Visiting Sica in Jiujiang

At the start of May, I went to visit Sica in Jiujiang, who was there with the American women's basketball team. Getting there required trips by taxi, plane, bus, train, and subway. Also, there was a fight with a guy who tried to take me in his fake taxi. All the trouble was worth it.



When I first walked into Sica's hotel room, I thought, "This is nicer than our place in Shanghai," and right after I thought that, she said, "This is the worst hotel so far." Ha.




We went for a walk and saw this very calm dog that looked just like Kota but a bit lighter.


We also walked back into a park and found a temple-looking thing on a hill, so we went into it and saw some adults doing tai chi while a little girl with the cutest white puppy danced around. I got to hold the puppy. It was fun to try to use my meager Mandarin skills with the people there. Later, a guy asked if he could take a picture of us, but I told him no thanks. I was happily surprised that he even asked.




Sica mentioned she needed a trim, so we walked into a salon with all guys and I did my best to translate that she just wanted a little bit off and that we only had 45 minutes. The workers were amused at trying to communicate with me. When they asked why we were in Jiujiang, I tried to explain by saying that Sica was a doctor for basketball people. Ha. When I used Google Translate for "athletic trainer," they then thought she helped them work out and get strong—I hope someone comes up with a better title for Sica's job soon. I asked the guy who did the trimming if he'd cut blonde hair before and he said it was the first time. He did a good job. I think the total was like 20 kuai, which is a little more than three bucks. Nice.




It was awesome to watch Sica get the athletes ready for the game. I even got to help out by putting Gatorade powder in water, writing names on bottles and towels, and switching out the towels and water bottles as the team rotated.

Apparently Jiujiang really wants to have the Olympics there and the city has already built the arenas and is working on the athlete housing! The sports arena where the competition was played had Olympic rings in front of it. I don't know if that's allowed if you haven't actually been granted the Olympics . . .




I think male cheerleaders are cool. I was surprised that they had their stomachs hanging out, though. I guess consistency is good?




This is the Chinese team (in red) and the American team (in white) warming up. A lot of the Chinese players had horrible haircuts—the same ones that girls in middle school are required to have at a lot of schools.




The game was so much more fascinating when you kind of know the players and when you get to hear what the coach says. I was amazed when he gave pre-game and half-time lectures. He used all sorts of lingo I didn't know and showed that he had paid close attention to the other team.




The U.S. team won the entire championship. A part of Sica's job that most people don't know about is taking pictures. :) Apparently the Chinese women were taken out of regular school several years ago and they are in a sports school where they train full-time. You'd think they would have won.




These are the two tallest players, I think. People flocked to take a picture of #7 because she is part Taiwanese (I think that's right; I do know for sure that she speaks Mandarin), gorgeous, friendly, and clearly talented.




The translator kept telling us on the way back to the hotel that there's no pizza in Jiujiang, and the coach was so sick of hearing no as the answer to everything that he goaded him on, saying, "If we find out that there is pizza, will you pay for it?" and the translator agreed. So I googled it and looked it up on Dianping and showed them the results on my phone. That's when the translator (who looked like Kermit the Frog and who was very adept at jumping into pictures where he shouldn't be) backpedaled and said he thought the coach meant Pizza Hut. So the next day when we were walking around and found this cute little cafe with pizza, we had to take a picture.

Luckily, the bus taking the team to the airport in Nanchang had extra seats and I was able to catch a ride.

Tech and Me in Shanghai

Right from the start of our time in Shanghai in August, I was interested in helping more women join tech; I was in touch with Girl Develop It about starting a chapter, but after around December, I never heard back from them. By the time WomenWhoCode was in touch with me, I felt like it was too late and wished I had contacted them first.

Luckily, I still had several tech opportunities. First of all, as I had time, I worked on re-designing my blog (though that is a project that may never be finished because I want it to be just right).


At Barcamp Shanghai in October (put on by Techyizu), I spoke about/held a discussion about women in tech and my story.

Michael filmed me:


(How do you like that guy going on and on about how too many women on a team make so nothing gets done? Uh, okay . . . my on-the-spot responses to him weren't great. I think really there just needs to be more understanding about how to work with both genders rather than just always working with the team we feel most comfortable getting stuff done with.)

I had planned on finding a full-time job in Shanghai, but I worried that working full-time would mean I wouldn't be working on learning Chinese, which was the real reason I wanted to live in China, and also, honestly, I worried that my still-very-junior dev skills weren't good enough (technical interviews can be freaking scary!).

One company I started to interview at seemed pretty awesome (I was excited about being able to learn and work with Angular.js), but the non-Chinese CEO sat me down after he heard my salary requirements and talked to me about how they were way too high for China. Together with another foreign tech employee, he explained that junior developers in Shanghai make about 3,000 kuai per month (about $500), foreign or local, and that if I could go with around that then we could continue the hiring process. I told him I'd think about it and the employee invited me to lunch where he assured me that those were normal amounts for Shanghai. I was nevertheless a bit doubtful, especially once I realized that the least-expensive studios we'd looked at cost more than 3,000 per month. Then I talked to Michael's cousin, who had been a developer in Shanghai for a while, and he said, "No, that's just a Chinese guy trying to pull one over on you. You could probably make 15,000 or more per month." Imagine his surprise when I told him that the guy wasn't Chinese . . . I didn't go back there.

In November, I introduced the Hult Women in Business Club to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

In December, I organized a RailsBridge HTML/CSS/JavaScript workshop for women.



I met many times from October to May with a woman named Jenny (who became a good friend) to teach her some tech skills, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, git, and a tiny bit of python.

I planned on organizing another RailsBridge workshop and making a weekly JavaScript study group, but without being able to find a location and sponsors (asking for money and space is not my favorite thing to do), and with a lot of other things to do (always), those things didn't happen.

Michael's cousin introduced me to these really cool Taiwanese guys working on some intriguing projects. I showed them what I'd done before, and without a technical interview, they agreed to start me at nearly triple what the other company had offered and go up from there after a three-month review. Unfortunately, all of this solidified when we had only about four months left, and I felt bad jumping in to their company and getting a lot of training, only to leave, so I turned it down. Once again, though, two big factors were the fear of getting detracted from learning Chinese and my fear of not being good enough (impostor syndrome, grr). A third, more embarrassing factor was that I found out I'd have to get another, more complete physical for a work visa and that freaked the heck out of me.




Instead, for a couple of months at the start of the year, I worked on making a website for Michael's Hult Prize team's organization: Revive using some technologies I hadn't used before. This is what the main page ended up looking like.

In April, while I was recovering from my horrible sunburn, a friend from People Can Code Shanghai texted me, saying that he had some friends looking for some front-end skills and asking if I knew of anyone. I told him I may be able to give it a shot and I'd like to hear more details. It turns out that these two guys had an idea for a foodie app, and since they were accepted to Chinaccelerator (an intensive accelerator program for startups located at The Lighthouse in Shanghai), they were in need of someone in a hurry and were willing to pay wages closer to American wages. After we spent a lot of time comparing our favorite foods to bake and our favorite restaurants and bakeries in Shanghai, they said they'd like to have me work with them. Again, impostor syndrome had me scared even though I knew that this would be a good opportunity for me—to learn quickly, to earn some money, to get out of my misery about having failed at creating a positive Shanghai experience . . . and somehow I was able to talk myself into it.

And so I started working on ChiShen.Ma, which happily was flexible in many ways. Working with even-headed, hard-working, smart Rem was great. When it was clear that getting into the office was quite a long journey that was wasting the little time we had to get the app launched, he said I could just work from home, where I felt like I could focus and get more done anyway, and when I was needed in the office, he offered to pay for a taxi to speed things up a bit. He let me choose the tech stack, so I chose to build a Django back-end, and though ChiShen.Ma will eventually be a hybrid app, we started out with a mobile web app using jQuery Mobile, meaning the "app" is a website (accessed via a browser) that looks like a phone app.



The first paycheck ChiShen.Ma paid went to yours truly. Notice the mixed currency. Also, this was the first time I've seen the new, blu-ish dollar bills ("bluebacks?").



This is The Lighthouse on Changping Lu, where Chinaccelerator's office is.

As with any project, I butted my head against unexpected barriers every single day and as the only engineer, there were times when my resilience wore out and I felt bashed into the ground discouraged, but the successes were great, and I was able to earn some moola for our rent in London.

The most unique part of the app is what Rem calls the "Decide-o-matic," where you can swipe pictures to sort them into piles of likes and not-likes. Getting the right library in place for this took waaaaaaay longer than any of us could have guessed.















































Now that Rem and Ryan have demoed the ChiShen.Ma app, things are a bit up in the air as the search for funding takes off.

Writing this post makes me feel better about my time in Shanghai. We'll see what I get to work on next.

Looking for a Place to Live in Shanghai

I feel kind of bad about my negative Shanghai experience and I feel completely confident that I would have liked Shanghai better if I had liked where we lived, so I wish we had found our own place to live regardless of extra expense. But at least I've realized that my surroundings affect me greatly (especially because I work best from home), and that it isn't worth it for me to suffer through places I dislike.

I did give place-searching a bit of a shot, but there were several things that made the search very difficult:

1. I don't speak Chinese so I couldn't easily state what I was looking for (basically wood flooring, an oven, natural lighting, not nasty, convenient location, less than 3600-5000 CNY/month).
2. Most posted pictures of available places are fake. One agent explained to Michael that he had to post fake pictures because everyone else does it and otherwise people wouldn't ever call about places. That seems like bad logic to me, because we showed up at places and felt disappointed/disgusted. So we started asking for pictures beforehand, and they'd say, "We don't have any, why don't you just come meet us there?" But they were wasting our time on horrible places and always, always telling us after we arrived that the price was actually more than what we'd said our limit was.
3. Michael didn't have a lot of time to help, and prices mysteriously seem to triple when a foreigner is involved.
4. Most Chinese apartments just don't appeal to my style. I knew in my mind that there is nothing wrong with a clean, shiny tile floor, but they just made me grimace. The apartments that are more up to Western standards are very pricey. It would have been great fun just to rent a place and fix it up, but I didn't want that to distract from me learning Chinese.
5. A lot of places were just downright nasty.
6. There was a nagging feeling in me saying, "But your stay at Tianhong Residence is covered and neither of you are employed full-time. Better to just stick it out."
7. I need an oven. Most places in China don't have ovens.

I did a lot of searching and ran into a lot of ads that amused me, during which time I discovered the blog Terrible Real Estate Agent Photos. You should spend five minutes there. I still laugh my head off at each new post and have submitted a few photos.


Why the sparkly hearts and snowman? Why?




Fake flowers and a teddy bear on the TV.




Not sure what this guy has to do with renting on Airbnb?




This toilet is very comfortable and quiet.




High quality picture.




Picket fence divider between living room and bedroom.




Thank you for telling me what that is.





Is that a cardboard bed?




Newly-installed sinks are more impressive after clean-up.




Eeew. We actually saw a place with a shared kitchen like this. The landlady said, "No one really uses this." I wonder why . . .

We did find the time to check out several places, with a goal budget of 3600 CNY/month. Sadly, the places I liked most were either fake or way out of our price range.


Lovely light, nice wood floors, beautiful whites . . . fake/not really available (and especially not at that price).




Chinese feel with a modern touch . . . fake.




This was the nicest that we saw within our price range, but the shiny tile floor (AH!) . . . and it wasn't very convenient or in a nice area, which was half the reason I didn't like where we were.




This little guy froze up when we walked in. Clearly not a guard dog.




We ran into a foreigner in the same building who had us take a look at his place since he'd be moving. Unfortunately, his apartment was above the price that would work with our student loan at over 5,000 kuai per month.




He didn't have an oven either.




This was probably the nicest and closest to campus that we saw, but picky me couldn't stand the beige tile, lack of oven, and junk in the hallway.




Also, for some reason this and many other apartments had fluorescent lights in the bedroom/living area. Eek.




I didn't want to touch stuff in most places because there was always a greasy or dusty layer. And I didn't even take pictures of the nastiest places.




Most apartments we saw had really awful, very temporary-feeling furniture.












Airbnb option . . . pretty nice, but clearly not at normal monthly rent prices. And no oven.




This place looked nice until I realized that the toilet is right next to the (oven-less) cooking area. At least there are separate sinks?





This place looked pretty cool, but it was "no longer available" which often means "fake."




This place felt so fresh and light. Unfortunately, too much for monthly rental.




This place makes me feel like I'm taking a breath of fresh air. Out-of-budget longing ensued.




I gave up for a while, but after we stayed at this lovely Airbnb place for Valentine's Day, I threw my budget out the window and tried to book another nice Airbnb place with a full kitchen and a scooter and bike for our remaining time in Shanghai. Unfortunately, it fell through.

So we stayed at the overwhelmingly gross yellow and gold Sky Rainbow Tianhong Residence that never should have become a residence for the whole time, and poor Shanghai never had a chance.

Once the next module was approaching, nearly everyone who was staying in Shanghai decided to get the heck out of the residence. I saw two of the places they had found to live and again felt bad that I hadn't looked harder. If I could re-do Shanghai, I would have shown up a week earlier and forked out the money to live in a place that felt like home to me.

Shanghai Hult's executive director asked Michael if he would ever accept a job in Shanghai. I think Michael would if I'd go along, but I'm of the opinion that I don't want to live there ever again unless Shanghai cleans up its air, I can afford the food I like (cheese!), the housing is amazing (according to my standards), our location is convenient enough for walking and biking only, and the salary is undeniably good. We'll see if that happens or if my opinion changes . . .

I'll show you soon where we're living now.

Final Food Journal in China

Since the last time I blogged about our food in China, there's been a lot of noteworthy food.



Somehow I ended up with the Hult Thanksgiving celebration on my shoulders, and ironically, most of the people who helped me make it a success weren't American. We made oven pans of pumpkin/butternut squash pie, a pyrex of apple pie, whipped cream, and stuffing, all of which disappeared in a rather quick manner with the turkey we'd commissioned a nearby sandwich shop to make for us.



Tangent: I made this Thanksgiving YouTube playlist which you are welcome to use at future Thanksgiving celebrations.




I made my mom's potato orange rolls for Michael's class to enjoy after a test. Yum.




Honestly, we didn't try the food (just hot chocolate), but we liked the atmosphere of this cutesy place called "A Room." And on the way to finding it with Michael's cousin Jiu-yi, we accidentally walked into someone's house. Ha ha ha.




I went to a German program and immensely enjoyed the breakfast (and German).




I went to a German Christmas dinner and immensely enjoyed the food (and German).




Claire came to visit and we were so hungry while looking for dinner that we settled for a tourist-trap place called "More Than Toilet" that is toilet-themed. Unfortunately, the food itself wasn't much more than toilet.




In January, my friend Kate showed me all the expat shops in Shanghai and I almost died when I found all the Dominosteine leftover from Christmas on sale. And then after I recovered, I almost bought all of them.




They also had a giant Lindor ball!




After Thanksgiving, one of the Hult employees, Lucia, asked if I could teach her to bake. We made cookies a few months later.




Strangely, all the brown sugar I've seen in China has hard lumps, and without a mixer, it always took me forever to get out all of the unsmashable ones and smash the others.

Also, it took me a long time to adapt my chocolate chip cookie recipe to China. It turns out that the best thing to ensure success is to freeze or at least refrigerate the dough so that the butter doesn't have time to melt all over the pan before the cookies finish baking.

Here's the weird final version:

Michelle's Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe for China:

• 113 g. softened butter (½ cup, a little less than half of a Chinese stick, one stick in the U.S.)
• (1/2 c.) of sugar, ⅓ of which is brown sugar (the rest is white sugar) 
• Cream together with a wooden spoon, taking out brown sugar lumps that won’t go away, until there are no sugar crystals 
• One egg 
• About 1 c. flour
• 2.5 ml (½ tsp.) salt 
• ½ tsp. baking soda
• 5 ml (½ Tbsp.) vanilla
• 2.5 ml (½ tsp.) almond
• chocolate chips


• Chill the dough for 24 hours
• Don't grease the pan and wait until the oven is all the way heated before inserting the pan
• Bake at 176 Degrees Celsius for about 10-15 minutes. The cookies will be darker than expected, but leave them in until the middles don’t feel squishy anymore.

Lucia and I also made apple pie.




Hult scheduled an activity for students to learn how to make jiaozi at a nearby restaurant. This flat pile of dough is the result.



While eating at that restaurant, we ordered Di San Xian (地三鮮—"earth three fresh"), a fried mixture of potatoes, eggplants, and peppers with brown sauce. I liked it so much that I looked it up online and taught myself how to make it.




And then I started adding other things to Di San Xian because the sauce is what makes it so good. It turns out that chicken, tofu, green beans, and carrots all are really good in this dish. Basically, you'll fry each of the chopped items separately (I find it's good to start with some chopped onions and garlic and make sure that the potatoes stay in long enough to be soft), with peppers being last and shortest in order to reserve some of the crisp. Then you pour them all in to the frying pan together with a solution of dark soy sauce, hot water, and sugar. You mix all of it until the sauce thickens, then eat. Yum!




Michael found taiyaki in Shanghai. Cream-filled pastries will always be a favorite of mine.




Everything at Pure and Whole, a vegetarian restaurant with a sister sushi restaurant next door, from which we also ordered, looked this great.




We tried a lot of Pure & Whole's amazing food with anime films running on the screen behind us.




Claire brought a big bag of shredded Costco cheese to us from Taiwan. Oh, the joy. Our whole diet completely changed. It turns out you can use half a pan to make enchiladas.




Cheese on taco omelets!




Cheese in burritos!




Michael likes to make food look pretty (and he does a good job).




Cheese with eggs and peppered ham on toast.




I started checking out the Shanghai bakeries, most of which were near Changshu Road and the Shanghai Library, like this one, Farine.




I was happy to finally find an eclair at Sunflour on Anfu Road, though it was a bit pricey at 16 RMB (nearly 3 USD).




Why does the atmosphere of a place make such a big difference? I took Michael on a tour of the bakeries I'd found one morning and we quite liked Baker & Spice as well.




Then one day I saw that a Chinese bakery on Wulumuqi Road had eclairs! I was so surprised and I went straight in to buy one (I think it was between 8 and 12 RMB). Unfortunately, the "cream" had been whipped too long and I felt like I was biting into butter with each bite.




My mom sent us a whole bunch of American goodies, like Cheese Fantastico.




She also sent cherry pie filling, which I put into use on my birthday.




And she sent pickles, which were used with the cans of tuna that Claire brought us. When the pickles ran out, I thought, "Why shouldn't I be able to re-use the juice?" I googled it and ended up chopping up cucumbers and making more pickles a few more times (yum!), until someone stole the whole thing while we were in the Philippines. :(




Blue Frog had a pretty good burger.




My friend Kate gave me a cooking magazine from Australia and I had to give these mint chocolate biscuits a try. Of course, the mint-chocolate combination is one of my favorites, but the Europeans who tried them seemed a bit doubtful.




Michael's cousins kept bringing us noodles from Taiwan. When I discovered that they tasted pretty much like any American pasta, but that they cooked in about two minutes, I was very happy to keep making them.




Interestingly, I compared Chinese and American Hershey's, and the Chinese version is better.




I absolutely fell in love with these Dove bars that were sold at every store in Shanghai. Wow, there was this amazing melty-honey taste that I could never get enough of.




We probably had Indian food more than we had Chinese food.




At a Hult event, I won a gift certificate to a Mexican restaurant called "Mexo at the Bund." Not only was their logo design gorgeous with chairs upholstered to match it, the food was pretty, too. This chorizo was to die for.




We had this lemon ice cream pie at Mexo at the Bund. They poured dry ice on it and eating it was so weird, but it definitely tasted good.




Michael picked up some Cheetos at Carrefour a few weeks ago. It was only after he'd arrived back at the hotel and looked at his receipt that he said, "These Cheetos must cost one RMB each!" Then he proceeded to jump every time I accidentally dropped one. "These are precious!" he said, "We can't lose a single one." Ha ha.