some bull from the China shop...

Hello from China! Sorry for the late posting; it has taken me a while to figure out how to get into blogspot. My initial attempts resulted in a page in Chinese that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. According to one of my students, many websites are not accessible due to government control, but using a different approach I was able to get to the familiar posting page.

I’ve been here in Shanghai for ten days, with another 3 weeks to go. For the most part I’ve enjoyed myself, although admittedly I’ve stayed away from the more challenging cuisine. The area of the city I’m in, Pudong, is a relatively new area with most of the buildings built in the last 15 years. It is south and east of the Huangpu River and is considered the financial capital of southern China. The offices I’m working in are just 1 km from my hotel and I’ve been walking there every day since the second day. The weather’s been great with just a couple of days of showers.

My job here is to help “bring to life” a new business operation for a multinational company, and it involves training, data preparation, and deployment tasks – all of which I enjoy doing. I’ve been working a lot of hours, many more than I’m being paid for, but I suppose it’s all in good fun…

I’m working with several others on this small team – two people from the east coast and one from Europe. On our first working day the local management hosted us for a team dinner. The variety of foods served went pretty far beyond my experience - squab, suckling pig, pig skin and pig knuckles, roast goose, duck soup, and chili fish just to name a few, all washed down with warm watermelon juice. Of course I tried a bit of everything and it was all fine and interesting, although one of my coworkers was a little less fortunate with his consumption…We’ll have another team dinner tomorrow night so that should, again, be interesting.

In the mean time I’ve been on my own for most dinners (breakfast at the hotel, and lunch has been catered in every day). There are quite a few restaurants within 1-2 miles of the hotel so I’ve been exploring them – many serving some combination of western and oriental dishes. Last night I made the mistake of ordering the ‘Thai-style’ chicken curry over rice. Whooo! I should have known better – a lot of Thai spicing is way too hot for me these days. Today I had a few bites of Kung Pao chicken off of someone’s plate, and that dish was only about as spicy as we’d find in the US.

There’s a Carrefour down the street (Euro-based chain; think WalMart SuperCenter) and it has a lot of restaurants downstairs. There’s a bread-making shop with a sense of humour – tonight I bought a thing called “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Bacon” along with some Indian curry naan bread and a fruit-tart kind of thing – total 19 yuan, or about $2.60. Cheap eats…I’m nowhere near consuming my $70/day per diem guideline.

One of the tourist attractions in town is a TV tower called the Oriental Pearl (http://www.shme.com/attracti/tower/tower.htm). It’s about 1400 feet tall and one can take an elevator to the top for a view. Since it’s about 10 miles from my hotel, I walked down there so I could explore Shanghai a bit, and met my coworkers there. Unfortunately what had started out as a typical smoggy day became extremely hazy – to the point where we figured we might not even be able to see the ground from the top, much less any of the rest of Shanghai. We’ll have to try to get up top another clearer day – and maybe in the morning before the smog gets too bad. This place is worse than LA on its worst days back in the 70s.

I did enjoy the walk, and the previous day’s walk with one of my coworkers (we did about 6 miles). As you would expect in a city of 18 million, it’s very urban with huge skyscrapers – both office and residential – and a lot of small shops and alleyways in the shadow of the ‘scrapers. Many street vendors – and many very persistent “Rolex” watch salesmen. My coworker Joe seems to attract these – he apparently looks like a man in need of a watch, whereas me, with my shorts and beard, apparently look like someone who can’t afford one – even though these fake watches can be bargained down to less than $4 each. It’s pretty funny – you can always spot Joe; he’s the one trailing several watch salesmen…

I wanted to take some pictures of the more gritty areas of the city that I was walking through, but felt it would be rude – might look a little like a man taking photos at the zoo or something. So for common courtesy I didn’t, but maybe I’ll figure out how to get a few discreet shots. I’d describe it as sort of a cross between India and the west – you don’t have the variety of vehicles and rickshaws and oxen and such, but it’s not exactly downtown San Francisco either. Although there are still a lot of cars, it’s nowhere near what you’d expect from a city this size – I haven’t seen a traffic jam yet. Lots of two-wheeled vehicles, mostly non-gas-powered – either manual or electric. And it was several days of wandering around town before I spotted my first gas station. So I’m not exactly sure where all the smog’s coming from.

I could go on, but it’s approaching midnight and I have my daily 6am date with the hotel gym. And the stairs, of course: I’m on the 11th floor and it’s 169 stairs up from the 4th floor where the gym is. A good warm-down, I guess. And it’s 269 steps from the ground floor, which I’ve been trying to do once a day. Anyway, I’ll hang it up here and post something again in a few days. Assuming I survive tomorrow night’s meal…

Thanks for reading!