Alexander's

Like so many other airports Beijing airport has free WiFi internet access.

I found this a bit surprising, since China has quite restrictive internet rules. Generally the government is not satisfied by simply blocking some sites. They want to make sure that they can track who is doing what.

That’s why they need identification.

Too bad that at the time of our transfer -- way after midnight -- there were very few airport personnel working anymore. But like a gentle mother the Chinese authorities did even think of this. They provide these -- only slightly suspicious looking -- machines that promise the great wonder of instant internet access for a simple scan of one's passport.

After a week of roaming through the emerald green mountains of Taiwan -- in absence of my daily internet-fix[^1] -- there was no question. Without a moments hesitation I pushed my passport deep into the slit for the documents, pushed the onscreen button and listened to the sound of an old scanner doing its work.

A popup dialog, explaining in Chinese that the machine had just saved a 4MB file of my passport, left a slight feeling of identity theft in my mouth. This feeling grew even stronger when I noticed that step 3 -- get the internet access code -- was not working.

The only working steps were:

1. choose language and
2. scan the passport
3. there is no (working) step 3

Not willing to give up that easily I decided to try again -- same result. Also switching to another language didn't help at all.

Maybe, I thought, it’s because I still have an old passport that sometimes makes problems when machine reading it.

Sadly no one in my family was willing to borrow me their passport to repeat this surely harmless experiment.

This blogpost was written on my way home from our honeymoon in Taiwan. So it's a bit dated already.

[^1]: For some strange reason Ting was really against me spending half the time in front of the computer

Yea I know I know. My Japanese is sublime. Every one of my japanese friends tells me how well I can speak and how they can somehow understand almost everything that I try to say.

And then I got a job offer:

So do you think you can talk to the boss of a japanese company in japanese?

Yes I can

Well um ... on second thought I can but I'm not sure I should. It's true by now I hardly ever insult Ting when talking to her in japanese, but talking to an important guy from a huge japanese company is a lot more challenging.

What impossible! Your Japanese grammar is stuck on the level of a beginner!

This from the girl that told me how well my japanese already is just a few days prior. So I needed a bootcamp from beginner to talk-to-the-boss-level in just a few short days.

In Austria it takes the average student of japanese about 3-4 years of hard work to be able to read the newspaper in Japanese -- but then I guess the average student in Austria does not have a girlfriend who made it into the most elite university in Japan.

I scanned 3 books already
I can't possibly learn 3 books in a month or two![^1]
Well, you are going to have a good study schedule -- I'll tell you about it tonight

Maybe she misunderstood. I'm not a Chinese student. I can't stand up at 6:00 and work till 24:00 with only three fifteen minute breaks for food and still remember the things I learned during the day.[^2]

You want to get progress really quickly so let's work on it

Oh well I guess a chapter per day is manageable -- I just wish there were other students, so I could take a break from time to time.

This post is a bit older. I just stumbled across it while looking through my not yet published posts and felt like sharing it.

[^1]: If you study japanese full time in Austria you work through a single book every six months. [^2]: Actually now that I'm a consultant this almost feels like a normal workday.