slacking excuse #1: 798

As anyone keeping up with me daily knows, I haven't posted in a few days. I have had a friend from Songyuan visiting me in Tanggu and we have been going on adventures. It's been a crazy couple of days, during which nothing has worked out as planned, but everything has been awesome. He's leaving in the morning and I am gearing up for a really long weekend of teaching, which I am also very behind in lesson planning for, but I will share the first post about adventures tonight!

On Tuesday I met my friend in Beijing and we went to 798, which is a very cool little gallery district. We only had a few hours there and I could honestly spend a couple of days going through all of the little shops, galleries and cafes. 798 has been my favorite thing in China so far.

 

 

 

 

 

it was bound to happen

Yep, Korean sushi. First sushi in China

I have no clue what any of it was, I just ate it. Mom, don't have a heart attack.

next career move?!

This would be the section in which I have a short media buyer dork out, please feel free to skip :)

I see these out of home advertisements for Rising Sun Outdoor Media every time I leave the Beijing train station and they always remind me to post about media. I have yet to turn on a tv here, so I don't get exposed to any advertising there. Radio I pretty much only hear in cabs, so that's out as well. I don't read the paper and I have a VPN routing my internet through LA, so the only traditional media I have any exposure to here is out of home.


They have a lot of really large format outdoor here, really long billboards that go over a whole road, either on the side of a bridge over the road or stand alone, and they are both on freeways and surface streets. All of their billboards are static or that kind that has panels that turn to rotate the ad (not sure what this is called, we didn't have it in Phoenix). I find it kind of interesting that they don't have LED or anything, given the fact that they have so much random public "art" using LED and neons, and so many buildings with that kind of thing just built right in (kind of like PCH, but more neon than LED). And where there are billboards, there are always lots of billboards. Placement strategy has to be interesting too, almost the reverse of in the States. You want to surface level boards in order to reach the most people, because most people don't drive, not the freeway boards.


They also have these large inflatable signs or bridges that go over surface streets with text ads on them. Picture the inflatable wavy arm men that car dealers use, just longer and thicker and arched over a road.


Outside of those, they have a lot of fairly large format backlit signage (see above), all over the place. In malls, on buildings, etc.


I've been thinking about trying to find a media outlet or advertising agency to take a tour of here, just to check it out. Being a foreigner, I would think it wouldn't be too hard to get one to show me around. It would be very interesting!

a normal lunch

This was my morning. It felt great and very normal to be posted up at a restaurant by myself eating my one (delicious) dish for lunch and working, buuuut this is not normal here. The Chinese don't work in restaurants, they never order only one dish and they don't look like me. People were literally stopping outside the window and staring at me. C'est la vie, it made me happy regardless.

hot pot

My TA made us hot pot for lunch! For a girl that can't cook, this is awesome. Also the trade out for the banana split the other day. Win.

random pix: KFC book & Happiness for sale

When my TA and I go out now we're also on the constant lookout for KFCs just so I can shake my fist at them (I've pretty much stopped taking pictures of them though). The textbook I selected for my Business English class in Beijing today is from a series and I found this in another book of the series, which almost made me switch. Curse you KFC!

But seeing this business kind of balanced out that part of the trip for me :)

Beijing Books Building adventure

I'm reading "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" and "Are You There God? It's Me Margaret" with my two middle school tutor students and I had been "borrowing" the text for both online so far. My school owner sent my TA to Beijing today to actually buy the books, so I decided to tag along for adventure.

I discovered today that traveling with her is almost like traveling with another foreigner. People always want to scam me because I'm foreign. People always want to scam her because she is so very, very naive and it's very obvious. She has never lived on her own or really traveled on her own and she prefers to ask people questions to figure things out rather than look around for signage and instructions. She always impressed when I can figure out where we need to go and then I point out the English on a sign somewhere.

I had to tutor tonight at 5pm, so we had to get up pretty early and catch the 8:30am train to Beijing. We got to the train station right around 8am and heard that our train was sold out. Naturally we get up to the ticket counter though and, seeing a foreigner, first class tickets are suddenly available.

So we get to Beijing and our school owner tells us he'll meet us at the book store instead of picking us up; no biggie, we take the subway there. It. Was. Insanity. On the subway; so many people, in such a small space, an agoraphobic's absolute hell. We get to the bookstore and it's this monstrous building that is also absolutely packed with people. Being a big reader, I could have spent a week in there; my TA on the other hand, not so much with the reading.

"Beijing Books Building"

We find the books, school owner doesn't show, so we call and he says he'll pick us up when we're done and take us to lunch, but asks me to pick SAT study books for my tutoring students as well as Oral Business English textbooks and Comprehensive Business English textbooks for a government class I'm teaching beginning next weekend. Never in my life have I picked out a textbook. The girl I'm tutoring that's studying for the SAT is 12. I've never met the people in the government class so who knows what level they are or what their needs are. Eek. To top it off, the book store isn't organized very well (or at all) and there are rows upon rows of textbooks, which naturally have only Chinese on the spines. Now that was a project and a half. I'm pretty happy with my choices though, and he was too so, yay me.

We finished with that and then he tells us to get a cab and meet him at the restaurant. We went to The Peking Duck for lunch, which I'd actually heard of before and was pretty good. Then we headed home. Or tried to. The 3:30pm train from Beijing to Tanggu was sold out when we got to the train station, so we opted to take the 3:30pm train to Tianjin and cab back to Tanggu in order to catch my tutoring student on time. The line for cabs when we got to Tianjin was over an hour wait (which would have put me around 45 minutes late for tutoring), so we decided to take a bus. Which we then had to take a taxi back to our apartment from. And took forever. I think we finally got back at 7pm, only two hours late. I was supposed to tutor until 9pm so she stayed until 10pm.

Then I had a full night of lesson planning ahead of me. I tutor the labor union guy tomorrow morning for an hour and a half and he's a very quick learner and goes through material like nobody's business. Then I have the middle school girl from 5pm to 9pm. I also wanted to get a jump on my lesson planning for the week because I have my first visitor coming out on Tuesday! I only work 5pm to 8:30pm Tuesday through Thursday, so a Chinese friend from Songyuan is coming and we're going to go on adventures around Tianjin, I'm very excited. As much as I love my TA, it'll be nice to have another non-student here, and it'll give her a chance to catch up on work (she's very excited about this part as well, ha).