Matts blog

So we’ve been here a little over a week, and it feels a lot longer than that, we kept busy with fixing up on of the rooms, ripping out fitted wardrobes, making good the wall with mortar and finally plastering it, I seem to picked up some good plastering skills from somewhere and it looks pretty good, the real test will be when we come to painting it and finally hanging shelves from it!!!

Christmas day was good, and we finally got to open the presents my parents gave me in China, which included a lovely top from my Sister and a bottle of whiskey (Highland Park) from my parents, and of course, lots of English chocolate Thanks to 0064.co.nz I had several chats with my parents, and was on the phone when they opened their present from me - an engraved Ipod Nano, they’d wanted one for ages, not sure how much use it’ll get, but they feel cool Our Christmas and birthday presents went down well with Claire, David and Izzy, and I cant wait to visit and play with the Brio too.

On Boxing day we visited a friend of Lizzie’s Aunt, who was holding a bit of a adult gathering at her place, shes an sculptor, and had a number of very interesting pieces around the house and garden, and best of all great beer and food, you can’t beat sitting by the pool with a beer talking shit! We also met an English guy who runs a design business here, very interesting to talk to, and his parents were visiting from the UK, and have offered to give my parents a call and let them know I’m doing well, which is cool. I also met another expat from Retford, just goes to show how small the world really is! We ended up getting a little drunk and disordally and ended up drinking champagne in the hot pool as the sun went down, very enjoyable.

Today was another scorcher - 36 degrees still, its cooler than Beijing, and less humid than Shanghai.

So we are here and settled in and been keeping busy with job, plastering, making new kitched doors (MDF rocks), and building Ikea furniture. Nice and relaxing and it turns out we are pretty good at plastering Also got an australian access number for www.0064.co.nz on a Sydney local access number, and the quality is fantastic, it seems the call quality issues was related to China rather than my coding / setup, which is very good news.

I thought I should write something about my long and almost painful process of transferring my RMB salary in to a GPB account held in the UK. There seems to be a lot of posts on expat forums and newsgroups asking how to achieve this, but very few answers, and I’m the only person I know how has actually achieved this. The first thing to remember is that transferring money is not a problem, the actual electronic transfer works like everywhere else, so take along your bank details, including branch address and find out the IBAN and SWIFT codes for your account, the main difficulty is exchanging RMB to USD/GPB/etc

First of all, allocate a good chunk of time to do the transaction, and prepare well, you will require all of the following documents:

1. Alien Employment Permit
2. Employment Contract
3. Certificate of Salary
4. Certificate of Income Tax Return (Usually one per month)
5. Passport

You’ll need the originals of all of these, and a photocopy as well, I prepared photocopies of all the documents, and photo page and visa pages of my passport, and any page with a red seal from my Alien Employment Permit.

Most of these documents should be readily available from your HR / operations team, and as long as they have the company seal on them all should be OK.

You’ll need to find a reasonable sized branch, my account was held at Bank of China, and I chose to us ethe Guomao branch as they speak reasonable English there. Expect to queue for some time, you’ll probably be one of many at the Fund Transfer or Travellers Cheque counter - I got pointed to this counter from the normal counters.

Once you get to the counter you’ll have to present your paperwork which is checked, particular attention is given to the tax documents, and a calculation of how much can be converted and transfered calculated, I’m not sure what the formula is, but I was OK

Next you’ll have to fill in a number of forms:

• Payment Form For Payment Abroad
  This form details who you are paying, what currency you are paying in to the amount of currency and the reason in the form of a code - mine was 3200 ‘Other Investment’
• Application For Telegraphic Transfers (overseas)
  This details the sender (you) the receiver (maybe you!!) and the bank details, you only have a small box to fit ALL the bank details in to so take care, you will be asked for IBAN, Swift, Sort code, account number and branch address. This sheet also details the RMB amount and the exchange rate (I got 14.37)
  
• A form in Chinese (I’ll translate and put the name here)
  This has your name, phone number, china address, and (i think) the reason for the purchase of foreign currency.

Next a whole load of transaction slips will require signing, and pin numbers entering, this covers the transaction itself and the commission (for me 100RMB).

Once everything is complete the forms and paperwork will be taken away for checking, this may take a while, as the tax payments were recalculated, but once everything is calculated and many, many stamps applied, its all done! Sounds so simple when its written down, but it took me just short of 2 hours to complete.

I’m not sure how long it takes to reach the UK, I’ll update this entry when it arrives.

So after finishing work today, there was only one thing to do….. Have a leaving party, so I knocked up that old classic - Spag Bol and invited my best buddy Sting and his girlfriend Yang around, and Lizzie’s friend Ramona also came. As its -7 or so, we decided the only viable option for drinks was mulled wine and a quick search round the supermarket turned up Cloves and what I think is whole nutmeg. The mulled wine went down a storm!!!! It seems cheap Chinese wine is the vital ingredient

So once everyone was suitably Inebriated I took my chance to ask Yang what my nick name they had chosen for me was, and it turned out it was 蚂蚱 (ma zha) or in English grasshopper, the general consensus was that this is very similar to ‘Matt’ and I have long limbs like a grasshopper, I’m pretty keen on it as a name

Lizzie also received a new name, which was thought to be more fitting to her than her current Chinese name. So Lizzie is now known as 荔枝 (li zhi) and in English that means Lychee or Litchi chinensis Sonn if you prefer a bit of latin, this fruit is native of southern China, which is about the only bit of China Lizzie hasn’t visited, a must of next time obviously.

Right, guess its bed time, no more mulled wine left, and lots of cleaning and banking to do tomorrow.

But hopefully not unemployable, it exactly 6 minutes time I will officially finish work for Cyclades China, and for the second time in 18 months be voluntarily unemployed. I feel happy. Now, wheres that bottle of Bubbly gone???

No matter how much investigation, planning and preparation you do here, when you finally come to implementing the process in invariably goes wrong - today I had to prepare to send my money to the UK, I had a pile of paperwork and thought I was all prepared. Upon arrival at the bank I was told I didn’t have all the paperwork and there was no way I could access my Bank of China Shanghai account in Beijing, my only option was to go to Shanghai. After talking to a couple of collegues I found I should be able to perform a transfer if I was willing to pay a service fee of 1% capped at 50RMB, so returned to the Bank, and queued for an hour, and after a short arguement where I informed the same clerk of this fee he then quickly performed the transfer as requested. It seems you have to know the process back to front and be willing to tell officials about it to get anything done here.

Fingers crossed I should get my required paperwork tomorrow, and can do battle at the bank again to get the money back to the UK, I’ll be glad when its over!

Tomorrow is the day for the box collection of our chinese junk to be shipped to NZ, we seem to be shipping 2 t-chests of rubbish, I’m sure it could all go missing and no loss to us.

An early start lead us to McDonalds for a Egg & Bacon McMuffin and Orange juice to cure our slight hangover from yesterday night in Lan Kwai Fong, then we headed up The Peak on the tram to go find our first Geocache located on the peak overlooking Stanley and Kowloon, The last 200m of the GPS guided Journey was a scramble up a steep incline through natural HK bush, but when the GPS finally indicated we were within 1m of the location I turned round to investigate the area and was amazed by the view, it has to be the best view of Hong Kong.

The rest of the day we spent first with a bread, cheese and humous lunch overlooking Central, then a walk down the hill from The Peak and a ferry over to Hung Hom, the sun broke through, and we had a beautiful walk by the bay.

I had to write something about this, on the way up the mid-levels escalator we spotted a ‘Pizza Express’ and as it was the first one we had seen for at least 18 months we jumped at the chance, and guess what? It was absolutely fantastic, in fact I could have eaten it at least 5 times over it was that good. I can’t wait to go somewhere with good restaurants.

After a quick trip up the mid-level escalator, and a walk back down to Lan Kwai Fong for a couple of beers and a pub quiz we walkd back down to central and found that in front of the HSBC building was Father Christmas walking round his house. Sourounding his houe were trees covered with chritmas wishes, and a large screen displaying some of those wishes to the world, so for the first time this year it actaully felt like christmas, lovely! Obviously I can’t tell you what I wished for, but I did take a picture of a guy in a suit placng his wish, and shared a smile with him has he left.

After a quick trip up the mid-level escalator, and a walk back down to Lan Kwai Fong for a couple of beers and a pub quiz we walkd back down to central and found that in front of the HSBC building was Father Christmas walking round his house. Sourounding his houe were trees covered with chritmas wishes, and a large screen displaying some of those wishes to the world, so for the first time this year it actaully felt like christmas, lovely! Obviously I can’t tell you what I wished for, but I did take a picture of a guy in a suit placng his wish, and shared a smile with him has he left.