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 :-)

CANIGETAREWEINDSELEKTA?!?!!

Hullo out there in blogland, I am not dead, it's time for my semiregular update :-)

First off, the title of this post is a reference to what I'll be doing this Friday night, which is listening to some nasty drum & bass at Bonbon, courtesy of DJ Marky. I. Can't. Wait.

These posts have been so long, and I've been pretty tired after work, so I haven't had the time or inclination to commit two hours of my evening to blogging. I'm sure as life here settles down and becomes more normal, my posts will become shorter (and perhaps have more pictures) and I will be doing smaller updates. But for now it's all so new and zany that I've just gotta post about everything, heh.

Let's rewind the time machine back to Sunday, where we last left off ...

Sunday morning I woke up and had nothing to do, so I decided to go on an adventure. Those are not hard to come by in this city, especially not when you don't speak the language :-) Because I couldn't think of a better place to get coffee, I walked down to the Thumb Plaza and had a coffee + chocolate muffin at (shudder) Starbucks. I read a little bit of That's Shanghai, which is where I discovered the aforementioned DJ Marky event. I also saw that Sven Vath is playing there in two weeks. After being in Austin for the past couple of years, with its good-but-not-great electronic music scene (like the majority of US cities), I am thrilled to be in a city where techno/house/drum & bass actually are regular things for people to listen to :-) w00t :-)

Anyhoo after chilling at Starbucks for awhile, I decided to take the metro, on my own, for the first time. I live off Line 2, and I didn't want to mess with changing lines just yet, so I got on the train and headed to People's Square. I exited the subway stop and came out from underground, and for some reason I looked behind me. There was People's Square framed by massive skyscrapers in every direction. It was pretty awe-inspiring. I'll have to go back this weekend and take some pictures.

So that vista was behind me. Ahead of me, though, was the Shanghai No. 1 Department Store. I'd heard about this, and even though shopping doesn't interest me as a pastime, I thought it would be neat to see what it's like inside. So I crossed the street (no mean feat given that I didn't immediately see a crosswalk) and went inside.

Wow. The building is 11 floors of shopping insanity. Whole floors are devoted to a single type of product, like menswear, sporting goods, electronics, etc. And each floor is pretty extensive. Like the electronics and fabrics markets on Saturday, each floor is segmented into, well, let's call them vestibules, but that's not proper since they can be pretty large. Each "brand-specific sales area" is devoted to a certain brand. So on the meanswear floor you have your Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Dockers, etc. vestibules. There's also a ton of European (I think) and Chinese (I guess) brands, of course. On the sporting goods floor you have your Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Puma, etc. vestibules. And so on. It's insane. And it was really crowded on a Sunday afternoon, which made it even more insane :-)

I must have spent two hours wandering around just looking at things. Here and there I would pick up an item to see the price, and they all seemed pretty expensive, even though I am only barely capable of determining what passes for expensive here because I'm not used to thinking in terms of renminbi. And my instant-division skills are lacking. I use the rule of thumb to dividing by 8 to get a rough estimate even though it's really more like 7.2 yuan to the dollar (damn currency appreciation). But I'm sure I stood there like a moron for a couple seconds trying to divide 560 by 8 (quick! The answer is 70). And only later did I realize that I have a calculator, and more importantly a currency converter, in my cell phone :-)

After all that window shopping I headed out on the ground floor, only I got turned around and instead of being back at People's Square, I was in some sort of shopping plaza (go figure). I looked around for a place that looked like it sold food, and saw a Subway and a Pizza Hut. Because I was hungry, I headed for the Subway. En route, I saw another smaller restaurant that was Chinese, so I opted for that instead. I ordered food all by myself (yay!), a process that was helped by a quasi-English-speaking waitress. At any rate there were a couple other white dudes in there, so I could have prevailed upon them for help if I needed anything. In fact, at Carrefour that morning (oops -- forgot to mention that I went sundry shopping all by myself -- that's where I got the slippers), I asked a couple of white people if they knew where the trash cans were. Turns out they were German, but they were able to also use some pidgin English to communicate with me. Actually it was mainly just pointing :-)

Not much to tell after that. I had dessert at some coffee shop and took the metro back home, where I promptly bummed around the apartment for a couple hours. I called Rob and we went to Thumb for dinner. There are like a billion restaurants there. In fact I've eaten there every day except for Saturday and Monday, and I'm planning on going there after I finish this post and catch up on my emails :-) Mostly because it's so close to my apartment . . .

Monday was my first day at the office, and it went well. At lunch with my team, I managed to successfully order a bottle of water, only they didn't have bottles, so the waitress stared at me and everyone laughed :-) During the day I'd made plans to meet up with Kenneth Tan from Shanghaiist. He lives and hangs out mostly in Puxi, so we agreed to meet at The Arch for dinner. Getting to the Arch involves switching metro lines. I guess that Sunday's experience convinced me I could do it on my own, so I did. Before I left work, I looked at the map on SmartShanghai. After work, I took Line 2 to People's Square and changed over to Line 1. I got off at the Hengshu Lu station and exited onto the street. Took a right on Gaonan Lu, then a left on Huaihai Lu. The Arch is at the corner of Huaihai and Wukang, but the walk on Huaihai Lu was taking awhile, so I stopped in a ritzy-looking hotel to ask someone if I was going in the right direction. All I was able to say was "Wukang Lu" with a questioning look on my face and a shrug of the shoulders, but the bellhop pointed in the direction I was walking. Sweet :-) After another 3 minutes I found the place and set up shop inside to wait for Kenneth. While I was waiting I had some french fries, and they were pretty good. When Kenneth got there I ordered a chocolate cake and some ice cream. What a great dinner -- for a five-year-old ;-)

While I was there, my dad called and we talked for a bit. It was neat to talk to him on my cell phone and to realize just how strange that was, given the time zone difference :-) And, as I started to walk back to the Changshu Lu metro station (as advised by Kenneth) my mom called, completely independently. (Everybody say "Awwww" ...) So that was pretty cool, walking down Huaihai Lu at 9 at night while talking with my parents. Neat.

As I exited the Shanghai Science & Tech Museum metro station, I thought I'd push my luck with navigation and language skills, so I hailed a cab. I stuck out my left arm and said "Changliu Lu", then I stuck out my right arm perpendicular to my left one, touched my fingertips together, and said "Dingxiang Lu". Then I took my right hand and pointed to the spot where my hands had just been crossed.

This almost worked, and it was my fault that it didn't. I recognized we were on Dingxiang Lu, and then the driver said something, which I interpreted as "Here?" No idea why I thought that. So I nodded and said "Hao" ("good"), indicating I wanted to stop here. I got out and paid the fare, then realized I was one block over from where I wanted to be. Oh well. Again, my fault for not recognizing where I was. But at least he knew the general direction and area I wanted to go :-)

That's all I can really think of. I'm sure I'll have more to tell on the weekend, so if I don't post before then, don't worry :-)

Oh yeah, and I would love to reply to the comments I'm getting here, but due to Internet blockades from inside the country, I can't actually view this blog page to reply. Actually that's not true -- I can view the page but I can't log in as myself to reply to any comments. Which is strange, because I can post to it just fine, but that's because I post from blogger.com while the actual blog address is blogspot.com. Again, strange. But keep sending the comments, and if you want to talk to me, just Skype or email me or use whatever other way you know how to get in touch :-) I'm planning on posting some pictures of my apartment, complex, and neighborhood on Saturday morning.

Out & About

Two coworkers and I went out to dinner last night. They picked me up at my hotel in a cab. Apparently my hotel is very new (I think it opened in May) and so not a lot of cabbies know where it is yet. Also it's in an out-of-the way place, so that didn't help. So they had gotten lostand turned around a number of times :-)

We headed out into traffic - I must repeat how glad I am that I'm not driving! People are on bicycles, with no reflectors or helmets, standing in the middle of intersections as cars whiz around them. Motorbikes try and angle for the best spots possible, which is often in between 2 lanes of cars. Cars change lanes quickly, and while very close to other cars (or people or bikes) and often without signaling. I guess you have to be very alert as a driver.

Traffic signals are generally followed but the goal seems to be to move forward as quickly as possible (which is funny since we're in a metered cab) regardless of what's in front of you. For examples, if a car is stopped in front of you with its left turn signal on, it's acceptable to swerve around (on its left side!) if if you're going straight. I guess it's possible the driver is not actually turning left , so you might be safe :-)

I gasped and cringed a lot. My co-worker (who's been here 2 years) just laughed and said the only thing that shocks her now is an actual accident. I guess she's seen surprisingly few of those.

Crossing the street, you'd better look both ways. Cars making a right-hand turn often try and find gaps in between groups of people crossing perpendicular to them. You better not be in that gap! Pedestrians seem to have the right of way, but drivers like to make you fight for that right :-)

I changed $25 into about 180 RMB at the hotel'sfront desk. I'm pretty sure this is the first foreign currency I've ever held that's actually mine. My dad used to bring back francs from Europe, and I have seen/held shekels from Israel, and everyone's seen pesos or Canadian dollars (loonies!) but those were like gifts or trinkets because I was in the USA. These RMB are actually going to buy me stuff :-)

My hotel has a TV that gets about 6 english-language channels, including ESPN and HBO. I watched a bit of Serenity this morning.

Anyway, we ate some dim sum at a shopping center on Nanjing West Road last night. The food was very good (I haven't been sick yet). Since we took a cab out to there, we decided to take the metro back to the last stop and then hail a cab from there. Taking the metro was pretty smooth, especially since I'm used to the system in Washington DC / Northern VA. You get a fare card, insert it in the turnstiles, and go on your way. Prices seem to be fixed depending on where you start and where you're going, which again is like the DC system. But you also can use your metro fare card on the bus or in the taxi, which seems very helpful.

In fact, just walking around the shopping center area, and using the metro, really felt like I was back in DC. Just a very large city, with lots of people and good public transportation. I liked it. Of course Shanghai is at least 5 times the size of DC, and we were only in a small portion of it. And fewer people speak English here ;-) But the overall feeling was very familiar.

In the distance we saw the Pearl Tower, the Jinmao Tower, and the future World Financial Center. They looked enormous, and they were still many miles away.

Taking the taxi back to my hotel was an adventure. We dropped one coworker off just fine, but I'm staying in a different hotel. Which, you might recall, is somewhat difficult to find :-) So we drove around the area for like 10 minutes, getting very lost. Luckily my co-worker knows a smattering of Mandarin and was able to converse with the driver, or at leastunderstand his frustrations at getting lost.

Finally we called the hotel from the road and all was well. But I felt incredibly useless sitting in the front seat, not able to understand the driver (except for when he said "sorry" over and over) but understanding the fact that we were lost. If my coworker hadn't been there, it would have been a long (and expensive) trip.

Interesting :-)

I went to sleep just fine at about 10 PM and woke up around 8:30. Today I've had breakfast at the hotel (very good) and learned how to say "good morning" in Mandarin. I imagine that the hotel staff are used to white people practicing Mandarin, poorly, on them. They're very nice about it. So my vocabulary is up to 3 phrases: good morning, hello, and thank you. My goal is to learn a couple more phrases before I leave.

In about an hour my coworkers and I are going to hit up The Bund and then do some sightseeing from there. My camera's rechargeable batteries seem to have failed, so my co-worker is going to try and bring some AAs. If not, I'm sure I can buy some somewhere.

Tally ho!