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

Blogger error: content lost.

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

Meet the Clients

At long last my blogging comes to the purpose of our trip: to contribute some value to local clients as volunteers from IBM. By Monday we’d each worked long hours to prepare a single slide – or perhaps two – describing who we are. My slide had a big picture of a D Stock Hydro and another big picture of Maya. I was sure this would clearly demonstrate to the clients what sort of value I could deliver.

In the afternoon I donned my new gray suit and joined the other ten CSC members as we piled into small taxis for the trip to the kick-off meeting. We drove for some time through busy city streets with little regard for the color of traffic lights or the presence of oncoming cars, buses, and scooters. The horn was used liberally. Shijiazhuang is quite a big city by most standards, and the provincial capital of Hebei Province. But it seemed to contain approximately 11 foreigners.

Once on site we walked into an old school board room for the kick-off meeting. A Chinese flag stood at the front of the room alongside a massive vase. The main table was enormous, flanked by long and narrow backup tables of sorts. Cameras seemed to be everywhere. I expected to be given a number of pens to sign something into law. After some time of polite seating and arranging, our host kicked off the meeting with a formal speech that one of our Australian Business Volunteers (ABV) volunteers, Emily, translated into English. Next, the local IBM team did their presentation, explaining that Sam Palmisano was here. A few of us were momentarily amazed until we realized that “here” was Beijing, where he was giving some sort of speech to people who were not us. Nevertheless, the meeting tone was quite formal. As the first clients began to read prepared speeches, I noticed that my palms were getting sweaty. This was at least as likely to be due to the fact that I wear a wool suit about two times per year as it was due to nerves, but nevertheless.

Then it was time for the client from Hebei University of Economics and Business to introduce himself. His name was Pau, and he was my client, shared with a German fellow named Tom Treuten. The tone of the meeting changed. He spoke excitedly. He laughed a lot. He addressed Tom and me by name. He spoke terrific English. In short, Tom and I were in luck.

It was with this spirit of optimism that I took to the stage to introduce myself. I started by butchering the Chinese pronunciation of my name that I’d put on my business card that morning – Hao wen si – hoping to get a laugh. Not much. Then I went for a joke about my birthday given that much of the early meeting talked about IBM’s 100th birthday this year. Ooh…not funny when I heard it out loud. I went on to mangle some Chinese I’d learned from our guides on The Great Wall. This was the first time all meeting that Pau wasn’t laughing. Tough crowd. I noticed I was sweating again. Thankfully I wrapped up with a picture of me eating Dan Dan noodles. Good old Dan Dan, always comes through for me in a pinch.

The meeting wrapped up and Tom and I joined Pau and his student Jack for a conversation on our scope of work. We noticed some immediate problems. The first presentation was to take place in less than a week. The second was scheduled for a Saturday. They wanted us to talk about HR issues in our home countries. But once we spent a bit of time discussing the scope we felt good, and soon we would visit campus to nail down the topics and schedule once and for all. And Jack is a big fan of F1 car racing. Perhaps I’d get a chance to introduce him to F1 boat racing and the legend of Fast Freddie. After all, there are three F1 boat races scheduled in China in 2011.

Shijiazhuang

After a good night out in the village in Beijing on Saturday (hmm, I seem to be falling even further behind with these posts. Blame Mr. Black.), Phil & Rebecca, Kristy & Angie, and I went our separate ways. On Sunday morning I hopped on a bus bound for Shijiazhuang with the China 13 Corporate Service Corps team and said goodbye to Beijing. I had visited Beijing once before, in 2003, and I found this experience to be very different. My memory had Beijing absolutely filled with bicycles, and this time I saw relatively few – emphasis on “relatively.” And while crossing intersections is still an adventure, it doesn’t compare to the feeling I had in 2003 that there was a 50/50 chance I wouldn’t make it across in the bicycle rickshaw and the awe I felt when a sea of bikes would magically part every time a car came plowing through.

Perhaps the next time I visit Beijing it will have transformed again. As we drove south out of town evidence of further transformation was all around us. Texas-sized highway projects, enormous fields of rubble, high speed rail construction. And an incredible amount of cottonwood drifting between raindrops in the air. All along the highway to Shijiazhuang were rows of trees, neatly planted from four to twenty deep. They guarded the highway from the massive apartment complexes just outside of town, from the factory towns further south, and from the endless wheat fields interspersed along the way. They were infinite. I watched them through the rain and drifted off to sleep.

I awoke with a start to our bus driver laying on the horn. All I could see out my window was the side of a truck. It was raining harder now, all the windows were fogged up, and we were on the shoulder passing a pair of slow trucks, one hauling massive mechanical gear and the other highly piled crops of some sort under a tarp. A few rows behind me our Brazilian colleagues, Thiago and Carlos, were still trying to teach everyone Portuguese. I had already decided that I could go no further than “mano,” apparently short for something like hermano. My capacity for absorbing language was as waterlogged as the road down which we continued to swerve and honk.

Trees

When we arrived at Motel 168 in Shijiazhuang I felt like I was in college moving into the dorms, except that there were infinitely fewer places to store my clothes. Shijiazhuang was as foreign to an American as Texas was to a Wisconsinite. Luckily for me, Phil was busy chasing me down via train and arrived at the hotel late that night. For him it was a good excuse to come back to the town where he learned Mandarin – or at least a reasonable portion of it. A while back, when I told him I was going to spend a month in Shijiazhuang he thought I must have figured out which town he’d lived in and was making a lame attempt at a joke. His assessment of the town was slightly inconsistent with the Chinese waiter at a restaurant in Fresno who had told me it was “a tourist town, similar to San Francisco.”

So we set out to let me soak up some of Phil’s Shijiazhuang knowledge. We grabbed some food at the “boat restaurant” and then had a couple of drinks at the “stair bar.” He invited a former teacher of his to join us. We learned a lot about how one becomes a member of the Party. Fascinating. And I picked up cards written in Chinese for every place we stopped. It would be the only way I’d find my way back via taxi in the coming month.

At any rate, I was quickly settling in. The next day we would meet our clients. To add some drama before wrapping up this post, I’ll note that my colleague Sue has today posted the following: “another scary day with even more questions and problems of our customer.” What will my client be like? (Just to be clear, by now I know what my client is like, this is more of a question you might have in your head, only swapping “Dan’s” or “your” for “my” in that sentence.)

I think this is a picture of Shijiazhuang

Catching Up

A lot has transpired over the past several days. I met the Corporate Service Corps team, Kristy & Angie and I parted ways, I moved into my digs in Shijiazhuang, we met our clients, Phil gave me an insider’s whirlwind tour of Shijiazhuang before he went home to Shanghai, and I was thoroughly dominated in a late night game of ma jiang (or mahjong?). Meanwhile, I seem to have missed the point of a blog, which is apparently to report on things as they happen. So with this blog I’m going to look back on our visit to Beijing, May 6-7. Sort of like my retroactive NCAA Tourney updates, but instead of VCU causing us pain it was every single muscle in our bodies after our Cinco de Mayo Great Wall adventure.

Speaking of Cinco de Mayo, upon returning from The Wall we tried to hit a Mexican restaurant for dinner but it had apparently closed down, perhaps because there seem to be no Mexicans in Beijing. Instead we went to Tim’s for Tex-Mex. At Tim’s there didn’t seem to be any Texans or Mexicans, and there were no Chinese either. We did meet a Canadian who had gone to Fresno State. But in our state of mental and physical exhaustion we could get no finer than “Europe” in deciding what other accents we were hearing in the restaurant. And the food? It met our expectations for Tex-Mex in Beijing.

On Friday we slept in before dragging our weary bodies to Tiananmen Square. It was roped off. The first time I visited Europe I saw it this way: from behind a locked door that said “closed” in a variety of languages. We could see a lot of uniformed men marching up and down some steps, and then pondered the irony of moving on to the Forbidden City since we couldn’t get into Tiananmen Square.

But by the time we’d eaten a bowl of ice cream, the taste of which can only be described as "interesting," the ropes came down. In through a security check we went, along with quite a few people who must have known this was going to happen. The square is a really big slab of concrete with a couple of big monuments on it, Mao’s grave, the biggest flat screen TV this side of Cowboys Stadium, and a dizzying array of police vehicles. They have police cars, police vans, police buses, and police mini-buses that look like clowns may come tumbling out at any moment. They have police bikes, they have police golf carts, they have police scooters, and yes, they have police Segways. And for every policeman they have 10 military personnel.

More Bluth humor

We crossed the street to the Forbidden City. After buying tickets and walking in, we looked at each other and said, “This isn’t the Forbidden City.” So we walked next door and bought more expensive tickets and went in. What struck me about the Forbidden City was that it seemed infinite. Every time you got through a gate or a hall you came to another. And another. And another. The Lama Temple the next day was the same. Temple after temple after temple – the only difference from one to the next was that the Buddhas kept getting bigger. We assumed we’d made it to the end of the Lama Temple complex when we saw a Guinness Book of World Records plaque hanging on the temple door. The Buddhas don’t get any bigger than that.

A lot of China seems infinite. The Wall. The number of steps in The Climb. People on the Hongzhou bus. The Shanghainese appetite for honking horns. Chinese history – our West Lake boat pilot told Phil that he could study for 100 years and wouldn’t be close to knowing it all. The complexity of the Chinese language. The amount of food we would order for dinner, as was the case when Rebecca treated us to a wonderful Peking Duck dinner in Beijing.

Earlier I mentioned irony, so I should probably cut off my rambling examples of infinity right here. I’ll leave you with a picture of me eating my first bowl of DAN DAN NOODLES along a Hutong on our last day in Beijing. They were wonderful, which is lucky because I didn’t want to have to change the name of the blog.

Dan & Dan Dan Noodles

The Great Wall, Part Three

The saga continues...

Not only did I make it up The Climb, but I made it clear to the Five Window Tower, beyond which was the Simatai section of The Wall, now closed for renovation according to our guides. We couldn't be sure because there were no signs, but I for one didn't need to go exploring much further in this direction. At that point Phil called Kristy to discuss our entourage.

"They will want you to buy something from them or give them money. They can be quite persistent."

"We noticed."

"Just be very clear up front that you are not interested."

"What if it's eleven towers later."

"Ah."

Once we got back to the spot where the workers were rebuilding The Climb - we took a shortcut to avoid climbing back down it - our entourage suggested we take a path to the parking lot. But we wanted to keep walking The Wall. "Ok, then you can buy our souvenirs now." It would come to a head here. We talked the bookseller and the Mongolian Farmer into an easy 33% discount for two books, but we didn't want to buy from the third companion, who was now baring her teeth at us in a metallic snarl. As she poked Kristy in the chest with her index finger while exclaiming, "I followed you!" it dawned on me that we were carrying enough cash to buy all of their books, our muscles were near total failure due to three hours of climbing, the workers who had gathered around to watch the negotiations had access to large stones and shovels, and we hadn't seen a single tourist in over an hour.

Thankfully, the people were nice, and as we made our retreat along the wall only the third companion followed, making increasingly desperate offers. A book, a T-shirt, a fan. After she poked Kristy we decided on principle not to give in, and by the next tower she gave up and went home.

Though our time with the entourage was entertaining, at this point the skies seemed to open up and reveal that they are blue in China as well. We had a beautiful walk in the opposite direction over a newly renovated section of The Wall, in the end spending a total of 5 1/2 hours. Mr. Li patiently awaited our return and drove us back to Beijing.

Blue skies emerge.

The Great Wall, Part Two

As Mr. Li drove us the last stretch of the two hour trip to the Jinshanling Great Wall, we had a sense that we were in the mountains, but the sandstorm prevented us from confirming so. The sun was beginning to shine through what we imagined were clouds above when we left Mr. Li to hang out in the parking lot, packed up our water, power bars, layers of clothing and cameras, and set off for The Wall.

From the Jinshanling parking lot it's quite a climb up to The Wall, so we wisely chose to take the cableway, Angie and Kristy in car 29 and me in car 30. During the ascent I noticed a woman hiking up the hills below us carrying a bag full of goods. I suspected that she was carrying water and beer to replenish the vending posts at each of the towers along The Wall, and I began to root for our cable car to hurry up and beat her to the top. The cars were remarkably slow; many times I had to remind myself of what the sign at the bottom had said: "If the cableway is breaking down, do not be afraid." And the woman just kept climbing. She didn't look like she had done this very often but clearly she had. She was sturdy and young, and climbed as if highly motivated.

When we reached the top the views erased the young woman from my mind. As the ticket we had purchased at the bottom said, they were "Dreath-taking." The haze seemed to be dissipating and we could now see that it was indeed a great wall. Angie was taking pictures of Kristy and me when the young woman appeared at her shoulder.

"Hello."

"Oh - hi. Hey, are you the same girl I was talking with at the bottom?"

"Yes."

"Wow! You got up here quickly. That's amazing!"

"Yes, it took me 17 minutes. It took you 16," she explained in fairly decent English.

"Do you do this often?"

"Yes." There was a pause as she caught her breath and then continued talking to Angie. "You said you would like a book?"

"Oh. Well, maybe when we're done."

We stepped from the trail onto the Great Wall. It had been rebuilt at this section and was impressive, wide enough to drive a truck on it, though as we soon would learn this truck would have to be capable of driving vertically. From afar, we couldn't fully appreciate how steep The Wall is, and despite having visited in 2003 (albeit a different section), I was completely unprepared for the utter terror that lie ahead. My fear of heights is so great that when I first went to the top of the arch in St. Louis, I dropped to the floor and held on for dear life. But our walk in the Simatai direction started out pleasantly enough.

After reaching the next tower we noticed that the fast-climbing bookseller was still with us, and now an older friend had joined. The friend carried a bag similar to the first woman's and struck up a friendly conversation. It turns out that she's a Mongolian corn farmer with two children who lives a two-hour walk from where we were standing on the wall. She recommended that we walk to the "Five Window Tower," which looked awfully far away to me but was about one-tenth what Angie was lobbying for us to do. We continued, ascending and descending from tower to tower as The Wall seemed to fall into disrepair under our feet. Soon some excited talk in Chinese was followed by a third companion sprinting up and down the wall to join us. She, too, carried a bag.

Concerned about what sort of implicit contract we'd entered into with these women, Kristy shot a quick text in Phil's direction. About this time we came upon The Climb. The Mongolian Farmer explained that it was 123 steps to the tower. The steps went straight up, and there were no walls alongside to hold onto or against which to faint. And the steps were so broken and worn out that several workers were actually in the process of replacing them. The thought of The Climb made me woozy, and by this point I'd been hiking up and down uneven steps for an hour on legs that spend their days tucked neatly under a desk in my home office. I was thankful that at least the layout of my home forced me to climb stairs to get coffee and lunch during the day.

By the time I had taken a deep breath and given myself a pep talk, Kristy, Angie, and our entourage were half-way up. Now the construction workers were looking down at me wondering what the heck I was doing. So I began to climb, counting each step to see if it was really 123. By the time I got to 18, numbers and their proper sequence stopped making sense to me. 20, 31, 9, noodles. The trees and hills to my left and right seemed to be rushing past like a swollen river, and the steps didn't look like steps at all, more like chunks of gray. I leaned forward and steadied myself with my hands.

In other words, I was crawling. Some laughter registered as I kept moving. Something was said about the horror film The Grudge. "Are you ok?" All I knew is I wanted everyone the hell out of my way. I was climbing The Wall.

The Climb.

The Great Wall, Part One

As we descended into in Beijing on Tuesday, my first impression was, "Wow, the sky is dark yellow." My second impression was, as previously mentioned, "We seem to be going awfully fast still..." followed quickly by, "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" No, it wasn't quite that dramatic a landing, I'm just checking to see if Johnny is reading the blog. But the lack of visibility was dramatic. The local paper I read during the flight explained that the culprit for the terrible air quality over Shanghai and Beijing was an epic sandstorm raging in the Southern Xinjiang Basin. It also explained that dust is not the only ingredient in such sandstorms, as they also contain "toxic pollutants from coal combustion."

At any rate, breathing was not our immediate concern. We had been bumped to a later flight from Shanghai, which was subsequently delayed, meaning that our driver holding a sign with my name on it had given up and gone home. Without Phil or Rebecca along, we began to encounter the language barrier. Up to this point I had rigorously catalogued the extensive list of phrases we'd learned thus far: hello, thank you, how are you, you're welcome, I don't need it, I don't want it, waitress, and bottoms up. No combination of these phrases could locate our driver until we found a helpful woman at the tourism desk and called our hotel. Eric soon would be on his way with a driver. To kill some time we decided to sample the Terminal 2 Pizza Hut and quickly learned why corn never really took off as a pizza topping in the US.

The drive from the airport was a harrowing one for reasons opposite those that made Shanghai taxis such an adventure. Our driver rarely exceeded 60 km/hr (37 mph) in the left lane on the freeway. It was a good idea not to look out the back window as cars swerved around us going twice that speed. But we noticed another significant difference from Shanghai roads: very little honking. Perhaps a lingering after-effect of an Olympics politeness campaign?

I'm being told that I'm slowing us down and making us late for today's sightseeing in Beijing. This is not the first time I've been told such a thing, but it's forcing me to wrap it up before ever even getting to yesterday's trip to the Great Wall.

As mentioned above, a sandstorm was wreaking havoc on visibility and our lungs, so I was a bit concerned that our trip to the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall would lack the coolest element of visiting the wall: watching it stretch endlessly into the distance. I will end with this picture and a cliffhanger (somewhat literally, as will be described in future blog posts). Will we actually be able to see the wall? Will Dan conquer his fear of heights? Will we fall prey to aggressive souvenir vendors?

The Wall is out there.