I Leave Shanghai an Older Man

Even older now that it's taken a while to post, but on Tuesday I celebrated my birthday in Shanghai and Hangzhou / West Lake. The theme of the day was "transportation." Ok, I didn't actually define a theme for my birthday, but looking back we did have some fairly interesting experiences involving transportation. And this doesn't even take into account the Shanghai taxis, which by now we had become accustomed to. The taxis generally just barge their way into any small opening that exists, regardless of lanes, which is fine because they blast their horns a few times to let you know not to hit them. So it's relatively organized chaos. We never even bumped into anyone.

From Shanghai to Hangzhou and back we took a high-speed train that hit 355 km/hr according to the digital speedometer located above the doors between cars. That's just over 220 mph, and I think the fastest I'd ever gone on the surface of the earth up until that point. The record would be broken the next day as our China Eastern flight landed in Beijing and then desperately slammed on the thrust reversers and brakes to get us stopped, which was a unique feeling as well, but the train felt like it was just up and running. It had that levitating feeling like just before you blow over a race boat backwards. Very cool.

Once in Hangzhou we made our way out to West Lake, which received at least 5 stars in the rating system devised by one of Kristy's excited Chinese patients in the weeks prior to our trip. According to the Chinese press, on my birthday the Air Pollution Index in the greater Shanghai area exceeded 500 for only the third time since the scale was devised in June of 2000. This gave West Lake a hauntingly beautiful look that brought tears to one's eyes, as though shrouded in a thin fog. A thin fog that burns your eyes a little bit. There we hired a local gentleman to take us on his small boat around the lake. We were in luck. Thanks to the death of Osama bin Laden, he was willing to give us a special price. For the next thirty minutes we laughed quite a bit as he rowed us around several small islands while animatedly speaking Mandarin trying to convince Phil to move to Hangzhou and begin learning Kung Fu.

Achingly beautiful West Lake.

After leaving West Lake we took another great adventure: the Hangzhou city bus. I must admit I've never even been on a city bus in San Francisco, but I frequently took the bus in Oshkosh, WI while growing up. This was different. To be fair it really wasn't that different, it just had 6 times as many people on it and didn't have any signs or sounds in English. After what seemed like 3 hours gripping the bars and contorting myself into enough space to stand without hitting anyone in the face with my backpack, we were at the train station. Interestingly, we encountered no English at all between West Lake and our seat on the high-speed train home. Thank you, Phil.

So it was a good birthday. At some stage I hope to get back to individually thanking everyone who wished me a happy birthday on Facebook.

A Note on Food

I suspect that a lot of people come to this blog hoping to learn about food, or at least about bland egg noodles served from a pole by peddlers. While these people will be disappointed to learn that one of my favorite restaurants in the world is Cho's Kitchen in Selma, CA and that I've only watched one episode of "Hell's Kitchen," this post is for them.

Thus far the food has been outstanding, though we've been expertly guided by Phil and Rebecca and we've mostly been in highly developed Shanghai. One of the constraints we have is that Kristy does not eat anything that could possibly be construed as seafood. On the flight over, which lived up to longstanding stereotypes for airplane food, one of the better items we received was a plastic bowl of instant Chinese noodles. I thought they were fine. Kristy somehow discerned that "Bonito Powder" is not laundry detergent but derived in some way from fish, and therefore refused to eat them. "This is going to be a long trip," I muttered.

So it was with some surprise that I watched Kristy thoroughly enjoy the notoriously fish-laden Japanese food we had our first night in town. She had noodles. On our second day we walked through a local market and saw a lot of things we have no intention of eating, including a poor catfish being hacked apart with a cleaver in the middle of the street. We opted for Italian food that night.

But by day three we were ready to tackle some actual Chinese food. During our trip to "China's #1 water town," Zhouzhuang, we stopped at a restaurant and began to take notes on what Phil and Rebecca were saying to the waitress.

"I have no idea what they are saying."

"Me neither."

"Hey, that's a cute turtle in that tank over there."

"Hmm."

Out of the kitchen came probably the best Kung Pao I've ever eaten, along with several other tasty dishes. We drank shandies. Phil and I nevertheless felt masculine.

Last night we had more great luck with a late dinner of beef noodles. I would post pictures, but pictures of food never really come across looking very good unless shot in a Hollywood production facility. The below picture doesn't look that great, either, but it was taken near food and hopefuly at least won't make people ill.

No feet eaten yet

Arrival in Shanghai

I'd say our 13 hour flight from San Francisco to Shanghai felt more like a six hour flight. Yes, it flew by. Having Economy Plus seats with no one between us helped, but it was odd not to sleep much at all, not to watch a single movie (they taunted us with promises of True Grit and The King's Speech, then delivered Tron and something starting Mall Cop), and still feel like the flight went quickly. I guess it helps to have missed so many recent emails regarding this trip. Amazing what you can find when you get a chance to work through your email backlog.


So we gathered our many bags and walked off the plane.


"It's pretty humid."


"Yeah, maybe that's why we couldn't see the ground until we landed."


"Where's Angie?"


Angie was on Air China flight 986, having missed our flight out of SFO after a botched transit from home to the airport, the fatal flaw of which was relying on a cabbie to be in a specific place at a specific time. After chasing him down the street lugging 3 weeks of luggage once he finally arrived in the vicinity, Angie came running up to the United counter 39 minutes before departure time. Meanwhile, I was on the phone with Mikey, who hatched a brilliant backup plan involving the Bluth stair car from Arrested Development. But no luck, unless you count the fact that Angie was immediately rebooked on Air China to arrive only 5 hours later than us.





So Kristy and I proceeded alone through customs in Shanghai, surprised at how quickly it went despite our successful bid to become the last people from our 747 to get into the Passport check line. It then took me a mere 15 minutes to re-learn how to use a pay phone, and I was on the phone with Phil. Moments later, he and Rebecca met us and we were aboard our first of three taxis of the evening between Pudong and central Shanghai.


We made it, Angie made it, we got a good night's sleep, and today we will explore Shanghai. My goal is to convince the others that we need to go to the top of the Shanghai World Financial Center regardless of the visibility. That and to drink some coffee soon.

Expectations

I had meant to write out some expectations prior to departing on my trip. But, true to form, I'm not ready to walk out the door and our cab arrives in an hour. Kristy already called them to postpone the pick-up by 15 minutes. So expectation #1 is that we are going to end up making our cabbie wait.

So here are some top of mind thoughts:

• The client project scope will turn out to be very different than we might think at this point. That's an easy prediction, because I have no idea what to think of it at this stage. I will likely be teaching some MBA skills, which is ironic given my inability to gain acceptance to an MBA program when I applied over a decade ago. Take that, Stanford.
  
• Eating is going to be an adventure. I'm doing my best to harden my stomach, having recently shown more tolerance for Kristy's work stories at dinner. But as a fall-back plan I've packed 30 power bars. Literally 30.
• I will have overpacked but somehow will curse myself for not bringing along enough of something. My goal in packing was to make that something not turn out to be underwear.
• A lot of people will point at me and laugh. This will be pretty awesome because I'm 6'4" and pale, and therefore an easy target. Not sure if it will deflect from or exacerbate the problem given that I'm paired up with a tall German for my project.
• Maya will howl when we leave. Poor baby. But she's in good hands while we're gone.

Maya - not excited about the trip.

Next post will be from China...

Culture

Still have a lot of packing to do (yeah, my flight leaves in 15 hours), but blogging about nonsense is much more fun.

I've never thought so much about cultural implications while packing before. Well, maybe when we went to Dubai, but those issues were pretty straightforward and turned out not even to apply to Russians at all. For this trip I'm thinking about the color white, red pens, business cards, things that come in packs of four, chopsticks in rice bowls. It's a lot to keep in mind.

One of the first cultural guides to China I read when preparing for this trip included the following bullet point (ok, it was a slide presentation):

• Never give a clock as a present or wear a green hat

I'd heard of the clock situation before (counting down towards death), but the green hat was new to me. Apparently "wearing a green hat" is an expression used to indicate that the guy's woman is cheating on him. Maybe this is why someone removed my brother's Jets hat and ran off with it in the bathroom at a Raiders game. He was simply helping him gain face.

Flava Flav: probably not Chinese

Commencement

I hereby begin blogging about my trip to China.

To set a bit of context, I was fortunate enough to have been chosen to be a part of the IBM Corporate Service Corps, a program to develop leadership skills while addressing economic challenges in emerging markets. It's also a very good example of blending corporate responsibility with corporate strategy, which I find interesting. From a personal standpoint, I'm excited to do some good by doing work I'm actually good at. I wouldn't say my day painting houses was a complete disaster, but they never invited me back, either.

So I'll be heading for Shijiazhuang, China to help a university build their research capabilities and improve MBA teaching and some other things. We'll figure it out when we get there. The work will last from May 9 until June 3, which should be plenty of time for me to learn Mandarin. In the meantime, on Friday I depart with Kristy and Angie to visit Shanghai and Beijing for a bit of vacation prior to kicking off the work. It will undoubtedly be excellent.

Why is this called "Dan Dan Noodles," you ask? First of all, my name is Dan, so that takes care of the first two words. I like noodles. And Dan Dan Noodles are in fact a Chinese dish, which you can learn more about right here. It is also what one of our friends has taken to calling me in recent years, so at a minimum Jessica will laugh.

According to that Wikipedia article, Dan Dan Noodles translates to "Peddler's Noodles." But it also says that a dan dan is a type of pole, which would seem to translate to "Pole Noodles." Either way, I'm getting pretty hungry right now.