Shanghai Bob

My taxi driver yesterday was wearing an amulet that looked like a Matrix-style jack at the base of his neck, and his dashboard held a miniature shrine. Buddhism in Thailand extends to T-shirt philosophy like “Don’t fight your destiny” (which I actually saw on a T-shirt.)

The pre-Socratic philosophers used a cart metaphor to describe our relationship to fate or destiny: We are a puppy tied to a cart — wherever the cart goes, we will go too, but we have enough freedom to decide whether to be dragged by our chain or to trot happily beside the wheels.

It’s not all genial fatalism here, though. There are Lamborghinis for sale at the mall:

Is this your destiny?

In the Pudong arrival and departure terminals you are given the opportunity to rate your border guard while a flute instrumental version of George Michael’s “Last Christmas” plays in the background. You can choose among two degrees of smiley faces, two degrees of grumpy faces, and one neutral face. The instructions ask you to rate the guard according to the amount of time you had to wait in line.

I flew to Bangkok today for a three-week stay.

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.

Today is China’s “National Day”, the anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 1949. It’s an auspicious day to be flying to Shanghai for a three-week scouting trip — if all goes well I’ll be there tomorrow and Schwinger will pick me up from the airport. The weather turned windy and rainy here overnight, but it looks sunny and clear today and tomorrow in Shanghai/Pudong.

Today is also the beginning of my third month of intentional unemployment — I’m still not used to it!

I’m leaving now to catch my train to the airport.

I spent Tuesday sleeping, packing, saying good-bye’s and watching the movie The Earlier You Die, the Longer You’re Dead with Imme. It’s funny, but you need German subtitles for the Bavarian dialect.

One of the reasons the party was so successful was because of the game. The people who came to the party were from several different worlds: old friends, old roommates, family, and current colleagues, and we were worried that people would only talk with people they already knew (as is typical). So I applied everything I had learned during the last two years of management training at my former firm and invented a networking game.

As they arrived, each guy would get a sheet with a number, and each girl would get a sheet with a letter. The guys (“numbers”) would then have to find out the names of all the girls (“letters”) and write them on their sheet. Same thing mutatis mutandis for the girls. There were three conversation-starter questions to ask, and because I thought I wasn’t going to be playing, I gave the girls good questions like, “Are you still single and if so why?”, and “Tell me one of your secrets”. The secrets all revolved around theft, gambling losses, illicit sex, and secret crushes on other party attendees (all hilarious), and even the shy or cerebral could have meta-discussions about the questions themselves: whether the questions were “appropriate”, what they would have asked if it had been up to them, what the best way to answer each question would be.

Lesson learned: Next time, as the game designer, I will give myself a “super-user” set of questions to ask, or perhaps multiple cards that I can rotate into the game depending on the context.

I canceled my Istanbul trip to come back to Freiburg for Imme’s birthday. I had missed it by a day last year, and it seemed a shame to miss it by just two days this year. I’ll go to Istanbul from Shanghai sometime next year.

The party was super — about 50 people came and occupied the basement of the Art Cafe until about 2:30a, after which we went dancing until around 5:30. It was a good group of people and I think I talked to almost everyone.

When I was preparing for this trip, I got lots of advice from people who have clearly mentally planned all the elements of their own round-the-world trips, but just haven’t set the date yet. One colleague sent me the link to The Man in Seat 61, a site devoted to rail travel. I wish I had time to take the Trans-Siberian railway to Shanghai next week, but I will be flying instead.

On the way back to Freiburg I got a reservation for Car 6, Seat 66 at a table across from a little girl who managed to kick me in the shins every time I fell asleep and next to a guy who hadn’t bathed in several days and made up for it by gargling Listerine. At first I thought he was snoring, but his eyes were wide open along with his mouth, and he was expelling sparkling drops of mouthwash like Old Faithful. It was hard not to laugh.

Thursday was a fairly quiet day in Berlin after staying up all night on Wednesday. I dropped my stuff at the Pension Seifert and spent the day shopping, sightseeing, and eating. I had pork tenderloin wrapped in bacon at a place called Julep’s and wondered how many pigs had sustained me during the month I’ve been in Germany.

When I went to Cork a few months ago, I came from London where it was unusually warm for the season to an unseasonably cold Ireland and had to buy a new jacket. The only thing in my size was orange — a color I’m used to as a UT-Austin alumnus, but not normally my first choice. This has resulted in a snowball effect, as each new clothing purchase has to match the bright jacket, and the latest result is a pair of shiny gold shoes. The black pair I would normally have bought made me look like a jack-o-lantern. It’s a slippery slope: I wonder what kind of Ali G wardrobe I’ll be wearing after a year of matching the new color scheme.