsibility in terms of insurance payment) because we were making an unsafe turn. Gary was not happy about that, but we were thankful that no body was hurt. Again, Sammy was not in the car with us so that was good too, We are waiting for the replacement doors to come in before dropping the car off for repair. Apparently in China, we’ll have to pay for the repairs ourselves first and then get the money from the insurance company. They will deposit the reimbursement into our account directly. We’ll see how well that works. Needless to say, Gary says that he’ll remind himself to drive slowly in China, and I don’t want to drive myself at this point. We’ll have to get a lot more used to the roads and the somewhat manic drivers. In the U.S., student drivers are the worst and one has to look out for them. Here in China, they seem to be the safest drivers and one has to look out for all the other drivers.
• Surviving the air pollution. Compared to most of China, Zhongshan’s Air Quality Index (AQI) is pretty good. Since we’ve been here about 7 weeks ago, most of the days have ratings of “excellent” or “good”, and maybe a couple days were mildly polluted. However, we have found that our car gets dirty and dusty very quickly even when parked underground, so there must be something there still. On the whole, I  have been feeling okay and Gary says that sometimes his chest feels a little heavy. I am glad that we are not in Beijing nor Shanghai with their crazy AQI numbers, but we think that we’ll need to get better air filters still. There are just too many cars on the road and too many factories producing things.
• Getting used to slow and inconsistent internet services. We are supposed to be getting 4-6Mb/sec speed but a lot of time things just load very slowly. In order to get to some sites, I have to use a VPN sometimes even though those sites have no political contents. WordPress is a hit or miss and I am never sure when it will work. Just a few days ago, our internet service went down and it took the ISP 3 days to fix the issues in our area. I should give myself a pat for continuing with this blog 🙂
• Buying things on Taobao, the Chinese version of Amazon. You can pretty much find anything there, except for Western OTC medicines. The deliveries have been pretty quick as well. Needless to say, I have become a poster child for them as I have been getting deliveries almost every day for over a week now, sometimes 5-6 boxes a day. I even bought the usage of my own farm land for a year! In theory, we will be getting our customized vegetables and fresh eggs delivered to us every 2 weeks for a year. The first delivery is supposed to start next month, so we’ll see how well that works. However, I bought this on sale so I paid less than ¥600 (~$90) for this, so I figure I can’t go too wrong.
• Finding a tennis coach for Sammy. Zhongshan is a “small” city (by Chinese standards) and finding a good tennis coach is not an easy thing. Tennis is an elite sport in China and it has become more and more popular in the last two years. A lot of wealthy parents pay for lessons and it’s not cheap. We were told that if we wanted to find a professional coach who would be teaching for a pro track would be pretty difficult as most people here were doing it for recreational purposes. Through friends, we’ve gotten in touch with a company who hires foreign coaches and teaches in our development too. We met with the head coach on last Sunday, a Chinese-American coach with pro experience and has been taking kids to pro tournaments. We don’t know whether Sammy can turn pro or not, but she seems to have some promise according to her USA coach so we should at least let her try. The  coach really liked Sam and we are starting the first lesson this Thursday.
• Surviving the Chinese hospitals and visiting a Hong Kong one. Gary has been having long lasting headaches and so far he had been through all three main hospitals in Zhongshan and he has not been impressed by any of them. Some of them have better equipment than others, but the technicians did not seem that well trained. Today, we went to a private hospital in Hong Kong to do a more complete check up. Gary felt much more comfortable there and everything seemed normal. Longer term, we think that quality healthcare is definitely going to be our big concern. Going to HK for emergencies is going to be difficult.

While there are still many things that we need to get used to and discover about China, despite a lot of these problems, we like the fact that Sammy is developing a stronger relationship with her grandparents and her Chinese is improving. We also like the entrepreneurial energy here, and the diverse backgrounds of people (local and foreign). Everyone seems to have different stories to tell and it is fascinating to learn about them. I (and Sammy too) also like the ability to explore my hometown specialities on the rare occasions that Gary is not out with me. Most of all, I like spending more quality time together as a family. Even if we can’t achieve much else, this has not been time wasted.

Halloween Party in Chiang Mai

Our car had been in the shop for about a month since the car accident. We rented a car for that time period and were to return it this morning. We were supposed to get our car back yesterday, but were told that it wouldn’t be ready until this afternoon at 3pm. We extended our lease for that period of time.

When we checked the progress yesterday afternoon, the car seemed far from finished, so we were a bit skeptical about getting it back today, but they assured us that it would be ready by 3pm.

At 2:30pm, we were passing by the dealership so Gary dropped in to check on the progress, and there were still much to be done. The car did not even have the bumpers on. We were told that it wouldn’t be ready until 4pm. We tried to call the car rental company for a later drop off, but were told that the person was already on his way to the dealership to pick up the car.

Oh well, so we returned the car to the rental company by 3pm and got our deposit back (we had to pay for the car rental ourselves even though the accident was not our fault. The insurance paid for the car fixes). We then went in to the dealership to wait for our car.

The whole dealership was decorated with orange and black for a Halloween celebration! I remembered receiving a text message from the dealership before regarding a Halloween party for customer appreciation but never paid attention. Oh well, since we had to wait for the car, we might as well enjoyed the process.

Inside the dealership, there were tables setup with drinks and deserts. There was also a tarot card reader stand. There were quite a few people sitting inside with heaves of food on the table. We have been told that Thai people don’t pay much attention to the exact time, except for food.

Cupcake

Green bean paste mochi

Outside the dealership, there were food stalls making fresh food.

Fried oysters with egg

Shrimp Pad Thai

 

Coconut crepe

Fried meat balls with cheese inside

Some of the employees came by and saying Thai to us, encouraging us to get some food etc. (I presumed). Since we had nothing better to do, we ended up doing quite a bit of food tasting. Samantha was quite happy. Even the owner’s wife came by and talked to us in Thai. She switched to English after we’d told her that we did not understand Thai and that we came from California. She said that a lot of Thai people wanted to visit California.

We finally got out car back around 5pm. It looks good from the outside but there are some issues still, but that’s for another day.

Visit to the Mae Rim Police Station

Mae Rim Police Station

I am sure that not many people would put visiting the police station as part of their adventure and/or part of the cultural experience while visiting another country. We have drawn up an “Adventure” list since two weeks ago, and the police station is definitely not on there. Nonetheless, we have the good fortune to visit one anyway.

Yesterday afternoon around 4:20pm, we were on our way to pick up Sammy from school when a bad accident happened. Our car was badly damaged, both on the rear and on the left front side. I couldn’t actually open my side of the door. Furthermore, both front seats were bent at and angle. Luckily, no one involved in the accident was physically hurt (at least not much).

I was probably the one most affected physically, and my left leg muscle was hurting. Gary told me that I could try to apply some heat on the muscle. I put some Tiger Balm on the left thigh last night and it has been better today, though it still hurts a bit, it is not as stiff.

Everything happened so fast that we really did not know what to do. It obviously did not help that we could barely speak a word of Thai. We called several people we knew, and we got through to our car salesperson R. She was very nice and tried to speak to the guy that hit us.

Soon, several policemen came and started taking statements. They all tried to speak to me in Thai until they found out that I was not Thai and couldn’t speak the language. Some of the officers seemed to speak a little bit of English. Gary was dealing with them mostly, while I was frantically trying to contact school to keep Samantha with them as we had no idea how long this would take. Thankfully, one of the teachers decided to take Samantha to his house (on campus) with him and we could call him when we got to school.

The policemen were all very nice. After having talking to some people and took down some statements (took pictures of the vehicles involved and IDs of everyone), Gary asked for permission to leave so that we could pick up Samantha. They let us go and told us to come back to the police station once we had Sammy.

Badly damaged as it was, the car was actually still functioning, to our amazement! We picked up Sammy, and the teacher even offered to keep Sammy overnight with his family and offered us his truck. How nice! We declined, but did ask for some strong tape to tape up the car a bit before driving.

By the time we got to the Mae Rim Police Station, it was about 6:30pm. We ended up spending a little over an hour there, telling the officer-in-charge and other different policemen again what happened. The police also helped us call the insurance company. There was a lot of waiting around. We did not really know what the purpose of the visit was, but was eventually told to return to the police station the next day at 1pm and the insurance guy would be there as well.

Tied and hungry, we got back to our housing development and went to the local restaurant for a quick dinner. Of course our good friend Murphy was with us the whole time, so the restaurant had sold out chicken already, which was pretty much all that Gary would eat. He ended up ordering a dish with seafood. It was way too spicy but he ate it. My dish came with an unusually small amount of seafood. Oh well, why we should have expected otherwise?

This morning, we dropped Samantha off in the morning and then drove to the dealership. R. helped us explained to the service department what happened. They would hold on to the car until we got the insurance paperwork to approve the repair. They though the repair would take a month. Gary was not entirely convinced that it could be fixed given the frame seemed to have been bent.

R. then drove us to a local car rental place so that we rented a Toyota Yaris for a month at 18,000฿. We were told that insurance would not cover this.

After lunch, I prepared an accident report on the computer (see below), hoping to help clarifying the matter a bit given our non-existing Thai.

We got to the Mae Rim Police Station again just a few minutes before 1pm. The Silver Truck guy was also there. We were talking to some new policemen on duty and our policeman also came out. Gary handed them the report and he tried to explain the situation again, emphasizing that we were not at fault at all. One of the policemen said that he could speak a little bit English and he had visited New York and Washington. He pulled up Google translator on his computer, and typed in Thai so that the English read, “The first car (Silver Truck) is not making a claim.”

After a little bit, the Black Truck guy walked in with his insurance agent and his entire family (it looks like) of several people. Some more talking among them and the police. They used the report we prepared and asked more questions etc. Unfortunately, even though our insurance guy was supposed to be there at 1pm as well, he was no where to be seen. After many phone calls and R.’s help, some one finally showed up, about 50 minutes later!

Our agent also did not speak hardly any English. We gave him a copy of the accident report that we prepared. He talked to the police and the other insurance guy. After a while, the Black Truck guy paid the police 400฿, and Gary was asked to sign a book for that 400฿. No one asked us for money though.

Some more time passed. After about 40 minutes, the Black Truck guy came over to Gary and said in English, “I am sorry.” They shoot hands and Gary gave him a hug. Our insurance guy came over with some more paperwork for Gary to sign but couldn’t explain what it was for. Gary called R. and she talked to the insurance guy on the phone. She told Gary that everything should be okay. The Black Truck was taking responsibility and it would be fine for Gary to sign the papers. So he signed it. The insurance guy said that he would take the paperwork to the dealership so that they could start the repair. When Gary asked him who would be paying, all we could get out from him was “no worries”.

With that, we shook hands with the policemen and the insurance guy and said our farewell to the police station. Everyone involved was really nice. the police included. I couldn’t help but feel bad for the Black Truck. He (his insurance) probably ended up paying most if not all of the costs, but the procuring cause was really the Silver Truck. People in Thailand just don’t seem to pay attention to the traffic, though they don’t mean any harm.

We were a bit shaken up yesterday after the accident. After all, it was the first big accident we have had in years! We were just grateful that no one was hurt. I couldn’t help but think of the saying, “Live each day as it were your last day.” If the truck behind us were a bit bigger or if it were traveling a bit faster, or if the driver were not wearing his seatbelt, it could have been our last day. Thankfully, Samantha was not with us either, not sitting in the back. There were just so many things to be thankful for.

If I were still working in the States, I would be questioning whether I was doing what I wanted to do if that were my last day on earth. However, we are now in Thailand and I am actively working on some business plan and trying to figure out what makes me happy and fulfilled, I don’t have any sense of regrets. I just pray that this will be our last accident!