There were a number of surprises the first night at the hotel. I felt a little like I was in a reality TV show - Survivor: china tourist. Part of it was probably just being dead tired. It's actually a nice hotel, as you can see from the lobby above. But there are nicer hotels closer to the main tourist attractions. This one was chosen because it is right aroung the corner from (5 min walk) the offices we'll visit. I haven't seen any westerners in this hotel or the surrounding streets.
When we first checked in, the rooms were very hot and muggy. Not too surprising, just need to find the thermostat. Took a little while. There is a funky wood paneled master control area with dimmers and switches for all the room lights, the radio and AC controls. AC wouldn't seem to come on. Jian called in help, but we slowly realized the AC was on, you just couldn't tell. At least not immediately. This is not the land of the big honkin' AC. It's a central system and you can feel it if you put your hand up to the vent, but you can't really hear or feel if it comes on otherwise. It does a decent job after 15 minutes or so.
In a bit we all went to dinner downstairs. When we returned to the rooms, mine was pitch black and hot and stuffy again. When we were ushered into our rooms earlier, whoever let me in (I can't recall) had used the key card and then there was a nifty little holder thingy for the card right inside the door that they showed me. I thought, well that's cute. Turns out it was more than cute. You have to put the card in that slot to turn the power back on. Whenever you leave your room with your key the power to the whole room goes off after about a minute. That includes the AC, the room frig, a charging camera battery. China is undergoing a boom in power usage too and conservation is a big push. So we always get to return to a warm stuffy room.
I knew the power would be different. It's higher voltage 220 instead of 110 so it would fry some US devices. But a lot modern electronics are designed to handle both. It's especially easy to do in an AC adaptor and I checked all three that I brought and they were fine with the higher voltage (all three were made in China too, so they are back home again). The plugs are different as well, but I had been told that I would probably be able to plug in. Well that works if you just have the two prongs, but it can't accomidate the third ground prong. The camera adaptor was fine but the laptop charger had the three prongs [I ended up just bending the ground prong off as I had work to do the next day and was too tired to think about other options and it's superfluous in an AC adaptor anyway].
The hotel has high speed internet which worked fine for me. I did find right away that a number of sites are blocked including this blog, facebook and youtube. Poor Carrie has had a lot more trouble since she has a mac and evidently the internet in the hotel is setup to only work with Windows (not sure yet whether it's the OS or the browser that's the issue)! [Everything is Windows here, even on the ministry computer systems. We run all our stuff on linux, so we've had to do some training in that area as well].
The next surprise was laying down. There's no mattress! At least not what we would call a mattress. Felt like laying on a box springs. Fortunately I was so tired that I slept fine anyway. There is a pretty decent comforter and I realized the second day that since it is a queen size I could fold it in half and tuck in under the sheet to make sort of a makeshift 'pillow top' effect. I certainly don't need the comforter to stay warm. That's worked out okay. One last surprise is that the AC shuts down sometime overnight. Not that it's all that hot, just warm and stuffy. It has probably dropped to the mid-70's outside they figure, but it's still a bit muggy I figure. Highs have been ~88-90 and lows ~68. Jian mentioned that they opened the windows overnight and that did help on the third night [apart from a couple of mosquitoes-no screen].
In summary: Trip to China: a fascinating adventure/not for the fussy or inflexible. And I would avoid the summer months if you don't like being warm to hot a lot of the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment