Tony's China Blog

I've been lazy lately, not wanting to write, not wanting to do much of anything. It is fairly depressing when this happens. But the weather is nice, so the unit we taught this week to the eighth graders about basketball was particularly fitting. Though to the dismay of many Chinese, Yao Ming's Houston Rockets were eliminated from the playoffs this morning.

Basketball is big time here. Our school has a half-dozen courts, and the games are carried live and then rebroadcast later in the day. It is not uncommon for it to be on TV in our 'library' here at our dorm or in the noodle place next door. Many of our kids are really into it. One of my students is named Kobe, and they were really excited that we were able to go outside this week for a few minutes and practice some of the words we taught them: "pass," "shoot," "steal," "dribble," "rebound," etc.

The games are all on with Chinese commentary and are played commercial-free. I haven't figured out Chinese TV at all.

When we were over for dinner at Rosie's last week, after dinner we watched a DVD from two years ago, when Xiao Shi competed in some gameshow against a school in Beijing. Her daughter was involved, and the show had about thirty students doing dance routines, answering trivia, being carried on their principal's shoulders, doing some sort of bungee basketball competition, writing a spontaneous creative performance piece, and racing through an obstacle course.

I suppose that wasn't all that strange, it was somewhat like the famous all-day variety shows like Sabado Gigante and their ilk in Italy. This one, sadly, did not involve any scantily-clad hostesses or supporting women.

Our apartment came with a TV. Just last week I decided to see what was on. Basic services here are about 30 channels, but they are all in Chinese. There might be an English channel that we just don't get, but no one seems to know for sure. Another of those things where no one seems to know, or know who would know. We have figured out how to watch DVDs played on our computer through the TV, so we've watched a few episodes of The Sopranos over the past week. A typical DVD costs about 10 yuan.

Dinner with Rosie

We have had some problems here finding people who like to cook or even know how to cook. Most of the locals we are in touch with are fellow English teachers, and they are usually young, around our age. It seems that almost everyone we talk with on a consistent basis lives with their mothers (or vice versa, more truthfully), and that their mothers do the cooking.

We asked around and finally found someone who was willing to give us a cooking lesson! One of the English teachers at our school named Rosie generously invited us over to dinner last Sunday and cooked us a lavish meal.

We were over for dinner once before in a Chinese house, and both times we followed a very similar scenario. We sit down, drink some tea and watch TV while consuming snacks. After a short while someone retires to the kitchen to cook, and then we eat, lingering afterwards for a short time to have some fruit and perhaps look at photos or something.
At Rosie’s, before we started cooking, we watched the basketball game on TV. Despite the fact that they are on all the time here (especially when Yao Ming’s Houston Rockets are playing), I hadn’t watched much. But this game, a playoff game between the Rockets and the Lakers, was engaging me. I was getting into it until Rosie mentioned that the Lakers won by a point. It was on tape delay. Oh well, onto the kitchen!

Rosie had the largest kitchen we had seen in China, able to equip three people easily. She had a very nice apartment, two floors and fancy fixtures. Her husband owned a cement factory. If there is a stereotypical way to get rich in China today, it is owning a cement factory.

In the kitchen, Rosie had prepped various items for our feast. She started with a simple dish that I will probably not have the patience for here, a pork and ginger soup. In a pressure cooker, which I may never own despite their handiness, she had previously steamed a few pieces of pork shortribs (she just called them bones though they were boneless) and a few slices of ginger. She then added raw soybeans (essentially edamame), and pressure-cooked it for about half an hour more. Without a pressure cooker, I’d estimate it would take a much of the afternoon to create such a tasty, concentrated broth. It was excellent and jealousy inducing.

The next dish she made started with a bowl of quarter-sized clams, which are extremely cheap here. She scrambled a few duck eggs and poured them and a little water over the clams. After adding a little salt, the bowl went into the microwave for a few minutes. It wound up a bit overcooked, but next time she’ll cook it for a minute or two less. Chicken eggs would be fine, too, but Rosie uses duck eggs because she can find them farm-raised where they eat a more natural diet.

After the eggs and clams were in the microwave, she prepared a dish that she invented. Erica peeled a cucumber, and then Rosie cut it crosswise into two-inch sections. She then scooped the seeds out of half of each section, creating a tiny bowls. She simply stuffed ground pork into each bowl. Nothing else. She steamed the dish for about ten minutes and that was all. This dish wasn’t amazing, but the natural salts in the cucumber brought out a bit of flavor in the pork, and it was better than I’d have expected. The Chinese do not like to eat raw vegetables, not even cucumbers.

For another dish, she stir fried small strips of beef with hot green peppers to make a dish that is very common in this area, perhaps the most common way to cook beef.

Next she worked on the fish, which was the most involved of her dishes. She had a fish (an ocean fish, she doesn’t like the freshwater types here as much) in a bowl, resting under another bowl full of water. She explained that she had salted the fish and was pressing it in an attempt to concentrate the flavor.To make this dish, cut about 2 tablespoons of ginger into matchsticks and fry them in maybe the same amount of oil in a wok. After a minute or so, slide in the fish (which was flat-ish and about the size of a small saucer), making sure it displaces the ginger and doesn’t sit on top of it. Fry on high heat until browned, maybe 3 minutes a side, then add a splash of soy sauce, brown sugar, wine, vinegar, and water. Next, steam/boil it for a few more minutes, then add some chopped scallion tops and more water. Cook it a little longer and it is ready to eat!

Another dish (my least favorite) was a stir-fry of tofu pressed and sliced into linguini-like strips, processed ham, and zhai cai, a pickled vegetable that Rosie swears by but I didn’t find that fabulous. We looked it up in their electronic dictionary and it spat out ‘mustard tuber,’ not helping us all that much. To these ingredients she added a splash of wine, and a little MSG, which is not belittled nor used sparsely here. Fine chefs proudly admit that they use the substance, which does bring out the flavors in almost everything.

The final dish she prepared was French fries Chinese style; fry your potatoes in a few tablespoons oil, then after they’ve fried for a few minutes, add water, vinegar, salt, and scallions, cook another minute and serve. They weren’t crispy, but they were good.

Maybe I have been living out of my Lonely Planet for too long. Maybe I have read too much travel literature in my time. But I hereby vow never to use the words 'vibrant' or 'bustling' again in describing what I see. They are the two most overused words in travel writing.

Okay, this is the remainder of our Nanjing trip. It is an awfully long bit, and if you feel like wading through it, you will find some drunkenness, some tomfoolery, a giant Buddah, lots and lots of eating, animals made from blown sugar, and several animated discussions with Chinese vendors. Things are good here otherwise, and I am backlogging stories for future ramblings.

Nanjing II

So we had three more days in Nanjing after my last entry. We got up a little slowly the morning after our boat race-laden banquet, but the low proof of the beer kept us clearheaded the next morning. Erica and I took a cab to a suburb where we visited the Nanjing Massacre Memorial. It was a very somber place set on the site were many Chinese were killed. The massacre, which has been inexplicably largely ignored by the rest of the world (and virtually denied by the Japanese), took place over a few months in 1937. Japan invaded China in 1937, and marched straight up the Yangtze River into Nanjing, which was the capital city at the time. They occupied Nanjing when the government fled. Over the next few months, they raped, tortured and murdered over 300,000 of its residents in a brutal effort to “bring China to its knees.”

The memorial was built less than ten years ago, and is somber though full of people. We did see a short man restrained so he couldn’t attack an old and extremely frail security guard while we waited to get in.

On the site, we saw many totems of remembrance, including a very large inscribed bell, a huge sculpture of a dismembered body and a boat, a walk of bronze footsteps, and a large field of smooth pebbles to represent the lives lost. Past the memorials was a painful site where several dozen skeletons of the dead lay half excavated (many victims were buried on this site as well), with explanations occasionally pointing out signs of torture or bayoneting. The melancholy mood was briefly interrupted by the ringing of a cell phone and a man answering it.

Lastly we walked through a photo exhibition that documented many acts in uncomfortably close detail, and finally, on a slightly higher note, recent photos of some of the survivors. It was a very moving episode.


We met Joe back downtown and continued eating. We went to a Muslim restaurant, recognizable by the fact that the workers there all wear little white hats. Inside, Joe ordered for us and soon afterwards, a huge plate arrived full of chicken, potatoes, peppers, and onions, flavored with tomato sauce, coriander pods, Sichuan peppercorns, and star anise. We dug into this plate that had a diameter that approached a foot and a half, and I was happily gorging myself when a waiter came around and dumped a bowl of wheat noodles on top. They were about an inch wide and as thick as lasagna noodles; they made an excellent mop for the juices. Joe won the battle to pay for this meal—less than $4 for the four of us.

On the way home, we ran across a man in the street with colorful toy animals on sticks on the back of his bike. Closer inspection showed that these animals were made from sugar. Joe and a friend of his from Minnesota talked up this man, who made the animals himself. Upon our request, he opened up the wooden box attached to the back of his bike and showed us his tools of the trade. In it he had a few hot coals keeping four or five colors of sugar in putty-like consistency. At our prompting, he selected some red putty, took it in his hands and kneaded it for a few seconds, then deftly worked it into a balloon with a tapered end where he blew into and, about a minute later, he had blown a nice looking horse, which he sold to us for about 13 cents. Amazing.

We figured the best way to work off this insane amount of hot, filling food would be to climb a mountain. So we did. Purple-Gold Mountain overlooks Nanjing. It is a holy mountain, and definitely derives some of its popularity due to the fact that Sun Yatsen (father of modern China) praised it highly and chose to be buried there. But we visited him later.

Today we took a cab to the base and started at the base, suspiciously close to the restaurant where we had feasted the night before. A few minutes later, we were on a well-marked and well-trodden path, but in a now well-forested area. And with this forested area came an increase in volume. Not the expected sentimental music that one often hears at tourist sights, but actual natural sounds. This was the sound of cicadas or maybe locusts. It was almost deafening; we had to talk extremely loudly in order to hear each other. Joe stopped a few passersby to quiz them on the source of the noise. They established that yes, as we already knew, they came from bugs. One man enlightened us to the fact that this happened every spring. So we were not in the midst of one of those cicada hatches that comes around every 18 years, and I understand is taking place somewhere in the States this year. But we were nevertheless almost in a different dimension than the city just a few hundred yards away.

So we climbed higher, marking our progress by the numbers that someone conveniently painted on every few dozen steps. Around step 1,100 or so, we reached the top, where we had to pay a few yuan to enter (there is always an entrance fee) a small park where a few men were doing gymnasics on some new playground equipment. We sat at a picnic bench with a beautiful view of the trees 30 feet away, and if you strained your eyes, you could see a bit of a hazy view of Nanjing. We walked a bit further and came across a huge, probably 30 feet across, poured cement Buddah. We took a few semi-scandalous pictures with him and walked out to the actual viewing part, where we squinted at the haze to make sense of the city below us. Nanjing has fairly bad air pollution, so the skyscrapers, roads, and parks below us did not make an awesome impression upon us. Joe spent most of the time chatting up a group of local phy ed teachers who were also enjoying the view.

We decided to take the chair lift down. A man at the top had set up a small archery range and was offering us the chance, for a few yuan, to shoot at the targets he had set up. We declined his solicitations. “We’re pacifists,” Joe announced to him.

We were unable to sweet talk the chairlift operator into allowing us to ride three on the chair (it would have been quite uncomfortable had he), so we rode down Erica and I in one, Joe in another. We quietly drifted along the treetops on this well-forested mountain, making out some more of the sites. We soon began to hear something off in the distance that became louder and louder as we approached it. It was music. At the top of one of the support pillars a speaker was mounted playing… Latino music. There were around 25 pillars on this half-hour long ride, and all of them should have been playing this sentimental music, except that the few pillars before and after our first speaker had malfunctioned, leaving a solitary speaker as an oasis of sound on the way down.

At the bottom we visited the pay toilets. Joe likes them because he is told that they are rated on a star system, and the attendants are usually game for a conversation with a wacky foreigner. This was not rated, but the facilities were fairly clean and the man was happy to be complimented on the high quality of his toilet.

Next, we hiked in the direction of Sun Yatsen’s grave, but it was a long ways off. We contented ourselves with the botanical garden where we walked around and admired many types of flowers and plants. Many tulips were blooming in celebration of this being an international garden or something.

When we decided to leave we had the unfortunate realization that we were far from any other tourist site, not on a main road or bus route, and that it was 6:00—the time that most cab drivers are either switching shifts or eating dinner—a horrible time to hail a cab. However, before we had time to despair, a tiny bus/van pulled up in front of us. Joe said where we were going to the driver. “Get in,” the driver shouted to us. Without thinking, we did, and the other five passengers made room for us. Once we were moving again, it dawned upon us that this was probably not a free ride (those are incredibly rare in China) and that we should have agreed upon a price before we got in, for we were now in his territory. So the bargaining began, and the driver was ruthless. Joe was hamming it up, appealing to the other riders and saying how naïve and lost we were (or something… I couldn’t understand anything), and the guy decreased it from 21 to 20 yuan. Anyhow, he had to continue arguing with the guy for almost the entire way home, which was somewhat fun. This guy was just some local who had a van and was trying to make a little extra money by running as a jitney cab. In the end, he left us off vaguely where we wanted to be and only charged us a little more than a cab would have cost.

So we walked to an Indian place and had dinner with two more of Joe’s friends—two characters. They were perhaps the only two young Conservatives I have met abroad. One was a Mormon on a fellowship to study Chinese and had just graduated from Harvard. The other was a PhD in Chinese military strategy at U Penn and a former rugby player. We were mainly spectators as these two guys, who were meeting for the first time, had quite a conversation.

The Mormon was asking advice about hitchhiking on a military road in far Eastern China—a road that is officially closed to foreigners and perhaps everyone not in the military. Everyone else seemed to think that this was a bad idea, but he was really excited about being a modern day Marco Polo or whatever. We figured he will wind up in a Chinese prison. The military historian volunteered that he had a friend in the Chinese police force who could possibly get him some sort of official document that could make it slightly less ridiculous for him to try to travel that road. He then asked if the Mormon could buy him a dagger when he was there. Apparently, some really nice daggers come from that area. We did point out that it while it might not be a good idea to hitchhike on a closed military road, it is an even worse idea to do so while carrying a dagger.

The conversation then turned even more absurd when these two guys got into a big argument about whether an academic should be obligated not just to research and ‘discover knowledge’ but then to present his knowledge to the masses, thereby circumventing the press, which the military guy thought was worthless. This argument went on for quite sometime while the rest of us stole glances at the Bollywood movie that was playing in the background. When we were full, Joe and I preferred to talk about what had become my favorite running conversation. Glancing at the leftovers and patting our distended stomachs, I would ask him, “How much more could you eat, if your honor were at stake?” We would then speculate how much more food we could cram into our stomachs if we absolutely had to. Hours of fun. As we left, the Mormon checked to make sure that the other guy would still talk to his friend in the police department for him. After dinner we called it a night.

The next morning we walked around the campus of Nanjing University, which had wide shady lawns and ivy covered buildings. Two women practiced on the croquet course next to the volleyball courts. For breakfast we had two more variations of one of China’s most popular (and best) snack foods: Take egg, batter, and scallions, combine in one of many ways, then grill or fry it, and maybe serve with something salty or hot.

We met Joe (who worked mornings all week) for lunch with some of his friends from Nanjing University. We had local take out for lunch and finally ate the cake that Erica had baked in Ningbo and hauled all the way out there on the bus. It sagged a bit, but it was a chocolate cake in China and was greatly appreciated by Joe and the other dozen or so people who were invited. We had bought a local candle that had lots of plastic, a little sparkler-like flame, and a tiny chip that played Happy Birthday, and that wowed the other foreigners there. It was one of the few times this week I was able to walk, not waddle, away from a meal.

After lunch we visited a lake and the city walls, which, though over 600 years old, are still in excellent shape. On the way there we saw a woman who looked like her poodle. Each brick was inscribed with the name and address of the maker, and the walls have a nice comfortable walkway on the top. We paid a few yuan to climb up and the walked for about a ¾ of a mile before a fence inexplicable blocked our way. Apparently, most people turned right at the top of the stairs. We had turned left.

After our excursion onto the wall, we ventured to the lake. Like the lake from our first day there, this lake was also probably natural only to the Chinese, but we had no way of knowing. We rented a paddleboat that was shaped like a swan and paddled around the lake for about an hour, doing a little public service by scooping up floating orange peels and bottles. We flirted with a little subversion but opted not to abandon our boat on the far (and more convenient to us) side of the lake and give up our $9 deposit on the craft.

But we pedaled rapidly on the way home and got back just before we’d be charged for another hour, then caught a cab to meet some more of Joe’s co-workers, again largely dermatologists. We went back to the same restaurant that we had eaten our prior banquet, and were seated in a private dining room one room over.

That afternoon, Joe had been telling us how embedded into the medical establishment that the drug companies are here. There are fewer restrictions on how much wining and dining the drug reps can dote upon the doctors, and though their presence is not as visible in advertising, it is severe behind the scenes.

As we sat down to this meal, we were immediately introduced to one of these drug reps. She was going to be kind enough to sponsor our meal tonight. Great. We felt guilty for taking part in this racket, but we couldn’t just decline the meal. The menu was fancier than the previous night. Our host, the head dermatologist, frequently pointed out dishes that were particularly expensive. No abalone, shark fin, or swallows nest, though. Joe tried to tell everyone that I was an ornithological gastroenterologist and most looked on bemusedly, figuring, probably, that something was lost in the translation.

The highlight of this meal was also the lowlight. For two-plus months, I had managed to avoid a bout of serious drinking with the Chinese. This night, the streak would end. I have mentioned before the cursed baijiu, a foul elixir made from fermented rice or sorghum that goes down painfully. It is the same proof as vodka but tastes far worse. It is usually served in tiny shot glasses that allow you to throw it down and almost avoid the taste.

But tonight, I looked on confusedly as our waitress cleared the tiny shot glasses, since I had been forewarned that baijiu would be involved. To my horror, this did not mean that our plans had changed. I realized this when the waitress then filled my wine glass to the brim with the perverse clear liquid.

We had a few toasts and took a few painful sips, then our host raised his glass to Joe’s and mine, smiled devilishly, and said, “Half.” I warily eyed my glass, teetered, and talked him down to a quarter. That was still too much, but I closed my eyes, imagined it was grape juice, and took a few gulps. To my surprise, I didn’t go blind. The rest of the night was more and more of that, until the 5 or so of us who were expected to drink had emptied a liter and a half of the foul juice (Erica did her part when she tipped over her full glass of baijiu onto my place setting. I got blamed for it, but at least didn’t have to drink it. A further unfortunate result of the spill was that the smell, reminiscent of rotten-strawberries, permeated the air around me for the rest of the evening).

Finally, we were allowed beer (Budweiser), which we naively drank greedily, it being not the foul substance we had just been paroled from. Earlier in the meal, we had considered just running away, but stayed on for honor.

There are a couple of blurry pictures from the rest of the night, but the short (and only, really) story is that we stumbled back to Joe’s apartment and passed out by around 9:30, sleeping soundly until morning.

The next morning Joe slept through most of his rounds, but caught up for the end of them. Erica and I sat around dazed in his room. When he got home around 10:00, we stumbled around for awhile before going back downtown and found a place for lunch. Joe was excited about a Western-style restaurant, so we ordered a few pizzas, some skewered lamb and chicken, and some French fries. Grease always seems to make a hungover stomach feel a bit better. The food did not completely erase my memories of the previous night, which frequently restated its presence every hour or so through a painfully bad tasting belch.

We lounged until mid afternoon and then Erica and I headed out to see Sun Yatsen’s mausoleum, a huge staircase up the side of the mountain, loaded with tourists but featuring nice views. We walked up the stairs and enjoyed the weather, paid our respects to the man who is most responsible for modern China, and then took a bus back into town.

We met Joe at a foreign language bookstore so he could help us buy some Chinese textbooks. So we can now study our characters and have some actual form to our Chinese lessons. We bought Joe a book that he had been coveting about Chinese high school girls getting pregnant.

We then went to one of Nanjing’s most famous restaurant where we ordered one of their tasting menus. We ordered the cheapest menu, which was 20 small courses. Each came in a single serving bowl, which were cleared as soon as we devoured its contents. It was somewhat like a Nanjing dim sum. They were tasty, but I was jealous of the table next to me that had ordered one notch up, to 25 small courses. I switched my order half way so I could partake in their additional dishes. Sadly, that confused the servers and I only got one more dish. We caused small spectacle up front trying to get my extra dishes (I had photographed each one and we stubbornly pointed to the sole extra dish on our camera’s display), but to no avail. You win some and you lose some.

We left and did a little shopping for souvenirs for our Chinese tissues. Joe was fairly deft with his bargaining (he says if you add an exasperated “ayyyy-ya!” that automatically knocks off 20%) and definitely saved us a few yuan when we bought some of Nanjing’s famous rocks, called Mountain Flower Rocks, the types of rocks that, if you looked at them with an open mind, the mineral deposits depicted scenes of mountains, forests, and lakes.

We wandered around for a bit longer before heading home, bidding Joe farewell, and hitting the hay. Our bus ride home was fortunately uneventful and our classes the next day back in Ningbo went surprisingly well.

Nanjing

We have just returned from our longest trip so far in China. We had a week off from classes because of midterms, so Erica and I ran off to Nanjing, the city that we almost moved to and visited our old friend Joe. He is there doing work on STDs and learning Chinese. It was an eventful and fun trip. Nanjing has a very interesting history and is much larger and its university draws many international students, allowing for a much different experience than Ningbo.

I gorged myself on numerous occasions. Numerous, well documented occasions. We ate many different foods with many different groups of people, and I just kept on eating. Upon reflection, I think what killed me about the burritos the other day was that I wasn’t limited by the use of chopsticks, which do a great job of regulating how much food I can shovel into my mouth at one time. Here, I also had that limit, so there were no sickening moments of overindulgence. Well, one, but it wasn’t with food.

Onto Nanjing. Joe is a great guy, and we really enjoyed spending more time with him. Our original plan was for us to spend a few days with him in Nanjing and then move onto Suzhou, but we never made it out of Nanjing. He and the city waylaid us, but we have no regrets.

We made it to Nanjing on our own, with no Chinese interpreter, though we comically took a cab to the wrong bus station early in the morning and had to jump into another to take us to the correct bus station. Our spanking new bus arrived 5.5 hours later, where we caught a taxi to some park where a bunch of ex-pats were celebrating Easter. We bought some mangos and oranges to contribute and managed to be so speedy in our arrival that we beat Joe there. We asked three lingering foreigners (lawai) out front whether they knew Joe Tucker. The were somewhat confused, until one asked, “Dr. Joe?” He’s the one.

We took a boat ride, all 14 of us, out to some tiny island with a pagoda built in the middle of this lake/lagoon. We spent the afternoon eating Western foods (someone had brought tahini all the way from the states to make hummus—we loved it), basking in the beautiful weather and catching up with Joe, who was close only to a few of the other foreigners there.

On the boat ride home, someone wondered aloud whether the lake was natural. That sparked an interesting conversation about whether that would even be a legitimate question to a Chinese person. It is unclear how many of the lakes in China, especially here around the Yellow River delta, are natural. West Lake, for one, the most famous lake in China, was once a bay that was eventually sealed off from the river and sculpted over several centuries to be the epitome of Chinese ‘natural’ beauty that it is today. It holds maybe six islands, with only one non-manmade one. The canals of Ningbo are usually completely straight, and were likely formed as a way to keep dry land drier and wet land wetter. But in the Chinese way of thinking, “manmade” and “natural” are not mutually exclusive. Of course the lake is natural! It is a lake! It is like asking if something plastic was manufactured! We asked our boatman, who of course answered that the lake was natural, but, unfortunately, we did not press the issue.

Joe took us back to his downtown apartment, where we were able to sleep in his ‘weekend room,’ which is close to Nanjing University, where most of the other expats live. He then took us out for dinner at the German restaurant where I had weiner schnitzel. At dinner, we continued to catch up and talk about China. He informed us that, since we were his guests, and this was China, he was going to follow the Chinese custom and pay for us. We allowed him the dinner, but when he suggested that we share a beer to end the night, we erroneously attempted to buy the beers. There was a bit of a scuffle, but Joe knew the woman at the store and told her not to accept our money, so he wound up paying.

For the rest of the week we continued to fight over picking up the bill, often creating a scene that was funny, at least to us, as Erica and I teamed up to restrain Joe and pay for whatever ticket or bill we were faced with. Joe gamely allowed us to foot some bills, but we did not come close to picking up our share.

Occasionally, we created a scene, drawing a tiny crowd of onlookers wondering what on earth these foreigners were fighting about. Joe and we took much glee in this, as Joe is fascinated with creating a spectacle.

In China, there are frequently spectacles. It usually involves two people arguing loudly, and occasionally involves construction work or other odd things. In order to be a true spectacle, though, one needs a crowd of people gathering around it. Otherwise, it is just an incident. Almost anywhere you go, there are enough people that if there is an argument or odd/interesting occurrence, people will stop, stare, and usually crowd around. It is not impolite to stare here, which works wonderfully for us tourists, but is a little unnerving (as we are often the object of the staring) until you get used to it. We failed (or didn’t have the guts) to create any true spectacles, but we came close a few times.

Back to our trip. After dinner, we turned in, climbing to the fifth floor and sleeping on the couch (me) and single bed (Erica). The next morning and wandered around the neighborhood. We found the drum tower (many cities here have an old, traditional, wooden drum tower that is a few hundred years old and was used to bang drums to ring in the time of day or warn war or something—we have one here in Ningbo, too!) and wandered around it, paid a few yuan to climb upstairs and escape the light drizzle that was falling—our only bad weather of the trip—and then ate a great breakfast, where a woman poured a big ladle of batter onto the bottom of a very hot oil drum, cracked an egg on it and spread it over the crepe-like substance below, then laid in some scallions, cilantro, hot paste, and some salty brown paste.

We then walked around lost, using our crappy guidebook map to look for the bell tower that we eventually found, though it was more of a pagoda in a tiny manicured garden setting. Bells are a symbol for remembrance here, apparently. It was lost on us what this particular bell was remembering, but it was big, probably ten feet tall. It made me feel pretty sad, thinking about all this to-do in the States over our Liberty Bell, when probably a half-dozen Liberty Bells could fit into this one, non-revered bell. Okay, I didn’t feel too sad.

Next we met Joe and an entirely knew set of expat friends for lunch. By the way, today was Joe’s birthday! We went out with maybe ten expats, but this was a very motley crowd. There was an undergrad from Minnesota, then three older undergrads from Malaysia, a guy named Guy from New Zealand, a woman from Belgium, and two crazy French guys who spent the duration of our (Chinese) meal torturing our waitress. The defining moment was when one of the French guys decided to take off his shirt and continue eating for 15 or so minutes. Our young waitress was absolutely scandalized, and the whole scene was pretty hilarious.

From there, we went out to do some sightseeing with Joe. We had a very fun time trying to find an art museum, which involved getting in a cab, driving 100 feet, then getting out again because we hadn’t realized the street we wanted was at the next corner. We walked the length of this tiny street looking for the museum, and wound up in a hilarious conversation with a half-dozen locals at what was labeled as a police station but seemed to be operating more as a foot-massage place.

I should mention, because most of our experience in Nanjing was drastically affected by it, that Joe speaks very good Chinese and is always excited to use it. When we would raise various questions, or wonder aloud about anything, Joe was usually halfway towards asking the closest local about it. We didn’t take a single cab ride where Joe didn’t engage the cabbie in conversation. This added a bit of giddiness to our trip, for Joe is full of energy, and all of us were excited to see each other and relieved to find someone here who shared those good old Swarthmore values.

What was amazing to me was that, despite having the ability to communicate with locals, we still usually didn’t have any idea what was going on. This, and numerous other occasions, has given me the conviction that most people in China frequently have little idea what is going on. Whether it is when the government holidays are (it seems that the government declares them less that a few months before they actually occur) to where the museum is, most people here seem to just take things as they come and not fret. There is almost no planning in China, and things change all the time. I guess we’ve mentioned that before, and I suppose it shows why people don’t want to invest time or energy in to plans, or learning things like opening hours and so forth because they will most likely just change.

So the gaggle of advice givers eventually steered us to the other side of town where we found the museum. Except that it was the wrong one. And it was closed. Kind of. There was a woman at the ticket office, but she wasn’t there to sell tickets. She was there just to tell people like us that the museum was closed. There was another man in the office, but he was busy playing Warcraft on the PC and didn’t pay much attention to us. We couldn’t quite figure out why it was closed, but the door was open so we walked in to find that most doors were open, but that there were galleries on the sides that had some Chinese watercolors.

Instead we went to the Presidential Palace, which was the seat of the Nationalist government in the 1930s, but was much older (I tend to forget these things more here). We enjoyed the numerous tourists wearing matching hats and taking pictures at the front gate. We snuck into a few of their photographs and had lots of fun with the video record function of our camera, creating a mild spectacle when Joe pranced around doing some sort interpretive dance to the poetic reading that I did of the poor English translation of the rules.

Inside, we admired the architecture of the air raid shelters, took detailed measurements of many things using Joe’s birthday present, a whale shaped tape measure, asked women about the flowers inside, wandered into a greenhouse on the grounds where Joe asked about plant care, and had a lengthy conversation with a security guard regarding the fact that the palace was AAAA rated by the government tourist council (or something) and whether he thought it could earn that fifth ‘A’ (he thought perhaps in a few years, if they worked hard).

Eventually, it was time for dinner, so we went out to a birthday banquet with Joe’s boss and some dermatologists and Masters students he is working with. It was a great meal, and though I am tempted to describe every course (I photographed each one), the gist of the meal is that Nanjing food is slightly spicier than Ningbo food, and there is a lot less seafood. They also served donkey, which was pretty good (cured, perhaps brined a bit) but made me wonder if there are donkey farms here that raise donkeys for just such a reason or if not, where they get it.

Another great thing about China is that most rules can be avoided if you are persistent or oblivious enough. At this restaurant, a fine dining establishment, we all sat down and ordered some local beer. Aghast that they only carried Budweiser and Tsingtao, Joe’s boss (the host) immediately sent two people to the store across the street, where they returned lugging a case of 600ml bottles of the desired beer. Probably against the rules, but no one was going to challenge us on it.

We drank the beer freely during the meal, and as Joe and I were reminiscing about rugby days of yore, somehow we got into our drinking games, and the next thing we knew we were competing in a boat race, which is essentially a linear chug—there are two teams and each member has to quaff his drink as soon as the competitor before him has finished his. But we didn’t break into teams, as per the norm, for this boat race was against the clock. Everyone at the table participated, men, women, students, and doctors. We did four rounds(!) and lowered our group time from 40 seconds to 12, though there was more than a little cheating by the end.

We headed home a bit hazy and a bit early. So that was our first day and a half. We didn't slow down from there, but I will write about the next three days in a future entry, for this is already absurdly long.

Avoid this at all costs. Horrible, horrible, stuff. More to follow.

P.S. Nanjing was great.

So we are off to Nanjing for the next week to hang out with our friend Joe from Swarthmore, and though I expect some crazy stories or keen observations to emerge from our visit, I can't promise it. If you try to make them happen, they don't. I will leave you with a story or two from the archives to tide you over while I am gone.

The health check up:

We needed to pass the Chinese Govenment Health Check up so, as far as I can tell, w could get a neat little boolket saying that we have passed our health check up. So our first week here, we were picked up early in the morning with three passport photos in hand. We took a cab downtown and were dropped off at some sort of travel medicine clinic.

In the clinic, we walked into the reception of the aging building and filled out part of some form, then were shuffled into a small room, where a doctor took our weight and height using some sort of laser distance finder. He then proceeded to check off a handful of boxes on the form: neck, back, anus, gall bladder, genitals, arms, and so forth. So from there, we cross the hall, where another doctor (or nurse, I don’t really know) draws a vial of bloods and gives us another stamp. We go into the next room down, where a doctor makes me read some letters off a wall through a mirror (I miss the last three rows, but Erica doesn’t have to take off her glasses). He then looks in my ears, down my throat, and up my nose, with some strange nostril-pinching apparatus. I am unclear as to whether this particular building is modern or downtrodden by Chinese standards.

We have several rooms to go, but I am waived ahead so we are not all waiting for each other in order to proceed. The next room was just next door down the hall. Here I had to lay down, take off my shoes, roll up one pant leg and one sleeve and hike up my shirt. The nurse (doctor?) attaches electrodes and we inhale sharply in response to the coldness of the equipment. I wait awhile, and finally, the nurse produces an ECG. Apparently, everything is normal, though there is a little more space than usual between my beats, she tells me. The next room has a standing divider/shade, making me think it was finally time to strip down. The sign outside said “b” ultrasound, but it was written top-down, making it look like bultrasound.

Inside a woman is reading a chart or an article or something (it is all Chinese to me) with her back to me. I stand uneasily right behind her, waiting for her to attend to me. I clear my throat a few times to make her aware of my presence. Still, no reaction. I wait a few moments, figuring she has decided to make me wait until she finishes her article. I waive my form in front of her in a last effort to make sure she isn't deaf. Maybe she was, for she turns around, startled. Here I hike up my shirt, she puts some sort of liquid on the ultrasound sensors, and rubs it around my kidney areas, then on the other side. I think I passed.

The last room is down around the corner, fairly isolated. Here I am instructed to stand amidst a car-sized machine. It looks about 50 years old. The technician retreats behind a window and there is a banging of machinery as a sensor scans my chest from the front. I look to the old TV set on my right and sure enough, there is a ghostly image of my ribs on the screen. A few moments later, it is done, and I return back. I suppose my lungs showed no sign of tuburculosis.

Chris is still in the ECG room. Apparently something is wrong. He has heart disease, they say. Amazing, he is 22 and very active. They want him to schedule an appointment in a different office. He is slightly worried.

He is considerably less worried when we describe our plight to our fellow teachers. “That makes four of us!” says Anissa. They all told us we had heart problems, as well." Alan, our facilitator here, laughs when we describe to him our ordeal. “All you need to do is stick out your tongue and I can tell you what is wrong with you!” he announced to all at a banquet we attended that evening. Chris went outside with him to be examined. “You are fine," Alan told him. “Well, your lung is a little dry. Beer is the best medicine!”

A sample banquet:

In our first three weeks here, we have been the guest at six different banquets. They all involve copious amounts of food and frequently much drinking. I wanted just to write a few things about them, and record a menu from a fairly typical banquet that we had over lunch to welcome us to Xiao Shi.

The banquets always start with 7 or 8 appetizers, or cold dishes, which are on the table all at once. On this particular meal, we had cuttlefish in jelly with seaweed and sliced into disks, cooked dates with honey, cold steamed squid with a red, five-spice like coating, fruit salad with mayonnaise, dried little fish, salted raw crab, and pickled winter squash. I liked most of what was to offer, the cuttlefish being quite tasty, but the fruit salad would have been better unadorned with its condiment, and I have to admit that I wasn’t a fan of the texture nor strong taste of the raw crab.

After a few minutes of picking at the various littles, which were placed equidistant along the circumference of the large lazy Susan on the table, the other dishes trickle out. This day we had gelatinous fish soup, fried finger-sized spring rolls, tiny prawns, Sichuan beef, steamed razor clams, a bit smaller than your pinkie each, a salad with broccoli, shrimp, mushrooms and winter melon, sea cucumber, crisp fried duck skin with scallion and pancakes, whole steamed fish, braised crab, braised baby squid, braised cabbage, and finally, mushroom soup. The meal finished with a Ningbo specialty, tang tien, which are little glutinous rice balls filled with black sesame paste. At the end of the meal, the host always asks if you are full. "Would you like any rice or noodles?" is the question they always pose. Impressively, I usually decline.

This meal may have been a little more involved than most of our banquets, but not too much. Essentially, you have a tiny plate and your chopsticks, and you just pick at whatever is in front of you, spinning the table if you want a few more mouthfuls of a dish that is not near you. It is a neat way to eat, and no one can really tell if you are eating like a bird or a hog. I, of course, am always guilty of the latter.

Going out:

There has so far been a generally implied consensus that we should go out as a crew once a week. That has worked okay, as it generally involves drinking lots of low-alcohol beer. There are just a few bars in Ningbo, and in our time here, we have been to the same, French-Canadian-owned bar that offers pool, American ambiance and music, though we’ve gone on off nights and both times it has been fairly empty with mainly Chinese populating it.

It is a fairly big group, the six of us, and we have coped by playing games. We play pool, liar dice, and cards. It is generally merry, and I think it provides decent staff bonding as a way to get away from the ickiness and politics of the ‘office.’ Liar dice is extremely fun, and I mentioned the other night to the crew (after several pitchers had been imbibed) how I can’t wait to get back to the States to show it to my friends. It involves, essentially, shaking five dice apiece and hiding what you roll. You then try to bluff the number of pairs and triples in your hand. It is lots of fun.

We met another Westerner who runs one of the three Western-style bars in Ningbo, called Cheers English Pub. She is British, and before I knew she ran the bar, we asked her what she does. She said she ran an antique factory here. I didn’t want her to clarify or explain away my first impression. It was perfect just that way.

Oh man... I just ate 7 burritos (one for every week and a half we've been abroad) and drunken at least a half gallon of (low alcohol) beer. I feel like I am about to explode. Tonight was one of the many birthday celebrations that have showered down upon us here in our short time. Half our staff as well as one significant other have flipped the page in their life calendars since we've been here. This one, for Chris, our Australian cohort, was celebrated in full effect Tex Mex style, without the music or the jalepenos.

It wasn't bad. Erica made flour tortillas and I made refried pinto beans. We bought something that seemed to be black beans but after soaking overnight all the black leached out and left us with reddish beans that were white under their skins, but they refried okay. I kicked myself for not saving enough hogfat but we made do with the two measly strips we had so we were able to add a little taste to the beans. Someone had a pouch of taco seasoning which was poured into some ground beef, home-ground by David and Anissa.

What made the meal stranger was the presence of three women, Emily's mom and her two friends, who are visiting and hanging out with us here for a few days. There was a little less foul language (but just a little), and we were able to bond over jokes that elementary school kids like (Where do you find a no-legged dog? Right where you left him!) and Monty Python skits. Erica's big old chocolate cake was good, and though she wasn't that happy with it, everyone else was enthralled--it's the only chocolate cake you can find in Ningbo. We gave Chris a cactus and a bicycle poncho for his birthday and he seemed happy.

I tried to show him Beirut after most everyone went home (our 9:30 curfew also means that guests have to be gone by then or else they'll have to climb the fence to leave), but I couldn't find any cups that could hold their own against the mighty onslaught of a ping pong ball (plentiful here, as one could imagine upon seeing the dozen or so cement ones next to our school). So we played with skimpy cups and bounced all of our approaches so as not to upset their contents onto the table. By the time we finished one game of it, I was so full that I couldn't imagine fitting anything else into me. It has been a pretty good night, but I've got to get to sleep.

The haircut:

I have had some neat haircuts over the past year and a half. One nifty side effect of having traveled the world is that I can remember quite distinctly each of my past few haircuts, and they have all been memorable.

There was the one in Buenos Aires, where, seconds after wondering aloud why there were so many people handing out leaflets advertising their services on the street and resisting Erica’s not-so-subtle hints that I could use a trim (and it is always her prompting that gets me to the hair cuttery sooner or later), I was handed one for a barber. So of course I got it cut, which was memorable for two reasons—the barber had only nine fingers and we happened to run into him on the street a few days later.

The next haircut came in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where I got my hair cut by an older man with a big graying pompadour. He gave me a newspaper than asked me how I wanted it cut. My response (I’d never learned barbershop words) prompted him to take back the newspaper and give me a comic book, and give me a picture guide from which I could choose my haircut. I then asked for a haircut like the guy with a ponytail, but my attempt at humor went unacknowledged. In the background someone sang Spanish lyrics to Procol Harum on the radio, and he sent me off with a business card/calendar that happened to have a dirty cartoon of some doctor having sex with a patient while talking to her husband on the phone and saying that she is doing fine, or something. Erica threw it out before I could put it in the scrapbook.

To the chagrin of all, I put off my next haircut for several months too many (no word in the English language rhymes with month… how strange). Just to spite her, I waited until the day after Angie left after hearing hell from her all week about my shagginess to schedule an appointment. I somewhat atoned for it by getting a haircut with Ken the Barber, my barber since probably second grade, a family friend on the corner of East Washington and Baldwin St in Madison. I will miss him, for this was probably my last haircut with him since I understand he has malignant cancer. But I went from having an ugly semi-fro with the receding hairline to having a buzzcut with a receding hairline.

I had a quick trim from my brother-in-law in San Francisco, which was notable only for the fact that I, idiotically taking matters into my own hands, misjudged the length of the clipper guard and carved a nice bald spot onto the side of my head before doubling over with laughter. Just in time to be introduced to China.


Oh, right. My haircut here. With my thinning hair out front my curly locks do not look as Adonis-like as before… Erica had started mentioning such. So we were walking down the street on our way from school, a two-mile or so walk we do a few times a week, when a boy runs up to Erica and sticks a glossy flyer in front of her. We brush him off, but then he goes for me, and starts gesturing wildly at the, yes, hair cuttery right down the street. And this was not just any hair cuttery, but the one with big windows and lots of light and a staff of two to eight standing at attention facing each other and flanking the doorway. We had noticed this many times, and it was Erica’s favorite salon in town. After a few moments’ indecision, I decided to take the plunge.

I can’t properly describe this salon in a vacuum. I need to put it in the context of its kin in Ningbo. Our apartment is, actually, in the thick of some of these establishments. Here there are beauty salons, and ‘beauty salons.’ The latter have several young women very done up and wearing skirts loitering in the salon, and I’ve never seen anyone getting their hair or nails done. We are unclear whether they would be defined as prostitutes, but the smart money is that these are, indeed, brothels. On our block (which is about twice the length of a normal city block), there are at least a half dozen of these ‘beauty salons.’ One could consider our neighborhood a school and brothel ghetto, if he so desired.

But the legitimate salons are just as interesting. We have at least two of these on our block. Here, whether a hole in the wall or a snazzy downtown place, the barbers are usually men. And they always, I mean always, have highlighted or bleached hair. Almost always long, too. This wouldn’t be as notable if it weren’t for the fact that we never see anyone else with this hairstyle. Except for one time, in Hangzhou. And he was a photographer, so he didn’t count.

In our salon, we were greeted by a half-dozen of these bleached and highlighted young men. I sat into a chair next to a woman with her hair in curlers that were attached by tubes to a contraption a few feet above her head that did something, who knows what. A man moistened and then shampooed my hair, spending several minutes with the lather, massaging my scalp, and so on. He did a nifty thing where he rested his palm on my head and his forefingers on his middle fingers and then snapped them down onto my scalp. It was not uncomfortable. We walked to a sink and rinsed, and he put my hair in a towel while he worked on the rest of my upper body. But first, the most harrowing part of the visit came. He pulled out a pack of q-tips and motioned to my ears.

Here is where I followed advice that I have used, with mostly successful results, throughout our time here. Since they offer this service and people apparently take them up on it, I went on faith that there must be some merit to it and that people are not getting punctured eardrums all that frequently.

So I let this stranger who could only communicate with me via pantomime and gesture stick a q-tip into my ear.

And he did not just wipe around the opening to my ear canal. He went all the way in. I think he was actually touching my eardrum, which was not all that comfortable, and quite loud to me. But he was practiced, despite the fact that he couldn’t have been much older than 20, and once he reached the point of resistance, he simply rolled the q-tip between his fingers for a long time. Probably a minute per side, or at least it seemed that long. Then he discarded the first q-tip and went in with a new one. Despite this dangerous and delicate procedure, it did not remove years’ worth of built up earwax. In fact, I was disappointed by the measly yellow buildup on his q-tips. Oh well. I was able to trick myself into thinking I could hear a little better afterwards.

Then we proceeded to the neck/shoulder/arm massage, which ran the gamut from pinches to flicks to karate chops. He did a little limbering with my arms, chopping the length of them and then shaking them out as one would shake out a sandy towel. By the way, I understand that all of these procedures are standard at most beauty salons in the area. Eventually he reached my hands, where he did some standard massages of the palm and then squeezed each finger between his thumb and forefinger and pulled outwards, forcing blood to the tips of my fingers for some alleged therapeutic effect. The he left.

A new young man (with fewer highlights but longer hair) came over with his satchel of scissors to do the actual cutting. He unzipped his tools and went to work on my hair, which was now dry. That is how they cut hair here.

Our trusty Chinese phrasebook had a section on the barbershop (“Please don’t cut it too short,” “Please massage my head only”), and Erica looked up the phrases that she wanted to use, “Please don’t cut the front too short,” and “Please shave his neck.” Our barber misunderstood the latter phrase, and awkwardly took his little scissors to my four-day stubble, which perhaps could have been cut a hair shorter but barely. Eventually he did shave my neck. Some of it.

Soon enough he was back onto my hair, which he fastidiously attended to. Naturally, during his work the entire staff cycled through, curious if he could handle this crazy white guy’s curly hair. We were in the same boat as everyone else. For the first fifteen minutes, I doubted that he was going to even cut it short enough to notice. But as he rotated from one side to the other to the back to the top (but being judicious with the front), my hair did get shorter. He spoke a tiny bit of English, but we exhausted our shared vocabulary fairly quickly.

I think his strategy for tackling my foreign head of hair was a good one: cut it short enough that it no longer is curly! And that is what he did, thinning and snipping around and around my head until my hair laid flat like good hair should. And when it seemed that he wasn’t going to cut it any flatter, he just kept going around, snipping stray hairs. We both wanted to yell, “Stop,” but that wouldn’t have been very nice. Finally, he was finished, and I got another shampoo and a pat on the back. We paid (about $3.75), and left, walking again past the employees standing at full attention on both sides of the door. It had taken over an hour and a half.

So I feel derelect with my blog, with my journal, and with the rest of my life. We go on a vacation next week! A real vacation, for six days, to Nanjing and Suzhou. In Nanjing, we will be able to see old friend and co-rugger Joe Tucker, which should be a dandy of a time. But taking a week off mid school year means, of course, that we need to work much harder before so that we are caught up on our lessons when we get back. No big problems. But I still have to talk about my trip to the barber (yes, cleanly shorn again), how the volume here is always a click or two too loud, and an interesting experience we had at the market the other day trying to buy crabs. Hopefully I will get around to writing them soon, because, of course, after Nanjing I will have a hundred new stories to tell.

Excitingly, our fancy new camera just arrived today with the mother of one of our coworkers, so we should be able to get digital photos out onto the web very soon. I just read an article about two better ways to share pictures than with ofoto. Anyone tried share a lot or OurPictures Network?

So maybe I am finally catching up with my journal. I am writing about what happened only two weeks ago. I was talking to Erica last night about how many things I’ve neglected to write about; things that shocked or startled me initially, but that I am now almost oblivious to. I no longer get white knuckles while riding in a taxi. I am not overwhelmed by the supermarket. I am quite capable of finding my way around town. The intense manicuring of park areas is beginning to bore me. I can buy things at the wet market without fear, and am even beginning to figure out how much things really should cost there. But what different/interesting/crazy things have I neglected to internalize before I became desensitized to them? Too any, no doubt.

Shanghai

Shanghai is a very, very different experience from Ningbo. It might have well been an entirely different country. This was partly because we stayed with Tom, a friend of the Turners for many years who is now an ex-pat settled in comfortably in Shanghai. He had a comfortable apartment with a nice view, a guest bedroom, and satellite TV which got a dozen channels in English. We read the English language newspapers available, watched TV, and gazed out at the city from his living room.

Unfortunately, it was a very poor weekend to go to Shanghai. It was cold and rainy on Sunday, and colder and cloudy on Monday. We caught the last bus from Ningbo and arrived around 10:00 in Shanghai, driving through a perpetual drizzle. Luckily, the cab driver could read our address for Tom since we didn’t have his phone number. We found his place, watched some TV and went to sleep. I suppose that should have been the time we went out and partied like you can’t do in Ningbo, but we aren’t quite that type. The next morning we got up and had some buns which Tom had brought home from the gym. Good, classic, central China vegetarian buns, similar to cha su bao, but full of some bok choi and tiny slivers of tofu and shitake.

We went out, in the rain, and visited the places that Tom knew well. We were next to the Xuijiahui shopping center, (at least at some point) the largest in China. We checked out the main mall area, which had a huge glass-domed atrium and seven or so levels of shopping opportunities circling it. We then crossed the street to Web International, a private language school were Tom worked until this year. It was quite impressive. In every way that Witts has no idea about what they are doing, Web did. They had a curriculum that the teachers worked from, they had adequate supplies, and they had a nice facility. It was like night and day. I admit I was a bit jealous, though the fact that they are expected to be at their nice facility for 8 to 9 hours a day was off-putting.

We left and took the subway to the People’s Square, on the site of the former racetrack that gave Shanghai much of its anything-goes reputation in the 1930s. This square, ironically, has a center park area with koi ponds and such that has a 2 RMB fee. “Communism with Chinese characteristics” is the phrase I have heard used to describe their economic system.

We went to the Shanghai art museum in the square, and despite it being a rainy Sunday, the museum was almost empty. I found it very compelling. The first floor was nothing but traditional Chinese watercolors. Some had more modern subjects, often involving construction workers. Upstairs was a more eclectic variety of art. On the third floor was an interesting exhibit using photo and video. We looked at a range of videos of people scratching—creepy. We were both transfixed for a few minutes by video of dozens of people of different races looking into the camera to say, “I will die.” Some said, “Yo voy a morir.”

We bought some paper cut cards from the gift shop, left the museum and walked, through the rain, down Nanjing Lu. Nanjing Lu is the primary shopping/people seeing street in Shanghai. But not quite as much in the rain. After a few hundred meters the hunger pangs started, so we had a lunch on the 8th floor (reached by 8 flights of escalators) restaurant of some department store. We had sizzling stone pots of curried rice and Korean rice. Both were good.

We cabbed over to Yuyuan Gardens, a popular spot for the tourists and with good cause. There is a nice garden complex here, with lots of little ponds and pagodas and courts and courtyards and such. It was built in the 1500s. It is mazelike, with each small part feeling intimate. We admittedly spent some time searching for the famous Large Jade Something or Other and came up empty. We found a large rock in a garden which may have been jade, but we didn’t know. It had a lot of holes in it.

Afterwards Tom went home and we went to the surrounding market and bazaar, which was extremely crowded (maybe some people stayed home but it is a lot harder to deal with huge crowds when everyone is carrying an umbrella) and extremely interesting. There are rows and rows of shops selling kitschy things as well as legitimate art, jade, jewelry, and so forth. But those did not beckon to us nearly as much as the numerous shops selling snack foods. Immediately, we regretted having eaten before we arrived. I had my nose pressed against the glass of various stores where you could see the cooks making their famous Shanghai dumplings. Ground pork and crab and a little liquid was magically sealed in a dough wrapper and then steamed or fried. Heavenly. I watched a woman with a pair of scissors and an empty bottle deftly extract the leg meat from a huge pile of dismembered crabs much smaller than the blue crabs we are used to in the US. We walked through a huge cafeteria and looked on jealously as others, not yet full, gorged on dumplings, buns, shellfish of all sorts and other foodstuffs.

Finally, we left, and walked briefly through the Old City, which was just as advertised: an older part of town. It was somewhat interesting to see the narrow winding lanes (though not as much so when you warily approached each corner with the real potential of being run over by a bicycle) and the local flavor of the old China we all idealized (chamber pots and everything), but we have those neighborhoods in Ningbo, too, so we didn’t spend too long treating the neighborhood residents like zoo animals.

We decided to walk to the Bund, considered perhaps the most interesting tourist attraction Shanghai. It wasn’t but I’ll get to that in a moment. Along the way, we peeked into a market/bazaar where everything besides food that could sit in a breadbox was seemingly sold, from six-foot stalls that covered three floors, each the size of a football field. It was an amazing place, nothing that would make a tour book, and not that it was particularly busy, even. But all shops were open, and I became disoriented very quickly, my eyes glazing over as we walked past stall after stall of cell phone holders, combs, envelopes, umbrellas, calculators, hair accessories, and the like.

We left and made it to the Bund, which was, essentially, the original fancy strip of buildings built along the river when Shanghai was a decadent city based upon the British concessions. Today, it is perhaps interesting for some tourists because of its European architecture, but we’ve been to Europe and seen plenty of said architecture. The buildings were nice, but they were just buildings. And did I mention that it was raining? The view from the Bund across the river to Pudong is supposed to also increase the enjoyment of the area, and we tried to enjoy it, but the scene was blurred by the rain and the low clouds. We were able to see some of the modern skyscrapers across the way, but the scene was not as dramatic as it would have been on a nicer day. We kept reminding ourselves during this trip that we will come back and see it again on a nicer day. It is such a luxury for us to be able to do so.

So we took a bus with foggy windows most of the way to a favorite stop for our co-teachers—the ‘American store.’ in the Ritz-Carlton complex It wasn’t super exciting nor was it specifically an American store; inside were many things you would be hard pressed to find outside of Shanghai (barbeque sauce, mustard, lox, Special K) at inflated prices. But it was worth the stop so Erica could buy some powdered sugar and cocoa powder for a cake she intends to make. We also bought some dill-infused mustard from Germany.

We went home and back to dinner where Tom took us out to a favorite restaurant of his. He invited along a Chinese friend of his, and we had a nice dinner of silken tofu with crab, finely chopped and mixed green vegetable, tofu, and sesame oil, pork short ribs in a oily sauce served in a hollowed-out bamboo bowl, and fried chicken pieces with hot peppers and peanuts. We also had wine, a bit of a luxury for us.

Dinner went late, and we came back and watched some CNN before bed.

The next day was colder, but dry, at least. Tom went to work and we set out on our own to take a walk through the French Concession. It was an interesting neighborhood, with many stand-alone houses and such, but it was not too interesting. We walked into a park (that charged a small fee to enter) and watched a few locals (who likely did not pay) practice tai chi, do some ballroom dancing steps, and take wedding photos. We stared at the Marx and Engels statues and those practicing tai chi in front of it for a bit and debated what to do for lunch. I was excited about coming back to Yuyuan Gardens next trip, with eating in that cafeteria and be able to look forward to. But I gave in, and wasn’t able to look forward to that any more after lunch. Now I have it as a memory. We ate, of course, both types of Shanghai dumplings: both the fried kind and the larger, steamed kind. Very tasty, but dangerous, as the hot broth is prone to squirting all over the table for those who are unschooled in the proper eating techniques. We supplemented it with a nice tofu/green/crab soup and a bowl of little crayfish/shrimpy things that were braised, it seems, in a five spice oily sauce. Messy but tasty.

We walked around the bazaar a bit while. Erica waited in line for a baked doughy thing that wasn’t as exciting as the line in front was promising. and then took a bus to the American consulate where we waited around while they put more pages in our passport. If you do it in the US, they say it takes six weeks. It took about 6 minutes for us, but our retinas were scanned upon entering the premises.

Afterwards, we were cold, so we just took the subway home. It involved walking around in circles and feeling somewhat lost until we found our station. We shopped a bit for a host gift for Tom, and settled on some cocoa and sugar coated almonds. We made it home and rested/watched TV before he came home. I became enthralled in a documentary about the travels of Marco Polo (he went to Hangzhou) and the next documentary, where a woman did an almost identical portion of our South America trip from Cusco, through Bolivia and across the salt flats and into Santiago.

For the rest of the night we became why so many expats love Shanghai. We went to a trendy restaurant which could best be described as Peruvian-fusian tapas. It was mostly good, with some tapas much more successful than others. It was also extremely expensive by our standards—we spent about $60 between the three of us. But it was fun and quite different. We had hot chicken wings, a bland ceviche, a shrimp/avocado/pineapple salad, some sake-marinated roast fish, and some fantastic bread with butter.

Next we went to a club and watched some jazz being played. Two African-Americans were playing bass and piano, and Chinese were on brass and drums. It was a nice show. Tom ran into a two friends there, a woman from Suriname and another who was Jamican but had lived in England for her recent life. I don’t think there is anyone from Suriname in Ningbo. The band stopped around 10:00 and the club turned into more of a dance club, but we, being old and unfun, left.

We got up early the next morning, found the bus station and took the bus home, arriving there in time for our 12:30 meeting and taught in the afternoon our lesson on pop music.

Gotta admit that technology is wonderful. Don't believe that I am out of the loop just because I am across the Pacific (or Eurasia, for a few of you).

Yesterday I was able to listen to NPR, have my bro-in-law IM me music from UC-Santa Cruz, IM with my friends Gerry in Morocco, Matty in DC, and read the NY Times online from the comfort of my living room. While guys ride past in their pedaled-trike carts, loaded down with scallions, trash, or the occasional trio of loveseats (like I saw today)

And I am currently listening to another welcome addition to my life: lefty radio. About time I could keep up on the banter without reading. And keep up with The O'Franken Factor

Google is offering email. A news item I am excited about, a chance to escape my spam-clogged yahoo! account. A new internet gold rush! Get that email address you always wanted. Just don't take mine