Shanghai Bob

Several times in the past two days the same woman has pointed to the empty sidewalk in front of me, reached down and pretended to pick up a gold ring that she had been hiding in her hand.  The first time she gave it to me although I tried to decline it.  She showed me that it was too small to fit her (though that would mean it was certainly too small to fit me) and forced it on me.  Then she came back ten seconds later and asked for money.  I assume she probably has better luck with people who actually put the ring on (or ones who don’t notice that she is conjuring the ring out of thin air).  Her “office” is around the Louvre, but she has so many customers, she didn’t recognize me until she tried the trick for the third time.

In Brazil I had a similar kind of trick played on me, also three times:  a guy points at your shoe, you look down to see that it is covered with bird guano.  The guy happens to have a shoeshine kit with him and cleans your dirty shoe for 5 reais, then asks for a tip to “even them up”.  The first time this happened, I thought it was strange that I hadn’t notice any birds or the mess on my shoe.  The second time it happened, I was sure that the shoeshine guy had fouled my shoe, but I didn’t see how he did it.  The third time, I figured it out:  the guy points at your shoe, you look down and don’t see anything.  You look back up at him and say, “What?”.  While he’s keeping his eyes locked on yours, he squirts the crud on your shoe and says, “Look!”  You look again and see the mess and convince yourself you just didn’t notice it the first time.  I made the last guy clean my shoes for free — he denied several times that it was a scam, then finally confessed.

The virtue of his trick over the gypsy ring trick is that your shoes actually end up dirty and you have to do something about it.  The ring trick relies on a very feeble thread of obligation created when she offers the ring, and reinforced only slightly if you actually take it.

The best scam that I actually fell victim to was when someone entered my normally locked apartment complex and started ringing doorbells telling the upstairs people he was a downstairs neighbor and vice versa, asking for change to pay the pizza delivery guy.  I was suspicious, but as I was on slightly bad terms with my upstairs neighbor, having complained about the noise when he and his band held a full-volume rehearsal for seven hours on a Friday night, I thought I should make an investment in bridge-building.  After I closed the door I called the landlord and asked for a description of my upstairs neighbor.  It didn’t match the guy at my door, but by that time he was gone.  That delayed suspicion was better than Ollie’s, though — he came to my door about an hour later looking for his money and I had to tell him he had been conned.  His response:  “The dirty dog!”

After that incident, I went and introduced myself to all my neighbors.  I also made a personal rule to look at all requests for money as simply requests for money — to ignore the story or trappings that surround the request and decide whether to give money for the sake of charity or in expectation of a return or repayment.  I think this has helped me avoid giving money in circumstances that play on the very natural inclination to be obliging, as with the (I suspect) false monk in Thailand.

“Don’t cross a gypsy, boy” is what the old bats in grey pea coats around Picadilly Circus curse you with if you don’t let them put a flower in your buttonhole.  If you do let them, they hit you up for cash.

I was asked directions in Paris!  And I knew the answer!  I have an unbroken record in every country.  I plan on going to Antarctica next and helping lost people there.

This time I actually saw them decide to ask me.  As I was walking up the sidewalk, I could see them looking anxiously from their map to the faces of passersby.  When they saw me, both their faces lit up at the same time and their shoulders visibly relaxed.  I find their confidence in me very funny, but so far I have in fact always known the answer, even when I was a stranger myself.

I stayed at the Hyatt Paris Vendôme for the first two days, then on Greffulhe Street near the Madeleine Church.  “Greffulhe” looks like it should be an adjective meaning “out of breath”.

I had lunch today in Café Angelina on the rue de Rivoli across from the Tuileries.  There I found preserved all the French rough edges that elsewhere have been worn smooth by globalization.  It was a museum of snobby waiters, pretentious patrons in black turtlenecks, and little yapping dogs inside restaurants.

The little black dog was like the familiar of the witch sitting opposite.  The witch was a French academic specializing (I gathered) in the representation of justice and the law in French literature, with an emphasis on Balzac.  Her interlocutor was a fellow academic with a mop of Warholesque gray hair, the black turtleneck, and an American accent in both English and French.  She switched to French for the pretentious bits of her conversation (I’m not sure if that is good camouflage…).  I tried to screen her out, but heard snatches over the barking of the dog, including this good example, “The salient features of violence are its suddenness and the damage that accompanies it.”  I would classify this as a tautology, but perhaps it sounds better in French.  So much for the dog and patrons.  As for the waiters, I watched two of them ignore a poor Japanese couple who were pressed for time.  The third finished sorting forks into a container then walked across the restaurant to replace the tray he had been using before coming over finally to take their order.  Service in Japan is so outstanding, Japanese people must be traumatized the first time they go abroad and learn they are expected to pay extra (that is, to leave a tip, which is not the custom in Japan) for snootiness and indifference.

Total damage at Café Angelina was €28, the same as the price of a single drink at the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz (I ordered a “Poire Victoire”).  It is also half the cost of lunch at Café de la Paix (next to the Opéra) for the same number of courses, and exactly four times *more* than the beautiful, simple set lunch I had at a cafe called Chocolino near the Madeleine Church.  The locals seem to think highly of Chocolino as well:  in the 15-20 minutes it took me to order and eat my lunch, there was a constant line ten people deep.  With throughput at around three people per minute, I saw around 50 people go through that place in a very short time.

I took the Eurostar from St. Pancras to Gare du Nord on Saturday the 24th.

I flew from Boston to London on the last leg of my round-the-world ticket on January 19th, my sister’s birthday and the day before Barack Obama’s inauguration.  Bruce posted a plaintive comment on my Facebook status:  ”But, but…we’re just starting to get our act together!”  It did make me think — everyone is so optimistic, I may have to head back home to the US after this trip is over (assuming he lives up to expectations!).

Manny is putting me up in his pad in Covent Garden again, and I’m looking forward to seeing friends from work, though unfortunately a slew of layoffs were announced at my old firm last week.

I need to pronounce a verdict on the round-the-world ticket as I promised.  In the end…worth it.  I only made two changes (to extend my stay in Germany and to fly to Missoula instead of Billings), and the cost to do that was minimal.  I used every leg of the ticket and could not have done it nearly as cheaply or conveniently by buying individual pieces.

I skipped over a lot between Tokyo and Paris.  I was in Tokyo for my birthday, then celebrated my birthday another three times in San Francisco, Montana, and Boston, mixing in Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and a trip to New York City.  I unpacked my London shipment and packed my stuff for Shanghai, studied the first 15 chapters of my Chinese textbook, and met my new nephew for the first time, along with the rest of my nuclear and extended family.  I read 20+ novels.  I’ll bring this month up-to-date as I find time when I’m back on the road.  Happy New Year!

I’m in Tokyo for my birthday, and the girls at my favorite cake shop remembered me though it’s been over a year.  They slipped an extra piece of cake into my take-out box like they used to do, perfect for a birthday party.

Thai people’s sense of “fun” extends to pretending to shake up your can of soda (and accidentally doing so while miming it) and also to carefully judging your spice tolerance and then throwing in an extra handful of chillies, as the person who prepared my noodles today did when she thought I wasn’t paying attention. Next time someone asks, “Spicy OK?”, I’ll be a little less confident when saying Yes.

On a related note, I meant to record that China’s love of spice apparently extends to ice cream. While were were waiting at the Hope Star Cafe for Joel to arrive, we saw “Vanilla ice cream with spicy sauce” on offer. Reading the Japanese description gave us a clearer picture: “Vanilla ice cream in Tabasco sauce.”

I got the news about our new President-Elect first thing this morning.

I’m staying on Patong Beach, which is lively, but also fairly seedy, full of touts who seem to have learned English from New Yorkers: “Hey, brotha! Where you from, my man? You need a suit? I hook you up, good price!” They all want to shake hands so they can physically hold you in place during their patter but I’m wise to that trick. Some guessed I was German, so I also got the following: “Wie geht’s? You Berlin? Alles gute!” There are no zonkeys, though.

The Ronald McDonald statue in front of McD’s on Bangla Road has his palms pressed together in a wai, the Thai name for the gesture of welcome and thanks that looks like prayer.

Dairy Queen is just as prevalent here as in Shanghai, but the Shanghai cup that is called a “medium” there is a large here, which suggests that China will plump out on foreign fast food sooner than Thailand will.

I ate on the beach, though, red snapper and shrimp while listening (trying not to listen) to a two-piece combo murder one Abba song after another (the male keyboardist singing falsetto) at the request of four little blonde Swedish girls who were flitting around the stage.