art taylor

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The view from the hotel room was fairly panoramic. This view is stitched together from about 20 random snapshots.

As for my hotel room desk, I didn't bring a laptop on this trip. I had my iPad and iPhone in my carryon bag (which is too small for my laptop anyway) and packed my bluetooth keyboard in my checked luggage. Unfortunately, my brilliant plan was foiled upon checkin when I discovered that the hotel had wired access only. Normally, if I had a laptop with me, I would have been ecstatic about this, since hotel wireless tends to suck at the best of times. I had enabled international data roaming on my iPad right before leaving, but the rate was something like 20MB per month for $60. That's one or two emails or one set of directions from google maps.

Since it was relatively early (around 5pm) I wandered into the "computer city" area and tried to ask for a wireless router or access point. It was kind of hilarious trying to explain what I wanted to someone who spoke no English. I thought I'd be able to use generic terminology such as "802.11g" and "WiFi" to get my idea across, but I ended up drawing some pretty dreadful pictures of cables, and antennae and junk like that, before finally just dragging the guy over to show him what I wanted. I found a Chinese Linksys knockoff box that cost all of 180 RMB (about $26 at the time), so I was in business.

The last photo was a bit of craziness that's pretty common. A girl will often sit sideways on the back of a moped. Usually, they're holding on to something, but this one was only holding onto her magazine. They rode alongside the car for a long time, through traffic and pedestrians, and I kept expecting a horrendous accident. One of my...favorite?...things here is the pure chaos that is traffic. Chinese traffic laws seem to boil down to two things: A) the biggest thing wins (bus > van > car > scooter > bike > person) and B) push it as far as you can. There are these great crazy ladies in orange vests waving red flags and yelling at people in the intersections, but it didn't seem correlated to any particular activity. I think they just liked to yell and wave flags.

I checked into the hotel (Shangri La Chengdu) today and, despite all other kinds of wonderfulness [1] there is no wireless access in the room. Ironically, up until recently, I vastly preferred wired hotel broadband, but when you travel with an iPhone and an iPad, there isn't anyplace to plug in the cable.

Since I had some time to kill and wanted to look around the city anyway, I headed towards the "Computer City" [2] to find a wireless router that had the distinguishing characteristic of being plug-and-play, requiring no temporarily tethered computer to configure security, etc.

I pulled out my handy dandy notebook and started writing for the saleskid. "802.11b/g/n". He scratched his head. "WiFi". Confused puppy. I drew a picture of an antenna, and he went and brought me a USB WiFi adapter. Progress! He was really trying to help (everyone here has been extremely helpful) and I was trying to use my tourist Chinese (all learned since Thursday night, mostly on the flight here) to cobble together fragments to describe it. Finally, I ask if I can look around, miming half and mangling Mandarin for the other half.

I found a "Netcore 150Mbps AP-ROUTER" from "a company with classic professional datacom system." They started the whole "calculator negotiation" thing and entered "180". 180 RMB is about USD 26. I wasn't about to negotiate for a $26 router.

Anyway, the manual was in Chinese, and it goes to my extreme confidence that I believed I could make it work. Everything was fine until I attempted to connect to my secure VPN back to the US. I dug through menus until I found the following:

(Once this was working, I turned off the ruinous China GSM roaming)

I had deduced from some of the other screens that the first glyphs meant something along the lines of "enable" and the second meant "disable". Probably more idiomatic than that, but I did recognize the second glyph of "disable" from watching Chinese-subtitled movies on the flight over to Hong Kong. [3]

Anyway, the thing is working, so I can send and receive email. With the VPN, I can hit Facebook, Twitter, and all those other sites (wink wink nudge nudge) so I think I can bear a couple days in inner China.

[1] One of a) TSA, b) Cathay Pacific, c) Air China, d) Chinese customs screening tore the pulls off one of the zippers on my bag. When I asked if the hotel could fix it, one of the bellboys offered to hop in a taxi and take it to a repair shop. He brought it back tonight (a few hours later) and apologized for the zippers being a different style!

[2] One really weird thing about China is that all the competitors seem to set up shop next to each other. I guess the Japanese do this as well, cramming Akihibara full of the same sort of stalls. You'd think someone would get the great idea to open a computer store on Mobile Street, and a mobile store in Computer City. [3] Yes, this is the secret to my rapid language acquisition. The cat is out of the bag. I watch two kinds of movies: English-language movies with subtitles in my target language, and English-language movies that have been dubbed into my target language, but then with English subtitles. The second is especially helpful if I know the movie really well.