ni hao - 你 好
Posted by Ian Holsman
Apologies if the Chinese is wrong ;-)
I’ve been in Beijing for the past week. I was supposed to be here the week before, but I must be the only person alive who didn’t know you needed a visa to travel into China.
I’ve been visiting the AOL office here to hire some people to work on dmoz. The quality of the candidates was good, and there competition for candidates from Google and Microsoft. (I could see the google office from my hotel window.. they were the ones who still had people in them @ 10pm when everyone else went home).
Language is a barrier here. While the people in the office spoke very good English, the same could not be said for the locals. But waving hands seems to be international and the store keepers had calculators on which to show the price they wanted (which was lower than the sticker price on the clothes for some reason)
The other surprising thing to me was that none of the shops would take an international credit card.. cash only seems to be the rule here.
Internet access was everywhere. Even starbucks offered it. and the olympics are starting to kick off around here (lots of advertising) and logos on buildings.
The only other disappointment was that none of the Chinese restaurants seemed to offer lemon chicken or sweet and sour pork, but seriously, I think I had a different style of Chinese cooking every night.
I was warned about taking DVD’s home. apparently US customs check for them and the fines are large.