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Published: July 12th 2011
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After returning from North Korea everything seemed to move at lightning speed. A few weeks prior, towards the end of April, our school, , informed us that our teaching quality had decreased and therefore they were reducing our pay by about 1000 U.S. Dollars. There was nothing in our contract about this so we had no choice but to accept this unfortunate situation and hope for the best. By mid-May we were informed that again our salary would be reduced by about 1000 U.S. Dollars. It was at this point we started to make preparations to leave China. By June I was reduced to a paid-by-the-hour part time status and the situation as not tenable.
During June Laura continued to work for Clever Kids on a full time basis. Actually June was the only month we ever got our full salary, and after some hemming and hawing we even got it on time. I on the other hand found about 10 part time / freelance jobs. I really had a great time! I’ll describe a few of them now.
The place I worked on a semi-regular business was VanceInfo. They are a Chinese IT company and even are listed on the NY Stock Exchange. I worked on the Bing voice recognition project which I will describe presently. You know how when you want to Google or Wikipedia some random piece of information you have to type it on the computer on www.google.com or www.wikipedia.org, etc? Well you can do the same thing on Bing.com as well but they also have a voice app, where you can just say your request into your phone, like while driving for example. If the computer didn’t understand the request, I, with my headphones on, transcribed what the person actually wanted.
The most popular searches were “pizza,” “Lowe’s,” “McDonald’s,” “Chinese food,” and directions to various places. Since I was working on the April ones, there were tons of questions, “when is Mother’s Day,” and about the royal family (as the Royal Wedding in England was about to take place). There were kids who wanted to “play games,” and teenagers who tried to read their homework questions directly into the app. And of course there were tons of very specific pervert-like searches like “big titties,” “Asian porn,” “high-school cheerleaders changing,” and the like.
Another job I enjoyed is the iPad writing recognition project. Basically you have an electronic pen and electronic pad and you copy hundreds of statements or sentence fragments on to the iPad. They are stored for future use. Unless this device recognizes a wide variety of squiggles and lines, the device will not work for a wider audience.
I also did some acting and even have an “agent.” In the first commercial I did, which was for Proctor and Gamble, Laura and I were Olympic swimming officials in a commercial about the 2012 London Olympics. We were all dressed up in costumes and such and I had “product” put in my hair. Laura was an end judge and I was a side judge. It was in the Olympic Natatorium. It was a lot of fun. The second commercial I did was for Nike and took place in a giant warehouse that was converted into a U.S. Customs and Immigration terminal. Our “plane” just landed and we, the extras, had to wind our way through a maze of those lines in order to get to the customs booth. We all had our passports and the police and immigrations agents even had the same costumes as are worn at the actual customs in America. The entire set was really neat and I met a lot of cool people. If the photos upload this time, take a look at these two bunches of pictures.
I also did a bunch of private tutoring, did some editing of college essays, did some voice recording (as did Laura) and took a few surveys. One survey had me reading MSN.com for 20 minutes. So I proceeded to read all the interesting stories trying to guess what the survey was about. I then had to answer 50 questions about all of the advertisements I had seen. Actually I didn’t really see any since I mostly ignore them when reading the online news!
In and around Beijing we finally knocked off the last few touristy things on our list and Laura took me to the top of the CCTV tower for a belated birthday gift on our 2nd to last day in Beijing. It opened a magnificent view of Beijing from nearly 100 stories up and the revolving restaurant where we dined was top notch! It was the first revolving restaurant I had been to since North Korea. In the evening we had 4-way farewell party with friends as 4 of us were leaving Beijing and more than 20 people came. It was really wonderful!
Our last day in Beijing was also great. The only downside was these horribly rude girls who moved into our apartment after us. Not only did they demand we leave by 8 in the morning a FULL DAY EARLY they insisted we lazy Americans clean up better after ourselves. (The really bitchy one was from Australia mind you.) In our one trip permitted to get our stuff we couldn’t even get all of our things, so many things we had to leave behind. We even let them move in 9 days early rent free while we took the guest bedroom. And then they had the nerve to demand 9 days worth of internet money, about 4 dollars! I was going to leave my black D-link 40 dollar router for them to use for free, but then in the end I decided to take it. It deserves a better home. In the evening we had a wonderful dinner and drinks will all of our Clever Kids colleagues well into this morning.
Currently we are on the train to Mongolia. It is so clean and quiet and just a wonderful journey so far! Next Mongolian blog will be in a week or so. After that we head to Russia and then Ukraine.
*pictures to come after a gobi desert camping experience*
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