The University had a driver meet me at the airport and take me to my apartment. I felt a certain affection for Mr. Li. He spoke about as much English as I speak Chinese. I think we bonded. He liked something about Canada: maybe a singer.<\/p>\n
Amy Gu was kind enough to meet me at the apartment. She helped me figure out the heat in my room, which was a life saver. There will be more to say about heating and infrastructure in another post.<\/p>\n
After she left, I realized there was no kettle in the room. A hotplate but no pots. No way to boil water. No drinking water. After a brief panic, I found a nearby market still open with bottled water. Also a coffee shop with Internet, so I could at least email Kat.<\/p>\n
[Note to self: never arrive in a completely foreign city after dark. Critical things are closed, and it’s much harder to navigate.]<\/p>\n
After I got back, the exchange students upstairs told me that there was a breaker for the hot water heater, and life started to look up.<\/p>\n
I woke up this morning to snow. An inch of wet nasty snow on the ground, and still falling. When I opened the curtains, I actually said out loud (to no one) “I’m going back to the Philippines.” As I recall, snow is pretty rare in Hangzhou, so it should disappear soon.<\/p>\n
Hopefully the phone stores are open this morning and I can get a local SIM with some data. With a little more luck, Amy will be able to find somebody to figure out the Internet in my room and I’ll be properly connected.<\/p>\n
Quick update in the afternoon: have a phone with data at least. Snow is mostly melted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The University had a driver meet me at the airport and take me to my apartment. I felt a certain affection for Mr. Li. He spoke about as much English as I speak Chinese. I think we bonded. He liked something about Canada: maybe a singer. Amy Gu was kind enough to meet me at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1414,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405\/revisions\/1414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}