How to Hog-Tie a Hairy Crab in Three Easy Steps

Okay ... probably more than three steps.

Setting a Bad Example

In the US, I try really hard to not eat fast food. It's junky, unhealthy, and doesn't support the local economy. However, in China, I have occasionally had moments of weakness where nothing will do but KFC. Hey, it happens to the best of us. 

So you know how in the US, when you run across a Chinese restaurant in the US and see tons of Chinese people eating there, you think "hey, this place must be good!" I'm afraid that Chinese people who see me in KFC, waiting in line to order 一号餐 （橙汁，薯条）, think the same thing. So I feel guilty that I'm accidentally encouraging them to eat KFC. 

Not that KFC needs my help. After all, most times when I go in, the place is packed to the rafters. KFC was the first Western restaurant to establish a foothold in (mainland) China, way back in 1987, and they have done a great job localizing itself to Chinese tastes. As a result, KFC (Kendeji) is uber-popular and has about twice as many locations as McD's (Mai Dang Lao).

Still, though.

Interlude: Voting & Baseball (and Pizza)

 (We interrupt this stream of Tibet-related posts to bring you news of how to be American while overseas. I'll return to the pictures momentarily ...

So many things are new to me in China, and absentee balloting is one of them. Thankfully though my 100% offical 2008 Election ballot is on the way to the early voting clerk in Austin TX. That's right -- I voted like 3 weeks early. So if it turns out that one of my chosen candidates is, like, a child-murderer, then, well, I'm kinda screwed. I wonder if you can rescind an early vote? (Probably not -- it's probably like early admission to colleges, where if you get accepted then you have to attend. Speaking of which, I've always wondered how they enforce that, and what if any penalties a school will levy if you back out.)

There's a nearby FedEx branch that participates in a program called Express Your Vote, which any American citizen can Express-Mail (hah!) their vote to the US for free. So that's what I did.

My Chinese colleagues are fascinated by the voting process and we've talked a lot about it. I showed them the ballot -- most of them asked me who the hell Bob Barr was and what the "Write-In" blank was for. Good times. They were also unaware of the congressional elections going on and the various local Austin elections I am allowed to vote in, so I filled them in on all that. (Luckily no one asked me what a county tax-assessor is. I would have said "Um, the person who does something with driver's licenses?") They asked me how my identity is verified when I'm overseas and the possibilities of switching your vote to count for another state to try and game the system. Fun.

The time zone differences mean that I'll be at work on Wednesday morning while the election night results are being tallied. I bet that some places over here will broadcast the results-tallying live in the way that sports bars broadcast major American sporting events at the odd hours required by the time zone differences.

Speaking of which, so far I've managed to see Games 1, 2, and 6 (ugh, sad that even had to be necessary) of the ALCS via the magic of satellite TV. However it means I haven't been getting much sleep on the weekends, because the games air at like 8 AM over here. For Game 1, Dan and I headed out to a sports bar in Puxi and ate what turned out to be a decent, but not great, attempt at a Western breakfast. (Neither country can get the other's food right.) There's something weird about being in a bar at 8 AM though, but hey, I'm not drinking or anything. 

The next day Dan found out he gets the games on his satellite TV, and since he lives really close to me, that's how we watched Games 2 and 6. It's even better because he's rooting for the Sox and I'm rooting for the Rays -- although only so I'll have a reason to care about the at-bats. My heart lies with the O's. Regardless of who makes it to the Series, I'll probably root for the Phillies. Not sure though.

After watching Game 2 last Sunday, Dan and I headed to a place called Bubba's out in northwest Shanghai. Bubba's is a BBQ joint run by a Texan, an Austinite no less. They have good old-fashioned BBQ to eat and a nice little sports bar thing going on, a hearty slice of America right in the middle of China. It's fun. They also re-broadcast sports games, so last Sunday I saw UT kick OU's ass in the most recent Red River Rivalry ("Shootout" was such a better noun.) I'm not the world's biggest UT or college football fan, but I make my non-China home in Austin so the game was interesting enough. 

They have chili cook-offs there every year too, which is pretty great. I hope that people add spices from Sichuan and Hunan. And they sell T-shirts that say "Bubba's: A Few Miles West of Austin" :-) So, so true.

Another bit on American/Chinese stuff: I ordered a pizza last week with sausage and green peppers. Outside of ham & pineapple, those probably are my favorite pizza toppings.

So the pizza comes, and it's got, like, a few strands of green pepper slices on it. Fine. But the killer was that it didn't have sausage on it. It had friggin hot dog slices. Inexcusable. I don't know if that's, like, the common way to translate "sausage". Maybe I'll try again next week and see if I get the same thing, haha.

Tibet Post #2: Norbulingka and Sunsets

Our second day in Lhasa was my least favorite. That's because I was struggling a bit from the altitude, I think, my adrenaline high at having survived two days on a train and one in Lhasa was wearing off, and my stomach hurt, and I just felt pretty shitty overall. (Hey, I never said it was a vacation!) Top that off with a morning spent walking around Norbulingka, which isn't the world's most exciting scenic area, although there is a lot of history in there, like the first radio in Tibet, and the first western toilets and chairs. Man, that Dalai Lama knows how to party!! And, um, arrange flowers.

Full set here.

After that we went to the Tibet Museum, which was pretty dang neat but, had I been more awake, might have been elevated to the status of fascinating. 

After the museum, we at lunch, where I ate yak eyeball.  (Yes, really). Then we walked around the Sera Monastery for a little while. That was fun and very nice, but again, I was dragging ass by that point (having eaten too much for lunch and fallen into a small food coma. Maybe yak eyeballs are used as sleep aids in Tibet.). I have a lot of pics from Sera, but I haven't uploaded them yet; you'll have to wait for later :-)

Now rewind one day to the first day we got to Lhasa. After we'd finished sightseeing for the day, I brought my tripod out to Potala Square (across the street from the palace) at the center of town. I was struck by the layout of the square because it is exactly the same as Tiananmen Square, except with the Potala Palace at the north end instead of the Forbidden City, crossing Beijing Lu instead of Chang'an Dong Dajie, with some other monument at the south end instead of the Monument to the People's heroes. Interesting. Anyway, Dan and I stayed there for quite awhile, and I took some amazing sunset pics:

You can see that the sun was setting behind a hill with a communications tower on it ... Dan and I made endless fun of this fact, as if the silhouette of a communications tower has some mystical beauty in it ... when really it's probably a crass symbol of modernity. But its proximity did enable me to call Tim and Laurel, our friends in town for a grueling bike ride from Lhasa to Kathmandu, and set up dinner. Hm, paradoxes.

Globetrottin'

Just booked the travel arrangements for 澳门 (Aòmén, "Doorway to the sea", Macau). While I will get to do some tourism there, the main reason I'm going is to finally catch up with Jen, after a near-miss in Beijing and and her unexpectedly-long stay in America. I'll also get to see The Sound of Music, which is great because I've never seen it before.

So weekends in August already are pretty full. The 8th - 9th I'll be entertaining my dad's cousin Bennett and his family who will be visiting Shanghai en route to the Olympics. On the 15th - 17th I'll be in Macau. And from the 22nd - 24th I'll be in Huangshan.

Can't wait to see where I go the rest of my time here :-)

Lots of expats are making noise about the new Batman movie. Everyone keeps saying how good Heath Ledger is as The Joker. But the main topic is that it's not being shown in theaters here, unlike Hancock which a bunch of my friends saw. (I wonder how many scenes were edited out though.) People are saying it's something you have to see in the theaters, which rules out one popular option for watching movies. Some people are even talking about making a trip to Hong Kong specifically to see the movie. Sheesh. It can't be that good -- can it?

I ate dinner last night with 9 other people. Our total bill? About 250 RMB (~$36), or 25 RMB per person. The food wasn't stellar, but it was good Sichuan cuisine, and at $3.60, a definite friggin' bargain. It made the 480-RMB-for-three-people dinner I had tonight seem like I was giving away a kidney or something, espeically since the food was relatively worse than yesterday's (even though we got a boat of sushi, woohoo!)

Ummm and I got a wireless router, so I can 上网 (shàngwǎng, "surf the Internet") from my sofa. That's pretty kickass, if I say so myself. I got it at Best Buy, so I probably paid like 3x what I should have, but I know it's quality first-brand material and I can return it if it explodes or something like that.

Proof of Life

Practice makes perfect!!



This was taken at Gongdelin, the oldest vegetarian restaurant in Shanghai. est. 1922. They are famed for their tofu and soy-based meat fakery. I think what you see here is fake chicken.

And whoah, this new camera is pretty badass. I think the shot came out great.

Beijing: Day 4

This day was amazing. I could go into detail, but I just flew in from Beijing and I'm a little tired. Maybe I'll elaborate in a couple of days. But here's the two highlights you need to know:

Highlight 1:

I CLIMBED THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA.

Holy shit. Holy shit shit shit. Sooo amazing. So mind-boggling. It was cold and wet and rainy, but oh-so-amazing. My legs hurt from the crazy-steep ascent. But nonetheless I want to go back, really badly, and bring like, some food and a book and just sit up there, on top of the world surrounded by nothing except the occasional tourist, and read for four hours, maybe take a nap, eat some cookies, you know, just relax and soak in the atmosphere. If I hide from the occasional guards they post at some of the watchtowers, I could probably sleep up there.

Choice pics:















More on flickr.

Now, check this out:



That is a guy, harnessed to a zip line, suspended over the lake as he plummets from the base of the wall to the bottom of the mountain. You better believe I did that on my way down, and you better believe I took video of it too. I'll post it soon. Meanwhile, here's two of my tour-mates:





I spoke earlier of a steep ascent. Here's what I meant:



See the wall there and how it goes up and to the right at at 45 degree angle? Yeah. Not an illusion. We went straight up that.

You can see the steepness again, straight-on, here:



Ouch. My quads are killing me :-)


Highlight 2:

I ate fried scorpion! Not as exciting as the Great Wall, but still worth a mention. Check one off on the crazy-ass food category, I suppose.

Anyway, more on Beijing soon, including the last day, organized pictures, and videos.

Beijing: Day 3

Okay, so, yesterday's entry read "Part 1" but it's also the last part. I didn't do much after I posted; just went out to walk around Houhai, bought some more souveneirs, and ate dinner. Pretty relaxing, really.

Today though, I saw Mao Ze Dong.

Here's how it happened.

Mao's tomb is in the south-central area of Tiananmen Square, in between Qianmen and the Monument to the People's Heroes. The entrance faces north; the line starts at the north-west corner and wraps all the way around the west, south, and east sides before coming to the actual entrance. The line (I have some pictures up on flickr) wraps around the whole building and is five to six people wide. It is set off from the rest of the square by some rope, and there's about 50 feet in between the rope and the line, so we cut a narrow swath of people through an empty spot of the square.

I got to the starting point and it took about, oh I don't know, an hour? to get inside. I'm bad at tracking time in these situations. Luckily, at no point did we stand still. We were all just shuffling slowly forward. That kept the blood flowing :-)

So there's the line, which is like 5 people wide, as enforced by some painted line on the sidewalk. On either side of you are several dozen attendants, telling people to hurry up, move along, remove troublemakers from the line, and intercept people from crossing the open space in between the line and the rest of the square. (The orange twine is not a big enough deterrent, it seems.)

As you walk, loudspeakers enumerate the rules in Chinese and in English: be quiet inside, no picture taking, turn off your cell phones, dress respectfully (people with vests will not be allowed, apparently), and so forth. After shuffling forward around the building, you come to the front, at which point the line splits in two. Each half goes into a small bunker-like building in the courtyard. In these buildings, guards give you the airport-security treatment: metal detector, put your stuff in a plastic bin, wave the metal-detecting wand, etc.

When you're through, you go up the big steps in front of the building. At this point you can turn and look out over the square and get a sense of how many people there are milling around.

Then you go inside, and if you're wearing a hat, signs tell you to remove it. The signs also say to be quiet and no picture taking. I had a hat on, and I removed it before we got to the doors. I didn't bring my camera, because I'd heard the rules when walking around the area yesterday, so I didn't bother bringing it. Guards (this time in nicer dress, with white gloves) hurry you along and shush you if you talk. It's an eerie atmosphere, because there are so many people in there with you but they're all really quiet.

The first room has a big scenic painting of mountains on the far wall. In front of it is a row of vibrant green potted plants/bushes. In the middle of this row is a large white statue of Mao, seated and smiling. There are bouquets of flowers at his feet.

As you enter the door each line hugs the wall and you move towards the painting. As you get closer you realize it's not the far wall but just a partition. You move behind the partition and through another small antechamber.

Then you arrive in Mao's actual tomb. You can see him now. He's in a large glass-topped coffin, draped with a Chinese flag so only his face is showing. A light is shining on his face. The coffin is inside a glass room that's inside of the room you're in. There are three guards standing at attention inside this smaller room. The attendants rush you past. You spend maybe a total of 12 - 15 seconds viewing his actual body.

Then it's back outside and down the south steps of the building, back into Tiananmen where Qianmen stands guard.

And that's that.

After doing this, I went back to the hotel to pick up my things and began the journey out to the Summer Palace. I took the metro out to Xizhimen and then hailed a cab to the Beijing Zoo. From there I walked east along Xizhimenwai Dajie until I got to the Beijing Exhibition Center. It was a long walk, as the front gate of the zoo is (understandably) quite big. And it was really hot and sticky out. I stopped for a nice meal of Wuhan spiced duck neck, stir-fried pork, and potato pancakes (not the ones I'm used to though, haha.)

At the BEC I told the guard I wanted to get to the Summer Palace. You see, my travel guide says that you can take a boat from the north-east corner of the BEC all the way up the river, to the Summer Palace. I thought this would be more fun than a cab, so I wanted to do it this way.

The guard pointed me in the right direction. As I wandered toward the dock, I encountered two expats walking away from it. Since I was unsure of where I was going, I stopped and asked them if I was in the right spot. They said yeah, the ticket office was just around the corner, but that some guy was trying to scam people into getting into his private boat, so they were going to wait until 2 oclock.

I got to the ticket office, chatted with the lady behind the counter for a bit, and then bought the ticket (70 RMB). Soon enough, a speedboat came along to pick up myself and like four other tourists. I got some pictures of the boat as it came to the lake, so I knew what to expect. We rocketed through the water, swerving this way and that, until about 10 seconds later we arrived at a dock on the side, of the river.

We all hopped out and I started to stroll around the grounds of our landing spot. However, something was amiss. I didn't see any pagodas or giant lakes. All I saw were ... rhinos! And tiger statues! And signs for the aquarium!

I wasn't at the Summer Palace -- I was at the zoo.

Crap. Did I just get scammed again?

I was pretty pissed off right now. Memories flashed in my head of my foolishness from yesterday, with the pedicab and all that. So now I was like, shit, I just got scammed again, and even after those expats warned me!

I guess I could have just given up and wandered around the zoo. After all, it's a fun enough attraction. And there are pandas there! But I didn't feel much like it after yet another failed attempt to go somewhere scenic without getting ripped off. I just pictured this woman, and the guy who herded me into the boat, laughing at yet another lao wai victim.

Instead, I decided to try and get my money back. I walked all the way around the aquarium until I got to the north gate of the zoo. I checked my map and saw I was on Gaoliangqiao Lu. Great -- I was really close to where I'd embarked from. So I began to walk along the street towards Xizhimenwai Dajie. It was turning into a really long walk - like 15 minutes at this point and I hadn't seen the street. It was really hot and sticky out, the street was really dusty and dirty due to roadwork and construction, I was sweating like crazy, and I was still frustrated about getting ripped off again. I was picturing, you know, going up to the woman and asking for my money back, and then what happens if she refuses, could I get help, and maybe I could call one of my co-workers and have them explain it to a cop, if I could mange to find one. Robert told me that yelling works really well in situations like these, so I was psyching myself up to yell (because it's not something I do very well, so I have to, like, prepare for it).

But as I was walking along, I thought, hold on a second. What if I misunderstood something, or I should have stayed at the dock, or something like that? Did I even buy the right ticket? Maybe I was mistaken. After all, well, I don't understand Chinese very well.

The walk was dragging on, so I hailed a cab for the rest of the way. He deposited me out front of the ticket booth, and I marched right up to the woman and explained myself. "I didn't arrive at the Summer Palace. I arrived at the " (and here I pointed to the Chinese characters for 'Beijing Zoo' since I don't know how to say it."

Through the conversation that followed I figured out the problem. It was my mistake. After arriving at the zoo, I was supposed to transfer to a bigger boat. That would take me to the Summer Palace. Duh!

The woman and the guy apologized profusely. They explained the situation to the speedboat guy who came by in like 5 minutes -- this lao wai got off at the wrong stop, he's supposed to continue on to the Summer Palace. Considering it was my fault, or whoever's fault it would be for me not understanding the directions (if they had indeed been given to me in the first place), they were very very apologetic. I of course said, you know, that's okay, it's my fault, I'm wrong, thank you, thank you, etc.

And off we went again :-)

This time when we exited the boat at the zoo, a staffer pulled me aside and led me to the front of another line a short distance away. I guess the woman at the BEC radioed ahead or something: "The next boat has a tall white guy on it, make sure he gets to the Summer Palace!" Man, I was so embarrassed. And it happened in front of a shitload of people, a vast number of whom were already waiting in line, too.

After like 20 minutes of waiting in the hot sticky sun, the next big boat came and off we went. It was me and maybe like 40 other people. The woman conducting the tour did so, and of course I couldn't understand much except for a couple numbers (dates) here and there. But it was nice to be on the way ...

and on the way ...

and on the way. This boat was S-L-O-W. I guess I thought it would be faster, given the speedboat ride to the zoo. But such was not the case. I'm not sure exactly how long we spent on the river, but we got off at one point to wait for another boat. That boat took like 20 minutes to arrive, during which time I met and talked with two English students at Beijing University. They were taking the boat back to their school, which is out near palace.

Finally the next boat came, and we started off towards the Summer Palace. After like, I don't know, maybe another 20 - 30 minutes on the water, we arrived. Finally! I was really really tired by this point, after expending mental energy on the accidental zoo trip and physical energy on walking, waiting, and sitting out in the hot sun all day. I'm not sure what time it was by now; probably like 3:30 PM. I think I'd started on the first boat ride close to 1. Talk about your slow boat to China ...

*rim shot*

I debarked and immediately took in Kunming Lake. My first thought was "Hey, this look a lot like Xihu." And I come to find out later that this design was intentional. Makes sense. But, having already seen and appreciate the original -- and having been so tired and beaten up about getting to the Palace in the first place -- I didn't really have the energy to appreciate Kunming Lake that much.

I started walking around the path, just kind of relaxing and settling down from the journey. Along the way I met an expat, Odette, and her mom. I guess I'd just been frustrated by poor or nonexistent English all day, so when I heard Odette and her mom speaking in, you know, actual English, I was like "woohoo!" Haha. So I joined up with them, and we walked around for a bit and took in some of the sights around the lake. We saw a little impromptu musical performance, which I made sure to capture on video. I made comparisons between KL and Xihu, not knowing at the time that KL was designed to resemble it, hehe.

The three of us went into one of the museums around the area, the Garden of Virtue and Harmony. It was here the Empress Dowager Cixi watched theater performed onstage just for her. We took in the theater building and the halls surrounding it, which contained pictures, imperial dinnerware, costumes, jewelry, and other items of the period.

After about an hour of looking through here, I was exhausted. Luckily Odette and her mom wanted to leave also, so I tagged along with them and we caught a cab back into the city. We all made plans to meet up for dinner later on. I came back to the hotel and vegged out, watching some TV and writing the first bit of this blog entry.

Our goal for the evening was to hit up Quanjude, a 100-year old restaurant that serves the most famous (but not necessarily the best, I've heard) Beijing roast duck in town. According to wikitravel there is a branch near my hotel, so they picked me up in a cab and we headed off. We gave the driver the address and he got us most of the way there -- or so we thought. After he dropped us off, he told us to take a left at the next street -- he couldn't drive there (we think because it's in a hutong).

Long story short -- we wandered around for about half an hour, asking person after person, haggling with pedicab drivers, to no avail. No Quanjude to be found. We have no idea why the cabbie dropped us off where he did, because we walked quite a bit farther down Qianmen Xi Dajie. Perhaps we were going in the wrong direction altogether. Anyway, I was a little disappointed, because I'd promised Adeline that I'd go. But it seems it was not to be. It's apparently really difficult to find -- especially when you don't speak or understand Chinese all that well :-) But it was an adventure, you know, the unexpected kind you have in these situations.

We did end up at another restaurant that served Beijing roast duck, so we did get to eat it. It's really damn good, the sauce especially. And the restaurant was nice besides. I'm planning on maybe trying to find it tomorrow for lunch, but honestly, I'm not holding out any hopes.

After dinner, we cabbed it back to our respective hotels.

And that's the end of Day 3.

Hangzhou: Day Zero

There's so much to describe and say about Hangzhou that I think it's going to require two separate posts. After all, I'm uploading about 200 photos to flickr for you to look at, and I have many fun stories to tell.

The short version: The trip was a rousing success. Hangzhou is beautiful, well, at least the Xihu area is. It was a welcome escape from Shanghai and it couldn't have gone better. We did so many things that my feet and legs hurt from walking. I got very little sleep, given that we got early starts on both Saturday and Sunday mornings. I think I improved my Chinese by talking to so many people (including Adeline). I ate some really good food at some great restaurants, (including chicken brains, yum), including one that is over 150 years old. I didn't get much relaxing done, but there was a bit of that. But who has time to relax when you have mountains to climb?

The long version: Well, I hope to start that tomorrow with a "Hangzhou Day One" post, with illustrations via flickr. The Internet is very slow here so I started uploading Day One's pictures just now. I hope they'll be done by the time I wake up tomorrow ;-) If you wanna be ahead of the game, you can check out my photostream now. I also have a couple videos to upload.

Oh, and I didn't get my phone back :-( Gonna buy a new one tomorrow or Tuesday ... luckily I think I have all my phone numbers written down somewhere.

Saturday Night Dinner

This is why I enjoy having a tutors -- I learned how to say "zombie" in Chinese. It's huo2 si4 ren2 - literally, "alive dead person". (The numbers are the tones.) Awesome.

I'm now on the lookout for any Chinese zombie movies - she assures me there are a few in existence.

Also, I finally had a camera with me during a meal. This set is from a team dinner Saturday night at the Thumb Plaza. Highlights:



Needless to say, there were tons of leftovers.







That's a chicken foot, by the way ;-)



More.

In other food-related news, I made good on my promise to buy some matzah! So I have two boxes sitting around. I'm going to bring one into work tomorrow. It's not exactly the tastiest delicacy, so I'm not expecting it to attract a huge amount of attention ;-)

In other non-food related news, I just came across two really useful web sites for learning Chinese.

And if you're interested (which I hope you are), here's a Chinese translation of the TMNT theme song.

Best Friends?

You think these two were friends in a past life? Or -- in an alternate universe?

Friday day we had off, so I went to Roy & Eve's place and made spring rolls with a bunch of other friends. If I can toot my own horn a bit, I was not so bad at the rolling part. I ended up rolling at least 50 of the 100 or so we ate. There were three kinds: curry, banana, and teriyaki chicken. Mmmm.

Saturday I was really lazy and didn't do much. Then my friend Cameron called and invited me to a socc-- I mean, football game at Hongkou Stadium. He's Scottish, so football (patience, guys - that's what they call it over here! When in Rome ...) runs in his DNA. I however cannot recall the last time I was at a football game. It was the Tianjin Teda coming to town to play the Shanghai Shenhua.

The weather was pretty rainy and crappy, so the capacity of 35,000 was not even close to being full. I'd say maybe a couple thousand were there. But we sat right next to the loud Shenhua fan section, so that provided some atmosphere. They were chanting and yelling and beating drums and waving flags the whole game.

At some point they started singing a tune that I recognized, but I couldn't place it. Then it hit me -- these Chinese football fans were humming the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Now, I mean -- okay. That just blew my mind :-)

Tianjin scored once, early in the second half. But Shanghai came back with two goals in the last 15 minutes to win it. So that was fun. (Yeah yeah -- I sound really excited don't I?) The highlight of the game for me was a drunk fan who stumbled onto the field and began accosting one of the players:




It was all well and hilarious until the security guards dragged the dude away, and I realized he probably won't be heard from again for a good long while. (Nah, just kidding -- I think.)

Sorry no pictures. I'll do better next time and bring my camera.

Sunday I was supposed to go to Taikang Lu again to relax, and by "supposed to" I mean "wanted to." But instead I ended up at Moganshan Lu, this sort of cousin to Taikang Lu in the art world I suppose. But whereas Taikang Lu is a bunch of narrow alleyways, Moganshan Lu is a broader, more open maze of warehouses and small plazas.

That's where the pictures at the start of this post come from. I stayed there for nearly five hours, taking pictures and looking at stuff and browsing in bookstores and reading and eating and chatting with shop owners. (Yes -- I can kind of do that now. But only in small doses.) I knocked on doors and climbed stairs and looked out windows and debating crawling across some scaffolding to reach alternate rooftops. It was pretty great and very relaxing.

With my now-superior insider peek at the Shanghai art scene, I've made two observations. Observation the first: lots of photographers are into the whole my-pictures-are-black-and-white-except-for-one-or-two-brightly-colored-objects thing. I saw this trend in many galleries on Taikang Lu and I certainly noticed it at Moganshan Lu. (Listen to me, I'm becoming Robert Hughes over here.)

The second observation I had was that lots of artists create, well, variations on a theme. But that theme is really, really obvious. Example: a single gallery might be full of 20 - 30 paintings. Each painting is of, let's say, a person or two or three or a hundred people, but they're all done in the same style. They might just have different clothes on, or be in a different setting, or have different color skin. But they all share very distinct features that group them together. You'd have to be blind not to see it -- because all the people look the same.

Example:



Those same grinning faces adorn every single painting in that gallery, just in different costumes and environments and shit. I dunno if it's supposed to be this way or what, but it gets a little monotonous, especially when you're in a gallery and all these faces are leering at you from the walls and they all look exactly the same. It's especially noticeable because the facial expressions never change. Each one is exactly the same.

It's like, ooh, cool-looking face in a military uniform, cool-looking face in a cocktail dress, cool-looking face standing on a cliff by the sea. I dunno. Yeah they're cool-looking and distinctive but, again, it gets old.

Damn brain, I'm too logical for the art world I suppose.

After that I came home, ate dinner, and watched No Country for Old Men (finally!) I so love the Coen brothers and this film didn't disappoint.

And now for something completely different ...

The bees were okay-tasting. Not bad, but not something I'd go out of my way to order again (especially not for 78 kuai). They had obviously been soaked in oil of some sort and this gave them a powerful aftertaste which was good at first but stuck around way too long to be really pleasant. They weren't crunchy or anything. A little chewy, maybe.

There was actually some discussion among my friends about whether they actually were bees or not. Justin and Helen broke open several of the little corn-fritter-like pods and discovered just mush inside. "See, no bees!" they said, obviously wanting to ruin this experience for me ;-) But I maintain that a heavy cooking process simply liquefied the bees beyond recognition.

Since I'd built up to the moment for, well, months now, I felt like I had to eat more than I actually would've wanted to had this just been a normal dinner. Honestly, the anticipation and the build-up were way better than actually eating the bees. But hell. It was fun. And that's all that matters :-)

WWPFD

That stands for Worldwide Pillow Fight Day, and it consumed the majority of my Saturday afternoon. Pics here, but to really appreciate it check out the video of the first round:



(Yes, YouTube is unblocked in China now. Woohoo!!)

Because of the terrible weather, only like 30 people showed up but it was really fun to watch. Everyone was really into it, swinging the pillows and whomping each other silly. The security guards at the Shanghai Sculpture Space looked rather bemused but did not give us any trouble. Speaking of the venue, you can see a little bit of the sculpture yard in the pictures. I didn't go exploring because it was raining outside, but they looked really cool. I'm going to have to go back sometime, now that I know where it is.

That night Herbert and I went to eat dinner at Chua Chua, a Sichuan (read: spicy) place in Puxi. It truly fit the definition of "hole in the wall." There were maybe 15 seats total in the place, and if I stretched my arms out I probably would have covered half the floor. The meal was absolutely amazing, made even more so by the fact that it was 14 kuai (about $2). The deal is you pick out a number of veggies, noodles, rice, and meats, and then give everything to the kitchen staff to cook as a soup. Honestly, I have no idea what the meats I chose were. They're not labeled, even in Chinese. But who cares, because the meal was awesome.

Before and during the meal, Herbert and I were able to converse with a woman who was sitting next to us. I understood about 80% of everything she said, so between Herbert and me, we all had a complete conversation. It was great, very encouraging, to be able to understand and also be understood. She had no problem understanding my Chinese at all :-)

I can feel myself getting better at understanding Chinese, at filtering out the words I don't know and racking my brain to see if I can think of what it means. I've prescribed myself a semi-regular regimen of watching Chinese TV so I can get more used to parsing sentences. I also make it a point to listen to the talk radio in the taxi in the morning, as most drivers will play this while driving me to work. I still catch maybe one word in 20 or 30 -- not quite enough to even divine contextually what the person is talking about -- but I have hopes that this will improve with time.

Also, speaking Chinese still sounds a bit weird to me -- but I think that's only because I can speak only in short sentences that involve words I know. I am not able to get into the "flow" of a sentence -- the divisions between Chinese and not-Chinese are too close together. I don't feel like I'm speaking Chinese. At the point where I can speak in Chinese for, like, a full 15 - 20 seconds at a clip -- when I reach that point I think I'll feel more "natural" and comfortable with these foreign sounds exiting my mouth :-)

From my tutor I learned, somewhat to my surprise, that there is no way in Chinese to say "have a good day." I mean, there is -- I could put together the characters that formed that sentence, but the sentiment/meaning would not be there. I was really surprised by this notion, actually, so I confirmed it with a co-worker. I joked that I would start a cultural trend by saying "you hao tian" and it would catch on like some phenomenon, haha.

On the opposite end, linguistically speaking, I have taken to unwinding some nights before bed by watching TV. ICS is a new English-language channel in Shanghai, and at 10:30 every night (and most weekend mornings) they broadcast crappy low-budget, made-for-TV movies from the US. It is in this capacity that I've seen such compelling material as Full Ride and Absolute Zero, as well as portions of other movies whose names I can't remember. One of them involved killer ants of some sort. If CCTV 9 is the CNN here, then ICS is like TNT/TBS I suppose. Except they don't show Law & Order six times a day :-(

The last of the three lightbulbs in my 2nd bedroom burned out today, so I went to Carrefour to buy some new ones. I decided to take a shot on some low-energy CFL ones from Phillips, the ones that are bent tubes instead of a single globe. The packaging claims they output 40 watts of light while using only 8 watts. I screwed them in and they're awesome. The lighting in here looks so much nicer. It's white. By contrast, the other rooms here are yellow. I never noticed it before, but it's true, and now the other rooms seem really harshly-lit and dingy.

I would expect everyone to have them, except for one thing -- they're expensive. I think one bulb cost me like 25 kuai. Compared to 2 kuai for a normal incandescent bulb, that's a lot. But the room is so nice now :-)

For lunch today I had stewed pork & tofu. Nothing exceptional there -- but I am able to say "pork" and "tofu" in Chinese so I was able to do more than just point and say "please give me this". I could order the dish by name (almost - I don't know how to say "stewed". I'll have to look that up.) It was pretty exciting.

That's how things are listed here - the English might say "Dumplings stuffed with pork and cabbage" but you would order it by saying zhurou baicai jiaozi - literally, "pork cabbage dumpling" all in a row. They just make it look nice for us lao wai.

Speaking of pork, I was remarking to Jonathan on Friday how pork is served everywhere here. In the States, you mainly get beef or chicken. You can get those here, for sure -- but meats like pork and duck are much more common. Pork doesn't need to advertise itself with hilarious slogans.

Speaking of tofu, I had no idea that it is the same thing as "bean curd" which is how most menus list it here. You learn something new every day :-)

For dinner tonight I had fried dumplings. I buy them frozen from Carrefour and usually just boil them for 5 minutes. It's friggin' great. Tonight though I took the additional step of frying them in some Canola oil. Last time I tried this, the dumplings burned the second I dropped them on the pan. So this time I lowered the heat and was able to fry them for a good 5 or 6 minutes, turning the skin a crispy golden brown. The end result was rather tasty, although I used way too much oil so now, two+ hours after eating, I can still taste it in my mouth. Ick. Next time I'll use much less.

I got the idea of frying the dumplings from Ya Dian Fang, this awesome restaurant at the Thumb Plaza. They serve something "grilled meat turnovers" which essentially are large fried dumplings and they're amazing. Good to know I can replicate the dish at home, now :-)

I Have an Aunt

So, I'm about to head out to go ice-skating, except I'm worried they will not have skates for my giant American feet, haha. My friend humorously described this lack of inventory as an "untapped market", which made me laugh. You will not be surprised to learn that she works in PR :-) But I'm on my way out the door, so we'll see if they can dig up a special pair just for me.

I spent the afternoon today shopping at Carrefour for cleaning supplies. Not for me, mind you - but for my aiyi. Literally this word means "aunt" (Hi out there!) but colloquially it refers to a maid. Yes, that's right - after almost 2 months here I am breaking down and hiring a maid. I resisted for so long because, well, I am used to cleaning (however infrequently and half-assedly) myself. And I don't like the idea of paying someone to do something that I can easily do myself. I guess it makes me feel, too, what's-the-word -- bourgeoisie. (Icky.) But the dust is piling up and I'd rather spend my time sightseeing (and ice skating), and Tim recommended his aiyi who he and his wife have employed for over two years. So I hopped on the spoiled-expat bandwagon. I'm mitigating this feeling by still doing my own laundry and food gathering/cooking. It's just the scuzzy floors that will get a cleaning. She's coming tomorrow at 1 or 2 PM.

For whatever reason, the mop/broom aisle in Carrefour is the home turf of like 6 different salespeople who all try to push (pun totally intended) brooms on you the moment you step in the aisle. Nowhere else in the store has anyone else tried to offer my something. But there's like 2 - 3 people giving broom/mop demos in this particular aisle. Even when I clearly had a broom and mop in my cart already, they were still trying to hawk their merchandise, haha. I have no idea what's going on there or why that aisle is so popular with the type-A employees.

So I regaled you all in the past with the tale of my heating units and how I wasn't sure I was using them effectively. Turns out I was right. After several weeks of procrastination I brought the units' remote control into work and asked my boss to read the labels for me. I discovered I'd had the unit on "Automatic" instead of a specific "Heater" mode. Also I now can use the high-powered mode and have the fan blades oscillate to heat an entire room better. Coupled with the slight rise in temperature (I think it was 8 - 9 degrees out today) I'm feeling a bit toastier. Asking my boss to read the labels on my remote control brings me back to that embarrassing feeling where I know what I want but don't know how to say / ask for it, haha. But I swallowed my pride and it turned out to be a good thing (as I would imagine usually is the case) :-)

I've been eating some badass food, too. On both Thursday and Friday nights I had food from Guizhou province. The food is spicy, but not nearly as spicy as Sichuan or Hunan food. They have some interesting dishes too, including worms, bees (yes, bees!), dog meat (perpetuating a stereotype), and steamed turtles. I have to admit, I'm really curious to see what a meal consisting of bees and turtles will taste like. I'll let you all know what I find out, and of course I'll bring my camera along for the ride :-)

I also saw one description on the menu that was heavy on the Chinglish - apparently the dish contained "Jew's ear." I saw that and was like fuck, I'm getting out of here, ya'll aren't taking my ears!!

Tonight I go for the hat trick as, after ice skating (if I can indeed do that) we're going to a Hunan place. No rest for my tongue :-)

Small anecdote: I was discussing Chinese and American leaders today with my tutor, where I found out the Chinese refer to Dubya as "Bushi", which, when said out loud, sounds pretty close to how you would say "is not" in actual Chinese. I liked that. And she taught me how to say "Clinton," and then she said another name starting with an L. And I was like, "Hillary," naturally assuming that she would be the woman most closely associated with Bill. But Joyce (my tutor) was like "No, not Hillary, not his wife -- [this other woman] can't be president." I literally had no idea who she was talking about, so I kept saying "I really think you mean Hillary" and just assumed Joyce was mistaken.

But it turned out she was trying to say "Lewinsky"!! I cracked up for a couple seconds there, just because, you know, I don't think most Americans think about that incident anymore, but apparently that's not the case overseas. Oh, the legacies we weave without even thinking about it . . .

Chi fan

I'm not sure what it is about food here, but it seems less filling than in Austin. Maybe that's a comment on the typical American diet and/or what we like to put in food. Maybe I'm still in like "vacation" mode or something, so psychologically my brain is still relaxing. (Maybe this is why I can't seem to find time for the gym.) But seriously, I eat a whole meal and like 3 hours later I'm hungry again. Even when it's not Chinese food - even when it's cookies or chocolate or something like that. Something over here must be different. If I could read the ingredients, I might investigate :-)

Tonight Charles, Herbert and I ate some hot pot. That's this deal where you all sit at a table with a big, well, pot plonked down in the middle of it, above a burner. The pot is full of broth and some veggies. The staff turns on the burner, and you order raw meat and throw it in the pot. When it's nice and cooked (that's the important part), you take the food out of the boiling cauldron and eat it.

Yum.

Being in a foreign country, and being also perhaps preternaturally disposed towards worrying about unsanitary food, and being aware that my co-worker James got sick from hot pot when we visisted in November, I was a little wary about trying it myself. And, unfortunately, my co-workers insisted we order the spicy version. Now, I was not raised on spicy food, but I was pretty proud of the effort I made in Austin to eat spicy Mexican food. I even indulged in some spicy Indian and Thai food on occasion. However, spicy Chinese food (usually from Sichuan or Hunan province) is a totally different level. I can only take so much of it in one dish, let alone an entire meal. So when I saw the red peppers floating in the broth, I knew I was in for it.

And yes, it was insanely spicy. The kind of spicy where my lips, tongue, and throat were buzzing after each bite. It was not very pleasant, but I managed to hang in there and finish the meal. I couldn't really tell if it was good, though -- the spiciness just got in the way of the food. It was too much. So if I do hot pot again, I'll make sure to get the non-spicy version - but the way I hear it, that's kind of like the wussy way out. Oh well, so sue me - I like to taste my food :-)

As for the wigglies, well, I gave everything a thorough once-over before I actually ate it, and once or twice I even checked with Herbert or Charles, who have hot pot experience. So I think I'm fine. But, I will wait 24 hours or so before declaring myself 100%, haha.

Words & Food

Today was the first time I've been able to say it's actually warm. I even took off my big heavy jacket on the walk from the Thumb Plaza to the metro station. Of course, it's all relative, as today's temperature was something like 7 - 8 degrees C - hardly "warm". But given the past month of crappy weather, I'll take it. Oh yeah, and the sun came out. It was pretty nice :-)

I went to the Shanghai Art Museum today. Half the stuff my guidebook said to visit wasn't there, haha. Either that or I was just not good at finding it. There's not much English or Pinyin to be had, so I just walked around and looked at all the pretty pictures for awhile. There were a couple of which I wanted to buy prints, but the gift shop didn't seem to have them. I need to learn the word for "buy". Um, I'm sure it's in my phrasebook. I also need to learn "live", "need", "with", "there", "here", "after", and "like". Probably all also in my phrasebook.

The great thing about having a language tutor is that I can come to her and say "Help me learn these words." In fact I might text message her with these words and ask her to come up with sentences designed to help me learn and remember them. Word. (hah! no pun intended!)

I'm getting better at recognizing words I know when people say them to me. That's pretty cool and empowering. So I am having more mini-conversations with taxi drivers and waiters. In the morning when taxi drivers have talk radio on, I'm starting to recognize words like "today", "want", "have", "you", "me", and so on, from the vocabulary that I actually know and can speak. Baby steps man -- baby steps. Today I saw a billboard for Heilongjiang - and immediately knew that means "Black Dragon River". That's a pretty badass name for a province, if I say so myself.

In fact I was watching a bit of TV this morning, and there was some commercial for skin moisturizing cream on - Garnier, I think. (Amusingly, the announcer pronounced it "Gar-nyer", where in America it's pronounced "Gar-nyay", which I guess is the correct way to say it in French.) I heard the phrase gao keji, and immediately went - ahh, I know what that is! Because two metro stops I say the most are Shanghai Keji Guan and Zhangjiang Gao Ke. Ke is technology (first tone, anyway), ji (fourth tone) is science, and gao (first tone) is tall. (We all know why I know this word.)

So gao keji, in the commercial, literally means "tall science and technology". In this context though, gao probably means something like "advanced". Combined with my knowledge of how these commercials are all the same, e.g., they all try to convince you they've uncovered the secret formula for eternal youth, I could infer that the voice-over was using this same technique of persuasion in China. Not that there's anything especially interesting about that - I'm just happy I was able to recognize the words in a normal, everyday context.

Another funny phrase involving gao is Ni he gao le. This literally means, "You drink tall" which makes no sense. But colloquially, this phrase means "you're drunk", and if you think about it, it kind of makes sense (at least to me, anyway). This one is easy to confuse (when either speaking or listening) with Ni hen gao le, which simply means, "You're very tall". A way to make it easier is that he is first tone and hen is third tone, so if you get your tones right, I guess there's less of a chance of insulting someone accidentally.

In other, smaller triumphs, I went shopping yesterday at Carrefour and bought vittles. It took me a couple trips to load everything into the taxi, so I knew I wouldn't be able to carry everything up to my apartment by myself, not in one trip anyway.

Solution, you ask?

As we stopped at my door, I said to the taxi driver, Wo gei ni er shi kuai bang wo. This translates to "I give you 20 kuai help me." I could have added zhe ge ("this") while pointing at the bags, I suppose, but I got my point across. He understood and helped me carry all my bags upstairs. Victory :-)

Speaking of er ("two"), it's pronounced like "ar" (as in "yard"), and it's first tone. So every time I say it I'm reminded of the sound a dog makes ("arf arf!") and I feel a little silly because I feel like I'm barking at someone in the way a small dog would, haha.

Also speaking of er, you only say that when you're saying the numeral two. When you want to say "two of <something>", you say liang. So if you want two bottles of water and you say Wo yao er ping shui, you'll confuse people. What you need to say is Wo yao liang ping shui. But if you're giving a street address, you'd use er. Don't ask me why this little rule is in there. But it's confusing :-)

Back to Carrefour, or Jialefu as it's called here, I bought a pot and a pan. So now I can boil (and fry!) the frozen jiaozi that I bought, which is way better than microwaving them. They also make for a much better dinner than a pack of Bugles and some rice crackers. (I'm such a bachelor.) I'm really starting to enjoy all the different kinds of dumplings - jiaozi, xiaolongbao, and wonton. They're cheap and delicious. Good times. I guess it's in my blood, and all, given that I grew up being served kreplach every so often :-)

I'm not sure if now's the time to explain how I've been living here almost two months and my refrigerator was not plugged in -- but, I guess I just did. The funny part is, I didn't even notice, because it's so cold here. All the bottles of water I had in there were cold, so I had no reason to be suspicious. Yesterday I dropped something behind the fridge and had to look back there, so I noticed, hey, this thing's not plugged in! Now the fridge light turns on when I open the door, and I'm like -- oh, right, that's supposed to happen -- I forgot.

Back to Jialefu. You know you've made it in China when your company or product is blessed with a Chinese name. For example, KFC is known as kendeji which, when said out loud, vaguely sounds like "Kentucky". Same thing for places like Washington DC, Houston, Italy, Canada, Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, McDonald's, et al.

Aaaaand I am looking into booking a trip to Beijing at the end of April. Randomly enough, a friend of mine who I used to carpool with to Hebrew School in 3rd grade is in a play that is touring through China this spring. The tour is not coming to Shanghai, so I'm going to plan to meet up with them in Beijing.

Chop the Pepper Big Fish Head

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Shanghai has some fucking AMAZING food. Last night I had some kind of honey-BBQ pork with a side of (get this) dates stuffed with rice and glazed in sugar. With sprinkles on top, no less! Permit me to drool for a second ...

Tonight however, I walked into Tasty Hall, opened up the menu, and promptly saw this staring me in the face:



My favorite is "The Beijing onion explodes the fat cow." I just picture a harmless cow, perhaps a little on the "beefy" side, wandering around in a field in Beijing. Suddenly, an onion jumps out of nowhere!

KABOOOM!!! Cow giblets everywhere. The onion waits for a split second, calmly rotates around, and rolls off into the sunset, never to be seen again.

But I also like to imagine a platoon of west toast snow fish, spears at the ready, strapped into helmets and rattling their chain mail, gazing at a distant castle with a steely glint of determination in their round eyes.

Tonight, they invade.

(Ai ai ai, muchos peces peligrosos!)

Other delicacies on this Chinglish-ridden menu include:

• Pumpkin healthy fungus
• Burns the shrimp
• The XO sauce explodes the spiral piece
• Spiced salt little yellow croaker
• The Guangdong snake ground fries the cured foods
• Pineapple and the meat
• The gold garlic steams the Guangdong towel ground
• Pair of taste burns the dried meat boiler young
• The fragrant and hot string burns the big shrimp
  
• Fat cattle winter mushroom boiler young
• Tasty Hall water cooks big shrimp
• Chop the pepper big fish head
  

... and so on.

If you look at it long enough you can recognize patterns, like "burns", "cooks", "explodes", and so on. I'm guessing that "cooks" means "boiled", since it's paired with "water". "Burns" could mean "fried", except that "fries" appears a couple times on the menu. As to the other ones, well, I leave that up to you to decide :-)

So what did I have? Well, the "Tea tree mushroom and meat", of course. I had no idea what kind of meat would show up -- and now that I've eaten it, I still have no idea!

I wanna find these menu writers and hire them to write documentation for us :-)

In more word-friendly news, Shanghaiist posted an entry about an anagram map of the Shanghai metro. My stop is, appropriately enough, Huge Shoe Healing Communist Ascendancy (Shanghai Science and Technology Museum). And it's only a 4 kuai fare to I'm a Hot, Dashing Dinosaur. (Shanghai Indoor Stadium). Good times :-)

The Price of Tea in China

Well that last post took me an hour to write -- hopefully this one will be shorter ... although probably not :-)

Friday after work, I hung out with Tim, Herbert, and Tony. Tim's wife is in this cooking club and one of her friends invited her to this concert/sale/fashion show at High Street Lofts. Before that, we went to dinner at Dong Bei Ren ("Northeast People"). They serve (get ready for it) Dongbei cuisine. Pretty yummy, especially the appetizer dish of cucumbers, cilantro, onions, and sesame seeds. Very zesty. This is the first time since my arrival that I've had Dongbei cuisine, and like all the other cuisines I've had here (Shanghainese, Cantonese, Sichuan, Hunanese), I really liked it.

Anyway the four of us got kind of lost on the way out there, which resulted in probably an hour's worth of walking. We met up there with Megan and a friend of hers and proceeded to order. There was a game of snooker on the TV; unfortunately the TV was right next to my head so I was probably blocking a bunch of people from looking at it :-)

The food was great, but the high point of the night was this: halfway through dinner, we heard shouting and clattering dishes from upstairs. Megan, who speaks / understands Chinese very well, told us that somebody had just swore a couple times. So we were kind of giggling at that and just wondering what was going on. For like 10 minutes, we heard people shouting, some bottles breaking, and more cussing. We all just thought it was some kind of fight. All of a sudden, four guys come walking down the stairs -- and they're carrying, literally, a heavier guy who is completely passed out. Hahaha. I guess he got a bit drunk and obnoxious. They carried him outside and propped him up against a wall. We were all laughing at this point. Tony and Tim even had the balls to break out their cameras, open the door, lean outside, and take pictures of the scene. I don't think they got any good shots, mainly because they were smart enough to stand well away from the guys. But the idea was funny enough.

After that we hiked it down to the High Street Lofts. We cut through a dump, like, literally a dump on this plot of land in between two ritzier streets. People were carting things around. That's Shanghai -- the old right in there with the new, the poor jammed up against the rich.

We end up inside this shopping mall and take the escalator up to the second floor. Everything's very white. There's a group of guys and a girl playing djembes and other kinds of drums in the middle of the floor. Clustered around them are photographers and other hangers-on, mostly expats, who look like they do belong in a fashion show. There are several photography sets scattered around the place, and people are fussing with lights and clothing and cameras and sound equipment. We're in the center area of a 5-story shopping mall. Of course the space is circular and not very acoustically-minded, so there's a lot of crazy echoing going on. There's nothing much to do, so I take the escalators up to the highest levels and walk around looking for something interesting. I find nothing of the sort :-) All the stores are either women's fashion, bridal wear, or furniture. That, plus a couple cafes and stuff like that. So I'm not too disappointed when we all decide to leave like half an hour later.

On the way back to the subway, we cut through Maoming Lu, which is supposed to be this famously pre-Guliani Times Square place where lonely expats and prostitutes mix. So we're disappointed when we walk by the strip and all we see are like six bars with nobody doing anything interesting. One girl outside the New York Bar (which is playing techno, natch) yells at us to come inside. We laugh it off and keep moving. Apparently this place used to be far more of a den of sin, but the city appears intent on beautifying it because they've shut down many of the bars. At the end of the road is the House of Blues and Jazz, which Tim tells us is moving to a new location. How disappointing.

It's late now, by subway time anyway, so we rush to the station and hear a train arriving. Huzzah! Unfortunately it takes off before we can get there, and an attendant tells us it's the last one. Bu hao. So it's off to find a cab, which, given the cold and rain and the fact that it's Friday night on Huaihai Lu, is no easy task. It takes maybe 45 minutes of walking, walking, hailing cabs, walking, and more walking. Finally we find out and pile in. Night complete.

Saturday I awoke to rain. Given what everybody tells me about the Shanghai weather, I'm surprised it's taken this long into my visit to rain steadily. I'm still intent on sightseeing, though, and I walk to Da Mu Zhi to get coffee and breakfast. On my way out I duck into Carrefour and pick up an umbrella. This is the first umbrella I've owned since college, seriously. Because that's the last time I ever had to do this much walking :-)

Still intent on going out, I head for the subway station and exit at Lujiazui. My intent is to visit the Pearl Tower and do all the dumb touristy things inside, like the museum and the sightseeing deck. But after waiting in line for tickets for like 10 minutes, I decide to forego that plan and attempt to see the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum in People's Square.

Unfortunately I don't quite make it :-) The museum is on my map but I cannot find it in the park at all. Instead I find the MoCA, which is where I ended up spending my time and taking all those neato pictures. That took about an hour, maybe an hour and a half. It was pretty cool. I think the last time I was in a museum was for a project in my senior year of college. And before that, I can't remember -- maybe when my dad took me to the Smithsonian when I was a kid? No idea. I guess I am just not that interested in "art" or maybe I just don't consider it something that I'm interested in, so I don't go. Who knows :-)

But for whatever reason, I really enjoyed the exhibit at the MoCA. The sculpture of the girl and the eggs was really fucking amazing. I'd pay money to have that installed in my house :-) Upstairs was really neat, with hundreds of folding fans and decorated bags all over the place. Some of the prints downstairs were also really cool. I may have to re-think this whole anti-museum thing :-)

After that, I planned on heading to the Bund sightseeing tunnel, so I packed up my camera and started trekking across the park. On my way out, I passed two Chinese girls holding an umbrella. They said hello, and I said hello back, and like that dude on Nanjing Dong Lu, they stopped and begun talking to me. I figured they just wanted a chance to either a) talk to a foreigner or b) practice their English or c) all of the above. They were really nice and they asked me lots of questions, like "What's your favorite color?" Hahaha. Since I really had nothing else better to do, I walked around with them for like 20 minutes. Our walk took us outside the park onto one of the main roads, I think Fuzhou Lu. The sidewalks were incredibly crowded and because it was still raining, everybody had their umbrellas. I kept having to raise my umbrella up so it wouldn't hit either somebody else or a fence or pay phone on the other side of the sidewalk, haha.

Anyway we walk and talk for like 5 minutes and we get to one of the side streets when they say something like "Hey, come with us - we want some tea because it's cold out and that'll warm us up." Immediately I'm like: scam! I'd read about it way back in January 2007 when I first was thinking about taking the trip to Shanghai. Ah, good ol' brain, you come in handy sometimes. So I declined and said something about wanting to keep walking, or that I wasn't hungry, or some combination of the two. They politely excused themselves and went off down the side road.

At the time I felt kind of bad, I mean, who knows, maybe they were just looking to make friends? But I figured I've been here two weeks and don't know the lay of the land just yet - it's better to just decline anything like that, especially when I've read about it beforehand. And I'd rather not have my ass kicked by goons shaking me down for tea money that I don't have. It sucks, because the logical extension of that philosophy is that here in China, anyone who approaches you like that wants something from you (most likely your money) and is willing to put on false pretenses to get it. It makes me want to keep my guard up, which also sucks because lord knows my guard is up enough as it is. But hey, you know, that's just how it is.

When I spoke with Tim today, I told him what had happened and he was like "You did the right thing. I know plenty of people who've gotten taken in by that scam." So that at least made me feel better and that I'm not just some paranoid lao wai who's terrified of experiencing China, haha.

He even congratulated me for wasting half an hour of their time - "Way to take one for the team," he said, lol. But I was just trying to be friendly :-)

I went home after that, and that's pretty much the extent of my Saturday. It rained all night and morning. I left the apartment to get dinner on Saturday night and again this afternoon to get some grub. I had braised beef, asparagus, and deep-fried pumpkin cakes -- yum!! So delicious. Great breakfast :-)

Tonight I just got home from Cotton's where there was some improv comedy going on. I went with Tim and Herbert, who wanted to check it out because he's a stand-up comic. But it wasn't that funny. Part of the problem was the venue -- Cotton's is a bar with three rooms connected via open doorways. It's not a traditional stage-and-audience venue. So the announcer and his troupe were wandering from room to room, doing the same sketch in here as they did over there but with a different premise. I couldn't see the performers half the time. They were going for a Whose Line is it Anyway kind of deal with a lot of audience participation, and it kind of worked, but the performers weren't that good :-) Before that we had dinner at Vedas, an Indian restaurant just down the street. That was pretty good - actually, the tandoori sea bass was awesome. And at the show we sat next to these two women from Holland. They are in Shanghai because they have degrees in hotel management and Shanghai has an inordinate number of five-star hotels, so they're working their way up the ladder, haha. Also, they want to land Shanghainese men - "to carry [their] purses." I thought that was funny. Apparently though, they're in the right place. Shanghainese men have a reputation as being pretty meek. And Shanghainese women have the opposite reputation - they're stereotyped as manipulative, materialistic, and all that. Hahahaha. I wonder how those dynamics evolved.

So that's about it for now. I really need a haircut, and I really need to sign up with a gym. I haven't worked out in forever. But for now -- you guessed it -- I'm going to sleep :-) Finally caught up with my blogging ... woohoo!!

Framing Babies

I was so intent on setting up Flickr last night that I forgot to describe what I actually did during the day :-)

I woke up and did laundry. Exciting! I won't bore you or embarrass myself with the horrible details of what occurred. Let me just say that my hands were freezing and my floor was wet. The wash itself went well though, and I'm relatively certain that my clothes are actually clean. The hanging-out-to-dry thing is very new and unfamiliar, but I checked this morning and it seems most of my clothes (except my jeans) are actually dry. I need to invest in an iron though. And, let's just say, a laundry basket.

In setting the wash and looking at the washing machine, I recognized the Chinese character for "middle" or "normal" which I think is 中. You would pronounce that as zhong. For you Westerners out there, that's "jong" but with the tip of your tongue closer to the roof of your mouth your teeth. That, and the g is soft. And it's not the typical "o" sound like in "long" -- it's more, hmm, it's softer than that. Oh, and it's first tone, which means you raise the pitch of your voice and keep it steady, like you were an opera singer holding a high note. Come to think of it, it's tough to think about how to describe it by just using English. But anyway, when you put that together with the character for "guo" (country), you get "middle country" or "China".

So anyhoo, I chose the "middle" setting on my washer, and it seems to have worked out pretty well. If my clothes aren't actually clean, they at least smell nice, which has to count for something.

After that I was getting ready to go to Garden Books when Tim called. He had to run some errands around that area and wanted to know if I wanted to tag along. I said sure thing, and in 30 minutes met him and his wife Laurel outside my complex. We walked to the subway station, got on, transferred to Line 1, and ended up at the South Shanxi Road (Shanxi Nan Lu) station. We were all hungry so we had lunch at Di Shui Dong, which serves Hunanese food. Among other things, I had the ziran paigu (cumin ribs) which, wow, were amazing. Chairman Mao would have approved - he was from Hunan province. But the highlight of the meal was when I successfully ordered my first bottle of water :-D Laurel graciously took a picture of me with the bottle, and I put it up on flickr, but the site's down now so I can't link to it. Just look in the Shanghai - January 12, 2008 set.

Tim and Laurel are avid photographers and travelers - they've been in Shanghai for over two years now - and they were going to get some of Tim's pictures framed. If you check out his blog you can see his skills. We headed to a framing store that his friend had recommended, but that was swarmed by expats. But we checked around and there are no fewer than five framing stores all along that same street (Maoming Lu) within three blocks of one another. We'd unwittingly stumbled onto the Framing District in Shanghai :-)

While Tim and Laurel haggled with the owners of one of the stores, I said I'd meet them later at Garden Books, since we were so close. I walked down Maoming and turned right on Changle to end up at the store, where I ordered a coffee (woohoo!) and just rested my legs, which were tired from so much walking.

Garden Books isn't large, but it's the largest English-language bookstore in Shanghai. So it was swarmed with expats. Again, not what I'm looking for right now :-) But I looked around at the book selection. There were of course a lot of books about Shanghai and China. There's even a German-language section, where I saw the German editions of two familiar books. That was kind of neat.

After a little bit I decided to go for a walk down Changle, so I did. For the next hour I wandered around the Changle Lu / Shanxi Nan Lu area, which is pretty interesting. There's a bunch of neat little stores that sell knicknacks, interesting styles of clothing, furniture, and generally just what you'd expect to find in the South Congress area of Austin. One tidbit: I noticed that a lot of stores had maternity clothes on display. I wondered as to the origins of this phenomenon until I passed the window of one building and saw a nurse swaddling a baby while a happy mother looked on. It turns out that I was passing the Shanghai Center for Health of Mother and Baby, or something like that. Suddenly all the maternity stores made sense ;-) I even saw a clothing store that advertised its clothing as being resistant to electromagnetic waves, or something. (I wish I had taken a picture of this ad.) I snickered to myself until Tim told me, later on, that electromagnetic-resistant clothing is a common concern among pregnant women in China. Hm.

So in one day I found the Framing District and Maternity District of Shanghai :-) Here's where, if my family and co-workers were not reading this blog, I would joke about putting both of these districts to good use during my stay here. Oops -- guess I just made the joke anyway ...

After that I met back up with Tim and Laurel at Garden Books, where we ran into a friend of theirs. This friend actually is the senior editor of Newsweek's Chinese-language edition, which sounds pretty cool. She's American but has been in China for six years (or maybe eight, I can't remember exactly). We ate and drank some more in the cafe, and then they invited me to dinner, which turned out to be at a new restaurant called Effigie just down the block. Tonight was the "media preview" which meant that the owner, a friend of Laurel's friend, had invited a bunch of magazine writers to eat at the restaurant like 2 weeks before it actually opened. It was close by, so we got there quickly. For the next four hours, I drank good wine, ate amazing food, and had awesome conversations with some really cool people. It was neat being around a bunch of magazine writers, because I'm a writer myself but in a completely different capacity.

I talked with a guy who sells programmable milling machines that make jet engine turbines. This gave me the perfect chance to geek out about NI and start talking about virtual instrumentation and modular hardware in a casual dinner setting :-) And what's more, he understood me because he was an engineer. We even discussed hardware-in-the-loop simulation. Nuts. I should have gotten his business card or something and passed it along to our sales department ;-)

Unfortunately I also had two cups of coffee, which meant that when I got home around 11, I stayed up until like 2:30. But that turned out to be good, because it gave me the opportunity to set up Flickr because Picasa seems to be blocked.

Right now it's about 11 AM, and I'm gonna take a shower, go eat some breakfast, and recharge my transportation card. Don't know yet where I'll end up today, but I promise I'll bring my camera along :-)

Grubbin'

Shanghai seems to be overflowing with all-you-can-eat-and-drink places. At Teppanyaki, 150 kuai ($21) gets you "No limit to quantity of food serviced." Yum. And this ain't no Waffle House, neither. Hao chi jile.

The cool thing to do, as expats, is get the business card of any cool place you visit. That way you can get there again simply by showing the card to a taxi driver. Knowing this, most places I've been to have business cards sitting right out on the counter. And if you're super cool, you get six or seven cards, one for you and the others for your expat buddies so they can try the awesome place you just went to. Rob and Tony already have a collection. I'm working on mine :-)

Yesterday I confused my writers by speaking Spanish -- intentionally, this time. "Es tiempo para almuerzo!" I guess I just want to show off that I actually can learn a language. Then I said "Gesundheit" when someone sneezed, which prompted a quick lesson in German. And this is on top of the extended discussion about Hebrew I had with my manager on Tuesday.

In talking with Tim, I found out he and his wife practice a fun mixture of Spanish, Chinese, and English. I forget what the name is, but it's funny. I demonstrated: "Puedo tener mas shui, please." See, it's easy :-)