Is New York just like Sex and the City?

There are seven people in my department, excluding me. Six of them are women and of those six, two are girls in their 20s. One is 25 and the other is 22. Since I don’t speak any Chinese, Grace and Ariel have been babysitting me non-stop since I moved here. Basically from the minute I left my hotel room until I went to bed, one, if not both of them, have been by my side. Both of them are fairly good English speakers and they practice some English by watching U.S. television shows. This isn’t uncommon, when I tutored a girl in Hong Kong, she told me she used to watch Friends to pick up slang.

Grace and Ariel also watch Friends but they’ve been watching Sex and the City and Gossip Girl to learn more about American culture. Since they can’t talk to anyone at work about those shows, especially SATC, they’ve been coming to me every day to talk about episodes. They’ve been asking me which character I like the most and if all NYC women are one of those characters. Since I’m an outlet, they keep on talking about characters on the shows and let me know their opinion whether I ask for it or not (i.e. Carrie is too moody, Charlotte is baby crazy, Samantha is scandalous, Miranda looks like a man….the girls on Gossip Girl are so mean sometimes!) It’s been pretty funny to answer their questions about shows and American pop culture. At their request, I’ve introduced them to “How I Met Your Mother”, I’ll have to see how they like the show.

I’ve been in Wuhan for 9 days and things are slowly falling into place. I had been living in a hotel up until yesterday but now I’m in my new apartment. This had been the longest I’ve ever searched for an apartment…my Cleveland apartment took me and Fritz approximately 1 hour to find (I still love that apartment, great location and overall, just an awesome place to live (ping-pong table)) and San Francisco took 3 days to find (once again, awesome location)

I want to live where the all buzz is, so I focused on the riverside. My apartment is about a half block from a strip of bars and about 20 minutes from a bunch of restaurants and the main shopping district. Imagine 5th Avenue and Times Square…that’s what Walking Street is, except there are more locals than tourists. Since this is considered to be corporate housing for Granules employees, I decided to get a nice place and after some prodding, Harsha convinced me to get a really nice place. I live on the 50th floor in my building and have a great view of the river and the first bridge (there are 3 bridges in Wuhan and are called first, second and third bridge). My counterpart is concerned I’m living here because she thinks I’ll go drinking every night instead of practicing my Chinese. She wanted me to live near the office, where it is very quiet so I can focus on Chinese. I see her point but I’d go crazy if I walked outside my apartment and things were dead. The only big downside to my apartment is that it’s 7.5 kilometers from work, so a solid 30 minutes to get to work in the morning…I’ve never commuted to work in my life, so this will be an interesting change of pace for me.

I’ve been eating out for the last week and I will admit I’m really enjoying the food so far. Almost all the menus are in Chinese but most of them do have picture menus so that helps out a lot. One of my new favorite dishes of all time is a fish dish that is served in a bowl of oil, peppers and a whole fish…it’s delicious and I can’t eat enough of it. I’m also getting better with my chopsticks, I can pivot my wrist properly so I can throw rice in my mouth instead of shoveling it in. I’m still working on bones though…I still haven’t mastered how the Chinese can bite meat off a bone with their chopsticks…instead of trying to improve…I’m just avoiding chicken and things with lots of bones like frog. I haven’t tried too many crazy things yet, I passed on ordering turtle last week (we had a pet turtle in 4th grade) and I didn’t eat any eel when we got some yesterday. My big concern about food is that the places we’ve been visiting don’t seem like the places where you go to by yourself…the quick noodle joints where I see stragglers…well those places only have Chinese menus and no pictures. This will be a bit tricky once Grace and Ariel stop babysitting me! Hopefully I won’t resort going to McDonalds, KFC or Pizza Hut in desperation.

I have kind of started working but it’s been on and off so far since I’ve been busy running around and getting things set up. I did have an interesting experience when I went to dinner with my Chinese counterpart and the boss to meet with some suppliers. To my surprise and probably the only reason I was invited, the suppliers are from India. After dinner, we got down to business, which is when it got interesting. My Chinese counterpart speaks English, while our boss does not. So she would converse with the Indians in English and talk to the boss in Chinese, the two of them would chat amongst themselves as the two Indian suppliers and me just stared and smiled at one another. I could add no value to the conversation because A. I speak no Chinese and B. I don’t know a thing about the ibuprofen market; I’m a Tylenol guy. My only value-add was that I could tell the Indians wanted to talk to each other but couldn’t because they figured I knew Hindi. So I guess that is where I come in…letting people assume I know the language of my motherland. All in all, it was an interesting experience because in a group that had Indian guests and Chinese locals, I’m some sort of weird hybrid that is a local. I felt bad when the waiter kept on serving me first because he assumed I was a guest before he served the actual guests.

There are definitely a lot of little things I keep on observing everyday that I still haven’t captured in the blog, Once I get into a routine and things settle down, I’ll start writing about that sort of stuff….don’t worry. And for those of you who have made it this far in my blog post and are still focused on the second paragraph…yes, I do watch Sex and the City on occasion. Girls are crazy and if I can kind of understand how they think by watching this show, I’ll do it.