Thursday, June 29, 2006

Xiangyang Market

We moved offices on Monday. Now we’re in much more spacious digs on Huai Hai Road, one of Shanghai’s main shopping avenues. The space is nice with big windows and a clean modern layout. The office’s only groan-inducing aesthetic quirk remains the fresh flowers that are delivered to the lobby and conference rooms on a weekly basis. Think explosion of pink carnations with glitter and ribbons. Think Long Island “Sweet Sixteen” party. Think Kentucky Derby winner’s circle.

I asked the office manager about something more, eh, subdued. (With my characteristic tact I think I said, “less god awful.”) Apparently any flowers that are remotely tasteful (even something generic like white lilies) signify death or bad luck or suffering for some typically arcane Chinese reason. I’ll try to remain culturally sensitive, but if I have my way the flowers are gonna go.

The office is also adjacent to the infamous Xiangyang Market, an open air mall where they sell reasonably well-constructed fake versions of luxury watches, bags, sneakers, wallets, clothes, basically anything. Need a Prada bag to impress your label-conscious comrades? Only got $10? This is the place.

I never actually bought anything there because the shopping experience is about as pleasurable as amateur brain surgery. Mobs of people surround you when you come within a few blocks of the place. WATCH? WATCH? WANNA BUY WATCH? I try to keep my cool since I never begrudge anyone trying to hustle a living. But since I live only 5 blocks away from the place, every day is a new opportunity to test both my patience and the outer limits of my white Liberal guilt.

It was with mixed emotions that I heard the government was going to shut the place down. As the country gets ready for the Olympics, prepares for the WTO and enters the rank of first tier countries, having Uncle Mao’s Rip-Off Bazaar on a prime piece of Shanghai real estate is something of a national embarrassment.

Today was the last day and the place was thronged with thousands of people. Piles of Louis Vuitton bags on the street for 20 yuan (about $2.50.) Women digging through mountains of Burberry scarves. Screaming. Fighting. Vendors selling squid-on-a-stick. (Get three or more people together and those squid-on-a-stick vendors seem to magically appear.)

I fought the crowd and bought some stuff -- a couple of knit polo shirts and a watch. I guess the sales pitch finally worked. Posted by Picasa

Monday, June 26, 2006

Back in town


Finally back from my Sinotastic tour. Shanghai – Guangzhou – Hong Kong – Taipei – Hong Kong – Guangzhou – Shanghai in 10 days. Lots of presentations and meetings and presentation meetings and meetings about presentations. I arrived home Friday utterly exhausted.

Since it’s Andy’s last weekend in China he flew down from Beijing to hang out. We hired a driver Saturday and drove with my Kiwi friend Karla to Suzhou, a “town” (all “towns” in China seem to be about the size of Houston) about 60 km from Shanghai. It’s described as the “Venice of China” because it’s an old city built around canals and gardens and just bursting with CHARM!

My expectations were low. Many of the historic wonders of China have been “restored” to Technicolor simulacrum (see: City, Forbidden) that capture nothing of the essence of the place. When we arrived I was pleasantly surprised to find the historic parts of Suzhou still seemed relatively authentic. The gardens were also beautiful if a tad overwrought.

I was also pleasantly surprised that I arrived with all four limbs still attached.

Everyone says that the people in (insert wherever you happen to be) are the world’s worst drivers. I can’t judge whether the Chinese are the worst drivers, but they’re certainly the least afraid of dying in horrific, fiery, head-on collisions. We spent two white-knuckled hours in the car accelerating, braking, accelerating, honking, accelerating and swerving and accelerating around trucks, cars, people, buses, bicycles, animals, et.al.

Our driver had the patient, deliberate technique of someone driving with his hair on fire. At one point we blindly careened across four lanes of traffic, horn blaring. Andy started screaming and curled into the fetal position as we came within inches of a gas tanker. Karla flipped furiously through the phrasebook to find the Mandarin for “Please drive more slowly.” It’s hard to use the right tone when you’re seeing your life flash before your eyes.

I can only say that if I’m destined to die in a car crash – please don’t let it be in a Buick.

Overall:

Suzhou’s worth a visit.

But take the train.

(The photo is from a Suzhou garden.)

Suzhou

I included some more pictures. Everyone likes pictures.

The first is one of the canals, the second is inside the "Humble Administrator's Garden," the last is Andy and Karla on the water taxi.



 Posted by Picasa

Attention everyone


Please make a note of it. Posted by Picasa

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Taiwan Storyland

After my meetings in Taipei on Monday, some gracious people from the office took me for dinner here.

It’s almost impossible to know where to begin with this.

Since most of the historical bits of Taipei have been razed to build desperately needed shopping malls, some clever entrepreneur decided to re-create an “olde tyme” Taipei neighborhood. In the basement. Of a shopping mall.

You enter the neon-clad K Mall near the Taipei central train station. Walk past aisles of flat screen TVs and digital cameras (cheap!) Then take the down escalator and arrive in a simple bygone time. It’s like Mayberry, ROC. There’s a giant fake tree in the town square. There are rooms fitted out like an old police station, a general store and a school. At the end of the tour they have a restaurant (where we ate) which serves traditional Taiwanese fare.

(Quick tip for Westerners abroad! If you’re out at a restaurant and you ask, “What is this meat?” And your host smiles and says, “Why don’t you try it first and decide if you like it?” The meat will be one of the following: 1) liver, 2) intestines, 3) tongue or 4) ???potpourri???.)

Amidst the kitsch there was a stage for a puppet show. That’s me between the puppets.

I'm back in Hong Kong now. Will be home in Shanghai on Friday.

Atlantis wants potato skins


Todd - I thought only of you when I saw this in the Hong Kong airport. Months and months of tripping around Africa and you never once discovered the Lost City of Snacks? It pains me to say it but you can never call yourself "well travelled" until you've been to LCoS.

Come on, Pyongyang is SO last year.

Now you and Emil will have to visit to restore what's left of your dignity. Posted by Picasa

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Taipei 101

I arrived in Taipei today around 2PM.

It’s a pain in the ass to get here. You can’t fly directly from mainland China because of the political situation. Switching planes in Hong Kong is a nightmare because the airport terminal is about the size of Rhode Island. When you do land in Taipei, the taxi ride from the airport into the CBD takes another hour.

But I made it. It’s tropical here so it’s hot. It would be good beach weather, but I have no idea if we’re close to the water (I don’t see it.) I have no sense of Taiwan’s geography other than what I got from that crappy animated map they show on the airplane.

After checking in to the hotel I went to the city center, did a bit of walking around, ate at Chili’s and then watched an hour of the pointless remake of “The Omen” before walking out. The only really frightening part was Mia Farrow’s facelift.

I’ll kindly say the city (the small part I’ve seen of it) is non-descript. Choking urban sprawl with construction everywhere. Multi-level shopping malls with the requisite assortment of mid- to high-tier retailers. Endless, identical six story (or so) buildings in various states of decrepitude. Neon signs. Food stalls. Zillions of mopeds. Etc. Etc.

Taipei does have one notable attraction though. Taipei 101 is the world’s tallest building. (Pictured here. I shot the photo at a diagonal to try to get it in.) In fact, it’s really the only tall building in the city, perched like a middle-finger aimed at the bureaucrats in Beijing. It creates a rather ridiculous skyline, low-rise monotony interjected only with this glass and steel pagoda stretching over 100 stories up. If it’s the world’s tallest building then it’s also the world’s loneliest.

I thought about going to the observation deck. I can’t imagine that it’s very worthwhile. Maybe tomorrow evening after work.

I heart the Internet

I think this is the reason the Internet was invented.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Jumbo


I’m spending the weekend in Hong Kong, so yesterday I met a friend who lives here for brunch. He suggested someplace that was “fun” but “kinda touristy.”

I arrived at the address in a taxi, but there was no restaurant – only a sign for the restaurant and a dock. An ornate boat motored up and everyone waiting loaded on. As we navigated around the fishing trawlers in the harbor I could see our destination.

If there’s a gravitational center of Chinese kitsch it’s this place: Jumbo Floating Restaurant. It’s like someone took the Forbidden City, added some fountains, put it on pontoons and then pushed it out into the center of Hong Kong harbor. I didn’t see it at night, but something tells me it’s also clad in enough neon and flashing lights to make the Las Vegas Strip seem positively demure.

For a tourist place the food was actually quite delicious. It had typical Hong Kong dim sum brunch fare – dumplings and buns and fritters. (Thankfully no chicken feet.)

Today I’m off to Taipei.

Friday, June 16, 2006

Transit

I've been on the road this week. Just arrived in Hong Kong after three days in Guangzhou. I have to get my banking sorted out before American Express sends their collection ninjas to exact a pound of my flesh.

I'm staying at a Ramada in some nowhere neighborhood in Hong Kong because it was cheap. The bed has the pleasant firmness of a marble floor and the shower is a plastic, camper-style thing. The whole place has a stale institutional smell.

I will post more later.

Off to meet some friends of friends for dinner.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Improbable things on mopeds (and bikes)


I've been taking scads of pictures and I just found this one from a couple of weeks ago on my laptop. It was taken on Fangbang Road. Posted by Picasa

Monday, June 12, 2006

Great



My friend Andy is back in Beijing for a few weeks. Since I was there for work on Thursday, I stuck around for the weekend. On Saturday we went to The Great Wall.

A tour guide met us at Andy's hotel. She was delightful, a twentysomething bank employee who moonlighted as a tourist wrangler on the weekends. She smiled broadly as we shook hands, “I love Americans!”

Apparently she'd just woken from a 20-year coma and not yet had a chance to watch the news.

“These Americans love China!” I replied in my usual charming and hilarious way. “But I bet you say that to all of your customers.”

She scowled. “No. I hate the Japanese.”

The guide loaded us into the car. As we sat in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way out of Beijing, she gave us a bit of a Great Wall 101. The Great Wall was joined from early structures by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang around 200 BC as a defensive barrier against northern tribes. Most of the wall around Beijing was built during the Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644.) During this period, more sophisticated designs and passes were built in the places of strategic importance. The whole thing stretches about 5000 kilometers across northern and western China. Or something like that.

There are several restored portions near Beijing, and we wisely selected an area that was a bit further out to avoid the hordes. The weather was nice and when we pulled up you could see it clearly.

What can you say? It’s a wall. And it’s great. The Great Wall.

We navigated through the gauntlet of souvenir shops and geegaw stalls. (HELLO! HELLO! YOU BUY (stuffed) PANDA! YOU BUY PANDA!!! HELLOOOOOO!!!) We hopped on a gondola which motored us to the top. Then Andy and I spent a few hours walking along the restored section. There were moments of genuine awe – the history, the sheer physicality of it all. People built this with their hands in the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter. 5000 kilometers long. Probably no health insurance or 401K either.

Wow.

As a former New Yorker, it was also depressing. New York City can’t muster the will to burrow through a trillion dollars worth of litigation to build the Second Avenue subway and it’s only supposed to go to the East Side. Or maybe a train to the airport LIKE EVERY OTHER CITY ON THE PLANET? “The people in Queens don’t want it.”

The Emperor Whatshisface of China had none of that. Don’t like my wall? I don’t like how your head is still attached to your body.

Now that’s government in action!

So I’ve officially walked on The Great Wall. I guess it’s not something everyone gets to do. I recommend it. Unless you’re Japanese.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

The view from the window


Here's the view from the window of my company's office in Beijing on June 8th around 5:30PM. Posted by Picasa

Friday, June 09, 2006

I.P. Freely

There was an ATT ad on TV several years ago with a guy sitting with his laptop on the beach. He smiled as a video window popped up on the screen.

“Have you ever had a conference call on the beach?” the voiceover intoned. “YOU WILL!” In my head I always added maniacal laughing after this part. (“YOU WILL! Muu ha ha ha ha!”) ATT added some kind of techno new age Enya music.

I know it was meant to seduce me with utopian visions of a completely connected future -- but really it had the opposite effect. I thought: who wants to have a fucking conference call on the beach? The idea of seeing my coworkers in a swimsuit (or having them see me) on a video chat was enough to make me shudder. I don’t care to stare at some office mate’s gelatinous white flesh and hamburger patty nipples as we talk about status reports.

That said, I just got a broadband wireless modem for my laptop. This means I can get high-speed connectivity anywhere in China (as long as there’s a cellular signal.) I have to say it’s pretty awesome.

Since I’ve been in Beijing and our office here is kind of cramped, I’ve spent the day working remotely from a Starbucks in the China World Mall. I have a table next to an electrical outlet, my mobile phone and my laptop. It’s been an incredibly productive day.

Perhaps this is because most of my regular days in the office are spent walking to and from Starbucks. I’ve saved all kinds of time, because by working at Starbucks I only have to walk to the counter. Maybe I could really streamline things and just have someone standing next to me occasionally pouring coffee down my throat as I type. Or maybe not.

Anyway, I took a camera phone picture so everyone can see my view at this exact moment. It’s 4:43PM on June 9th. The guy in the background on the left is talking REALLY LOUDLY.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

The view from my window


This is the view from the window of the study in my house on Saturday, June 3rd around 6:30PM. Someone was practicing the piano and the sound echoed down the alley.

Can someone let me know if these photos are appearing? They block the Blogspot domain here so the photos don't appear when I try to view the blog using a proxy server. Posted by Picasa

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Busy signal

Busy, busy, busy at work but will try to update here occasionally.

I'm in Beijing on Thursday and Friday for meetings and will stay through Sunday. Andy is back in town (Beijing) so we're planning on going to the Great Wall.

I hear it's great. It's a great wall. Not okay, but GREAT!

(I LOVE that joke. Funny only to me.)

I'll post pictures.

(This photo is incidental. I took it this past Sunday in Shanghai near Fangbang Road. I like the baby's perfectly placid expression in the foreground.) Posted by Picasa

Meatballed


I made another Ikea run this past weekend. I ate the meatballs and lingonberries and everything. (I tried to add photos. Not working. I don't know why.)

I got some chairs for the upstairs deck, a few more glasses and some towels. I think I've successfully stocked the new place with all the picayune crap anyone would ever need.

There's something I find absurdly compelling about the Shanghai Ikea. All the stuff in this massive store is made for pennies in sweatshop factories in China (mainly in Guangdong.) It's then given some idiotic Swedish-sounding name ("Stronker" anyone?) Then it's sold back to the Chinese as an aspirational "lifestyle concept." It's a master work of branding, supply chain optimization and sheer fuck-you capitalistic chutzpah.

I was going to make some point about morality and the downside of globalization, but I forget what it was. Oh, I bought, like, a zillion candles. And did I mention ...MEATBALLS!

Otherwise the weekend was perfectly uneventful. I watched the execrable "V is for Vendetta" on the DVD. I was going to watch "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" but the copy I purchased was dubbed in Russian with helpful Chinese subtitles. You get what you pay for, right? (And I pay about 1$ at the DVD shop around the corner.)

On Sunday I met Euan and some of his friends for brunch at a place on the Bund. Then I met Karla and Cam to go shopping for plants. We didn't find any plants but we did find a woman selling bunnies in tiny cages for pets or food or both. Somehow I resisted the temptation to try to liberate the rabbits. They looked incredibly anesthetized so I don’t think they would have lasted long breathing the sweet, sweet air of freedom. Sadly for the bunnies all non-fantastical outcomes end in the wok.

But I couldn’t get it out of my head: what’s the proper moral choice? Should I buy the bunnies (cheap!) and then free them? Should the bunnies live in my courtyard in some soon-to-be constructed bunny habitat? Should I write The Ethicist? (The perfect guilty liberal response: "The New York Times will know what to do!") Should I just accept blatant animal cruelty as just another not-so-charming cultural quirk? And really, how can anyone get so agitated about the pain and suffering of bunnies on Fangbang Road in Shanghai when so much human pain and suffering exists in the world?

Considering my circumstance, my moment, my life, my cultural and ethical DNA …whither bunnies?

I could only come to one conclusion: I think far much too much about this shit. I seriously need to lighten up. Just let the pills do their work. Out with the jive. In with the love.

There are no easy answers to anything. That’s what I like about being here.

Friday, June 02, 2006

Hog wild


Tired of your plain jane porker? Try some "Cool Pig Accessories."

Actually this is a dish on the menu at the restaurant in the Guangzhou airport. There is also "spicy stomach" and "braised fish heads."

I will never make fun of T.G.I.Friday's again.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

View from the window

 

The view from the 29th floor today in Guangzhou around 2:30PM. Posted by Picasa