Exams ended Jan. 11. I had two days free before teaching four middle school students two hours a day for a week. That was basically my only time commitment until the 20th, when it was time for all of us to begin the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) holiday.

Most of the students on campus vacated as soon as exams ended. A few stayed to work short-term jobs before heading home, and even fewer are staying here for the entire holiday. So, at least I had some company. I’ve also spent time with friends in town. Most of the time, it’s blessedly quiet, so I can pursue projects that I’ve put off for months.

One was to get better wireless Internet service. China Mobile, my cell service provider, has WiFi service, but it’s spotty in Jishou and on campus. They are reportedly building it out over the next few months, so that I might actually have WiFi available in my classrooms and home by April. I wanted something a little quicker, so I asked a friend to help me get 3G service from China Telecom, China’s version of Ma Bell. (China Mobile only offers 3G service with new phones.)

In a few days, I will leave for Jiangmen, Guangdong, where I will teach in an English camp for 12 days. There is no room Internet access in the hotel we teachers will stay at, and only two terminals in the business center. So, having 3G service would be a big help, both there and here in Jishou.

China Telecom sold me a USB dongle for 398 yuan ($60) and three months’ nationwide 3G service for 300 yuan ($45) — $100 gives me 90 hours a month, a little pricey, but I only intend to keep it until China Mobile’s WiFi buildout. The USB modem (a Huawei EC122) works perfectly on my Lenovo notebook, but getting it to work on the Android tablet I had bought in August was not so easy. That’s the subject of another post.

Since this is only my second time staying on campus during Spring Festival, it took me a day or two to realize that ALL the shops would be closed on the 22nd and 23rd for the New Year holiday. When a couple of my students and I decided to go out to eat, we to walk quite a bit to find a restaurant near the campus that was even open on the 20th. A trip to a downtown restaurant the next day was more successful, but twice as expensive as normal. So, I got the hint and went to the supermarket to buy some provisions.

None of which I have even used yet. Last night, four of us had so much food for dinner that we had leftovers to take home. I reckon I have enough food to last a week, but in fact I’m leaving in three days for Jiangmen. So the leftovers will get eaten first, and the other stuff will keep till I get back.

The weather here has been cold and damp for the last two weeks. Two nights ago, it snowed, but that had melted by the afternoon. The temperature has been hovering around freezing, which means basically only my bedroom is comfortably warm. The living room can be made warm, but the portable heater sucks up so much electricity, I only use it when I am actually in the living room. The temperature in Jiangmen is about 10 degrees C (18 degrees F) warmer than here, so I am really, really looking forward to being warm for two weeks.

As for other happenings so far, I’ve made some new friends, relatives of one of my students: a middle school teacher, her husband (a police officer) and their daughter, a college student in Beijing, and the teacher’s sister and niece, a high school student. I had lunch at their place New Year’s Eve, and then we all went to sing at a KTV (karaoke club). They picked me up at the university in a police car, so now I can joke I was picked up by the police in China!

So, that’s the latest news here. It’s now the Year of the Dragon, the most important animal symbol of China. Important things are supposed to happen in Dragon years, so 2012 should be an interesting year.

Incidentally, the Chinese word for dragon is lóng 龙, which is also a common surname or given name. One famous namesake (and Dragon year baby) was Bruce Lee, whose name in Mandarin is Li XiǎoLóng 李小龙 — “Little Dragon Lee.” Lee would have been 72 this year.

Naturally, there were compatibility problems.

There were some major changes to the main university dining hall this summer. The second floor got new tables and chairs, new serving lines and (bless us all) air conditioners. The other big change was, beginning this week, we can no longer pay cash for our meals.

Previously, there were two payment options: good old fashioned cash money and the SIM cards in our cellphones. Most students paid with their phones. Each serving line had a “wave-and-pay” near-field reader: hold your phone against the reader and the meal cost is deducted from your account. It’s a pay-as-you-go arrangement, so students periodically have to refill their accounts at the dining hall or cellphone office.

I, however, just used cash, because I eat less often at the dining hall (also known as the canteen here) than the students do. But that option ended this week. After a two-week transition period of requiring us Luddites to buy meal tickets at the door, the university switched completely to the wave-and-pay system.

For four days, I relied on my forgiving students to pay for my meals with their phones, but today decided it was time to get on the bandwagon. So, my colleague Gordon Ye and I went to the dining hall office to set my phone up.

Except it didn’t work. While my phone is only two years old, the SIM card is older, and not compatible with the payment system. Time to upgrade! Fortunately, there is a China Mobile office on campus, so we headed over there to get a spanking new SIM card for my Nokia.

As with any other upgrade, it always takes 10 times longer than you expect to get it to work. First, the tech said the phone couldn’t accept the new card. I replied several students had the same model phone, and had no problems. He tried again. Success! (But I had to disable my security app twice.) Then I had to drop 100 yuan into my phone account — not so bad, since China Mobile is offering a “pay 100 yuan, get minutes worth 500 yuan” deal for the fall term — and wait for the salesclerk to work her magic on the computer terminal. Then we went to another part of the office to set up the wave-and-pay system on the new SIM card.

Again, there were some small glitches. Another tech asked us what my four-digit employee payroll number is.

“Well, I don’t have one.”
“How does the university pay you, then?”
“Direct deposit, but the Foreign Affairs Office makes those arrangements, not the payroll office.”

I gathered that everyone, except the foreign teachers, apparently has a four-digit number that accompanies their university account. An employee has one for payroll deposits; a student has one for deductions from his or her bank account for tuition and other fees. Gordon worked something out with the tech, and in a few more minutes, my SIM was being programmed and soon had 100 yuan on it for eating at the canteen. (That’s enough for about 25 meals, by the way.)

The entire process, from dining hall to mobile phone office, took two hours. Quicker than upgrading Windows, anyway.

The cell phone issue was the biggest. I had bought my Treo 600 off eBay ages ago with the understanding that it was unlocked, meaning that I could use it with any carrier as soon as I inserted the appropriate SIM chip into it.

Wrong.

Sure, the Treo could find China Mobile and China Unicom signals, but without international roaming enabled (not that I could afford it), I could not use those signals. So, senior English students Christopher, Ava and Sophia took me to the China Mobile tents set up for returning students, where they helped me get a China Mobile account and SIM card.

Of course, it did not work. Believing my phone to be the all-powerful, unlocked, works-anywhere-in-the-world SuperTreo, I was of course mighty perplexed. The kids took me to the China Mobile store in downtown Jishou, where I got another SIM card that worked the same as the previous one.

“SIM card not allowed,” my SuperTreo informed me. “Your phone cannot be used with this SIM Card.”

How very informative. Thank you.

Of course, I gradually realized after spending an inordinate amount of time on the Web that my faith in SuperTreo was based on false information. My phone was in fact still locked to T-mobile, and the only apparent way to unlock (other than to call T-mobile and ask them to unlock it, not exactly feasible under the circumstances) was to pay someone a little money ($15) to download an unlocking program and obtain an unlocking code to free my Treo from its electronic prison.

I am now on the China Mobile network. And the $15 was still cheaper than buying a bargain-basement phone here.

Now I mentioned I used the Internet to solve my cell phone problem, but I actually had no Internet access at home until late Monday. Disappointing, but I could use an office computer in the meantime.

Chinese universities use a high security protocol for their wired connections, called the Ruijie supplicant. It’s based on the standard MD5 encryption, but with a local twist apparently. Without a university-supplied account, IP address and the Ruijie supplicant program, your wired connection ain’t gonna do nothin’. (Wireless does not exist here, by the way.)

Well, I had all that, but still nothing was happening. I have no clue why, but in any event the IT staff got it working by Monday evening. Only for Windows, though. Irritatingly enough, the Ruijie application provided me for the Ubuntu half of my dual-boot laptop (xrgsu) will connect, but will not authenticate my computer. At least others share my pain; my research into the matter turned many similar cries of woe, but no apparent solution.

So I’m stuck using Window$. Bleah.

When I first arrived at my flat on Sunday, I had no electricity. Well, actually, it was there; I just didn’t how to turn in on. A quick call to Christopher on the cell phone the office loaned me until my own cell was working again provided the answer. Outside each door is an electrical box. To turn on the power, you close the circuit breaker. Ah, so simple!

This morning, I awoke to find that once again I had no power, despite the circuit breakers in the box being all closed. Some texting ensued, during which I found that these boxes have a slot to insert a payment card to “recharge” your electrical account. (The boxes are called chargers for that reason.) My account had run dry sometime in the wee hours. The university, which is supplying my electricity and Internet at no charge, fixed the problem by lunchtime.

If you walk around this campus and look at the dorms, you will see every window or balcony (or rooftop!) festooned with laundry hung out to dry. Washing machines are thankfully standard issue here, but clothes dryers are not. I would wager then that each student has at least half of his or her wardrobe hanging outside to dry on any day. If I were to have clean clothes, I needed to emulate them and plan ahead. Washing my clothes the night before might work back in the States, with a clothes dryer at the ready. Not so here.

My flat has a little washer just outside the bathroom. Its buttons naturally have labels in Chinese. Since I had already bugged my hosts about cell phone, electrical and Internet problems, I was damned if I was going to ask them how to work the stupid washer. So I went to the local Jun Hua supermarket and bought some Omo laundry soap, confident I could certainly make the washer on my own.

The washer has two large buttons and four smaller ones. The big button on the right clearly turns the washer on, but no combination of the others would actually make the little fella do anything.

The Internet to the rescue! Poking around the Web with the model number eventually led me to realize that the manufacturer is Little Swan, a big whitegoods concern here that just happens to sell its products in the USA under the label Haier. And on their website I found an operation manual (perhaps written by some unmotivated business English major, judging from its lack of proper spelling and grammar) for a model similar to mine.

I am embarrassed to say how my Little Swan works. You push the righthand button. Then you push the big button to its immediate left. That’s it. So easy, an Ivy League graduate could wash his clothes. (The little ones provide washing and time-delay options, but the manual I found provided no help in making them do anything successfully.)

Now my flat looks like everyone else’s — half my wardrobe is out on the balcony. My cell phone works. My (Windows) laptop works. And I have electricity for the foreseeable future.

Now if I could manage to cook a decent serving of rice without burning it or drying it out …