Out of the way

I was in Beijing for the W3C's meeting of Members, which takes place twice a year and is where the people who pay for W3C to survive get together with the staff of the organisation (well, in reality about half or two thirds of the 60-odd staff actually get there) to talk about how to make sure the Web is moving in the right direction.

It's an interesting meeting. W3C has changed a lot over a decade and a bit, and is still changing. It has become more public, its processes have become more rigourous, and it has a much higher focus on testing and real quality than it did when the Web was very very young. Internal discussions are internal, so I can't really tell you what happened, but as always there is plenty to keep track of.
It's also interesting because we are generally sitting down with many of our fiercest competitors, and our (and their) past, present and potential customers trying to figure out how to work together so everyone can benefit. This makes for robust discussion, rather than some rubber stamp for someone or other's vision of the Web and how it needs to evolve.

I also spent a few days with the guys in Opera's Beijing office. A group of friendly and smart folks, it's nice to hang out. We all have work to do, so it never manages to be a big social holiday, but it's good to communicate with people. I did some official stuff, and some social stuff in the evenings.

One of the scariest things I did was go out for chicken wings. I was very tired (and a bit jetlagged after a long afternoon at the office. In the morning I had been to a conference to give a talk, and heard some scary ideas in a keynote that amounted to "give us everything you have, and we will let you use it too". I found out one of the benefits of the Beijing office - there is a great massage place in the basement, so I had a massage. And then we went out to an alley that is old Beijing. (That means it isn't hi-rise - almost everything in Beijing seems new).

In an alley off the alley we came to our destination. A small restaurant that serves chicken wings. you grab a plate, chopsticks, and a glass from the cupboard (they also serve water and beer. And a mango-and-ice mixture that I appreciated). There are napkins in a pile. And you sit down for chicken wings, which come in pairs, each pair on two skewers.

Most of them came in a bucket, and they had been marinated in different stuff before cooking. But the kind office manager had organised something special just for me - spicy chicken wings. I like spicy food - really quite spicy food.

These were really quite spicy. They were covered in chilli, and about halfway through the first one I realised it was really hot chilli. REALLY hot chilli. I had a pause then, a normal spicy wasabi chicken wing, about a bowl full of mango and ice and about a liter and a half of cold beer. It was almost preparation for the second one.

Afterwards we went to a place that claimed to be the smallest bar in Beijing - 12sqm bar, because it is twelve square meters. And behold, it serves meat pies, Coopers' ale (pale, sparkling or stout), and Bundaberg rum. I half-wondered if they had a stash of Tim-tams hidden under the bar. (Now I think of it, maybe I should have asked). An best of all, after only an hour in the bar my tongue had more or less stopped feeling like I was licking coals from a fire.

The rest of the trip was less scary, but just as interesting. Tibet was, at the time, in the news a lot. Chinese people, funnily enough, don't appreciate being told what to do by others. But I think that the average chinese person kows about as much about Tibet as I do. As a bystander, it seems like a complex situation. I generally think that countries should dissolve into larger groupings and into smaller communities (which seems a bit contradictory perhaps, but makes sense to me ). But countries don't always like doing that. Euskadi, Chechnya, Norfolk Island, East Timor, Wales, Ireland, the world is full of problems coming from the fact that this isn't ever as easy as it seems.

I went to the Silk Market (it used to be a street, now it is a building like a department store divided into little market stalls) and bargained from a written price tag (even the shopkeeper said that was a joke and offered a 60% discount straight away) to about 20% of the price for a power board. (China has great power boards - they accept any kind of plug I have ever seen). I got a couple of over-priced cookbooks in chinese from the Friendship shop (which when China was really a basically communist country was where foreigners coul buy stuff). I ate frogs (first time outside Australia) an jellyfish (seems to be common in China) and lots of other stuff, mostly pretty recognisable and almost all really good. I saw friends and went to good restaurants. I discovered that one of the guys in China is a professional standard translator (although that isn't his day-job). Overall, I had a good time with people it is always a pleasure to see, and with people it was a pleasure to meet.

I need to learn Chinese. In Beijing some people speak great english. But many don't speak any. Writing the address of the place I want to go has to be done in chinese. But despite that only one taxi driver (the official one I picked up at the airport) tried to rip me off, and people were generally friendly and polite. I guess people selling stuff in a market are a bit of an exception anyway, but I was still amazed by the saleswoman I saw in the Silk Market yelling at a potential customer "What's wrong with you!?" as though it was their fault they didn't want to waste a lot of time bargaining from an outrageous ambit price to something they thought was reasonable.