pencil

today i sent out an email and only after it was in my "sent items" folder, i realized that it might have been a little bit weird...


Dear G. ,

Unfortunately, T. 's flight got delayed and he will be in the air when the conference call was supposed to happen, running to his rescue mission in shanghai as soon as the plane lands.

If you're willing, I'd be glad to go over the pictures (from the two emails, there hasn't been a third one) with you, listening to your concerns, ideas and input so that those can be noted over here. Of course, knowing that I don't have any contacts with the K. people and that I am the only guy in this office building who doesn't speak one word of chinese, the alternative would be an email from you, where you can write a few notes regarding the pictures, like this making sure that no ideas of yours get lost in the process of being modulated, digitzed, sent through phone lines, modulated back, sent through a loudspeaker, captured by my ear, turned into synaptic signals, processed by my brain and then put down on paper using a simple pencil.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

#
Vahid Saberin

mercy fork

this evening i was sitting in a chinese restaurant, eating chinese noodles.

when i had finished my plate, i noticed that something was different. something had changed.

that is when i remembered that during my first weeks here, somewhere around six to seven minutes into the vahid-trying-to-eat-with-chopsticks adventure, a nice waitress was always offering me a mercy fork.

i can officially eat with chopsticks now.

china, i’m ready.

vahid dans la cité interdite

sunday!
beautiful sunny day.

so at around noon-ish i decide to crawl out of bed, get cleaned up a bit (!) and leave the building for a nice walk around beijing.

i start walking due south until after 15 minutes i reach silk street market and start my sunday with a nice fast food chain hamburger... now that i had brunch, i decide to walk along the main road to the west. i know that somewhere that way, like 90 minutes walk farther, i'd get to the forbidden city.

after almost exactly 90 minutes, as i am walking by an audi dealership, i see something behind the glass that isn't supposed to be there... if it had been in a movie that i don't want to name here, it could have been a "glitch in the matrix"... anyways... i stop, pinch myself and it's really standing there. in just a split-second a thousand childhood memories are made to resurface by what i'm looking at.

i walk a few steps back towards where i was coming from, find the entrance and go in. it really is the avus! shining in all its polished aluminium splendour. the technological mother of all modern sports car. the shape of things to come.... you get the picture :-)

for all those out there who actually have a life... the avus is a concept car prototype built by audi in 1991 to proudly present to the world what they're able to develop and build.. but mostly to make little 11 year old boys drool and dream :-)

as this is my walk-day, i walk to the guy standing behind the reception desk in the back and ask him how come the avus is standing there. he looks at me with a very serious face and says:

"it came through the door"

he seems very content with his answer... so i reformulate my question to:

"why is the avus here?"

he seems to understand me now...

"oh you know the name. you are german?"

so... i'm actually standing inside audi china headquarters and the museum of so-and-so has graciously lent them the avus for six months.

i spend some time walking around the avus... take some pictures... walk back home. happy.

i never made it to the forbidden city

oh! THIS is where i am!

today it's windy here in beijing, really windy, lean-against-the-wind-michael-jackson-smooth-criminal-windy.

when it's really windy, the fog gets blown away, which means that i can see farther than just 20 meters or so.

amongst many interesting things i noticed two things:

1) i can see where i work from my bedroom window:

2) i can see rem koolhaas' CCTV tower from the office:

... those stubs are the most massive facade steel structure i have ever seen... google what the finished building will look like and you will understand why :-)

need to hunt for food now.

borrowed logos... part two

they have starfleet in china. how cool is that?

when in Rome...

This one starts on February 22nd. I was on the plane, watching…. what was it again? Oh yes, the third matrix movie (don’t ask…. Air China) when the friendly stewardess passed and asked if I wanted some coffee. Me being a fan of (good) coffee, I accepted her friendly offer, only to find out that the coffee had a very weird smell and taste.
Anyways, I thought that this would have been quite predictable as coffee still is kind of new to China and I asked for tea from that moment on, which tastes heavenly here in China by the way.
Now this story continues… during these weeks here in China, I couldn’t but notice that whenever I smelled coffee, it had that weird smell that I remember quite well and that I encountered for the first time when my dear brother Navid once had gotten weird coffee cube samples from Colombia. Yes… individually packed little cubes of instant coffee.
While working at metaform in Luxembourg I got used to really awesome espressos and today I was craving the taste of good coffee. So after dinner, I decided to go to a starbucks, thinking that at least their coffee should not be the strange tasting Chinese coffee.
I got myself a large one, with hazelnut syrup (I really like hazelnut ;-)) and the moment I got it, there it was again! That strange smell from those Colombian coffee cubes!
How?
Does that mean that all the coffee in the world with that “defect” gets sent to China, the “coffee people” thinking that nobody would ever notice because the “tea people” of China don’t know it any other way?

There’s a starbucks in almost every block and I miss coffee :-p

office view

... please let this be only fog

ya show

this is the ya xiù clothing market. it's one of those typical clothing markets where you find little stands where they try selling you knock-off clothes.
but there is more.
there's a nice, quite big, tailor shop on the third floor where you can get a suit tailored in about one week, there's stands with kitsch for tourists, there's a bit of everything... but mostly the little clothes stands.....

anyways, let's get back to the story:

i was just going down the escalators (yes, they have escalators to keep the constant flow of tourists , chinese and foreigners, mostly chinese though, going) because i had just left the tailor's shop where i had my suit fitted, when i saw a nice and very simple plain black sweater, perfect for cold days.

so... they have these girls working in those stands and there are two things about them i'd like to point out here:

1) they speak english (!)
2) they have an amazing built-in radar that detects when somebody looks at their stand, even if it is just with the corner of your eye

this girl sees that i peeked at the sweater and she immediately tries to sell it to me. after i had convinced her that i needed a smaller size (somehow they are always eager to get rid of their XL and XXL sizes) she got all nervous and said: wait! how much you want to give me for it?
my reply was: "like always. 60." (60RMB is 6 euros... pretty convenient, huh?)
she started laughing and asked if i didn't mean 600 to which i answered that i didn't mean 600 of course

after 15 minutes of friendly discussion, she finally admitted that with 60 she'd still make a profit but not as much as she'd like to, so i agreed to pay 80 for it.

While leaving i noticed how much she insisted that i should come back and buy all my sweaters at her stand.... that is when it hit me that i STILL overpaid :-p

youh cahnt get ihn!

i am going to tell you about where i am and where "work" is.

let's start with a little satellite picture:

the office is inside the building which was used by the emperor to change his robes when he proceded to the temple of the sun in ritan park

as you can see my appartment's location is just perfect

there's nice pictures from the inside on the office's webpage, along with the offices address in ritan park: http://www.robartsinteriors.com

this is the north gate of ritan park:

very calm, very peaceful, very ancient...

the gate leading towards the inner courtyard of the office:

a peek throuh the gate....

until....

...

YOUH CAHNT GET IHN!!!

yes... some chinese guy who would defend that gate with his life

it turns out they moved like a month ago.

ok, after a few phonecalls, this is the NEW situation:

it turns out they moved to jianwai soho, which i pinpointed in that very same satellite picture

luckily it's still the same "area" of beijing so i don't live that far away

remember ritan park? let me show you jianwai soho:

also a park... just not the same kind

i'll be in building 15, 19th floor

building 15

the white stuff? yes beijing's foggy today

a little zoom-out:

ADDENDUM: imagine the whole scene with vavoo wearing a new shirt and a tie after getting up at 7 am

luminous cracks

remember the view out of the bedroom?



i thought i might share with you what it looks like at night... those are actually real cracks where the lines are.



oh.. the fireworks? it wouldn't stop until tonight. chinese new year. happy year of the golden pig.

china top brand

in china there is a seal you might encounter from time to time.

it's some kind of quality approval for products good enough to represent china.

the interesting part is the logo they chose... probably found somewhere on the net and "borrowed" just like most things here.

stolen time... where did it go?

jetlagged vavoo says:

"check out the view out of my bedroom balcony!"

MVP

while V is in china for half a year, M & P will be trekking (really) through south america.

check out their trip on their blog as they endure their heavy backpacks while V is sitting in his comfortable beijing office:

one flight to Beijing please...

this is how everything starts:

- got my ticket
- it's one-way as i don't know yet when i come back home
- i take off in frankfurt february 21st

... good times come on!