A day in the life...

Here's what my average day is like here in Guangzhou.

8:30 AM

Alarm goes off. Billy has usually already been up for an hour or two showering, reading yesterday's newspaper, getting breakfast, and taking care of emails from the NY and Finland offices' 'day'. I check our various financial accounts and take care of emails. If I want to catch the CA office during 'business hours' I need to IM them first thing.

10:00 AM

Change into something halfway presentable and go to breakfast. Most days, I walk down the stairs (20 stories). The breakfast buffet is awesome. Cereals, yogurts, juices, pizza, chicken & fish nuggets, spring rolls, assorted fresh fruit, scrambled hard boiled and fried eggs, omelet bar, assorted meats, french toast, steamed veggies, fried rice noodles, oatmeal, salad fixings, nasty coldcuts, croissants, breads, muffins, dim sum. And all the coffee or tea you can drink. Luckily, this is included in our room price -- otherwise it'd be about $28/person/day. If it's a laundry day, I take that down with me and drop it off before heading to the dining room for breakfast. It goes to the closest tourist shop/laundry service (about a hundred meters from the Hotel's side entrance). Drop it off by 11 AM and they'll have it ready to pick up by 5PM. A week's laundry for the both of us costs about $10. Sending it out using the hotel's service would be more than $200. There isn't any self-service options around here.

11:15 AM

The buffet closes at 10:30, but I sit around drinking tea (which they will happily keep refilling) and reading a book until I'm confident my room will be ready. The maids come around while I'm at breakfast. I don't like to be in the room while the maids are here, although they don't technically kick me out at this hotel. The staff here is all really nice, and they all seem to know enough English to go with their job. "Housekeeping!" "May I come in?" "May I change the sheets?" Some are definitely better than others, but overall, I'd say their English skills are better than the average cleaning staff at many US hotels. When we were on the 20th floor (an 'executive level') there were 3 people involved in cleaning the room every day -- a maid, a vacuumer, and a room steward to check their work and make sure all our 'executive amenities' were in good order. Now that we've moved to the 19th floor (the executive levels are being remodeled starting next week), there only seems to be single maid involved. I doesn't make any difference to me, especially since they've brought most of the extra amenities to our new room (like better toiletries and a handy tray of office supplies).

Afternoons

I try to get my work done, read my RSS feeds, and take care of whatever else I'm trying to accomplish. Lately, that's been obsessively researching mutual funds for my new Solo 401(k) plan. We started discussing refinancing our mortgage, so I think that'll be my next research project. I eat some food I stole from the breakfast buffet (usually a hard boiled egg, a piece of chocolate pound cake, and/or some mandarin oranges) around 3:30 and finally bother to take a shower sometime between 4:30-5:30. That way I'm looking my best when I go out to dinner, and I can make less laundry by rewearing my nice shirts several times. Honestly, I've only been putting in a few hours a day of paid work lately (about 20/week). But we've got a complete site redesign in beta over at oDesk. So starting next week I'll probably be back up to 30+, and maybe even full time. I love my job, but it's extremely difficult for me to work full time hours on it all the time. When I'm on the clock, nearly all my work involves constant thinking and creating. It's fairly straightforward to just 'do' for forty hours a week. I never had any trouble with it in my old, normal jobs. But inventing new content can be very draining. It's always exciting the first few days of a new project, and still fun when the initial excitement wears off. But after half a year of 35-45 hour weeks (taking zero days off, not even weekends) I had to cut back for a while. If I want to increase my hours while I'm here in China, unfortunately I'm gonna have to start getting up earlier, even if it means getting kicked out of the room for a bit by the maids each day.

Evenings

Billy gets back sometime between 5:30-8:30 PM on weekdays (mid-afternoon on weekends). We usually head to dinner about 30 minutes later so he has a chance to shower. The hotel has half a dozen restaurants. They're all quite expensive, but they get charged to the room. We can't take advantage of that too often -- once a week at most. We do dinner with Oki (a Finnish colleague) about 5 days a week. We try to make it a mix of western and chinese restaurants. The western restaurants have all been very good so far -- especially the italian place a few blocks away. The food at the chinese restaurants is hit and miss. Like they won't have half the things on the menu available. And you never really know what you're going to get, despite the menu being in English & Chinese with pictures. But I'll talk more about our food adventures another day.

Nights

When we return to the hotel after dinner (which usually takes an hour or two), Billy and Oki sometimes have to go write up reports. Although they seem to be giving up and do that less and less. Things aren't going very well at the shop, and I hear about it over dinner, so I don't bother to hang out with them while work on it (I am invited, and there's often drinking involved -- Oki is Finnish after all). Nights they don't work, Billy tries to find something on the TV. We get HBO, so some days there's a movie on we're interested in watching. Another channel has some shows from Discovery and other random American programs like Chuck. Some days I stay on the Internet and try to get Billy to participate in my research, sometimes I do some paid work in the evening (usually when I realize there was something I forgot to do earlier), and other days I give Billy the Internet so he can take care of emails himself. If we need to call anyone in the US, it has to be done either late at night or early in the morning (8 AM in NY is 9 PM here, 8 AM here is 7 PM there). We've been staying up until 11 or 12 every night. Billy's not getting enough sleep, so we really ought to call it make that a bit earlier (6 hours is usually OK for him, so the frustration must be taking a toll).