Shanghai Bob

Over the weekend I did several small things on my own in Chinese: mainly asking for directions and directing taxis. The exchanges were painless, and a big improvement over my attempts to navigate the city in my first two weeks. The early attempts usually involved getting the hotel concierge to write my destination on a card in Chinese.

I have several pages of notes on directions in Chinese, both cardinal directions (north, south, etc.) and taxi directions (left, right, stop here, you are going the wrong way). The minimum fare in a Shanghai taxi costs only $2.00 and will take you all the way across town, so it’s pretty cheap to practice.

I learned yesterday that Chinese say “Cold hands, warm heart” just like we do. Considering the telegraphic syntax, it could be originally Chinese. This is just a way of saying that it’s still cold here, in spite of today’s sunny weather (the first sunny day in three weeks).

I was chatting with a conversation partner who used “88″ to sign off. This turned out to be a numerical representation of a Chinese approximation of an English farewell:

88 = 八八 ＝ bā bā = “bye-bye”

Because “I”, “you”, “be/am/are/is” and “love” all have close approximations in Chinese digits, you can actually say a lot. Some super-methodical person put up this list of Chinese codes and their translations. My favorite is the self-refuting

8006 = 不理你了 = “Not paying attention to you anymore”

I learned today that in the local Shanghainese dialect a left turn is called a “big turn” (because you cross half the road) and a right turn is called a “little turn”.

In class we learned buy (mǎi; 买) and sell (mài; 卖). The characters differ only by one component and the pronunciation differs only in the tone. I asked how traders confirm buys and sells on the phone, but our teacher didn’t know. I was at a CFA happy hour over the weekend with Andrew and we found a member who could tell us: they add an extra character to each: “buy in” (买 进) and “sell out” (卖 出).

Although I posted almost every day I was traveling, I spent no time cleaning up spam comments, so the unreviewed comments built up to over 3000 entries. There’s no mass delete function in the WordPress interface, so I used phpMyAdmin to delete them manually with this SQL:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved != 1

[Update: I just updgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 and it allows bulk deletes. It doesn't allow you to invert selection flags, though, so if there are some comments you want to keep without publishing, the following SQL is still useful:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved != 1 and comment_author_email not in ('friend1@example.com', 'friend2@example.com')

]

In less than 24 hours after I started looking, I signed a contract on an apartment in Shanghai. The rent is expensive by local standards, but almost a third of what I paid for my Tokyo and London apartments. 6000 RMB/month gets a one-bedroom apartment of around 55 square meters in a “serviced” building. Serviced means they have guards downstairs, maids if you need one, and a bilingual concierge who can send faxes and registered mail, and help with other things that require Chinese language ability.

Update:

It’s fully furnished, in the same building as Andrew’s place, directly across the street from the university, on the tenth floor, south-facing, very clean and quiet, but poorly insulated like all Shanghai buildings, so I wear a ski hat and fleece vest in the house. I am looking forward to spring!

I also got a mobile phone (I have to break myself of the habit of calling it a “keitai”) for 1000 RMB, an eight-month gym membership for 500 RMB (less than $100!), and some personal name cards with the Chinese name Yi Mao (no relation to the Chairman) gave me:

罗博特 = luóbótè = Robert

I left Germany on Friday the 13th and arrived in Shanghai on Valentine’s Day, February 14th. I had a great time in Freiburg and am looking forward to spending some more time there this summer. Thanks, Imme!

I am staying in the same windowless hotel I stayed in during my reconnaissance mission, only this time they are replacing the sidewalks: both sides of the street at the same time so that workers, construction equipment, cement trucks, cars, scooters and pedestrians all compete for a lane!

I don’t want anyone to say I haven’t been making good use of my time off.

I was reading the Economist online and saw a comment in the business section that YouTube was changing people’s lives — for example by teaching them how to tie their shoelaces. I was dubious.

I did a search for “how to tie your shoes” on youtube.com and found over a thousand relevant tutorials. Many of them demonstrated a method that is at least twice as fast as the (three) methods I already knew.

Let’s say I wasted a second a day for the years I’ve been tying my shoes using the less efficient method. That’s about two wasted weeks, if I don’t account for the years I lived in Japan (during which I wore mainly shoes without laces). That’s two weeks that I could have devoted to watching other “youtubetorials” on how to make my life even more efficient. That could count as life-changing.

I have been on vacation for exactly six months. Andy sent me this link about taking a year off:

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2009/01/11/120-taking-a-year-off/

I took the train today from Paris Est to Freiburg through Basel.

Check out these photos of riot police storming burning streets. Did I fly to Iraq? Gaza? Nope, I stayed in Paris. The one thing missing from my Museum of Old Paris was a strike leading to a riot, and the French populace kindly provided one for my Thursday evening’s entertainment. Strikers filled the Place de l’Opéra wearing signs saying Rêve Générale (a play on the word for “strike”, grève) and shouting “Down with Sarkozy”.

A girl with a camera was making the riot police grin and blush while it was still daylight, but as soon as it got dark, the crowd started burning things, breaking things, and throwing things. I saw several people (standing right next to me!) throw Molotov Cocktails into green rubbish bins, which exploded and burned. I saw two guys take advantage of the disorder to have some fun trying to smash a glass telephone booth with flying kicks. They were easily dissuaded — a bystander tutted at them and they sloped off.

I saw the police in riot gear beat the crowd back the length of the boulevard, then some of them came back to shoo me away as the crowd flung broken pieces of furniture and bottles.

I spent my first day in Paris at the Louvre, the second day walking to the Eiffel Tower and back, and the third day in the Musée d’Orsay looking at a special exhibition of masks. On Wednesday I ate wild boar (sanglier — just like Asterix and Obelisk!) at a place called Aux Lyonnais, sitting next to two Japanese men over on business from Tokyo. They couldn’t read the menu, so I helped. They were afraid of the complicated a la carte items so stuck to the prix fixe menu, which required only binary decisions translated from French into Japanese (Cold cuts or soup? Blood sausage or crayfish?). Some of the offerings were a challenge to my Japanese vocabulary (What’s wild boar in Japanese? I don’t know.) I thought offering to help was a good way of letting them know their conversation was not as private as they might otherwise assume it should be with only a couple of gaijin nearby.

It was a good meal for a cold night, but not as good as the classic steak and fries I had at La Bourse ou la Vie (“Your Money or Your Life” — the French name is a pun on the restaurant’s location near the Bourse). That was so good I went back again two days later. I also made time for flan, lemon tarts, and “chocolate nuns”, a kind of snowman-shaped eclair.