NEW LIFE IN BEIJING

HELLO FROM CHINA
for those of you with kids, I hope that the back to school business went well and for those of you who don't that Autumn in creeping up on you gently.
We have had a great summer. France the whole time, with at first the mountains which was great, nice weather, fresh air, good food, then we spent over a month by the beach in a friend of ours house which was even better since the rest of Europe was battling with way-below than average weather (the mountain we just left went to 10C which is almost winter weather) while we were fine in Sanary, comfortable instead of stiffling, near one of my favorite cities in the world: Marseille. It was almost restful and awesome. (up to 8 kids 1-7 years old in da house, that was a bitch to feed and supervise)
Then a month ago we did the great Jump into our new life. Beijing. for those who did not know yet...

This city is MASSIVE. I mean, I think if one needed to hide Manhattan somewhere, it could easily be tucked away in my backyard and never be found again. And that's just my neighborhood... The good news is that taxis cost peanuts. I mean for me to go to Ikea (biggest one in the world... jealous yet?) takes about 40 minutes in a cab, and cost... almost $4, that's FOUR bucks, 3 euros for the ride. So that's that. Went twice already. Both times I ended up schlepping something like 2 long carts and 1 of the supermarket ones. And I am far from done, but now I need nice stuff. We moved into a great appartment, big, light, over a 10 lanes road.... but it was, shall we say, furnished with what a Chinese decorator imagines the taste of expats to be...Mmmm... I had most of the furniture taken away yesterday and they were baffled that I would chose to have such lovely pieces removed from my home. "Yup! Please take the Ikea knock-offs away.. Thank yoooooouuu.... Yes, I do not really wish to keep that grey massive armchair, I know, crazy me!"
The thing is that they copy with the same enthousiasm Chanel or Eames and all the great 20th Century designers, so pretty soon we will have the coolest pieces in our house! I am searching right now for the right balance between quality and price but a few iconic pieces are already on my shopping list, like the Vitra Eames chairs with the wood legs and 50's colored seats, the 1006 Navy aluminum chairs and the Eames rocking chair. So happy! I am even scouting for a carpenter to have an amazing desk by Franck Lloyd wright reproduced.... Can't wait.

Speaking of the cost of living, amazing little restaurants are dirt cheap, it is awesome. Took me a while to realize that just because a main course is 2 or 3 euros, I should not order 3 or 4 extra side dishes thinking they will all be tiny. I exploded last time I had lunch at the Japanese next to my house....
took stuff to go and the bill was like 7 bucks. Awesome. it's cheap and great. The drawback is that I cannot find - yet - a place where I can trust the meat or vegetables for the kids. Meat for sure I am freaking out. In supermarkets, it is just gross. Mountains of ground or cut mystery meat, piled up in the open air with people helping themselves to it and tossing in plastic bags. "E-coli, salmonella, tape worms"... ring in my ears everytime I am considering it... so here I am pushing my cart away as fast as I can before retreating pronto in the organic milk and egg section.... So basically we are becoming vegetarians at home. Pasta, rice, potatoes, crepes, omelettes, I can cook anything like that, just no meat. Found a few sources for organic stuff but it is pitifully limited. I might follow Jeff's advise and go check out the market, then I'll wash everything with baking soda and cook thoroughly, I am particularly paranoid over the pork for kids... heard about little girls, 2 to 3 years old, getting tiny" periods" like stuff due to heavy hormones in the pigs... YIKES!!!! SCARY! So I am checking out their school menus and packing up lunch on the days there is pork or "weird stuff". Funny thing is that the days I think it is too odd and they will go hungry, my boxes come back intact and they both claim that it was delish... (we are talking cauliflower with tomatoes, Sweet and sour chicken with pineapple, string beans with eggs and rice and sauteed noodles... whatev'"
They both LOVE dumplings and can scarf entire baskets, so we have found what they will crave as grown-ups to remind them of home... dumplings!

Took me about 10 days to get sorted with basic stuff like a VPN, yes I did not know what that meant also before i moved to Beijing. Basically it is a Virtual Private Network. A nifty little trick my computer plays on my server where as the 'address' of my computer, it's ID number if you will , gets to be magically NOT in China but somewhere else in the world (for extra security I purchased 3) and my computer is officially either in Switzerland, in Germany or in the States I think, could also be Singapore or Panama depending on what I click on. That allows me access to my gmail -most of the time, and to linkedin or Facebook, or more importantly to unlimited google or to the sites where I can catch french stuff in streaming (or Piratebay I'll admit).
Funny how we take internet for granted. The ipad without it is just a bip ipod barely good enough to play music or games. Wifi is now as essential as tap water and it feels really odd and frustrating when it is malfunctioning. What was pissing me off the most was that I could not access my most basic sites and my emails while searching for fashion stuff, really non-political things like cool stores in Lithuania or Ukraine!
So many firewalls surround the Chinese networks so that the most innocent request got the connection cut and relaunched which could take 10 minutes to reboot every time. It was just so frustrating. Lost a job over this little joke... Loved it.
So I dug that tunnel and got Wifi and VPN from California. It did take 10 days and I was not amused for those 10 days, but now it is more or less OK. I know there is a crackdown so I bought one of the most expensive one there is and for now it's working. And a Swiss spare one, and yet another one just in case...

About 10 days after landing, we got the kids packed off to school. The Yew Chung International School. Originally from Hong Kong, it is a great school, but we did not realize when we signed them up that it is 80% Chinese and Asian kids. Which is awesome considering that we are in... China, and that by years end they will both be on their way to being trilingual, in Chinese; but super tough at first for Tara. There are I think just 2 other french kids in the school and we still have to find them (one is Belgian actually). Tara is in second grade, she has massive catching up to do as in the French/Swiss system she would only learn how to read and write this year, while the other pupils from her class learned the basics last year. Fortunately more kids from her class are also at the same level since they are mostly all expats, but for extra fun she is learning English and Chinese at once as well, all the others have at least one of those languages at home. The good news is that she has a massive little girl crush on her good looking sweet and kind teacher so she works extra hard to make him happy. The bad news is that after school she is exhausted and that Chinese school style she is inundated with homework which is too much for her... We are going to figure that one out but for now it;s tough. She goes to school with Marcel at 7.25am (yup! you read right, we are up daily at 6.20 to prepare them for the school bus). So to boost her morale i am enrolling her into a "Learn French Class" after school so she can be the STAR somewhere, and show the others how it is done. Snap! Go Tara!
Met her teacher and her EAL coach (Australian accent out of this world, this should be interesting) and she could not be in a more nurturing environment, so that's all great. The uniform is... also quite lovely. Pictures attached.
So, that's for her. She is starting soccer practice tomorrow morning making me at long last a Soccer Mom! in China! Yippeee!!! with knee socks, pads, shorts and the official shirt from the China Football Club! so proud me. Tear.
Now for Marcel, well... there is a peculiar worship here of cute little foreign boys, and if they happen to be cute with light eyes then it is sort of out of control. Here is the thing. My son? here? it's Elvis. For real.
Like "OhmyGodCanItouchHim? - euh, NO you may not, Oh? you were not asking I see and i do not speak your language? so you are still attempting to touch his cheeks and freaking him out in the process... never mind me then...."
They literally go on their knees when he is walking by to try to extract a smile or to pet him like a goat. In the streets, in supermarkets, in shopping center, waiting for the school bus, everywhere. He HATES it with a passion nacht and the more unpleasant he can be - sulking, screaming NOOOOO to their faces or hiding his face in my legs, the more amused the crowds are and the more people try to coerce a smile which is not going to happen. They think it is adorable, we think it is creepy. "You say potatoes..." Last weekend we were in a luxury shopping area and the kids were playing in the water fountains, I saw 2 guys, about 20 photographing the children, mostly expat's with a professional paparazzi camera, in crouched behind one and saw him taking close up of my son's face, I taped him on the shoulder and he was utterly baffled when I asked him to stop, the other just slithered away. A lady ( a nut job) followed him almost into the water to play with him, my clever boy ran the other side through the fountains. She eventually gave up but it took her 10 minutes. Vincent was ready to punch her. We were saucer-eyed and frustrated but we also knew there was not much we could do except hold him tight near us. He is a sensation here, it should last another year apparently, once he will be less a baby and more a little boy, they'll lose interest. For now, 'Elvis is IN the Building'. He passes and women, grown men and children alike swoon and want a piece of him. They smile, coo, pet him if he is not fast enough -not often - and try to touch him. The more he sulks, the more adorable they think he is being.
His sister you ask? Who? What? Her? Nope. nothing. She a girl. With glasses. She invisible. Only once a cab driver told me she is beautiful, and he ignored him. And he was nice, but that was once. We even had to scold the Ayi, the lady who takes care of them, since she was doing the same thing at home and we were like " oh no you're not. Same attention to both of them, or we have a problem".... Which is another problem I have, but that;s a boring story.
The cool thing thought is that since they only have one child per family still, they love children and all is made for them to play and enjoy. (except the air and the food then) Everywhere there are games, toys, and fun activities. The park Chaoyang near our place is like Lunapark- on acid. With rides, amazing ones with water guns and planes, and slides, fab little stalls where they can paint plaster piggy banks or make pottery, or ride giant rubber duckies, or try to catch panicked gold fishes in giant paddling pools with pots and pans (for realz, the fishes have very short lives here, we have had 4 dead ones so far. In 3 weeks. ), there are rides where they can pedal on dinky fake UFOs in the middle of the trees (you had to be there). and playgrounds even in the most luxurious shopping malls, So much cool stuff and the attitude is super friendly with children - except for Marcel where i'll admit it is creepy and scary.
Then the zoo, the pandas, great aquarium, etc.. it is awesome.
So,
The most important artifact we bought to date?
Not some Ming Vase made last week or even antique furniture from 20 years ago... NOoooo my friends! Better!
- An air purifier. Brilliant move in a city where at least 3 times a week the Air Quality Index chart from the US embassy shoots up to 340 or more... between 200 and 300 the air is qualified as dangerous! Before it gets to hazardous, very unhealthy or basic unhealthy. Basic Unhealthy we don't even care so much. Hazardous and dangerous, I get headaches and I freak thinking of the kids. They are purifiers in the classrooms but then PE gets cancelled and they stay indoor to play. I now have the app with the index in real time on the first page of my iphone. Tara was pissed because she has PE on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and both days for the last two weeks the AQI index was so out of control that PE was cancelled. She was crying on Wednesday that "pollution is so mean, I wanted to play football".... Yup! Pollution is SO mean. But now we have one antidote at least at home, the best purifier we have is in their BR nacht, and we have no less than 2 tiny ones in our room while we wait for the MOST BESTEST one in the world coming from Switzerland. Ha! fighting back.
tSo this weekend we will head for the country in Vincent's office massive gaz guzzling 4x4 Toyota Prado (yes, our modest contribution to the city's smog.. so proud!) complete in the nouveau riche statement with diplomatic plates. So cool me! I am being a hypocrit because as much as I was nagging those that have this type of macho cars before, it's actually quite comfy now that I am riding in one... Mmmm... so we are heading to Badaling to sleep by and visit the Great Wall. I can't wait,,,, this is so exciting. I can tell from the pics that it is what it says it is: GREAT. and a WALL. Psyched.
There is so much to see and to do here, so far I have only been working inwards, prepping the kids for school, uniforms, knapsacks, snacks, white socks, blah blah, then basic furniture to replace the garish crap, get Tara a proper bed, curtains over the 10 lane road, more Ikea, more blah, the healthy food treasure hunt and lastly contacting the buyers for my job. I have had to skip Paris this season which blows on so many levels, particularly as I was soooo looking forward to it, but c'est la vie. Timing and finance combine sometimes in the most unpleasant manner, but am still making the appointments for the designer I am working with. Hope to fly there next season... So basically October 1st, right around my birthday I will enroll in Mandarin classes 3 hours a day, then scout the city, check out and research all the luxury malls (that alone could take me 1 year.. there are piled up everywhere i look. it's uncanny). And immerse myself in this amazing town.
Need to make friends, but it's next.
Beijing Fashion Week? still after that.
For today, the AQI was 16 this morning (it rained last night and cleaned it all away), it's climbing now, but still only 42, (23 by the time I read this again) so I need to head out and see what's what in this awesome town where I do not speak the language, even with my 8 months prep. Where I cannot place myself geographically and where I am not sure what I can eat but I LOVE IT.
Oh... anecdote. Yesterday I went to "glasses city" to get a couple of pairs done. Took 40 minutes and cost was about 8 times less than in Geneva... So, while they were making them I went to lunch. At first I walked into some emporium that looked nice enough. Pictures of the dishes, and underneath the tanks where the shrimps, fishes and frogs were waiting for their fate. There was a couple of buckets on the floor under the pics, so I peeked... Bad move: snakes. long as my arms. And more dead frogs. Fuckers were dead but I sort of backed off pronto or rather leaped back a tiny bit freaked out... The lady from the restaurant asked what I wanted moi: "-DaFu You -Mei You?" (do you have tofu?) she looked at me disgusted at my vegetarian ass in this temple of the weird flesh stuff (they also offered raw shrimps) and said "Mei you" I fled. Luckily around the corner there was a japanese place with super good ramen. For 2 bucks. it was great. After that I schvitzed all afternoon though. Soup! in 27 C. Good move.
Voila,
Beijing beckons people. Kids will be back at 4 and I promised the swimming pool of the hotel next to our place... so gotta run.