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.