{"id":725,"date":"2006-08-01T14:43:28","date_gmt":"2006-08-01T04:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/01\/welcome-to-beijing-day-1\/"},"modified":"2006-08-01T14:43:28","modified_gmt":"2006-08-01T04:43:28","slug":"welcome-to-beijing-day-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/01\/welcome-to-beijing-day-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Beijing (day 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just come back from lunch. I&#8217;ve managed to eat Chinese food, in China, with chopsticks and not totally embarass myself. Ate some new food, new vegetables and a seemingly different type of seaweed than I have eaten before. It tasted good though. I even think Kit would have liked some of it (once she got over the fact that it looked different and some things were green things).<br \/>\nI arrived safely after a flight that was fine (except for getting up rather early to get to Sydney to then take a sane timed flight). Beijing seems to be a bit like the firefly world, except with less flying cars. You&#8217;ve got heaps of stuff in English and Chinese. It could be really interesting to live here and experience things.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a national English language newspaper which is fairly up to date on world events &#8211; the fact that our dear Mr Howard is going to go to the election seems to be news here! It&#8217;s not packed with local news, which would be interesting to read (although I think I&#8217;ll have to learn to read first).<\/p>\n<p>The hotel is a short walk from the office (down the street, across the road). Oh, the roads are at least 7 lanes &#8211; they&#8217;re big!<\/p>\n<p>Hotel is pretty nice, probably about half the price of what I&#8217;d expect to pay back home. Breakfast was good &#8211; some totally delicious watermelon. Honestly thinking of just having watermelon for breakfast tomorrow :)<\/p>\n<p>Although it&#8217;s rather obvious that the hotel is aimed at western visitors. At breakfast you could only really tell you&#8217;re in China by: looking out the front window at all the Chinese writing or looking at the waiters and waitresses and noticing they all a) spoke Chinese to each other and b) were Chinese. About 5 languages before my first coffee &#8211; what a way to start the day!<\/p>\n<p>At some point I&#8217;m going to have to have some Chinese tea &#8211; it seems like a real obvious must-do. Although maybe I should give in at some point and buy coffee from starbucks as well&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just come back from lunch. I&#8217;ve managed to eat Chinese food, in China, with chopsticks and not totally embarass myself. Ate some new food, new vegetables and a seemingly different type of seaweed than I have eaten before. It &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/01\/welcome-to-beijing-day-1\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,2,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-life-the-universe-and-everything","category-mysql"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5a6n8-bH","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":728,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/04\/flickr-macplusg3s-photos-tagged-with-beijing\/","url_meta":{"origin":725,"position":0},"title":"Flickr: macplusg3&#8217;s photos tagged with beijing","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2006-08-04","format":false,"excerpt":"Flickr: macplusg3's photos tagged with beijing There's some photos I've taken around Beijing up there. Will be posting more over the next few days (and until I leave - on the 16th). Enjoy.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;General&quot;","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":726,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/03\/welcome-to-beijing-day-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":725,"position":1},"title":"Welcome to Beijing (Day 2)","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2006-08-03","format":false,"excerpt":"I am somewhere around here.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;General&quot;","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/general\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4404,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/16\/switching-to-iphone-part-1\/","url_meta":{"origin":725,"position":2},"title":"Switching to iPhone: Part 1","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2018-10-16","format":false,"excerpt":"I have used Android phones since the first one: the G1. I'm one of the (relatively) few people who has used Android 1.0. I've had numerous Android phones since then, mostly the Google flagship. I have fond memories of the Nexus One and Galaxy Nexus, as well as a bunch\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;cool gadgets&quot;","block_context":{"text":"cool gadgets","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/cool-gadgets\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":795,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/03\/stockholm\/","url_meta":{"origin":725,"position":3},"title":"Stockholm","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2007-03-03","format":false,"excerpt":"Currently in the MySQL Cluster team office in Stockholm - and have been since Wednesday. I'll be here for the next 3 weeks working in the office. This will be the longest amount of time I've worked in an actual office (instead of working from home) in more than 2.25\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;life, the universe and everything&quot;","block_context":{"text":"life, the universe and everything","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/life-the-universe-and-everything\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1618,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/26\/dodge-avenger-furthers-the-stereotypes-of-american-cars\/","url_meta":{"origin":725,"position":4},"title":"Dodge Avenger furthers the stereotypes of American cars","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2009-04-26","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Every time it goes around a corner you are going to die\" would roughly be an accurate statement. This is the car I've been driving for the past week. Absolutely no feeling in the steering at all (in fact less feeling when cornering). It also bongs at you seemingly randomly.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;grumble&quot;","block_context":{"text":"grumble","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/grumble\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":631,"url":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/31\/crash-halfway-through-upgrading-ubuntu-breezy-to-dapper\/","url_meta":{"origin":725,"position":5},"title":"crash halfway through upgrading Ubuntu breezy to dapper","author":"Stewart Smith","date":"2006-03-31","format":false,"excerpt":"see BUG#37430 for some details. Also see BUG#37435 for why it gets really painful later on. Basically, if your machine crashes around the time of the dist-upgrade, you're totally screwed. mkfs and re-install. I'd hate to have not made \/home a different partition from \/. I currently don't have much\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;grumble&quot;","block_context":{"text":"grumble","link":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/category\/grumble\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flamingspork.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}