More Noodles

One loyal reader of this blog requested that I keep writing. His actual words were, “Get the blog over with buddy…it’s not going to be too much fun later.” But that provides me sufficient excuse to mess around with this thing a bit longer.

I do have plenty of untold stories and observations, though they seem rather more distant than expected given the mere two-and-a-half weeks since I was fully immersed in China. Probably the high number of enormous hamburgers I’ve eaten since my return has accelerated the process of feeling fully at home in America again. But this past weekend Kristy and I decided we needed to use chopsticks and made a trip to a restaurant called Crouching Tiger in Redwood City in order to do so. I ordered dandan noodles, of course.

Writing that last sentence honestly made me start sweating from my face. The noodles were as spicy as the ones I ate at the Sichuan restaurant in Shijiazhuang, and much of our dinner conversation consisted of Kristy laughing at me while I said things like, “Oh man, these are spicy,” and “Can we get some more napkins over here?”

As previously mentioned, the food in China was mostly exceptional. It came in large doses, not suited for those with an instinct to keep eating as long as food keeps coming. This is probably why I’m convinced that I developed the beginning of a gut while there. Well, that and the bottomless tiny glass of beer with every dinner, the daily 3-pack of egg tarts, and the excess Ghirardelli chocolates my wife packed for me anticipating a client team of hundreds requiring authentic San Francisco gifts of goodwill. Had I stayed much longer I might soon have achieved my dream of developing a more convenient and fully portable snack food resting place.

Egg Tarts served with a smile daily

It’s something of a surprise that our dinners ever got started given the diversity and thoroughness of our team’s dietary restrictions. Several people cannot handle spice (I was accused of being one of them, but vehemently fought this assertion through the duration of the trip). Duli has a shellfish allergy. Two of the girls are relatively straightforward vegetarians, though apparently fish qualify as vegetables in Canada. And then one girl is what I will call an “ultra-vegetarian” simply because I don’t know what else to call her, never having attempted regularly to dine with someone who could not even eat onions or garlic. For all the work I do to pick hunks of onions and garlic out of my food I now recognize that I’m probably impacting 10% of the total.

The only restriction I put in place for myself was no dog meat, but I eventually extended this to cats after Duli, his grasp of the language apparently coming along much faster than anticipated, warned me that he recognized the symbol for cat in several dishes being grilled in the Carrefour parking lot. Later we found out it was the symbol for whichever Central Asian ethnicity was associated with that style of cooking, and there was no cat involved at all. Meanwhile, Tom made it abundantly clear that, with the exception of Duli’s allergy, everyone’s restrictions were personal choices and he refused to feel guilty if people struggled to find enough to eat in the local restaurants. As a result, some irony played out in the high frequency of visits to KFC by a subset of the group attempting to stay within the bounds of their healthy lifestyles.

One of the best meal options in China is the Hot Pot, lovingly celebrated in Mukul’s blog here. A hot pot, for those who don’t know, is a pot of boiling water into which you throw a bunch of raw food and then fish it out with chopsticks to eat. Important elements of the hot pot include the collection of stuff already simmering in the water to give it flavor and the sauces used to give the cooked food even more flavor. Well, and the food. I have categorized my hot pot experiences into three types: the community hot pot, the small table hot pot, and the personal hot pot. The community hot pot, as the name I’ve chosen implies, consists of one big “community” hot pot that sits in the middle of a table for 10 or 12 or some other relatively large number that can in good faith be labeled a community. The nefarious inventor of the community hot pot came up with a great way to start arguments, particularly among a group as picky and diverse as ours. Don’t put garlic in the water. Wait – is there shellfish in that? The meat has to go in last. That’s too many noodles. Why are you ordering more beef? YOU ARE SCALDING MY FACE!

At the other end of the spectrum is the personal hot pot, so named because each person at the table has his or her own hot pot to do with as he or she pleases. The fatal flaw in this design is its reliance on the individual’s ability to cook, which puts a significant damper on the experience for me. The other potentially more literal fatal flaw is that it puts the heating unit very close to people who may not be qualified to play with fire. At one restaurant I watched a woman lean over and light her hair on fire. I was about to congratulate her for the spot-on Michael Jackson impression when I noticed she was screaming and crying while her date was hitting her in the head with his hands and a napkin in a desperate attempt to put out the conflagration. By the time I got there with a glass of water she looked a little stressed out and more boyish than before, but uninjured.

In my experience the best hot pot is the small table hot pot, although this may have been more a function of the people around said small table, not to mention their relative lack of dietary restrictions. Apparently there is spin on the hot pot, whereby all the stuff to throw in the pot whizzes by on a conveyor belt while diners frantically grab items with chopsticks. With this invention the hot pot restaurateurs have come very close to completely automating the restaurant.

Mukul fell hard for Chinese Hot Pot

For those restaurants still employing people, ordering in China can be a challenge for those of us who barely even know how to count in Chinese. A key tool in this process is the translated menu. I had heard many stories and seen many pictures of menu translations gone horribly wrong in small town China, so I was looking forward to this aspect of the experience with great enthusiasm. Besides a few gems, such as “Trumpet She’ll Flesh,” Shijiazhuang mostly underdelivered for me. Thankfully, during our Shanghai trip we found a restaurant just off of Nanjing Road with a menu that nearly made up for it all. In addition to the famous Shanghai steamed dumplings, or xiao long bao, people dined on such dishes as “Trick Not Cut Jobs,” “Chicken Curry Piece of Land,” and that traditional favorite, “Hot Face in Three Other.” Everything we ordered was good, and when Duli didn’t die we found out that none of what we ordered had shrimp in it, either.

No comment

The Hamburglar sees a growth opportunity in China, too

Must have been what the girl with the burning hair ordered.

If you could read this you definitely would laugh

Editor's note: the fact that this blog doesn't have an ending is meant to be symbolic given that Chinese meals didn't really seem to have a very obvious ending, either. Actually, I'm proud I came up with that because in truth I sort of ran out of steam writing this one.

Enter the Wu Tang, Part Three

As Part Three begins, we still hadn’t made it to the actual Shaolin Temple. Emily, Carlos, Duli, and I had traveled many hours and kilometers (note to American readers: those are kind of like miles), and now we had a few steps left to complete the journey. The outbound journey, that is.

Duli, being single, had become enamored of Emily during the early stages of our assignment. By this time he’d decided that the feeling was not reciprocated and so hung back with me cracking jokes as we walked slowly to the Shaolin Temple. A lot of our conversation had to do with the Wu Tang Clan and Chinese language. One of the earliest phrases I learned in China was “bu yao,” or roughly “I don’t want it,” and it was always satisfying to be able to yell “boo yah!” at people and get a point across. A lot of Chinese phrases sound straight out of a rap song, but with entirely different meanings. In addition to my Shijiazhuang donut business I may also be able to carve out an opportunity by creating a Chinese-Rap crossover double entendre genre. I’m really surprised this doesn’t exist already.

At long last we entered the Shaolin Temple. I stuck a coin in an old tree, Duli burned some incense, Carlos snapped photos of Emily posing in front of temples, and the entire thing went on towards infinity like everything else in China. It’s a nice temple in a beautiful setting, and Duli took some shaky videos on his iPhone.

“I have a friend who makes Kung Fu B movies.”

“Isn’t he about 35 years behind on that one?”

“Maybe he can use some of this footage.”

“Let’s get one of me leaping out from behind that wall, then.”

The monks in the temple were not doing any Kung Fu. Mostly they were talking on cell phones. We heard later that a lot of them are actually rent-a-monks put in place for aesthetic purposes. But we did come across some older ones who, while they looked like they hadn’t done any Kung Fu in a long time, did at least chant, wave some smoke around, bang on things, and ask you not to take pictures. That felt authentic.

He heard the call

Inside the Shaolin Temple grounds

We’d seen the temple and continued walking away from our driver and Shijiazhuang. Now a number of women began swarming us to sell us these incredibly annoying cats that make a high pitched noise, apparently meant to be a meow, when you run your fingers down the string to which the cat is attached. The women were insistent. One woman came up to me while torturing her cat toy and began punching me in the chest, ordering me to buy it for 2 yuan. I started yelling “Boo Yah!” and pointing at her face repeatedly, which made me feel good but didn’t stop her. As I wrestled my way from her I asked myself who the hell would buy anything when faced with these selling tactics.

I heard Duli’s laugh before I saw him walking up to me, and then I heard a weak but still annoying meow come from the item he was holding in his hands. “This thing is great,” he said as he kept laughing.

Reluctant movie stars and their cats

Kung Fu Chicken

Eventually we began our journey back to Shijiazhuang. Our bus deposited us at a noodles place in Zhengzhou, and after dinner we dodged hectic nighttime traffic while walking through what seemed to be a pretty nice city. We narrowly avoided being run over several times and Carlos just about lost an eye when clotheslined by a low hanging wire. “Why this wire hanging here?” But we found the station.

Unlike our outbound train, the return train was a slow one with sleeper cars. Our “hard sleeper” consisted of six beds crammed three high into a narrow box. Duli and I were convinced that we’d share a unit with one of the local men who showed off their shirtless and prodigious bellies in what seemed to be a Shijiazhuang summer style. As we settled in, we found a bottle of rice wine that smelled like nail polish remover and a tube of something that thankfully turned out to be toothpaste awaiting us on the filthy table between beds. The train pulled out of the station sometime after 10 pm and would not make it to Shijiazhuang until 3 am. Tired and weary after a long day, the four of us chatted for a bit before retiring to our bunk beds.

Hard sleeper

I looked down at my feet that hung well into the aisle and, having recently seen Misery in an oddly-chosen dinner accompaniment at a Shijiazhuang restaurant, was glad there was no food cart on this train. Soon the lights were turned out and the train filled with sounds of many snoring Chinese passengers, what Carlos called the “Lotus Symphony.” Tool’s cover of No Quarter drowned out the sound via my iPod. With no real idea where the train was, and hours from Shijiazhuang, I lay there in the dark on a small, hard bed looking up at the occasional lights of a very foreign land flashing by. The world was infinite again.

Live Update

Quite a few stories are left untold, including the story of our final presentation to students at Hebei University of Economics & Business. Those stories will be told...just a little late, go figure.

Tonight was my last night in Shijiazhuang. Tomorrow we depart for Beijing and I catch a flight out of Beijing on Saturday. It's been quite an experience. Some quick observations:

• Shijiazhuang is booming. The scale of development is almost inconceivable but in a way that seems more sustainable than what I saw in Dubai last year. They build on three year plans and the city is transforming before our eyes.
• Students are students. Tom and I got to know a few of the students and they are smart and down to earth, although I never would have imagined being treated with such reverence by humans.
• The people I've met are outstanding, from my CSC teammates to the ABV team to those at the University to locals to anyone associated with Phil. Quite pleased to have a number of new friends and people welcome in San Carlos anytime.
  
• Very interesting to hear people talk about the overall climate over here. More on this later, perhaps.
• Can't say enough good things about the food, even if I did have to dodge several menu items. Nevertheless, I can't wait to have good Mexican food and a big, juicy burger.
• Does anyone want to go into the donut business with me in Shijiazhuang? The ratio of Chinese donut shops in SF to total donut shops in all of Shijiazhuang is huge.
  
• Is it rude for me to say I'm very much looking forward to the level of cleanliness to which I'm accustomed?
  

I should sleep. Stay tuned for more...

Enter the Wu Tang, Part Two

The story of our epic day trip continues where it left off, with Duli and me in our new raincoats, so thin that despite their gaudy colors they acted something like invisibility cloaks and we found ourselves inside the Shaolin complex without paying. We uncomfortably squeezed the wrong way through the turnstiles to find a place to buy tickets. Most uncomfortable of all was Carlos, who had held a mildly terrified look on his face for the last thirty minutes.

“I don’t know if I can make it,” he had said as we were winding our way into the mountains in our small bus.

“You gotta hold it. This is your first Shaolin test.”

From there his wide eyed gaze had fixed on the horizon and he focused all of his energy on not wetting himself. But now we were on the move, and he was getting desperate. “Where is bathroom in this place?” His first word was reaching ever higher notes. After running across a courtyard we were at the bathroom.

We were hacking and coughing when we could finally breathe again after leaving this gas chamber. “Oh man, that was a Shaolin test!”

Legitimately through the turnstiles again, we headed directly for the Kung Fu show that the monks put on at 2, 3, and 4 pm each day. This was such a beast of a day trip that we only arrived in time for the 3 pm show, despite having been at the Shijiazhuang train station on 4 hours sleep that morning. We chose balcony seats, settled in, and waited for the show.

Before it began, however, a tour group of middle aged Korean women swarmed the balcony. They were all around us, moving in every direction. A cacophony of “anyangs” accompanied a hectic search for seats. The women were like a swarm of bees on flowering shrubbery. They came from every direction at once, sitting, hopping up, moving to the next seat, trying to sit on our laps. Carlos and I leaned forward and used all of our size to block, but Duli wasn’t as lucky and two or three Korean women sat or stepped on him in their search. It was chaos until the emcee stepped onto stage.

When Korean women attack

He gets ice cream after this

Duli is from Boston – South Boston, to be more precise – and his accent got confused during a life spent in Sri Lanka, Dubai, Washington state, and South Boston. He is one of these guys who is already laughing when he walks up to tell you a joke, as he was the time he showed me his iPhone saying, “I think I found the place where William Hung gets his glasses.” The iPhone showed a photo of the façade of Shibang Optical in Shijiazhuang. Once, in conversation that I guess must have been about the predicted rapture, he said, “I once tried to resurrect a raccoon. Seriously.” He went on to describe the process but I’ve since completely forgotten it.

Duli is the only single guy in our group, so that makes him the most motivated to learn some Mandarin while here. In an early dinner with two of Phil’s former language teachers, Vicky and Sophie, Duli tried out one of the pickup lines he’d been practicing in hopes of getting some phone numbers. Quite a bit of laughter ensued until they were able to tell us that he’d just said, “Your telephone is beautiful.” Duli is also at least something of a Buddhist, so once the Kung Fu show was over I went with him to see some monks and offer a prayer or two.

“Duli, I forgot to bring money today.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not obligated to pay. They’re Buddhist monks.”

One of the monks was asking me to sign a book while he put beads on my wrist and a jade Buddha around my neck. Not a single signature was in anything but Chinese characters. I considered pulling out my Hao wen si business card to copy the characters before deciding what the hell and signing my name as I do on my checks. “I’m not sure what I’m committing to here.”

Duli began to drop a good amount of money into the offering bin – significantly more than we usually spend in Shijiazhuang for dinner – but it looked to me like his monk was not satisfied with this. The other monk was suggesting that I do the same. As they became more adamant it was apparent to me that we were indeed under some obligation. Duli doubled his offering and said in English, “I’ll pay for both,” which struck me as a phrase he really should have learned in Mandarin. This seemed to agitate the monks even more.

“What do we do?”

“I don’t really know. Buddhist monks aren’t supposed to make you give them money.”

“These guys know Kung Fu.”

I considered removing the jewelry and scribbling out my name, but I guessed this would infuriate them even more and might unleash fists of fury on my fragile western body. I had the Carlos look on my face when Emily walked up asking what sort of fix we’d gotten ourselves into. “I don’t have any money, and Duli paid for both of us.” Despite my lack of Chinese language skills it was clear to me that Emily didn’t make any more progress before saying, “It’s ok. Let’s go.” I was sure I had just stolen jewelry from Shaolin monks. This couldn’t be good.

Please forgive us

Duli and I decided that the best way to restore our karma would be to act out the fighting scene depicted in a large statue in front of the Kung Fu theater. This was met with rave reviews from Chinese tourists nearby, so we proceeded to take this show on the road for the rest of our trip in China.

Shaolin

Let's not act this one out, guys

Top of the World Financial Center, Shanghai - believed to be the highest Shaolin pose ever performed

Tom gets into the act on the Shanghai waterfront

Our karmic debt paid, we walked on. “What else do we need to see today?” I asked. “Umm, the Shaolin Temple?” Ah yes, a topic for Part Three.

The Great Carrefour Chase

Our trips to Carrefour had steadily increased in frequency during our stay in Shijiazhuang on account of the increasing popularity of evening team meetings with Mr. Black and Mr. Red at Club Mukul. A big supermarket in China is a little different from big supermarkets in the US. For one thing, the seafood section is significantly more “lively,” as is the veggie section where a lot of veggies are being tested, discussed, and thrown on the floor. And of course there are quite a few items that one seldom finds in US supermarkets. No, I don’t shop at 99 Ranch.

Not looking lively on this night

It's clear that the duck is giving the thumbs up under duress

One night at Carrefour, Tom and I encountered another new supermarket experience. As we contemplated what exactly might be in the Chinese jerky a woman sweeping the floors unlatched half of her facemask and began singing. She swept her way up to us and stopped, then went about finishing her song.

“What’s going on here?”

“I’m not really sure.”

So we shrugged our shoulders and enjoyed the rest of the song, which was sort of like Beijing opera only not quite as screechy and unsettling. After we said our xie xies she went back to her sweeping.

“Well, that was odd.”

“No kidding. I’m going to go look for some sweets.”

So Tom and I went our separate ways. I wandered the aisles looking at all of the packages of disgusting things I would never consider eating.

The food chain illustrated

This one appeals to a surprisingly wide demographic - both cowboys and squid

At some point I noticed something strange. A presence. I looked up to see our sweeper standing just a few feet away, staring at me. She had sidled up with her silent broom, a small pile of dirt and rubbish in front of it. Perhaps I was in her way. I stepped back to give her room to pass, but she just kept staring. Before she could launch into her next aria I decided to stop looking at the bags of feet and intestines and move on to the next aisle.

She followed. I kept walking. She kept sweeping. Down aisle seven we went, back up aisle eight. I moved faster. She swept faster. The pile of dirt was growing with the tension. Maybe it was all a coincidence, I thought as I doubled back on aisle nine. She flipped a U-turn more neatly than a Shanghai taxi and was right on my heels. I doubled back again and narrowly missed being tripped by her broom as it made a quick 180 to follow. Now I was heading for the end of the aisle and looking for Tom. I found him browsing aisle 12.

“Hey Tom!” He looked up as I blew past the end of the aisle, the sweeper following. I doubled back past aisle 12 again. “I think she’s following me!”

The next time I came past aisle 12, Tom yelled, “Maybe you’re leaking!” I then hustled down aisle 13 and up aisle 12 from the other direction, to Tom’s surprise. “Don’t bring her to me!” he pleaded. She began to sweep behind Tom as he walked in circles on aisle 12 and I high tailed it for any other aisle. But he quickly found me on the liquor aisle, where Mukul joined us.

“Mukul, something strange is happening. This woman is chasing us with her broom.”

“She sang to us.”

“Maybe she’s trying to sweep you off your feet?”

We had business to take care of on the liquor aisle, so there was an odd standoff at this point, captured in pictures below.

Trust us, Mukul, that move doesn't work

Mukul tries to draw a line in the sand

Well, this is all very uncomfortable

But it didn’t end here. The woman proceeded to check out with us, and then followed us to the parking lot. I thought I might soon become the proud owner of another very expensive book about The Great Wall, but she simply waved goodbye, perhaps disappointed to learn that we didn’t own cars.

Shall we split this one three ways?

The next day we happened to find ourselves back at the Carrefour. I was politely waving to a nice looking woman in the tea shop who was staring and waving at Tom and me when the sweeper appeared right in front of me.

“Ah!”

I understood precisely zero of the words she spoke over the next minute and a half. But then she disappeared almost as suddenly as she had appeared. When last we saw her she was not carrying a broom. We have not been back to Carrefour since.

Shopping

I hate shopping. It is without a doubt one of my least favorite things to do. All the standing around drives me crazy. Dealing with so many people gives me a headache. I feel like I’m always being ripped off, and to eliminate that feeling would require months of research that I’m not willing to do. And once I buy something I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach as if thousands of people are agreeing somewhere that I’m an idiot for spending that much on that thing.

This trip to China would seem an ideal opportunity for shopping. It’s well known that just about everything is negotiable, most of the world’s goods are produced here, and Shijiazhuang is decidedly off the tourist path. This blog’s readership is largely family and close friends who are likely excited to see what goodies I may bring home to them. Let this post properly set expectations for those people.

The intensity levels of the ridiculous anxieties I listed in the opening paragraph, like just about everything else, approach infinity in China. We recently made an excursion to the local tech mall to buy some unneeded electronics gear. The tech mall is basically a three level madhouse with thousands of booths selling all sorts of what appear to be brand name gadgets. One would think the prices would be low, but I priced some headphones and found them to be 150% the price found on Amazon. And negotiations, particularly for someone who looks like me, are arduous at best. But the previous day Mukul had gotten a pretty good package deal on a hard drive and media player, so four of us sought to replicate his success. We brought along a secret weapon – Emily – who, as a local, could undoubtedly negotiate a killer deal for us.

No, I think the on switch is over here

For some reason our entire crew showed up at the vendor to explain to Emily what we wanted. The opening price was high. We turned to Mukul who quoted his price from the previous day. The vendor reluctantly agreed, but somehow when multiplied by four it rose on a per unit basis. We were not that dumb. We then left Emily to shop around for the best price while we grabbed some food on the street.

Clouds gather at the tech mall, foreshadowing some trouble ahead in my story

Hours later we returned. The Mukul price had not changed, despite our having left the premises. Apparently the vendor was not that dumb, either. Eventually we each shelled out the Mukul price for our goodies while Mukul enjoyed a moment of smugness over his negotiating prowess. Meanwhile, by this time the shopping had gotten to me and I was feeling a bit woozy. I had just bought something I wasn’t sure I needed, had offered zero value to our negotiating efforts due to my relative lack of knowledge on the subject, it took what felt like 18 hours of standing around to accomplish, and there were literally thousands of people looking at me actually thinking, “That guy is an idiot. Let’s charge him way over American prices for what might be knock-off stuff that he has no opportunity whatsoever to return when it breaks.” I was beginning to get that awful feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Then I remembered the ice cream. I’m a sucker for ice cream. I love it. So I bought some on the street and ate it with glee. Afterwards, Tom made it clear to me that I was an idiot for making that purchase.

“Ice cream is one thing I never eat in these places. First of all, they use local water, which is never good. Second of all it’s dairy, which spoils easily.”

I bid a hasty farewell to my colleagues and began racing through the street in the direction of the hotel. My stomach was now in a knot. I flew past noisy vendors and a massive construction project to reach the main street that separated me from my toilet. To cross this 8-lane beast requires mad Frogger skills. Just when you’ve run from the buses that seem not to be equipped with brakes (the horns work brilliantly, though), you need to stand perfectly still while racing taxis straddle you, then you make a desperate dash for the center divide. If you do this right, by now you’ve joined some locals who form a perfectly straight line that moves forward like an advancing front and becomes a de facto lane divider, thankfully the one lane divider that cars tend to obey. One step out of line and you may lose a limb. Once across the street it’s easy to think the ordeal is over, only to step into the bike lane and be buzzed by twenty silent but deadly electronic scooters whose horns come on in unison as you take your first misguided step, scaring the bejeezus out of you.

This picture doesn't come anywhere close to doing it justice

I had made it. Now it was time to race the three blocks to Motel 168, but by the time I got there I’d forgotten why I was running. It turns out that the ice cream was not the problem. Shopping, as always, was the problem.

It’s fitting that I turned down an invitation from Tom to take a long walk and “maybe do some shopping” in order to write this blog. And it’s ridiculous that the above was the shorter and less interesting shopping story that I wanted to write in this post, so the story of the Great Carrefour Chase will have to be told later.

Not ice cream

Return to Shanghai

A non-trivial source of value for the Corporate Service Corps is that it’s an excellent way to build relationships with IBMers from all over the world. So five of us thought, “What better way to extend this value than with a weekend in Shanghai?”

Step one in going from Shijiazhuang to Shanghai is to get to the Shijiazhuang airport. The city planners have been thinking ahead, and have placed the airport so far from town that after 40 minutes of driving through the countryside I began getting cold sweats thinking that our cab driver had misunderstood us and was actually going to drive us to Shanghai. But these cold sweats came after quite a few warmer sweats caused by our cabbie’s actual driving. She was the first female Shijiazhuangian taxi driver I had seen, and any questions about her aggressiveness were answered when she went careening into the first major intersection and just turned left into traffic, causing oncoming cars to slam on their brakes, swerve, and double their efforts on the horn. This was just a warm-up. Once some distance out of town on the highway, I noticed that she had taken her foot off the gas and was dialing her cell phone. Duli’s and my conversation slowed to a halt in parallel with the cab. We were idling in lane two, with a fork in the road just ahead. The cab driver was yelling excitedly into the phone, and someone on the other end was either giving her directions or pleading with her not to kill us. Duli’s and my heads snapped left and right as we watched cars zip by on either side until, satisfied with the “phone a friend” answer, she began driving again.

If we made it to the airport, we’d be flying Spring Airlines on Emily’s suggestion. When I had mentioned Spring Airlines to Phil, he didn’t really respond right away. “Hmm. They have a reputation for always being delayed. But I’m sure they will be cheap.” That they were, so we jumped at the opportunity to book. Unfortunately, the way we submitted our passport information was something of a telephone game. Each guy got his passport. Someone wrote down passport numbers on a piece of paper. I transcribed the numbers onto the computer. Lucy pinged the numbers to her husband via instant messaging. Lucy’s husband plugged the numbers into the online booking site. So as luck would have it, something went awry with Tom’s passport number, and when we checked in he had to go to some other counter and pay approximately $3 (20 Yuan) to have the number changed. We decided to have some fun, and Mukul called Lucy.

“Lucy, we have a bit of a situation. Tom’s passport number was incorrect on his reservation, so they confiscated his passport and have led him away to a small room.”

[Quite a bit of excited chatter on the other end of the line]

“There is an official coming this way. Can you please talk to him?” Mukul handed me the phone.

“Wei?”

“Wei, ni hao,” and the stream of Mandarin that followed made absolutely no sense to me but I could tell Lucy was a bit nervous. We all laughed. Lucy let out a sigh of relief and wished us well on our trip, undoubtedly plotting her revenge. After congratulating ourselves on our clever joke, one of the guys got a text message from Emily: “Enjoy Shanghai. Oh, I should have mentioned, Spring Airlines is always delayed.”

Our flight was scheduled to depart at 5:20 pm. We boarded at 4:45, repeatedly looking at our watches with skepticism. We pulled away from the gate at 5:05. By 5:15 we were in the air.

This was our second indication that this airline does things a bit differently. The first occurred when they forced Mukul to gate check his roll-aboard bag. Sounds normal, until you take into account the fact that Mukul’s roll-aboard is about one-fourth the size of the average roll-aboard one encounters in the US. I was carrying on a duffel bag for the weekend that could have fit at least two of Mukul’s bags inside. Perhaps there was extremely limited overhead space? Not so. This Airbus 320 had some of the largest overhead compartments I’d ever seen, and they had a luxurious amount of space available inside. My bag got a compartment of its own. Mukul fumed.

My recommendation to Spring Airlines would be to take some of the overhead space and apply it to the seating area. This was the least amount of leg room I’d encountered in recent memory, but if I worked at it, I could lean forward and wedge my knees into the slots between seats. I should mention that Mukul’s birthday was the night before, so the five of us (Carlos, Duli, Mukul, Tom, and I) planned to catch an important 1 ½ hours of sleep en route. I was just tired enough to doze off through my discomfort.

More painful than it looks

I gradually became aware that an announcement was taking an outrageously long time to complete. A minute into the Mandarin I opened my eyes, annoyed, and looked at Carlos. “I think they are reading the newspaper,” he said. The other three guys were waking up and thumbing through their Chinese dictionaries to figure out how to say “shut up.” But then the flight attendants appeared in the aisle and the real fun began. Calisthenics! Wrist exercises, stretching, clapping, the whole plane was joining in. We played along, agreed it was reasonably funny, and closed our eyes to go back to sleep.

Seriously

Duli can sleep through a lot

Not so fast. Now a flight attendant playing the role of auctioneer stood up and began barking into the intercom. People were buying things. Drinks, chips, sandwiches…razors, toys, nose hair trimmers. This went on for just about the duration of the trip. We were sure they could make a lot more money if only they would sell noise cancelling headphones.

Yes, I'll take one baseball bat, please

Needless to say, we didn’t get any sleep on the plane. But now the fun in Shanghai would begin.

Shanghai night life

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At least we were prepared to get no sleep on the flight home, and we made it back to our home sweet home at Motel 168 in Shijiazhuang, with plenty of time to relax before Tom and I present to our client tomorrow morning.

Enter the Wu Tang, Part One

Last weekend, four of us decided to go to Shaolin Temple on a day trip, a pilgrimage of sorts to the inspirational home for so many Kung Fu B-movies and Staten Island rappers. This is not really an advisable thing to do from Shijiazhuang given the travel effort involved, particularly when one is nursing a bit of a hangover from a colleague’s birthday party the night before. But we were brave souls, Emily, Carlos, Duli, and me. We were convinced that the four hours of sleep would not be a problem given the many many hours we would spend on trains and buses where undoubtedly we could sleep like babies.

Emily, our intrepid local ABV volunteer who, as the title implies, has volunteered to help us through this Corporate Service Corps assignment, began negotiations for a departure time at dinner the night before.

“I think we should leave the hotel at 7:30.”

“How about 8:30. The train doesn’t leave until 8:56.”

“7:45.” She was a tough negotiator.

“Uh, can we at least do 7:50?”

Carlos and I made a side pact that we could at least stretch this until 7:55. Carlos is from Brazil, and is a bear of a man. I am doing everything I can to avoid saying, “Teddy Bear,” but he’s a big, nice dude. He has a thick accent and relatively deep voice and has a way of starting his sentences on an impressively high note, at least an octave above his normal speaking tone. “Why we going so early to de train?”

I awoke at 7:01 to Duli’s 7 am wake-up call through the paper thin wall that separates his room from mine. My wake-up call came seconds later. Ugh. Coffee. Shower. Put a bunch of junk in a small bag for the day. Post to Facebook that I am going to try to get to Shaolin Temple before the rapture. At 7:55 we were in the lobby and ready to get in a cab.

At 8:05 we were sitting in the train station staring at each other. “Why we go so early to de train?” Emily had a subtle but sadistic grin on her face. I was considering some food when I noticed a woman holding her child above a nearby trash can. Throughout China we’ve observed a clever money-saving tactic used by parents. Instead of diapers, they simply bust their children’s pants crotches wide open. This practice offers one of the many explanations for the fragrances that one encounters throughout the day in Shijiazhuang. But this baby seemed to have my fear of heights and was not cooperating with the mother’s plan, so she squatted nearer the ground right in front of the trash can, baby held between her legs. This was much better for the baby, who began to pee all over the floor and all over her mother’s open toed shoes. I stared in disbelief, and when the spectacle was complete the mother lifted her foot for her friend to help sop up some of the mess that had soaked into her socks. At that moment I abandoned my idea to seek food and looked appreciatively at my dry shoes and socks, satisfied that losing a half hour’s sleep was not such a bad way to start the day, all things considered.

The Yellow River (yes, I am proud of this segue)

The train ride to Zhengzhou lasted three hours and took us over the Yellow River, birthplace of Chinese civilization. We then took a bus another one-and-a-half hours through Dengfeng and to the Shaolin Temple. It was raining. The last thing I had done so many hours ago when I left my hotel room was stare at my rain coat and say to myself, “Come on, you always overpack.” But now a parking lot vendor was running full speed towards the jacketless pair that was Duli and me, yelling something that either meant, “Buy my rain gear!” or was directed towards poor Emily saying, “Hey tour guide, make them buy my rain gear!” I had a brief flashback to The Wall, but this rain gear was a bargain, with rain ponchos starting at 5 Yuan, or less than $1. We quickly snatched up two and tore into the packages only to find that the material was so thin that we had real doubts as to whether it would actually repel water. Thankfully, it stopped raining about the time we got them snapped around ourselves, but now we were in it for the look. We were ready to enter Shaolin.

Not as good attire for Kung Fu as it would seem

Another redirect

Good morning, all. Got up early today (6:something!) to wrestle with our Internet connection and link to the outside world in order to post to the team blog here in my more subdued and refined tone. Professional Manager Tom and I will be spending some time with students at HEUEB today in preparation for our next major “lecture” (I’ve told Tom to play up the German accent a bit more and try yelling at them, but he’s only agreed to teach them a few helpful phrases such as, “Can I get your phone number?” in German), which takes place on Monday.

You might also want to read Tom’s unedited version here, in which he and/or Google translations calls me a “womanizer.” I think this is a poorly translated way of saying that women in China find my nose utterly fascinating, and therefore frequently point at me while laughing.

Happy Birthday Maya

In this file photo, Mikey strangles Maya at Maverick's

May 23 is Maya’s birthday. She’s 12. I’ve been accused of missing her more than anyone else while here in China. That’s probably not true. I guess it might be true, but if it were I certainly wouldn’t say so on this blog.

The other night while headed to a dumpling dinner our crew came across the Samoyed pictured below. In the universe of Samoyeds I think this one looks more like Maya than most, so it was a nice moment for me to remember her while Tom took pictures and Thiago goaded the dog into barking at all of us. (It must have been a female dog, because Thiago has been getting that reaction from all the girls in China.)

Shijiazhuang's version of the Iditarod

As we were seated at the restaurant my mind wandered. I wonder how Maya’s doing. I miss having her distract me from work by throwing her stuffed Athlete’s Foot toy at me in the office. I hope now that Kristy’s home she’s stopped pooping in the house (let me be clear: “she” refers to Maya in the previous sentence). I thought it would be good to come back to reality in order to specify that we’d like our beer to be served cold when I noticed that Tom was trying to order dog meat dumplings.

“No way, dude.”

“Come on, we have to try things while we’re here!”

“This isn’t a good time.”

“It’s not your dog!”

At that moment an extremely drunk older local sidled up to our table to try and tell us a joke in English. Being a boat racer, my usual reaction when a drunken old dude appears is to pull a chair closer to him because it’s gonna be a good one. But it was clear that Susanna, our Canadian colleague who speaks a bit of Mandarin, was getting uncomfortable. The guy started to insist that she translate the more difficult passages of the joke. As Carlos cleared the Lazy Susan of the beer bottles, I began to scan the room for a restaurant employee who could escort this guy out. But I saw only frightened young waitresses.

Then Tom stood up. “Enough!” he bellowed, but this word must not have been part of the joke because the guy appeared not to have the slightest idea what it meant. An intense stare-off ensued. Tom was staring at the guy, eight of us were staring at Tom, and the guy was not really capable of staring at any one thing at all, so he sort of stood there and swayed before asking Susanna again if she could translate the joke.

Thankfully the man’s friend dragged him away, and we celebrated Tom’s heroism by ordering pigs’ ears. What was served looked like multiple floor plans of an incredibly intricate oval-shaped labyrinth, with cartilage used to indicate the vast majority of passageways and important rooms where treasure might be found. The consensus was that they weren’t that bad.

I think in my family from here on out we’ll leave the pigs’ ears to Maya.

She would gladly eat them

Senses

[Note: am posting this hastily as it's the first time in days that I've been able to access the blog from over here. And it's slow... Will update with pictures later if I can. Note that any references to "today" in the below are actually about 4 days ago, if it matters to you. Update: pictures! Thank you IE6 (yeah, I know...).]

China is an all-out assault on one’s senses. Everything is at a level of intensity rarely encountered in the daily life of a mild mannered work-from-home-in-Northern-California fellow, even one who occasionally races powerboats, yells at the TV during Raider games, and loves Alice in Chains.

The most obvious day-to-day example is the way that traffic patterns work. There are no discernable patterns. It’s every person for his or herself. I’ll give an example. When the light turns green, the oncoming traffic that wants to turn left just turns left. If you are going straight, you honk at them and jam your way in between two of the left-turning cars. If you are walking across the street you just walk part way so you don’t get hit by the first left-turning car, and then you hurry the rest of the way across in parallel with one of the cars going straight that found a gap. And if a bus is involved, forget about it. The most useful thing I’ve observed thus far is that buses don’t stop. If a bus is coming, just get the hell out of the way.

A game of Frogger begins

Such an environment is the perfect breeding ground for the horn. It is past 11 pm here and in the time it took me to write “horn,” I heard two horns honk. Every morning I wake up a bit after 7 to excessive use of the horn by local drivers. (This morning I actually woke up at 6:30 to fireworks, multiple explosions, or gunshots, but in any case I always fall back to sleep). Our Indian colleagues are entirely unimpressed by such local traffic habits. My colleague Shruti explained it nicely when she said that in Western cultures, horns are a sign of aggression. In the East they are just helpful warnings that you are about to be crushed under a large steel object that is likely to drag you several blocks until your disintegrating carcass is knocked loose, where feral animals will eventually pick clean your unrecognizable skeleton.

One thing I rarely pick clean around here is my plate, mainly because you can buy a plate of food that would feed four for about $3, but also because everything is so flavorful and covered in spices that you just can’t go on. Don’t get me wrong, the food is fantastic. Even the “Trumpet She’ll Flesh” that Tom and I ate the other night (at that link you’ll see me both presenting and “getting in the zone” for presenting) was edible, and as far as we can tell that’s some sort of snail that lives in the sea (i.e., a mollusk, but “snail that lives in the sea” is much more fun to say). But it is intense. In my ongoing effort to eat Dan Dan Noodles as often as possible (Admittedly, I’ve had them only three times. Twice they were quite good. Once I’m about to explain.), we visited a nearby Sichuan restaurant with the team. Sichuan is sort of the Texas of China. Ok, I totally made that up but food from the Sichuan province is friggen spicy, as I learned with my first bite of noodles. It was really a bowl of chili oil with noodles lurking somewhere under the surface. Before I finished chewing the first bite I ordered two of the coldest item they had in the restaurant. Thankfully this was beer.

As the fourth glass of beer (for the record, they use really small glasses around here) evaporated on my scalding tongue, the rest of the team started taking pictures of me while laughing heartily. My face was redder than my red shirt, which was more red than usual due to the fact that it was soaked through with sweat. When I started to lose my hearing a little bit I set down my chopsticks. “I can’t go any further. Mukul?”

Mukul took a bite and said, “The noodles are not spicy. The lamb is spicy.” These Indians are really difficult to impress. I took a bite of the lamb that was about the size of the point of a ball point pen and I didn’t think it was that spicy. Actually, it tasted like taco seasoning.

On most days you can quite literally taste the Shijiazhuang air. It has a tannic, almost gritty taste like the aftertaste of too strong tea. There is dust everywhere, like the Central Valley of California if you picked it up, turned it upside down, shook it for about two weeks, and then placed 20 massive coal-fired power plants onto Highway 99. To keep down the dust, Shijiazhuang employs a highly entertaining method that I’m sure would fund itself if they would charge a few RMB for foreigners to have access to the schedule. A water tanker truck drives down the street at full speed, water spraying in every direction from underneath. Cars swerve out of the way. Pedestrians run for cover. Scooters take off in a desperate attempt to stay ahead of the spray. Meanwhile, the driver, as is the local custom, just honks the horn incessantly and never breaks his pace. I’d like to think he laughs maniacally but he probably is just bored. The bicyclists, however, are the ones who are worth the price of admission. To see a bicyclist’s face when recognizing the water tanker’s horn is to see fear in its purest form. It’s a moment of utter panic, followed by a frantic search for an escape route, seldom found easily on the streets of Shijiazhuang. Watching one man swerve hopelessly until careening into an alley and half falling from his bike, I began to wonder just how many bicyclists these guys kill every night.

You might taste the dust, but it is not usually what you smell. That honor is fought for by thousands of aggressively competing smells best appreciated when walking through a street market at lunchtime. Onions, bread, chili, exhaust fumes, some crazy spices, BO, they hit you in waves. It’s similar to when you are driving a boat across a lake and you suddenly hit a real cool spot, only here you just keep hitting a new smell. With each breath you’re not sure whether your reaction will be, “Ooh, where are they cooking that?” or “Did I just fall head first into a porta potty?” or something in between.

Deep breaths

Our guy cooks a mean sandwich

Despite all of the adventures on the street, I actually spend a significant amount of time seated at my desk in my hotel room in front of my laptop, fighting to get onto the Internet in order to do the proper research needed to build good presentations for my client (yes, or blog…). It’s well known that accessing the sites so popular in other parts of the world can be a challenge from China. Last Friday I noticed a new sound coming from the streets outside my window. It was a chant being played over a loudspeaker that sounded like an insane aerobics instructor or a highly amped up rapper practicing one line for two hours straight. As it wormed its way into my brain the walls of my small and “less than US business standard” room seemed to move a little closer, and I imagined it to be a repeated warning from some authority not to visit Google properties. Over the hours the sound evolved from intriguing to annoying to unsettling.

Today I happened to walk by one of the source machines for this noise. It was yelling at the world to buy meat on a stick.

Diverting Traffic

At first glance many of you will say, “Finally, a post of reasonable length.” At second glance you will see that I’m sending you elsewhere to read quite a lot more.

One bit of reading material is my inaugural post on the team blog. I have a lot of trouble avoiding editorial comments, tangents, embellishments, sarcasm, etc. so my ratio of personal blogs to team blogs now stands at 16:1. But given the absolutely incredible day we had at the client on Monday, I thought it was a good time to drone on endlessly somewhere else.

The second is to a team intro post by Mukul, of “Club Mukul” fame, on his personal blog. There you will find the nose that makes Chinese girls lose control. Through the magic of photography, Mukul somehow made my chin disappear. Too many Dan Dan Noodles, perhaps? I recommend this blog if you’d like another good view of the experience in Shijiazhuang.

Enjoy.

The fish was so big it wouldn't fit the frame

Some Other Happenings

Taking a break from writing up my speaker notes for today’s presentation to fill in a few blanks of what went on in Shijiazhuang last week. Tom just stopped by to say he’s starting to feel the nerves in advance of being on stage in front of 200+ people. I told him if he screws up, he can play it off as nuances of the English language that the audience hasn’t yet learned. He said he’s German, with his nervousness he has a stereotype to maintain here. I’m wearing a surfing T-shirt, shorts, flip-flops, and saying “awesome” as often as I can. There’s not much more I can do.

Last Monday, before Phil departed, he took us to what he calls the “Runway Restaurant,” so nicknamed because of the catwalk that extends the length of the interior (see below). With Right Said Fred in my head throughout the evening, we had an exceptional dinner for about $10 per person. One interesting aspect of this restaurant was the bathroom. Every single wall in the bathroom was a mirror. Even the stalls were floor-to-ceiling mirrors inside. Think about that. And when you add the fact that most public toilets in China seem to be nothing more than glorified holes in the ground, you can get a sense for the level of concentration necessary to avoid stepping right in the toilet.

I'm a model, you know what I mean

I previously mentioned that I had a less-than-stellar meal at the KFC near our hotel. To acquire this meal, Tom and I stood in the slowest line in all of China. Others came to KFC, got in line, ordered, enjoyed their meals, got back in line, ordered dessert, and left before we made much progress at all. Tom insisted that this was the line for us. Based on his previous experience, this cashier was the only guy in the place who spoke English. At long last we reached the front of the line. “Chicken,” we said. Only a blank stare in response. We said it more slowly. Nothing. “Well, he looks like the guy who spoke English…”

Then a high school girl turned from the other line and asked if we needed help. “Yes, please. We’d like to order some chicken.” She said she could translate for us. It was at this moment that she turned to me and started laughing uncontrollably. She covered her face in embarrassment and was laughing so hard that tears began streaming down her face. After some time went by, she managed to point at my face through her tears and say, “Your nose!” She then composed herself and spoke only to Tom for the next 30 minutes.

One night during the week a group of us went to some tower that looks a bit like the Eiffel Tower trying to swallow a pair of giant diamonds. “This is not the Eiffel Tower,” noted Denis, our colleague from France. We ascended the tower for our buffet dinner to find that the top diamond held a rotating restaurant inside. I asked Denis if they were planning to build one of these at the top of the Eiffel Tower, since that would make it even more awesome. At this point he pulled a Pier 39 on me and said he’s never actually been to the Eiffel Tower because only tourists go there.

Well, not many people at all go to Shijiazhuang’s Eiffel Tower, and when we took a bite of our food we knew why. The view might have been nice, but we couldn’t be sure because the windows of the diamond obviously had never been washed. The one saving grace was that I recorded a video that I’m ready to declare one of the greatest of my life. I can afford such hyperbole because I’m not sure how to upload it and share it with all of you. When I figure it out I’ll provide a link and tone down the language.

Denis's place

Ok, back to my speaker notes. Other things I may or may not get back to regarding this past week include the sights / sounds / smells / tastes of the streets, the art show we visited at HEUEB, and our epic Saturday journey to Pingyao.

Fast Forward (well, sort of)

I expected to spend part of my Sunday catching up on the blog. Instead I worked during the morning, wandered around and bought some fruit next to some live chickens that were hanging around in a cardboard box and large live fish that were somehow swimming around in what seemed to be another cardboard box. Then in the afternoon I had a lovely massage across the street. I quote my Austrian teammate Sue:

“After lunch, most of us went across the street to have a massage at a kind of shabby center and were tortured more or less to get rid of our tensions and other problems.”

The woman at the shabby center had some mean knuckles but I’m feeling pretty good as I start blogging after 11 pm. For those of you who said, “I bet Dan’s making up that quote,” and clicked on the link, in order to find it you’ll have to go quite a ways past passages like this:

“Thiago had a very bad headache for days and I did not sleep at all (because I was feeling awfully sick at night), so we were exhausted and did not have a clue how to stop this demanding horror.”

Tomorrow Tom and I have our first presentation to our client. Suffice it to say, our experience has been nothing like this.

Our presentation will be to approximately 200 business students at HEUEB, and among other things we’ll be describing compensation structures in the US and Germany. This is neither of our specialties. Perhaps if it were we’d have figured something out and would be retired by now. But it meant that this week entailed a lot of research. I have one question to all of the old people reading this blog: what in the world did you do before the Internet?

If you are anything like me, you sat around sweating profusely and cursing the network. On Wednesday afternoon, Tom and I spent a sweltering afternoon in the IBM Shijiazhuang office. They are in the process of moving to nicer digs, so things were a bit crowded. In four hours I was able to get about two presentations downloaded from IBM’s intranet (w3), once got Google Hong Kong to come up (couldn’t actually complete any searches), and nearly permanently burned the image of the Firefox download status bar into both of my eyes. Hat tip to social software, as IBM Connections turned out to be the only productive path for finding and downloading a bit of useful information. The people at the office were great, but I left convinced that despite never having seen Layne Staley in concert I don’t want to go back to the 1990’s ever again.

At the hotel, I’m not sure where I’ve gone back to. Accessing the Internet is a different experience in China, you might say. I suspect that most of you have been closely watching the post times of my blog, and have therefore deduced that I rarely post anytime other than late at night. Ok, that isn’t really different from when I do anything, but we typically can’t access non-Chinese websites from around 8:30 am until late afternoon. So during those times we either build slides or walk up and down the halls asking each other what has become the theme of our trip: “Is the Internet working?”

Or, as in Tom’s and my case on Wednesday morning, we visit the University. There we met with Pau and Jack and learned how properly to drink tea, albeit out of a Dixie cup. Four key elements make up the tea experience. First, one must note the frame of the tea. I guess this means you look at it. Second, one must enjoy the scent of the tea. It’s requiring tremendous restraint not to launch into a four paragraph tangent on the scents I’ve encountered over the past week in Shijiazhuang and particularly during yesterday’s trek into the countryside. Third, one must appreciate the water. I’m not sure if you do more than appreciate it, but since you can’t drink the tap water around here it is something to appreciate. And fourth, one must be enchanted by the dancing of the tea leaves. This is especially important in order to plan which side of the cup to raise to your mouth so you avoid getting tea leaves stuck in your front teeth where they’ll undoubtedly remain for several hours while others laugh at you.

You’ll notice I haven’t used the term “demanding horror” in my description of the week. Our meeting with the client was so pleasant that every time we asked a question or offered a suggestion, we got a smiling, “Whatever you think, it’s ok,” in response. Perhaps this is an ideal way to set up some anticipation for what happens when we present tomorrow.

Jack: not Sue's client