Shanghai Bob

Today I went to the post office and with the help of six people, including Andrew and LiYan, mailed off my taxes.  Being global means filing your tax returns for Japan, the UK, the US, and two states from Shanghai.

To celebrate in a minor way (the major celebration will come when we drink the Dragon Juice), we tried to order a pizza, but couldn’t get past the automated phone menu.  In a country where perhaps the cheapest thing is human labor, I had to walk down to the pizza place to place my order and carry it home myself.

I attract lost people.  When I was living in London, people stopped me to ask for directions about twice a day.  I made tally marks until it got to over a hundred requests in the first six weeks, then I stopped keeping track.  I spent a fair amount of time quizzing friends about why it would be that people would ask me in particular.  The first time I was explaining the situation to Manny was when we were waiting for friends at a crowded Picadilly Circus, and in the two minutes that I was talking about it, two people interrupted to ask for directions, nicely illustrating my point.

An acquaintance suggested that the real test would come when I was living in Asia again — would people still ask me?  Last night I was sitting two flights of stairs above the entrance to the XuJiaHui metro station, and an Asian guy walked all the way up to ask me where a certain cafe was.  I counted afterward and there were 57 people in the plaza, including other white guys.  Why did he walk up to ask me?

We were waiting for a light today on Hauihai Road on the way to XinTianDi and this “mannequin” made a face at us, which startled us more than a little.  It’s a real girl.

I spent Saturday walking the length of Huaihai Road, where trucker hats are apparently in style

…and exploring XuJiaHui, where girls in cheerleader outfits were passing out beer.

In the evening I got an hour-long foot massage for $7.  The masseuse had knuckles like ball-peen hammers.  The 30% of the time that she spent on the soles of my feet really hurt!  I’m going to have to learn how to say, “Take it easy” in Chinese.

I also found my first submission to engrish.com:  a cookie called “Coque D’Asses”, in vanilla and chocolate flavors.  The package is written in Japanese, so this might be a popular import.

On Friday we went to Old Town…

…to have steamed dumplings (XiaoLongBao) at a famous place. Even at 2:30 in the afternoon the line was around the corner.

We passed several “2-yuan” shops, which definitely beat the dollar shops or the hyaku-en shops. It’s like a “30-cent shop”.

In the evening, we went to play pool at one of the bars in Julu Lu. One of the female pool sharks at Parrot Bar introduced herself as XiaoLinSomething and I said, “like XiaoLongBao”. She pretended to be offended and all the other girls giggled. The girl who spoke English best told us that XiaoLongBao is slang for “small breasts” and that DaLongBao is the opposite.

There’s a fair amount of physical danger in Shanghai, but not much of it seems to come from other people unless they are behind the wheel of a car. I’ve seen three traffic accidents since I’ve been here, and have myself come close to being run over by two trucks and a bus. I had read that traffic is dangerous in Shanghai, and Andrew told me as well, but it really is extremely dangerous.

Trucks and buses that ignore pedestrians are obvious dangers, but there are some very subtle dangers, too. The electric scooters are so quiet that you can’t hear them, and they don’t usually have headlights, so it’s easy to step out in front of one at night. All the intersections have very nicely laid-out crosswalks with little green men that mean nothing to traffic.

This is a frame from a video I took of a crosswalk with a green walk light and a big truck plowing through. 13 vehicles drove through in the 30 seconds that the walk light was green. Part of the reason it’s so dangerous is that traffic can come from any direction, but most of the reason is that I’m clearly subconsciously used to thinking I’m safe when I’m in a crosswalk and the light is green. I have to get over that.

In terms of crime, Shanghai seems to be relatively safe. Thieves seem more opportunistic (and incompetent) than violent. Someone stole tiny LiYan’s camera while she was in the metro, but gave it back when she grabbed his arm and asked for it.

Below is a picture of the high-tech scaffolding they use in Shanghai.

The food here has been uniformly cheap and delicious. We’ve had Mongolian shabu-shabu, Korean barbecue, spicy fried crawdads (or crawfish, or crayfish, depending on where you’re from), and Sichuan and Hunan food, which included spicy pig ear. Andrew commented that if you’ve eaten a hot dog, you’ve probably eaten a pig’s ear, but it is a different experience to eat something that looks like a pig’s ear.

Spicy crawdads

Yin-yang shabu-shabu

Among other amusing things, the menu at one restaurant says we can have squirrel for just 10 RMB more.

Many of the restaurants give you a package like a surgical kit with chopsticks, a straw, a plastic glove for eating with your hands and other utensils all bundled together.

At the shabu-shabu place, you can mix your own sauce.

The girl’s shirt…

On Monday we took two trains and a bus out to the Fudan University campus to see if Andrew had a made a good decision deciding to study at Jiao Tong.  By the time we were on the second train, we had already decided Yes.  Fudan is just too far away — this may be great if you need to focus on your studies, but if you want to get to know Shanghai, an hour transit time is too much.

The campus itself is big, green, and overrun with bicycles.  You would have to get a bicycle just to be able to match the pace of traffic on the sidewalks.

The trip was worth it, though, as Andrew got to use the knowledge he had acquired in just three weeks of study to get us where we wanted to go.  On the way, we learned that bringing explosive briefcases on the train, spitting, and jumping down onto the tracks are problems that the Chinese authorities are working hard to eliminate.

Schwinger is living on the 18th floor of a serviced apartment just across the street from Jiao Tong University. (Really it’s on the 16th floor, but the apartment doesn’t number any floor ending with 4 — his building skips 4, 14, and 24 because the word for four sounds like “death”.) It’s a great location for a student, though more expensive than the $7/day charged by the student dorms. This is the view out his window on the most polluted day of the trip so far.

I’m staying in a hotel in TianPing Road not far from campus, closer to the metro station. I am on a tenth floor which is really the tenth floor, but my only view is from the little round fisheye lens set into the door — there are no other windows.

This has been great for me. Although it means it has taken me longer to get over jet lag from the 9-hour flight from Germany, it also means that when Dawn’s rosy fingers pull back the cover of night, I’m completely oblivious. I’ve slept until noon on several days. The combination of no appointments and a completely dark room means my sleep deficit is almost cured.

Across the street from Andrew’s building is this building that looks like a keyboard.

Across the street from the hotel is a wet market. Only one block away from one of the largest and most popular modern malls in Shanghai you can buy a plucked and dressed chicken from a grey kitchen towel spread on the sidewalk.

On Saturday we took in the more commercial sights: Pudong, XinTianDi, and the Bund, where they had a fireworks display for China’s National Day (and so kept Pudong lit up past the normal 11:00p lights-out time). There are plenty of great photos of Pudong and such on the web (click the links above), but what you don’t see are all the construction cranes. With all the construction in Dubai, London, and China, I think renting construction cranes must be a good business to be in right now.

At XinTianDi, we had a beer at the Paulaner Brewery, which was a slightly surreal experience after just leaving Oktoberfest in Munich — the same brewery as our Oktoberfest tent, the same Bavarian costumes but worn by Chinese staff, beer in pint glasses instead of liters, and the dirndls suffering similar capacity issues, as a witty friend noted.

We went to Glamour Bar and then another recommendation across the street called Jean Georges. Glamour Bar was crowded and got even more crowded as the night went on — we thought we might bring down the tone with our T-shirts and jeans, but there were guys in there wearing shorts. Shanghai seems fairly casual about dress codes. Jean Georges was empty, but was slightly more pleasant than Glamour Bar, which is a little tatty, like Tableaux in Tokyo’s Daikanyama — you get the feeling it’s been around a while. The bar at Jean Georges doesn’t have a view of Pudong, though, so can’t really compete.