From The T.F.A. Trenches

Holy !@#% : Drivers in Shanghai

2009-05-21T08:14:00.001-07:00

It's taken me several months to reach the point where I can adequately reflect on the maelstrom that is Shanghai traffic. As it, much more than children or colleagues, is likely to make my blood boil on any given day, I've spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it. I've also found that most expats have pondered it extensively, perhaps as they recognize it as the most likely source of their early demise. I have come to see that there are, in fact, four distinct and progressive schools of thought about why Shanghai drivers are so willing to risk life and limb, ---theirs, their family, and mine--- for the sake of a moment or two in traffic.

GTL Theory

Get The Laowei theory stems from your initial reaction to almost being run down by a car: "Holy !@#% that guy was going to kill me!" This generally happens within an hour or two of arriving in Shanghai. Naturally, as you're many thousands of miles away from most people with any real cause to be so angry, you assume that it must be because you're foreign. That guy was out to get to you because you're here, messing up the aesthetics of his country and making vastly more money than he is, and he hates you for it. Or maybe he thinks he can run you over and you won't complain, because you don't speak Chinese. Or perhaps he just couldn't see your white skin in the light.

This theory only lasts a day or two. Quickly, you realize that the drivers will just as easily run their own grandmother down as your self-centered foreignness. And you feel bad for thinking it was all about race.

PRM Theory

Usually, you're pushed into Poor Role Model theory when you ask about why the police drive around with their lights on. The inevitable answer is, "So they don't get hit in the traffic." Then it dawns on you, ---no one here actually does know how to drive! If they can't avoid hitting the police without extra-special precautions, what possible safety have you?

Somebody quickly reminds you that, a generation ago, there were very few drivers in China. The vast majority of the population was, and is, on bicycle, scooter or motorbike. This means that a lot of the newly rich did not grow up watching their parents obey the traffic laws, respect pedestrians, or even make a proper left turn. They simply have no idea how it's done. The closest thing most people have to driving role models are taxi cab drivers, ---people with a tremendous economic incentive to drive as close to the edge as possible.

RLGL Theory

Red Light – Green Light theory takes over after several months of observation. Perhaps you're walking to Carrefour, as I was, and in the process of crossing the street with a crowd of about three dozen, as cars begin making a left turn in front of you. You keep walking, they keep turning, ever sharper as you walk forward. Rather than turn around or behind the group of pedestrians, they continue turning left into the wrong side of the street! A glance behind shows that, yes, they are turning left into on-coming traffic and then making an abrupt u-turn around the median. All this, to avoid driving ten feet to make their left behind you, or waiting ten seconds until you finish crossing the street.

No one, you realize, could possibly think that this sort of driving is an earnest mistake. It's an intentional, desperate effort to get ahead. Ahead of you. Ahead of anyone. China's recent history is littered with power changes. In just the last hundred years, it's gone from Mandate of Heaven to Good Republic to Corrupt Republic to Occupation to Workers Unite! to Workers Unite, Really! to Getting Rich is Glorious! Odds are, the parents of anyone driving, and possibly the drivers themselves, experienced the Cultural Revolution first hand. They know the stakes; the potential to lose everything is very real to them. So, right now, in the middle of a left turn, that driver also knows that it's their chance to get to where they're going, make some money and enjoy the middle class until the rules are changed again. And you're standing in their way? Fool.

CASS Theory

RLGL Theory is persuasive, until you realize that the people in the cars are far too smart to think that running you over will save time and far too proud of the vehicle to let your blood stain their hood. So you're pressed to come up with something new and more potent, Car As Status Symbol Theory is just that.

In the States, whether or not you drive is a poor indicator of your station in life. Outside of the fantastically wealthy and abysmally poor, both of which ironically tend to be driven, most people across the social status spectrum drive. The moderately rich might drive nicer, newer, cleaner cars than the moderately poor, but they all still drive.

Not so in China. There's no need to remind anyone here that driving is a privilege, not a right.

In China, at least in Shanghai, your mode of transport is a major display of your status. Old people, little children, and the dregs who can't afford a bicycle, walk. Everybody else rides a bike or takes a bus or the subway, or some combination. From a bike, the up-and-coming can advance to an electric bike. From there, an electric scooter or perhaps, if business is swell, a gas-powered scooter, is a clear improvement. Penultimately, one moves about in a taxi. A single commute-length taxi ride costs between a twentieth and a fifth of a cheap bike, depending on commute and bike, but either away one is clearly asserting a vastly higher station than those rolling about in the elements. Finally, the high achiever can reach the car. A woman driving to work in a car, has set herself above five lesser levels of society. Everyone who sees her on her daily journey should know: She has arrived. So why brake for these lesser cretins? And the sentiment continues on back down. Motor scooters driving on the sidewalk earnestly honk in the expectation that the electric bikes will get out of their way. The electric bikes have no qualms about cutting in front of their human-powered cousins. Each mode of transport is owed the deference their owner has paid for.

And everyone, truly everyone, expects that you'll get out of their way, you silly walking fool. Get it together! Who do you think you are? Where do you think you are? These people aren't driving this way because they want to kill you, don't know better or feel like they must. They're driving this way because they can. They've earned it and you haven't.

Seeing the Sights in Suzhou and Xi'an

2009-05-03T07:18:00.000-07:00

Travel, at its best, is the chance to experience something new.

My wife and I thoroughly realized this when, after our recent weekend trips to Suzhou and Xi’an, we found ourselves not thinking back to the magnificent gardens or Terracotta Army these cities are known for, but our more simple experiences. In Suzhou, we had a boat ride and long walk along ancient canals and we spent hours circumnavigating the city walls of Xi’an on bike. A month later, we still find ourselves thinking and talking about these views of the cities ---the ones we’d never expected to see--- and not the grand sights that originally led us there.

Suzhou’s gardens are indisputably among the best in China, ranging from intricate and intimate to majestic and grand, each resplendent with rockeries and greens, bonsai and bamboo, and pavilions full of dark wood and rich with reds, greens and grays. On top of this we visited amid Spring’s blooming flowers and rare clear days. Xi’an’s necropolis for China’s first emperor is as tremendous as you might imagine anything that can be called a “city of the dead” to be. Legions of carefully crafted soldiers, buried in their labyrinths a quarter millennia before the birth of Christ. So how could these fail to impress?

Suzhou’s canals, by contrast to the gardens, were almost simple and unadorned. Green willow trees bowed over and dropped thin vines into the water, while the occasional plum or Asian maples added color. There were a few pavilions and benches along the walls, in quiet, natural browns. Xi’an’s city walls were hardly a sight to themselves, but more so provided the chance to circle the city, looking down on parks big and small, enormous intersections and winding lanes, rows of neo-historic buildings. Can any of this compare to the splendor of the premier sights of the cities?

No, ---but that’s the point.

These secondary sights were, my wife and I finally understood, the parts of the trip that we had not really anticipated and so were enchantingly unimagined. They were parts of the cities that we had not seen featured in scores of pictures, posters and paintings. Sure, they had their place on the map and in the guidebook, but they still retained a sense of surprise and novelty for us.

By contrast, we had seen so many images, replicas and even videos of the Terracotta warriors that, once we had pushed our way through the crowds and laid in wait for a premium middle spot on the balcony overlooking them, we still found our view inferior to what the professionals had already achieved. Certainly, there is a spectacular quality to the army that can only be appreciated in person, but in terms of a rich and vivid appreciation of detail, one is far better off with National Geographic.

I suspect this will be a challenge for travelers of this generation, those growing up with mega-screens showing HD video of “Planet Earth.” They will be saturated with stunning images of everywhere, each taken in its best seasons, on its best days, and only showing its best angles. Always, of course, without the crowds, hawkers or mosquitoes. How can their own travels compare?

Comparison is not the point.

Culturally, we always understood this. We go to foreign countries because they are fascinatingly different than our own. We go to see, eat, hear and smell something we cannot find at home. An experience T.V. or Imax cannot provide. Now we realize that the same must be for the sights we seek, recognizing that we can and will get our best views of the major and magnificent at home.

In the future, I think we’ll give a nod to appreciating the scale and significance of the central sights in a city, but move on, finding a sight that is as unknown to our eyes as the food, scent or sound of a new place. Maybe this means walking the little lanes, taking a bus instead of the subway, or going to a park that no one has recommended. I see myself using the guidebook less and just looking at a map a bit more, searching for the sight to which I respond, “Oh, I didn’t know that was here!”

Gross Simplifications of Terrifically Complex Issues

2009-04-09T17:38:00.000-07:00

Gross simplifications of terrifically complex issues are best left to cable news commentators, but sometimes they're a lot of fun to join in...

I read Kitchen Table Math, the Sequel because it's informative to see how many intelligent, focused and well-read parents can totally miss the point. But sometimes they drive me crazy:

Their Post:

Independent George boils it down

Is it me, or can the entire philosophy of K-6 education be summarized as:

1. It's not our fault.
2. It's not our problem.
3. We're underfunded.

I'm thinking we should make this our default kitchen table math post on days when everyone's too busy to write something new.

Then there's this:

If kids don't learn math, it's because they're not capable of learning it. And if they enter high school five years behind grade level, then it's up to the parents and the high schools to catch them up. Either way, they need more money so that they can facilitate kids learning on their own.

My Reply:

Catherine - How do you deal with blogs that you recognize in your blogroll, like Dy/Dan and Teaching in the 408 (may it RIP), that specifically and powerfully argue against this idea? Do you think it aids those educators engaged in tackling the excuse-making attitudes of some of our colleagues when you apply this label so generally? Do you think it inspires our nation's talented youth to look to or stay in the classroom for their career when this is the public perception they meet?

The more you blame educators, whether positioned in the classroom or district office, for the failing education system, the more you must recognize that we are the solution. Only a corps of great teachers, inspired to offer their best, can provide the U.S. with the sort of public education system you all dream of on this blog. Instead of a default to untempered criticism, add an ounce of contribution. What are you doing to make that happen?

Here's my "entire philosophy for K-6 education."

1. Fault is for the politicians and academics. I worry and wonder about 5th graders who can't read.

2. It's our problem, whether or not we're equipped, prepared or intended to solve it. The best of us accept that and get to work.

3. We're undermanned, but thus underfunded because it takes money to get people. If you know how to get us experts and professionals on the cheap, make *that* your default post.

---

So go ahead, give in to temptation to boil it all down to tasteless nothingness. What would your three be?

The People Live with Their Pigs (And PCs)

2009-04-08T16:36:00.001-07:00

Tired of the city, tired of the culturally ambiguous modern Shanghai, we were excited to get out to the country on this trip. We wanted to see some of “real China.” We wanted to meet some Chinese people. So in between the splendors of karst hills and rice terraces, we decided to leave the typical tourist path a little. We hired a guide who planned our trip to small minority villages and little towns, arranged transportation, met us at the airport, and whisked us off.

We didn’t have to do any of the work, and yet, we were so unready.

In our hasty desire to see The People, we’d forgotten that, frankly, The People live in poverty and squalor. The People don’t have hot water, screens on their windows, and proper sanitation. The People live with their pigs.

Our first hint of just where we were going came when our guide suggested we stop and buy bottled water. Now, we drink bottled water in Shanghai, so this hardly seemed unusual. Then she explained, we were buying water for the whole week. They didn’t sell it where we were headed.

Oh.

We drove for eight-hours, over and around mountains, and through gorgeous red hills bedecked with terraces of tea. It is the spring harvest and workers in blue with their traditional conical caps were picking away at the young leaves while toddlers waddled nearby. From the road, we peered up and down at small villages, nestled in tiny valleys or against sharp hillsides, made exclusively of patched together wood houses. Power lines jarred the landscape and satellite dishes the architecture, but these were the only conspicuous elements of development.

As we walked down to the first village where we were to stay the night, our guide explained that the satellite dishes were an effort by the government to teach the people of these villages “the rules.” We snickered a little, thinking this meant some manner of propagandizing, but then she explained more, and it became clear that she meant “health and safety” sorts of rules, not political or legal ones. Then we walked through the village and it became obvious why this effort was gravely needed.

Animals roamed freely through the streets, littering the whole town with their waste, before taking nightly residence on the bottom floor of the houses. Little children toddled and played right through the waste. Household trash was dumped in whatever corner or on whatever hillside was mildly out of sight. Sometimes it was burned, filling the air with a vicious stench, and sometimes it was just clearly left to rot. The plastic remains of individually packaged snacks and goods were incessantly underfoot. All of this could be seen as a gross nuisance, but on a walk through one village, our guide pointed to a clinic filled with mothers or grandparents and their small children with IVs. “This is a hospital,” she told us, “they have a lot of sick children in these villages.”

The dignity of the simple life, however, was equally apparent. In the tiny village we were visiting, an elder had just passed away and our guide explained that the music we could hear wafting through the down was a funereal song, making this announcement. Now, she explained, everyone in the village would know that this family was grieving and would come to pay respects and help them through the difficult times. She noted, and we agreed, how such decency and community might never happen in a city. Unlike Shanghai, we never ended our days feeling battered by the jostling crowds or on edge from having to fight our way through the store and back. We talked about how the children were free to roam and how houses were not simply unlocked but open. She, speaking the local tongue, encouraged us to enter several homes, unarranged and uninvited, but we were always met kindly and once foisted with food. The food was something else entirely.

Regardless of their circumstance, it seems that The People know how to cook. Even in the darkest corner of the dirtiest kitchen, even in the government cafeteria of a small town, or a random empty noodle shop on a side road to nowhere, we ate well. We had weeds, we had chicken eggs (and not the kind they lay), we had a completely unknown root, and our only poor meal was when we tried to eat Western food at a tourist spot. Home again, we have since found ourselves tackling local joints we had never thought we would try.

Beyond re-enthusing us for Chinese food, our trip revitalized our expatriate spirits. We had allowed ourselves to become bogged down in work and big city life, and neither offer the sort of experience that justifies all we gave up when we left home. It’s easy to start thinking that we’re here to work in China. In fact, we’re here to live in China and work. It’s up to us to make the most of our breaks and weekends.

Finally, after and despite the appalling poverty, I found myself feeling a renewed gratitude for all I have. Even here in Shanghai, it is easy to feel deprived away from all the comforts of life in the US, but I’m reminded again of what it really means to have not. Nonetheless, I also feel a little hopeful for the Chinese rural poor. Everywhere we went, new roads and houses were being built. A train line is being run that will link the largest of these villages to the big cities of the South. And some gains are coming at the speed of light.

One night, as we went up to our rooms in the village leader’s house in the tiniest village we visited, I spied a familiar glow emanating from a room behind the stairs. I peeked past the door and here, in house still shared with two pigs, there were six computers, each manned with an adolescent. Some were chatting, some were playing games, and one appeared to be reading or writing a blog. Our guide explained, “The leader is a very clever man. He knows what the kids need to learn.”

Indeed!

Karst Hills and Terraced Farms

2009-04-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

Imagine great icebergs of stone, lightly shrouded in clouds, floating across a sea of rice paddies.

The karst of southeastern China are iconic enough to bedeck the back of the twenty yuan bill, but such frequent and mundane viewing does little to temper the experience of actually seeing them in person. These limestone hills are formed as the stone around them unevenly eroded away and then washed round by rain. They range in height from a few hundred feet to over a thousand and they populate the southeastern landscape in uncountable numbers.

From any perspective, they are simply magnificent. From a river raft or bike ride at their feet, they tower upwards with great suddenness, their sides awash in green vegetation and grey stone. From higher or farther, they fill your field of view, forming congregations like some geologic Manhattan, an expanse of massive stone skyscrapers, irregular and dense, with slivers of valleys running between them. Leaving or arriving, you see them in the distance, amassed on the horizon and forming a pattern surreal in size and shape, like the edge of some fantasy world.

If you can possibly swallow a scene even more spectacular, you can drive only two hours northwest to see the terraced rice fields of Longsheng County. Hillsides thousands of feet in their descent have been hand carved into the service of cultivation. Paddies range from ten yards to barely a foot across. From the side or below, they look like steps fit for a giant. From above, the most splendid vista is appropriately titled the “Dragon’s Backbone.”

We saw them two weeks ago, as they were being prepared for the spring planting. Most were not yet flooded, but were being plowed, as they have for many thousands of years, by a man and an ox. But despite their fame and history, they are a fickle tourist site. We arrived just before sunset and watched them in colorful splendor for about an hour. Then a fog bank rolled in and, after artfully veiling the hills for a few minutes, enveloped them completely and didn’t leave until well after we did.

But I can’t complain. Both sights, even if taken in for only a few minutes, offer the sort of mesmerizing magnificence that makes it hard to walk, talk, or even take a picture. You just want to look back and forth, taking it all in. It makes smile even now, two weeks later, just to think about them.

But we had a full week to explore and saw a whole lot more than we ever expected.

(Part II – The People Live With Their Pigs (And PCs), Tomorrow)

The Difficulty of Eating Chinese in China

2009-03-19T06:22:00.000-07:00

A month ago, our favorite Chinese restaurant in our neighborhood closed down and left a gaping hole in our culinary life.

Chinese restaurants are, as you might expect, rather common here. But this one was special: it was owned and managed by an older gentleman named Perkins, who spoke completely fluent English. He, it turned out, had spent many vacations visiting family in the U.S. and even driven through my hometown. His restaurant served dishes from all across China, another happy eccentricity. Across our first five months here, with Perkins as our guide, we were gradually being introduced to more and more “real” Chinese dishes. The man was something akin to an expert sushi chef, who would, in the course of small talk, decipher what we really needed and order it for us. Under his expert tutelage, we began to experience all manner of soups, vegetables and fish dishes we had never before encountered. It was marvelous.

But now he’s gone. And without him, we were having trouble summoning the adventurousness to find a new Chinese favorite.

I’ll freely admit that we are often intimidated by the truly local joints, either because they’re packed with smoking taxi cab drivers, completely empty except for some desperate looking wait staff, or feature a menu entirely without pictures or the few simple characters I can recognize. Of course, we know some simple favorites in Mandarin, but how many times can anyone eat pork/beef/chicken, eggplant, green vegetable, and rice in any six months? Further, after a few bouts with stomach ailments, I have found myself reluctant to be too adventurous when it comes to spice or sanitation. This had knocked off our second favorite Chinese restaurant, a Uyguhr place down the street that was a little bit of a stretch on both counts.

Two weeks ago, my wife realized that we’d gone too long avoiding the issue. We could not live in China and eat Chinese any less than twice a week. We had to stop grieving for Perkins and move on. We cheated for a bit and went to the basement food court of Carrefour, with an abundance of little Chinese food stalls available on a point and shoot basis. Then we were taken to an exquisite Chinese gourmet restaurant that made us reluctant to taste anything inferior. We ate our fill of baozi and fried dough from the street food vendors, but we knew were just stalling. Soon we were staring at a series of trips to Japanese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Japanese-Italian, and even a Mexican place, and feeling more than a little ridiculous. We had to admit that we’d grown accustomed to getting our Chinese food too easily and were now scared to fight for it like real travelers.

We had to start small. We choked up some courage and pushed ourselves to visit Dumpling Master. D.M. is a clean and trendy looking chain shop with a cuisine that might be easily inferred from its name. We had tried to go here before, shortly after it opened, but were deterred by the wordy menu and confused expressions from the wait staff. But dumplings sounded particularly good and the cleanliness was a big draw. This time, we were speedily seated, but again brought totally illegible menus. We began to try and piece together how and what to order, based off of price and a total of three pictures, when our waiter came up. Good service in China seems to be indicated by standing over a table from the moment the customers sit down until they finishing ordering. The pressure mounted and we couldn’t even figure out what came with what and when. We looked at each other and wondered aloud whether we should just give up and leave.

Then, our server crouched down and looked at our menus and, clearly understanding our plight, said in English, “Maybe I can help?”

Us and Them

2009-03-05T15:37:00.000-08:00

The last month has beaten me down with a variety of winter illnesses, always striking over the weekend or right at the beginning of the week when I’ve time to write. But now I’m healthier and ready to blog!

---

It seems like a truism that living abroad would make you more respectful of the differences between peoples, more understanding of the common humanity of nations around the world or, at least, more culturally sensitive and savvy.

Not always, I’m finding.

All too easily, a bit of stress or shock is all it takes to scrape off our thin veneer of respect and sensitivity and reveal a mentality of “Us and Them” that we share with expatriates of the earlier eras. I’m as guilty as the next expat, but I plead remorse and reflection in hopes it spares my traveling soul.

Many times, living here, I find myself slipping into the feeling that I am fighting against a tide. I’m battling waves of men spitting on the sidewalk, grandmothers letting their baby defecate in the street, hoards jostling to get on the subway before anyone has gotten off, or boys driving their motor scooters up a crowded sidewalk. I become convinced that I am being targeted because I’m foreign, ---that they try to snatch my cab because they know I can’t swear at them and won’t resist that much.

And always, always, it’s about “them.” We know better than to speak too often of “The Chinese,” as it rings of unmitigated colonial racism, so it becomes a vague pronoun that somehow serves only to make it worse. “They” are a nameless, faceless mass of black-haired spitters, hawkers, smokers, and thieves who are bent upon popping the bubble of happier, cleaner, quieter, more decent and ---though we so don't want to say it--- more Western ways, we try endlessly to puff up around us.

At school, some items of value have gone missing and we are painfully quick to accuse “Them.” (I can’t help but say “We,” though I find myself in complete disagreement with my colleagues.) Some suggest, with an attempt at earnest sympathy, that times are hard and wages are low, the problem would be solved if we paid them more. With money comes morals, after all, as evidenced so well in the US right now. Others, almost choking on their own racism, ask, “Who else could it be, you know, they have the keys?” The thought never occurs to “us,” of course, that it could be one of “us.” Worse yet, though, is the unspoken reality that we do not even know most of “their” names. When we talk about who may have stolen what, we have to describe faces and haircuts. “Us” and “them” is just all we know.

There is no chance for them to become our friends, or at least gain the sort of names, lives and identities that forestall the merger into "Them" ness. Here, just as long ago, expats can and are expected to satisfy every aspect of their social life, from going to church to joining a sports team, in their own little bubble. Even where the opportunity exists for Us and Them to meet and know each the other, at work, the language and precedent does not.

Saddest of all, perhaps, is how this descent into dichotomies seems almost inevitable when we stop traveling and start living abroad. Living abroad gives us the opportunity to see a country in a depth beyond shallowness of the spectacular. But once we have settled in, once the awe and excitement fades, we find that below the surface is the murky, dark and cold. The day-in-and-out grinding of the unfamiliar and uncomfortable leads us to forget a little of why we came. After a stressful week at work, we enter the weekend bent on living our own life, finding decent Mexican food and a book to read. Sometimes, a new park or an old building knocks us back to a state of happy amazement and dizzy intrigue with China. But all too often it goes the other way. A crazed driver and errant elbow combine to make us discard all thought of the incomparable complexity and majesty of this 4000 year-old civilization and to focus exclusively on all that divides “Us” and “Them.”

Hong Kong

2009-02-03T07:18:00.000-08:00

Despite spending the last six months in an epic city of tens of millions, my wife and I still felt like a pair of bumpkins when we arrived in Hong Kong. From the architecture to the transport, the shopping to the food, Hong Kong is a city whose density, diversity and accessibility rival any other destination around. In our three days there, we barely scratched the surface of this tremendous archipelago.

Hong Kong is a vertical city. It is now the world’s second tallest, according to Forbes, with 30 buildings over 700 feet. While New York has a handful more, Hong Kong’s greater density and hilly backdrop makes the skyline massively more impressive. Manhattan seems positively spacious compared to the pockets of buildable land on Hong Kong island, which has sagely restricted new building through the creation of parks and reserves, as well as a cap on “reclaiming” land from the harbor. Such demands have left little incentive to leave buildings under 20 stories intact.

That’s not to say that Hong Kong is a towering beast made entirely of glass and steel. Despite its size and density, the finance capital was still engaging and approachable. Our walks around the heart of the city took us past neoclassical and colonial government buildings, down café-lined streets fit for Europe, through a gorgeous and quiet botanical garden, across the campus of a simple Episcopalian church and left us peeking over a wall at a bright green mosque. Further, when one neighborhood, city or even island grew monotonous, we could just hop on the nearest bus, subway, ferry or escalator and see something new.

New York, London and Tokyo all get the fame for mass transportation, but if you really want to see a city move people, go to Hong Kong. A mass network of ferries, trams, double-decker buses, subway and high-speed rail is simply the first round. Hong Kong ups the game with jet-foils, a cable car, helicopters, and even the world’s longest series of escalators. Almost all of them accessible with a single, aptly named “octopus” debit card, ---that can also be used to pay for your morning Starbucks.
By 2050, I suspect Hong Kong will have developed a series of connections between skyscrapers that allow residents to skip the time-wasting rides in elevators and travel about the city entirely on the 23rd floor, in tubes.

Our second day in Hong Kong, a twenty minute trip on a double-decker bus took us to the opposite side of the island, and the little beach town of Stanley. This little village, sadly thronged with people, offered us little in the way of tourism, but everything in the way of shopping. Sure, Hong Kong has its Nathan Road, its fabulous malls, its Italian brands you’re just not rich enough to even know of, but so does Shanghai. It’s the simple stuff we can’t get. We were simply stunned to find, in a medium-sized market in a little town, American goods beyond our wildest dreams, --- cheap Mach 3 razor blades, Vaseline body lotion, and even shoes for our big American feet. It was Christmas in January, folks. Forget the Gucci purse, this was a shop-till-you-drop experience expatriate style.

By our third day, my wife and I were ready for a change of pace, and Hong Kong’s archipelago of smaller islands seemed a perfect respite. Because it was Chinese New Year, we skipped the more popular Lantau and Lanma for Cheung Chau. This car-less island of 30,000 seemed to have much more in common with a Greek isle than the Asian epicenter of urbanism only an hour’s ferry ride away. The ferry pier was, expectedly, surrounded by a tourist market, but once past that we enjoyed views of a harbor full of fishing boats, bedecked in red and gold bows, flags, lanterns and other accroutements of New Year’s. Soon, we climbed the island’s quiet north hill but were disappointed by a haze-suppressed view and frightened by roving packs of stray dogs. We descended through lovely little alleys, surrounded by apartments whose varied levels of renovation reflected a diverse population seeking the island lifestyle. Cheung Chau seems to have its fair share of both native fisherman and rich urbanites seeking a retreat. Nonetheless, the exterior styling of the buildings, rich and poor, was inevitably “beachy,” the sort of peeling-paint, falling-fence, rusted gate look that I’ve found preeminent in beach towns in California, Tanzania, Italy and now, China. My theory is that it’s a combination of natural influence of sand and salt and a human attitude that says, “I live thirty yards from the sea, how much do you really expect me to care?”

Nothing made us feel more like the Chinese country cousins than Hong Kong’s food scene. Shanghai has a tremendous range of international restaurants, but they are consistent only in their exaggerated expense. One walk down a street in Hong Kong’s Soho left us watering at the mouth, convinced of the quality behind the glass by an indescribable combination of décor, atmosphere, menus, and plate sightings. Painfully, our winter trip to Japan meant that we had to be easy on the wallet and restrict our consumption to lighter fare. We had olives, wine, and cheese, and enjoyed organic pizza and cereal. We erred once with supermarket sushi, still apparently only a good idea in Japan, but were otherwise delighted in every choice.

We couldn’t neglect the local specialties, though, and made a lunchtime trip to Maxim’s Palace at City Hall, a dim sum institution. The restaurant consumes the third floor of a large performance center, with an ever-full banquet hall that seats many hundreds. When we visited, it seemed every available wall space, and even the windows, were covered in decorations celebrating the New Year. “Ordering” and eating was a similar experience to a churrascaria, where men-bearing-meat badger you with savory offerings until you admit defeat and tell them no. Here, it was older women pushing carts of steaming dumpling goodness. We had a barrage of shrimp, pork, and leafy greens that left us full until the next morning… and our ferry ride to Macau.

The Ox Comes Thundering In

2009-01-25T10:30:00.000-08:00

If you ever start to feel like you’ve seen so much that nothing really impresses anymore, come to Shanghai for the midnight celebration of the Lunar New Year. (Spring Festival, as it’s called here) If it doesn’t excite you, ready the defibrillator.

The celebration started a day early for us. Around ten or eleven the night before the big night the compound guards launched a few rounds of fireworks. They were just impatient and having fun. It was nothing more than a sample, a minute taste, of the spectacle to come. Excited in our ignorance, we lay some cushions in our bay window and huddled under some blankets, bracing ourselves against the cold glass. Had we known what was to come, we would’ve just trimmed our fingernails or organized our sweater drawers instead.

The next day, we had dinner and started to wash our dishes. But as soon as the sun set, our neighbors began to light off fireworks. We would rush from what we were doing to catch a glimpse, only too often to find them done by the time we reached the right room and window. By about seven, there were enough fireworks that the booms became incessant. After twenty minutes of zipping about from room to room to catch the best view, the sight started to feel monotonous and we went about our night-time routine. I showered, picked up dirty clothes, and scrubbed the floor, all with an explosive soundtrack in the background. At eight, we made some dessert and watched the CCTV “Spring Festival Gala” on T.V. (More on that another day) Around nine, three boxes of mortars, each spaced a block apart were going off on a street parallel to our building. We watched for a while, but decided we were pretty cold in the corner room and retreated to the bedroom. By ten, we were so jaded we would peek out at fireworks only from our bedroom, and only if they were particularly close. Around eleven, with the peppering of sound in the background, my wife fell soundly asleep. We joked about her ability to sleep through anything. She only lasted about thirty-five minutes.

I was working on my computer and didn’t notice at first, until a particularly close set of sharp firecrackers sent my eyes to the clock. I knew that midnight was said to be something special; it was around 11:20 and I returned to my work. Then the booming started in earnest, and I looked out the window and saw a complex a mile away beginning to launch some larger fireworks. Across the ensuing minutes, they come closer and louder. By 11:40, the crescendo was unmistakable and a glance out the window revealed three mortars firing at once. My wife woke up and I started trying to convince her to go outside. Like instruments joining the melody of some triumphant symphony, every moment brought another firing to the array of sight and sound. Each minute seemed to compound with explosions in a new range or register. By 11:50, there were six, seven, eight distinct displays occurring simultaneously. Greens, blues, reds and whites lit the sky near and far. Whistles, pops, bangs, booms, sizzles, resounded with precisely what they were: a percussion section composed entirely of explosives, ignited independently by hundreds of individuals, their sound somehow unified only by their steadily increasing numbers. By 11:56, we headed out to our balcony.

Outside, the symphony had become a maelstrom, a hurricane of sight and sound. Within and beyond our complex, there were more fireworks exploding than we could possibly witness. Each slight turn of the head revealed at least a half-dozen different blossoms of fire. Below us, residents were lighting off strings of firecrackers that seemed to combine into an endless stream of pops. As midnight approached, the fury of the fireworks grew impossibly more intense until it seemed that every building near and far was bathed in showers of color. Fireworks fit to entertain whole cities were being launched between buildings not thirty yards apart. Embers would collide with the side of our twenty story towers and bounce or slide down. Shorter buildings in the distance were surrounded by streams of colored fire.

Soon, we saw a mortar being set up directly below our balcony and scurried inside for cover. We dashed from room to room, seeing and feeling ourselves immersed in the explosions going on above, below, near and far. Our office, the very corner room with the best windows, presented a dizzying array of spectacles. No sooner had we settled there, than a shower of sparks and explosions right outside our window drew us back to the bedroom. As we lay on our bay window shelf, the fireworks were exploding not ten feet above us, so bright as to seem dangerous just to watch.

Once they finished, we again found ourselves running from room to room to catch the best displays. Smoke leaked into our sealed apartment and seemed to envelope the city outside. By 12:15, the decrescendo had begun. Booms near and far, high and low began to fall away, never concluding. One lone resident, with a simply massive cannon of sparks, smoke and sound, offered something of a finale, sending his loudest of booms out across the neighborhood every minute or two. Even now, as I write this two hours later, the fireworks are still echoing on. Every four or five minutes a lone series of booms or a string of pops splits the night.

Happy New Year!

CHANGED

2009-01-20T10:42:00.000-08:00

As our president said it, change has come to America. Change has come for Americans the world over. Even those Americans staying up until 2AM, watching a tiny four-inch diagonal video feed on their computer screen, sitting at a cold table in Shanghai, China.

I am changed because for the first time in my adult life, I can take pride in who I am and where I am from. Living abroad, amongst students and teachers from dozens of countries, I have never had a greater sense of being an American. Yet I have also been made ever more fully aware of the complete idiocy of our recent policies and behaviors. Within America, all the grand divisions and minute sub-denominations of our society seem so pressing. Abroad, you are either American or you are not. I am American, like it or not. For eight long years, I have not liked it.

Yet, tonight –or this morning— we have again put a man on the moon. I stayed up tonight because witnessing a person of color take the oath of office is a moment no less awe-inspiring than that of the Apollo mission. It is an event that must been seen live to be truly appreciated and celebrated. It is, in fact, more tremendous than a moon landing. This time our national triumph was not earned by the strength of our science nor the prowess of our industry but by the simple power of our vote, the private decision of tens of millions of ordinary individuals. More than any other attainment in our history, this is a victory of the American people.

I am changed by the chance to take part in that victory. I am changed by the faith it renews in our democracy, the hope and pride it reconnects to our country's name. I am changed by the acceptance of what it means for "my people," both in this generation and every one to follow. Most of all, I am changed by the new belief that service rendered in the name of American society will not be futile strokes against a tide of corruption and everlasting injustice. Led by a president we believe in, we can believe in what we do.

We have made real progress today. America has changed.

Back to the Blogosphere II

2009-01-12T07:39:00.000-08:00

About two months ago, I seized my position as a “Technology Integration Specialist” and vigorously shook it until a real, full-time job fell out. It made me feel better about myself, but also made me tired, unreflective, and an obviously poor blogger. This quarter, I’m in pursuit of the happy medium.

I’m also in pursuit of a new voice for this blog, one that allows me to write about what I see and experience here without feeling like I need to fully understand it. Because I don’t, and that leaves me feeling unable to write about it. I want to move towards less analysis or "reflection," and more simple recording. Let me know what you think.

---

Our little park, located across the street and artistically rendered in modern gray and black stone with the occasional interruption of greenery, keeps growing, not in size, but in detail and complexity. We watched it take shape over the fall, open in the early winter, and now it thrives with activity. A troupe of women dance in its single, large open space each morning and night. At first I thought they were practicing for the Spring Festival, but I’ve realized they are just a fitness class convened without instructor or gym. Someone brings the boombox and away they go. My wife likes to scour the weekend crowds for new peddlers, she’s spied a balloon man, and is on the look out for a cotton candy hawker or a kite seller. I watch the guard. I’ve decided he’s there to keep the park safe from the people, rather than the other way around. At first he just had to wander the three paths, but eventually they finished a wooden bench under the concrete gazebo, atop the tiny park’s tiny hill. Now he has a small guardhouse, which even at the size of a porta-potty is too big for the park. I’ve noticed his guardhouse recently gained a light. I stroll by each day looking to see if they’ve added a T.V. or heater.

We walked by an entire old block that was knocked down, save for a long wall and two single-room shops, about a hundred yards apart. They lie on the edge of the empty block like the crust and crumbs left on the plate of some giant, too stuffed to finish his meal. Ignoring the earth-movers behind them, the ceiling of rags above them, the scattered remains around them, the stores carry on, one selling fruit the other newspapers and magazines. A ragged edge of bricks on all lines of their roof makes it clear that these shops were once wholly surrounded by others, above, behind, below and aside, already eaten away. I wonder whether they are the remnants allowed to continue, to nominally satisfy the terms of a renovation, or if they are merely the last to go, the lone hold outs against such obvious inevitability.

We are illiterate here and unnervingly at ease with it. There are signs everywhere that we cannot read and simply pass on by. Big red banners with yellow letters, strewn across courtyards. Flashing orange words on an LED screen just inside our complex. Highly official looking proclamations tacked to a board in our lobby. These letters have red stars and stamps. All that’s clear is the dates. There are always dates in the body, sometimes days and sometimes years. 1939 made an appearance on a new one today. We assume that if they were important dates, “Untented Fumigation Next Wednesday” or “Mass Eviction of Foreigners by Friday!” someone, somehow would tell us So we walk by, get in the elevator and go home.

Karaoke lulls me to sleep now. About six weeks ago someone, somewhere in my neighborhood purchased a karaoke machine and high-powered stereo. I don’t know if it’s an illicit karaoke parlor or an extreme enthusiast, but he lights it up around eleven, always a he, and carries on until anywhere from twelve to one-thirty. The sound is muted enough to take on an almost humming characteristic. No words, just a stream of “yuhs” emanate up through the floorboards.

Taxi U

2008-11-09T02:23:00.000-08:00

My wife and I have been taking Mandarin lessons, out of simple necessity as well as part of our life-long pursuit of defying the Ugly American stereotype. After 10 sessions with an excellent teacher, I now speak enough Mandarin to make my life even more difficult. At the very beginning of learning a new language, one learns to say things and ask questions a bit before one can understand the replies. People misspeak when they say it’s important to be able to ask for directions in the native language. It’s far more important to be able to listen to the answer.

Fortunately, I have an unlikely ally in my pursuit of poly-glottal glory: taxi cab drivers. Ever since we first arrived here, our ever-changing array of chauffeurs have taken an interest in teaching me how to speak their language. I think it’s because I sit in the front seat, thereby opening up the possibility for conversation. My wife thinks its because my accent is better than most, and hearing that, they think I’m ready to learn. Either way, I’ll take it.

Our first taxi-tutor taught us to properly pronounce the names of the streets we live on. It was a short trip to Carrefour and he only had time for a few streets, but they were highly pertinent words. I would have tipped him, but I’ve been told that it only confuses the drivers.

Our next in-cab-instructor was a real wise guy. I sat down and said, “We’re going to Carrefour in Gubei.” He said, “No, no, not we. You’re going to Carrefour, I’m driving the cab.” He then asked me if we were going to eat on the bottom level, I said yes, and he said a few things I didn’t understand. Then he asked if my friend in the back was my girlfriend. I said she was my wife, so he proceeded to teach me the Shanghainese terms for wife and husband, so I could sound more proper.

Recently, I sat down in a cab with a 300k+ driver, who amazingly didn’t know where we lived. I told him that I knew the way and would tell him directions. So off we went, me issuing profundities like, “Left, right, straight ahead.” The most complex piece of language I offered was “Can we turn left on Hongqiao Road, here?” To which he replied, “We can.” Nonetheless, at the end of the trip, he asked me how long I had been in Shanghai. I said since August and my auto-assessor said it sounded like I had been here two years. My personal satisfaction was tempered with shame that four-year-old Chinese is considered such an accomplishment for foreigners.

Today, my didactic-driver decided to take it to the next level. As we pulled up at a long light, he reached for a newspaper. I was a little concerned, but then the professing-pilot put it in front of me. Pointing to the large headline, he proceeded to teach me the pronunciation and meaning of the first four characters. The lesson was delightful and appreciated, but so unexpected that I almost laughed out loud. We went on to a discussion of Aobama (Good!) Bush (Bad!) and how last week, I said I was from Australia, but this week I could say I was American. Despite the wide ranging discussion, he also asked how long I had been here, but before my ego could burst the cab doors off, he said my Chinese was "bu hao," or not good. He explained a little, which I couldn't understand, but clearly, I had been slacking off since the last guy.

I’m a little concerned that my next trip is going to include a quiz before I can leave the car and some homework before I'll be allowed to ride again. I guess it comes with being a full-time student here at Taxi U.

Games (Lost and Frustrated) Expats Play

2008-11-03T07:01:00.001-08:00

We’re all nigh on frantic about the economy, the election, the climate crisis, health care, and the war. I can’t imagine how bad it is in the perennial media-storm of the U.S., but I’m experiencing it all on top of life in a foreign country. Call us even. So to ease the mood, I’ll take a pass on the bloggings of deep profundity that had been tempting me and offer some merrier fare. In fact, I’ll share just how we are dealing with it all. My wife and I have devised little games, bits of amusement to help us enjoy the routine of our days, while also making a little lighter the elements of foreignness that constantly pull us down.

Taxi Titans

This was our first China sport, as you play it whenever you get in a cab. In every cab, the driver has to display his (though sporadically her) license, with picture and number. Often, the picture doesn’t match the driver, which we have decided not to worry about. The number is the real source of amusement. They range from 0 – 310,000, in order of when the cabbie received their license. To a degree, the lower the number, the more experienced the cabbie and the better service we receive. Cabbies over 300,000 rarely know the effective short-cuts or even try to understand my pathetic Mandarin. By contrast, those under 100k can often shave 10% off the usual price of a long trip and offer free language lessons during the ride. (more on that later) Yesterday, Mr. 97,000 made a rare wrong turn and gave me two yuan back at the end. I didn’t complain when he made his mistake, so I suspect the refund was purely a matter of pride, a self-punishment inflicted to keep him on his razor edge. For us, the challenge of the game is to find the lowest number possible. We are in constant pursuit of the Johnny Appleseed of Shanghai taxis, the legendary 000001. We firmly expect that he will pick us up one cold and rainy night when we are completely lost in some nether reach of the city, perhaps driving an all-white taxi that hovers on a small cloud. Currently, we’ve gone no lower than 3559, and as everyone in Shanghai knows, no cabbies ever pick you up in the rain.

The StopHand

This is a game with real stakes, begun by my wife and her stubbornness. I’m a reluctant participant through prayer and memorization of how to say “Hospital” in Mandarin. You see, the right of way is firmly established in China, more so than almost any other country I’ve been in. Mind you, however, that we walkers do not have it. Ever. Cars make left turns, right turns on red, and proceed through stop signs with nary a pause for pedestrians, completely assured that we pathetic folk of the foot should wait for them. Usually, my wife waits for no one. After weeks of frustration, she now forcefully puts out a hand when threatened by cars, palm out in the universal statement of, "You will stop for me." She is convinced that she is “bringing the Stop-Hand to China.” Generally it works well, occasionally my heart flutters, but so far the car always stops.

Angry or Mandarin

To our English-attuned ear, Mandarin is a very harsh sounding language. Shanghainese, I’ve been told, is even more strident. When we first arrived, we rushed to our balcony a half-dozen times expecting to see a fight on the corner. Generally, it was humdrum activities like a discussion between a parking lot attendant and driver. We understood nothing but the wave and “Goodbye!” at the end, but could surmise it hadn’t been an angry encounter after all. Now, when we hear raised voices below our apartment, around the corner, or at the table across the aisle, we wonder, “Angry or Mandarin?” Before searching for context clues: smiles, good-bye hugs, or thrown napkins, we have to make an initial guess. Even with ten weeks of practice, we’re still wrong with surprising frequency.

Major League Bike-Hauling

This is a China classic. The working class here, denied by their nine-day work week any participation in such leisure activities as kite-flying, card-playing, or tai chi, have designed their own national pastime-in-working: Extreme Bikecart Hauling. At first, my heart sank with sympathy for the poor souls carrying mountains of recyclables, hardware, or the oddly shaped thing, across the city on a bike-cart. The more I studied them and their rate of speed, however, the more I realized that the towering piles could not possibly be the best way to transport goods by bike-cart. Any logic of economics or efficiency would suggest two trips. Instead, I now firmly believe that carrying the most incredible load is a badge of pride, the insertion of some small piece of status into an arduous and awful job. The bike hauler may never own an apartment or car, leave Shanghai or use a computer, but he can, at the very least, carry the largest pile of wood ever fit on a bike-cart. Who am I to deny him his moment of excellence? Appreciation, rather than heartache, seems the more appropriate display of respect. Having decided it’s okay to enjoy, I’m an avid bike-hauling fan. Each dimension offers its own challenge. We once saw someone biking down the street with ten feet of bamboo extending from either end of the cart. A trip to the ever reconstructing old-town featured a man who had given up bicycling and was simply pushing his twenty cubic foot load of bricks. Water-bottle haulers have to compete in their own division, due to the eccentricity of their shape. (Only rookies use wire cages or, worse yet, stack a simply pyramid.) The overall volume champion is pictured above. When he appeared in my peripheral vision, I almost didn’t look, mistaking the shape for a semi-truck.

Ethics and Economics in Expatriacy

2008-10-19T08:43:00.000-07:00

By moving to China, my wife and I made a class-shift we never could have imagined at home, bar a winning lotto ticket. Here, we can eat out as often as we like. We can take taxis about town. I can have shirts tailored and she jewelry customized. We found two paintings we wanted to pair, but they were sized incompatibly. Two weeks later, they were repainted to fit and hanging in our living room. We have a housekeeper, who visits twice a week and keeps our floors clean, our sheets fresh and our shirts ironed. All this, and we can save towards summer trips, retirement and the inevitable down payment.

I thought this meant that we could be free from worry about money. But quite the opposite is true. Even beyond the ups and downs of the stock market, I find myself worrying about money here far more than I ever did at home. Not about whether or not we have enough, but simply how to think about it. I know what a dollar can buy in the U.S., but in China, a kuai can buy different amounts, depending on who is spending and where they are buying. As I have written about before, the whole quality spectrum here is accessible, to everyone, sometimes within a single store. Further, our relative wealth here only increases my confusion. Every purchase spawns three questions: What need I pay? What could I pay? What should I pay?

Bargaining is an amusing cultural challenge to the traveler, but a real issue for the foreign resident. We don’t want to shop at Carrefour, but often, shopping locally means negotiating a price. More over, the further we get from Carrefour, the closer to impoverished seem the shopkeepers. This only adds to the intimidation. Just because I’ve stopped serving poor families means I want to start haggling with them. How much “extra” do we pay, knowing a kuai to us is like five or ten to the DVD monger? How much do we insist the small goodsman reduce his price when the difference is a matter of education or health care for his family? What is the real cost of a "great deal?"

On the other side, how often can we stand to walk away feeling cheated or taxed, simply for our American clothes and poor Mandarin? Just how poor is the retailer and when does her exorbitant gain start to become a meaningful loss for us? Sometimes we are offered an initial price ten-times the rightful fee for an item, sometimes less than we had planned to start with. Both are rare, far more usual is a price awkwardly in between, offering no help at all.

What we know is of little use, if my wife and I paid even U.S. prices for everything we bought, we would soon start losing money by living here. Despite what is described above, our salaries are around sixty-percent what we made in the U.S. Further, saving money is part of the reason we, along with many expatriates, came to China. We will have education and health care to pay for soon, out of the savings that build from paying the next little bit less.

How do we see a fair price from these two vastly different vantage points?

I just don't know.

Pining for the Trenches

2008-10-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

I was going to try and keep the focus on living China, but that writing has been tough in coming, and something has occurred in the teaching realm that I simply must write about. If you sit through this, I promise more on Shanghai soon.

Today, I reached a nadir, the low point. In the four and a quarter years I have been a teacher, I have been angry, elated, miserable and bewildered. I have been frustrated, stunned, ecstatic, and giddy. I have been unenthusiastic, once or twice even apathetic, but today, I truly hit rock bottom. I got bored.

Not bored in the moment, listening to a student read the same fluency passage for the umpteenth time, but bored across almost my entire day. Bored deeply and frustratingly enough to think, “Wow… I’m bored.” So bored that I didn’t even look forward to my two classes, until I was in the middle of teaching again and suddenly remembered why I signed up for this job in the first place.

Professionally speaking, my goal in moving to an International School was to mix things up, to see the other side of the teaching world, as well as the planet. I was offered a technology specialist position or another year in fifth grade, and in keeping with the idea of change, I went for the tech. When I was interviewing for the position, I specifically asked what sort of support was available and if that would be part of my position. I was told that we had a solid local support staff and they wanted me purely for curriculum and instruction. They said 80% in the classroom, teaching or assisting, and 20% researching new resources. I believed them.

What a fool I was.

Perhaps there are schools that are truly serious about technology, where technology teachers are free to teach and develop their curriculum while appropriately trained support staff deal with the machinery. Mine is not one of them. We reassigned and laid off all of our support over the summer. Consequently, this week, I have spent the barest pittance of time teaching and the bulk of hours supervising the copying and recopying of computers. Last week, I spent the vast majority of my time scheduling and proctoring computer-adaptive diagnostic tests. It gives me time to research resources and polish up curriculum documents, I don’t idle away the hours blogging (you may have noticed), but after two weeks of five hours a day of seat work, I’m on edge, the slightest bit goes wrong and I’m ready to scream.

But in the end, this is a very valuable experience. First, it teaches me that our nation’s low-performing public schools don’t have exclusive rights to all the bad decisions in education. $30k-a-year privates have elbowed their way into the incompetency party as well. Hire an expensive, well-credentialed teacher and have him mostly just pressing “restore” at 24 minute intervals. It hurts! When I return to the public schools, I can remember this frustration and know that the grass is yellowing and sour on both sides of the fence. Next, it helps me realize that no matter what it does to my blood pressure, I want to be in the urgent, high-stakes, classroom environment. My prior philosophy of wanting to work directly with the kids, to make a difference on an individual day-by-day level, was spot-on. I thought I needed a break, but it’s only been eight weeks and I already want to be back in the trenches. I don’t want to sit at a desk all day, ever again. Give me a class three years behind and on the verge of chaos, give me a child running off campus, give me an irate parent or an incompetent policy maker. But not a quiet room, filled only with whirring machines and a comfortable chair!

This I just can’t handle.

Goldilocks Goes Shopping

2008-09-14T09:04:00.000-07:00

Here in our little piece of Shanghai, my wife and I have probably eaten at only a tenth of the restaurants and toured maybe half the parks, but we know every fresh market, supermarket and convenience store inside and out. We still don’t have a good map, a lick of Mandarin, or bicycles, but if there’s one thing we go about with earnestness and urgency, it’s finding a steady supply of food. We require it good, fresh, cheap and clean. Fulfilling that constellation of requirements has consumed great swathes of our time here.

From the construction worker living in a sheet metal shack to the man driving his Ferrari down our most unworthy street, Shanghai food stores must service a tremendous range of incomes and appetites. For the young expatriate couple, this can be quite confusing. Where do we fit in on the spectrum? What are we willing to pay to recreate our diet from home? Where do we draw the lines of extravagance and hygiene?

We started with Carrefour because we didn’t know any better. This megastore offers the complete range of qualities within it’s own four walls. Each of the produce, meat and seafood sections offers three distinct grades. There’s imported/organic, “high quality” (the store branded) and bulk. Bulk produce is just dirty or irregular, but bulk meat and seafood can be a shock for the unaccustomed eyes, ---thoroughly frozen chunks of chicken, ham or fish sitting totally exposed, to be roughly selected with hands or tongs. Three feet down the counter, however, is imported Aussie steak or salmon filets running well over $20 a pound. We buy the middle, the store-line beef that still comes swathed in a comforting layer of cellophane. Beef and grains are the only food items we still get at Carrefour, simply because they’re otherwise hard to find. We plan to stock up in one monthly trip because the store is an absolute madhouse. Imagine a regular Safeway stuffed with a Costco sized crowd buying Costco sized quantities, but doing so one item at a time and often paying in cash.

The top of the “food chain” is CityShop. This supermarket is proximate to a massive foreign compound that borders on a golf course, with products and prices to match. If one is looking to recreate an American or Japanese pantry in toto, CityShop is the place to do it. They offer everything from Bisquick to Tide, costing two-to-four times their price at home. I was appalled to find two similarly sized bottles of Gatorade sitting on their shelf. One bottle was labeled in Chinese and cost about 60 cents, the other was labeled in English and cost about $3.00. This place clearly was not for us. I will admit, however, that I bought some obscenely overpriced olives from here but ---my goodness people--- a man has to live.

Our neighborhood streets are often spotted with the other end of the spectrum: produce vendors selling their wares from threadbare blankets on the ground. Believe it or not, the eggplants and peaches have little discernible difference from those sold elsewhere, but I can’t bring myself to buy them. One of my favorite sights is watching a transaction with one of these grocers, who often employ a handheld balance to weigh their goods.

A few blocks from our apartment complex is a permanent wet market. About thirty yards long and twenty wide, the interior of the market is filled with grocers selling vegetables, fruits, and grains. The outer edge is lined with spartan fish and meat shops. It is a Chinese market fit for a travel show, from the tapestry of produce cut to the tremendous sacks of spices and rice, do an interview the angry man forever slitting eels, and visit the stall where you can pick the clucking chicken you’ll have for dinner tonight. Alas, the travel shows don’t include the awful stench and flies, a terribly unpleasant by-product of the market’s diversity and freshness. While it is endurable as a tourist, it is less palatable as a resident. We aspire to buy our produce here and hope the smell and flies will fade with summer.

Past the entrance to the wet market, an oddly placed hospital and a lonely salon, is our supermarket. It is part of a local chain, Hualian, which should not be confused with Lian Hua, an inferior rival. The aisles aren’t stocked with the familiar, but they aren’t dirty or smelly either. It’s not empty, but I’ve yet to get hip-checked or prodded with a cart. It is almost totally local products, the only regular import is the Starbucks frappucino bottle, which neither of us drink, even in the U.S. Hualian won us over with its excellent produce and juice selection. Our basket this week included carrots, two kids of tomatoes, cucumbers, asparagus, eggplant, bok choy and radishes. The yogurt is good, though soupy, and they stock the right kind of frozen dumplings. They sporadically offer Western cuts of meat or fish, which is enough to keep us comfortable, but their frequent absence gives us a little push to branch out.

So after a month of effort we have our shopping routine down pat. While we recognize the futility of cooking Chinese dishes at home, there’s an adventure to be had in re-creating our favorite meals with Chinese ingredients. If we simply must have a wedge of brie or a new can of anchovies, we know where to go. For the daily goods, however, we know the imports are just not as enjoyable or economical. My bottle of olives, from CityShop, cost $12. From Hualian, however, we bought our produce, juice, and chicken for most of the week, for about $20. In short: Trader Joe’s it isn’t, but for us, that’s the point.

My Block

2008-08-31T05:46:00.000-07:00

We’ve been here three weeks, as of today. I’ve been wanting to write something for a week now, but unlike when I’m traveling, living abroad means that my day is consumed with just working and surviving, not so much meandering and pondering. Quantitatively, we have been here twenty-one days but only had three good ones to explore. I’ll write about those three eventually, but for now, let me tell you about what we’ve seen on the other eighteen.

Turning out of my building sets you in the midst of a row of restaurants, ranging from laughable to excellent. Laughable is a “bistro” that interprets gourmet American food the way we interpret Chinese food, ---turnabout is fair play, but I’ll cook my own Cesar salad from here out, without the bacon. Excellent is a Taiwanese noodle shop with supremely delicious beef broth. Many of the signs are in Japanese, as the area caters to the Japanese expatriate community. This causes no end of trouble, as most of the wait-staff recognize that I’m a foreigner and speak to me in Japanese, the language they’ve been trained to speak to foreigners. I respond in Japanese and they just look confused. Twice now, we’ve wound up with an actual Japanese server. It was like seeing blue sky, but that’s only happened once.

As we walk down the block we pass the last of the foreign restaurants and thus begins Taxi Alley. At about 6PM on any given day, no fewer than a hundred taxis line the street. They come for the half-dozen cheap Chinese restaurants and fill them to the brim. The shops are simply teeming with drivers, dressed in their white-collared shirt and black pants. Consequently, we have yet to enter a cab where the driver didn’t know almost instantly where we lived.

In between the cheap Chinese restaurants is an array of small shops and an utterly incongruous fancy pet hospital. We walk past an auto mechanic and car wash, a fresh produce shop, an office supply and stationary store, a DVD shop, a carpenter, and an animal seller. The other side of the block holds a convenience store, a sheet glass shop, a welding house, a clothes store selling only undergarments, a tiny arcade, another restaurant or two, and a water delivery service. Each storefront is no more than ten to fifteen feet wide and appear scarcely twenty feet deep. The sidewalks are lined with a further litany, recyclers sorting through their trash-picked wares, produce micro-stands offering hardly enough food to feed a single family, and men standing about bicycle carts presumably waiting to be employed in deliveries. There are cigarette and phone card hawkers, a man selling only the use of his bicycle pump, and children incessantly chasing down littler children. I am always amazed that these people can eke out a living in such a minute commercial niche.

Across the street from this mayhem there is no one on the sidewalk. There is nothing there but a wall, blocking off an empty stretch of land that sits awaiting its chance to be developed into chaos or an apartment complex. A little section has been turned into a parking lot and another piece holds some cinder block and sheet metal housing. The rest is the usual urban wild-land of tall leafy, prickly plants and rough grass. Directly across the street from our apartment, the corner of the empty block is being turned into a park. From street level, the park is veiled behind blue sheet metal. From our apartment, several dozen feet up, we watch the progress of the construction each morning and evening.

Before we arrived, the park workers cleared and leveled the land, a small square maybe fifty yards a side. Then they built a small hill, where a large concrete gazebo is appearing inside of steel scaffolding. Over the last few weeks, they have laid layer after layer of stone tile paths, first in dull gray sheets and now lovely white. The paths form a grid and we wonder during meals what will occupy the interstitial spaces. Memorials? Shops? Flower gardens? Late one evening, as we walked home from dinner, a large truck pulled up and delivered trees, planted the next day on the border of the park. There are stone pillars now and sheets of pink that lay ready for incorporation.

Some of the men building the park appear to live in a small shack made of the same blue sheet metal that wraps their work place. Every week, their laundry appears on a line hung from the shack and at night, a small light peeks out from various gaps in the shelter.
I’ve heard and seen that construction workers often live in their work place while it is in process. A number of restaurants near us are being renovated and we’ve often seen groups of workers and whole families eating dinner together on the unfinished floors.

Further down our street, at its intersection with a major boulevard, is going to be a new metro station. This requires the transport of serious amounts of materiel and machinery along our road. Between the restaurants’ renovation, the park’s landscaping, and this station’s construction, our corner apartment takes in the full urban symphony of horns, rumbles and hammers.

I could sit for hours noticing the details of the construction of the park and watching the passersby try to peek in between or over the fencing. I could hover over the intersection in our office’s bay windows or ponder our neighbors’ lives as seen from my balcony to theirs. But I’m living, not traveling, here, so it’s time to go help my wife with dinner. We need lunches for tomorrow.

Shanghai Arrival!

2008-08-17T19:32:00.000-07:00

Jets make travel far too quick and easy. Our bodies aren’t alone in struggling to adjust to the inhumanly rapid change wrought by plane travel, ---our minds are right alongside in confusion! A blog entry, a movie, and two hours of picture sorting and I was out of Malaysia and in China. But that’s not what it felt like; it felt like I was just in another big airport and another big city.

I’ve always thought boat travel was ideal for getting a sense of arrival. Day after day of endless blue, then distant specks of land, then powering past landmarks into port, and finally you pull up to a dock and you know you are really there. Maybe when I retire I can travel by boat. Maybe when I’ve seen enough of the world that I can afford a week or two spent en route. For now, I know I’m stuck with planes and their various lags.

We arrived and breezed through immigration and customs with hardly a word. We were met by people from our school and whisked to our apartment, conversing all the while in English. Then we unpacked for a little bit and went out for some dinner.

Like a rumbling of distant thunder, we heard it coming when we couldn’t read the signs. But we could still tell the relative class of the restaurant and make a guess at its quality by its busy-ness. When we walked through the door, however, the skies opened and confusion rained down. Every thought was translated into charades; every communication became painfully slow and awkward. There’s a dreamlike quality to being unable to speak the language, it’s the only other time we can so suddenly have all our capabilities taken away. Just like a dream, the frustration echoes in my head: Why can’t I talk? Why don’t they understand?

Then the answer and the feeling came loud and clear: You’re in China now.

The last week has been spent in remarkable inversion to the way we spent our days before we left. Instead of selling and packing, we are buying and unpacking. Every day features a trip to a store to find a different necessity of life. Much to my irritation, we are also cleaning up another apartment, as apparently “furnished” does not mean clean.

We love our apartment, minus the mess. It is huge: two bedrooms and bathrooms, an office, a large living room and dining space, a reasonable kitchen and plenty of storage. How ironic that we moved to China and got more living space. We’re on the fifth floor of a large building in a large complex. Hongqiao is full of massive complexes, often called Gardens, as they are somewhat centered on a courtyard. Ours has about 20 buildings. People talk about how this city built out and that city built up. Shanghai builds out and up; I suspect they’d built in and down too, if there were a way. Our walk to school takes us past row after row of these complexes, clusters of buildings twenty stories tall and teeming with signs of occupancy, ---satellite dishes, drying clothes, barbecues, patio furniture. There can be no doubt: There are a lot of people here. China doesn’t need to brag about being the most populous nation on earth. Step into Shanghai and it's an inescapable conclusion.

Malaysia

2008-08-12T18:33:00.001-07:00

If there is a microcosm for the world growing without "US", it is Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Funded by oil, influenced by colonialism and Islam, run by the emigrated Chinese, and worked by the emigrated Southeast Asians and emigrated Indians, KL is hyper-reality to Dubai's sur-reality. It is a spectacular and gritty place, with towering luxury condos and scrap metal roofed shanties only a few meters apart. Legions of motorbikers whiz around lanes clogged with status-symbol cars, their drivers each looking at the other with both disdain and envy. Its people are polyglottal, often speaking Malay, reading Chinese or Arabic, and working in English. On our second day, we spent the morning walking past the National Mosque and touring the excellent Museum of Islamic Arts, and the afternoon climbing 272 stairs to the Batu caves, a geological marvel converted into Hindu temple. At both holy sites, we saw tourists faithful to the other. For our three dinners, we ate satays, shawerma, and sushi. (and not for the alliterative convenience)

Our hotel was right in the shadow of the iconic Petronas Towers, connected to a massive supremely upscale mall. I have little interest in shopping but in a country where neither temperature nor humidity ever dip below eighty, a regular and convenient respite from the heat was irresistibly appealing. On Saturday night, it seemed that a good half the city's three million residents had arrived. Women completely concealed in burkas glided past trios of girls undressed for the club. Tourists and single men lined the rails and just took it all in. Hesitant to go out again after a long day, we tried to acquire a local dinner in the food court, but eventually found ourselves almost dizzy with confusion and frustration at the size of the crowds and the lack of queues. We retreated to a small Japanese supermarket, part of the Isetan department store, and bought reasonable sushi and Kettle Chips, which were hands down the best US export in KL.

On Friday, we toured the sites of the city using the Hop-On/Hop-Off bus, which was irregular, slow and too big for the city. Once we had paid $12 for our day-long ticket, however, we were reluctant to give up and try the taxis and trains. KL, I should note, also has a monorail that seems purely for entertainment value. I am still looking for an exception.

We particularly enjoyed the Bird and Butterfly parks, which allowed us to see some of the exotic fauna native to Southeast Asia. A walk through the insect hall convinced my wife and I that we would probably not need to schedule a trip to the Cameron Highlands, home of the sort of creepy crawlies best left to the Discovery Channel. The insects weren't the only menacing animalia, however. We were amazed by the sight of the Great Hornbill, which seemed to be a toucan with its beak turned inside-out and terrifying. We also visited the pen of the Southern Cassowary, whose head bore a disturbing resemblance to that of a velociraptor.

We toured the Central Market and Chinatown, where the contrast to the mega-mall next to our hotel was tremendous. The mega-mall featured brands from everywhere not Malaysia, the Central Market featured the Indian, Chinese and Southeast Asian products typical of this country's particular blend. Saris and batik sarongs, Zodiac statuary and video games, stone chess sets and tourist kitsch all had their place. Instead of the mega-mall's perfume and disinfectant, the Central Market featured incense and sizzling spices. The people here looked much the same as those in the mega-mall, but there they walked while they watched and were watched, here they were busy shopping and selling.

Leaving KL meant an hour-long ride on its new super-highways, past enormous new sub-divisions, around the new centers for federal government (Putrajaya) and multi-national technology corporations (Cyberjaya), then out through groves of palm trees and finally out through the jungle itself. I asked our cabbie why the airport was so far from the city and he said, "We want room for expansion. To grow."

Adelaide's Market and Aborigines

2008-08-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

The unquestioned highlight of our time in Adelaide was the Central Market. We made a point of getting back to Adelaide early our last night in South Australia, so that we might make a second visit. Open four or five days a week, the market offers everything from premium meats and cheeses to coffee and crafts. I found it very similar to some of the markets I saw in Italy last year, but vastly less intimidating in English and dollars.

Our party sampled an array of olives, tapenades, cheeses, and sweet yoghurt. It made a marvelous picnic meal and helped me through my grief for giving up such delicacies in China. On our return, we grabbed a chicken and vegetable pie (and more olives) to eat at our hotel. I found myself more than a little sad that the market experience is not one available in the U.S.

The glory of the market is that each item can be purchased from a specialist. In the States, buying premium meat, artisanal cheese, organic produce, and fresh bread might require a visit to three or four different shops and a prohibitive amount of driving. Consequently, we settle for the supermarket ---or Whole Foods, such as we can afford it. In the market, I visited four different stores in ten minutes, none were cheap but all tasted fantastic.

Throughout my visit to Adelaide, I noticed an unusual flag, red and black with a yellow circle in the middle, the flag of Australia’s Aboriginal people. Also, quite common on public signs and markers is a small note that the local organization recognizes their site as the traditional homeland of a particular tribe. Apparently, similar reflections are frequently offered as preface to public ceremonies and celebrations. While these hardly restore to the Aborigines a specter of what they have lost, the common belief that such sentiments are worth expressing regularly speaks well of the Australian people.

On my tour of the Rocks in Sydney, our guide reflected on the Aboriginal plight through the lens of Bennalong, one of the first Aborigines to learn English and participate in Australian civic life. Kidnapped from his tribe, he served as an adviser to one of the early English governors. Eventually, after many years and travels around the world, he earned his freedom and tried to return to his tribe. He found it impossible and asked the governor to build him a small house, on the spot now home to Sydney’s Opera House. He died there. Our guide explained that Australian children are now taught a history that includes the primacy of the Aborigines on the land, but they are also taught that, given the biology and mindset of the times, the decimation and conquest of the Aborigines was the only practical possibility. Remembering their history, honestly, providing them a place to live, and including them as they desire in today’s Australia, is the only recourse.

I don’t know that any of these are the right response to the terrors wrought on native peoples, but I know that, in the US, our response to the past is still a blank page. I taught about the Native Americans extensively in fifth grade but every unit ended with a big “Huh.” Few sentiments are stronger in a child’s mind than fairness, and they always wanted to know how we could make it fair for the Indians. I never had an answer. Nothing we can do can make amends, but that doesn’t mean we should do nothing.

The Outback!

2008-08-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

An intrepid traveler could certainly get further from civilization than the East Whydown Sheep Station but they’d just be showing off. Sure, on the massive continent-island of Australia one could drive ten or twenty hours into utter distance and desolation. But who has that kind of time or patience? We chose to travel only about six hours from Adelaide, in South Australia, and it was plenty distant and desolate enough.

Joan, our hostess at this farmstay bed and breakfast claims that they’re “more of a suburban station.” This is primarily because they are only a few minutes drive off the bituminized Great Barrier Highway and “only” 20km from the nearest town of Yunta. Yunta, mind you, has a population of 50. The nearest city of any real size is Broken Hill, two hours away. Joan does the family shopping in Peterborough, a town of a few hundred, only about forty five minutes to the south.

As guests on their homestead, we stayed in rustic quarters built and still used for the sheep shearers who migrate through two weeks out of the year. This meant trips to an outdoor “dunny” in the bitter cold of a winter night, but it was all part of the experience. 20km from Yunta also means that energy is supplied by a combination of solar, gas and generator power. There’s none to spare for heating guest rooms, which use wood fires if you’re lucky or hot water bottles if you’re not. Water is heated by an ancient wood-burning stove, which still does it quite well.

Joan, whose family has owned portions of the station since 1882, and her husband Chris, are the best hosts one could hope for in the midst of the Outback. And that’s not including Joan’s pavlova. We arrived full of questions about Outback life and sheep station operations and found our hosts prepared with tours and answers. Anticipating our arrival, Chris had left a little of the afternoon’s work undone, facilitating a tour of the woolshed. We first saw a tremendous pile of fleece sitting a top a table, and were stunned to learn that it was all from one sheep. We also got to meet a few sheep he had kept back for us. Cute animals, but their penchant for urinating at the slightest spook reduces the charm a bit. Meals and tea, shared with our hosts, let us hear of everything from the price of fuel (soaring) to the Open Air College (distance learning for Outback kids.)

Our second day was spent entirely touring the property. As we set out, Chris joked “Living out here, I like to call myself the King of Tonga.” I took the bait and asked, “Is that because the property is as big as Tonga?” “No,” he quipped, “Because it’s bigger.” Chris kept up a lively lecture on station history and the sheepherding business throughout most of the day. Nicknamed “Decimals” by his friends and neighbors, Chris’ discussion took quite a numerical turn at times, leaving our heads spinning. Twenty microns thick, double the price of ear tags, nine hundred dollars a bale at sixty percent yield times how many sheep per bale…yikes! I bet Outback kids do well on their maths.

We explored the ruins of older homesteads, built in the Thirties and left vacant for the last half century. The buildings had been pieced apart, their roofs and walls recycled into other structures by Joan’s father. The Outback climate seems to blow rust directly onto any metal surface, leaving the whole scene picturesque in its destruction. At times, our tour took on the guise of an Australian safari, as Chris and Joan radioed the locations of emus and kangaroos. We were treated several sightings of different kangaroo species, and stunned to find them racing along parallel to us at 40km an hour. On another occasion, the trip turned into a working adventure as Chris raced around the bush trying to muster some wayward sheep with his truck. He apologized for the distraction, but we were delighted by the “real life” sheep herding experience. When else would we get to speed 60km an hour, backwards, in hot pursuit of a sheep?

Beyond any singular highlight, I found the most enjoyable aspect of the tour just the opportunity to tour the landscape. There is no comparison or analogy for the Outback. It is unlike any other desert or plain I’ve seen. I knew any attempt to capture the view would be utterly in vain. The barren red expanses, wrapped with hills that always seemed so far away, speckled lightly with scrub brush and trees, created a tremendous sense of majesty. Riding along in a light rain, I found myself feeling simply blessed to take in such a sight.

Clare Valley

2008-08-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

It is a real testament to the charm of the Old Stanley Grammar School Country House that three teachers were willing to spend two nights of their vacation there. Most of us educators find an almost physical aversion to even the sight of a schoolhouse, historic or not. Built in 1857, Stanley Grammar was a boarding school for country boys for many years. Afterwards, it fell into disuse and then disrepair. Its current owners Frank and Denise, are restoring it to former heights of beauty and hospitality. Original wood is coming to the surface and appropriate furniture is being sought out. Frank and Denise aren’t opposed to a little reality, however, and if they can obtain the agreement of the Heritage Council, they plan to modernize the bathrooms.

Beyond the charm, we stayed here to enjoy South Australia’s Clare Valley wine region. While the grape vines looked barren, the surrounding lushness and lack of crowds made us appreciate the idea of off-season travel. We envisioned a day of biking and tasting along the Riesling Trail, a marvelously located train easement converted to bicycle and foot path. We hired some bikes and made reservations for lunch at posh Skilogallee winery and off we went. The trail itself was lovely, complete with the Aussie-exclusive sight of kangaroos lounging among the vines. Unfortunately, our itinerary also included a turn on Horrocks Loop. The Riesling Trail is flat and comfortable. Horrocks Loop was not. After several steep hills, we found ourselves arriving at our lovely lunch sweaty and late. It took three or four servings of water before any of us even started to have the palate for wine.

After a lazy lunch of recuperation, we finished our loop and returned to the Sevenhills Monastery and winery where we had rented our bikes. The return journey was a little easier and we were able to enjoy several tastings at Sevenhills. While the winery used to be run by the monks, the last brother-winemaker retired recently. Now, as the woman at the counter put it, they are waiting for a winemaker to turn Jesuit or a Jesuit to learn winemaking.

Our first night in tiny Watervale we enjoyed a local restaurant but on our second night we only felt we needed some of the cheeses and snacks generously provided by Frank and Denise. This also gave us the chance to retire to the fire with our hosts, some other guests and an amazing port Frank buys by the keg. He told me it’s only available for locals and for export to Europe, which is probably for the better. Conversation varied from politics to economics, before Denise and another guest suddenly disappeared. Frank explained that Denise had taken her off to read tarot cards. Then he continued to tell us that Denise had a sense for such things and had, on their initial visit to the country house, seen the spirit of a nun surveying prospective buyers. We didn’t take the whole discussion too seriously until a week later, on driving back from the Outback, a transplant from Watervale asked us if we had “seen anything” during our stay!

We would have loved another day in the Clare Valley, perhaps even the chance to visit some wineries by a more comfortable car ride, but we had limited time and the Outback awaited!

Sydney -> Adelaide

2008-08-07T22:19:00.000-07:00

These postings have been a bit delayed by a lack of time and Internet access once we left Sydney. Now we're in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but I'm going to try and set my blog to post an entry a day to catch up.

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Our bodies still in a bit of “travel wazz,” the post-jet lag but pre-acclimation phase that can haunt travelers for weeks, it was remarkably easy to get up at 5:45 and head out to a cab in the cold Sydney dawn. Staying awake the rest of the day was the hard part.

We were up so early to start a tour of Sydney’s fish market an hour later. Fortunately, a free cup of coffee came with the price of admission. As a big sushi fan, the chance to see my hamachi and amaebi in freshest form was very appealing. While, again, I don’t like tours and their demand that you stick with the group, I also recognize that there’s sometimes no other way behind the scenes. The fish market tour took us through the variety of different aspects of the marine bazaar. Most engaging was the auctions, for large quantities a Dutch auction with LCD projectors and digital bidding, for sashimi-grade fish, close inspection and old-fashioned voice auction. We also reviewed a few of the many different species that often appear in local menus, seeing them when they still resembled fish and not just filets, as we walked around the market floor. Then we strolled through some retail shops and out onto the wharf. Unfortunately, by the time the tour ended it was still too early for a fish breakfast.

Amusingly, we were joined on our tour by some visitors from Japan. Tsukiji, Tokyo’s fish market, is literally ten-times the size of its Sydney counterpart. Further, a big fish in Sydney might fetch a two or three thousand dollars, while in Japan a price in the tens of thousands is quite common. At first, the Japanese were simply unimpressed, but when they started to understand how much cheaper the fish was, they were flabbergasted. Tuna for $9.50 a kilo? Tsugoi!

We spent the middle part of our day flying from Sydney to Adelaide, capital of South Australia, to start the second part of our trip. It was an unremarkable journey, save that the pilot reported a delay because of 300 kilometer per hour head winds. That’s 188 miles per hour, for those of you still living in the standard-measure dark ages.

We drove and walked around Adelaide for a few hours in the afternoon. I love random walks in a new city, as lacking a destination or focus frees me to look around. Adelaide’s architecture is intriguing, a tremendous mix of medium skyscrapers with their expected variations on the glass-and-metal modernist theme, as well as the ubiquitous sandstone of older Aussie government buildings, and finally a smattering of frontier-infused streets with covered walkways, iron lattice-work accents, and older or remodeled stone facades now affixed with wooden balconies.

The next day, before getting on the road, we toured Adelaide’s botanical garden. Though diminished in winter and a sudden hailstorm, a chance to see the immense Amazonian lily pads, housed in a remarkable pavilion, made the visit worthwhile. We also stopped in the Haigh’s Chocolate factory for a free tour. Fortunately, a filling lunch kept us from making any indulgent purchases. After that, I took a spin behind the wheel, as we drove out of Adelaide and up to the Clare Valley, it was my first time driving on the left!

Sydney - Day 2

2008-07-29T16:11:00.000-07:00

Tours and museums are rarely the way I like to see a city, but today was full of both and still great.

We started with a walking tour of The Rocks, a part of Sydney rich with history. The tour offered a wonderful sense of Sydney throughout its two-centuries of foundation and growth. We learned about everything from the unique way each convict quarried sandstone to the gangs of late nineteenth century Argyle Cut. Most fascinating was the way the heritage elements of The Rocks, sometimes old structures and sometimes just rocks themselves, are intact and intermingled in a still-functioning part of the town.

Lunch was a bit of refined pub food. A menu replete with meat pies and mash, but cooked with the care and served on the large plate that behooves fine dining. It was satisfying to see such pride taken in what is generally considered a secondary function of a good pub.

A stop in a small art gallery piqued an interest in aboriginal art and we followed it up with quite a review in the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art. While the art form is ancient, much of aboriginal art is impermanent and only recently collectable or collected. Thus it required a conscious effort, post World War II, by the aboriginal art community to present their work to the larger world. The exhibit was almost entirely bark paintings, covering animalia, elements of daily life, and the spiritual world. The docent spoke to a level of symbolism within the cross-hashes, dots and lines, a technical language totally different than western art, that I wanted deeply to understand. Unfortunately, by the time we reached the resource room with books and Wikipedia, we were too tired to really pursue the matter. I also learned that the pointilistic paintings from central Australian tribes are intended to reflect a bird’s eye view of the world, a tiny bit of information that totally transformed my appreciation for these pieces.

Across the water was the Sydney Opera House and the ever-changing weather made it seem a logical next visit. At first I was disappointed to find the opera house not clad in crisp black glass and white tiles, as it seems from afar, but instead brown and cream. But the exterior grew on me, especially as its harmony with the surrounding colors became apparent. At first, the $35 price tag for the tour of the interior seemed to set a high bar, but the trip through three venues and well-presented historical videos left me very satisfied. We actually got to sit in the seats of both the great concert hall and opera theatre. Try finding another way to do that for $35!

The interiors of the halls are only slightly less spectacular than the outside of the iconic structures. The interplay of the wood and concrete, the melding of the domes and arches with the internal rectangular volumes, and the stunningly presented vistas of the harbor and bridge demonstrate a thoroughness to the genius of the building. Inside and out, it was one of those buildings that was simply exciting just to see.

Sydney - Day 1

2008-07-28T15:38:00.000-07:00

Before starting our time in Shanghai, we're spending ten days with good friends in Australia as a sort of belated honey-moon. We'll be visiting Sydney, Adelaide, the St. Claire wine country, and an Outback sheep station. On our way up to Asia, we'll stop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for two days. Laptop in tow the whole way, I hope to keep up a goodly blogging as we go!

We got in to Sydney very early Monday morning, losing the entirety of Sunday as we flew. I'd like to record that the success of our noise-cancelling headsets offered a good night's sleep on the plane and earned me my first "you were right" of my marriage.

Our dear-friends-to-the-end met us at the airport despite the hour. While we knew, rationally, that the Southern Hemisphere is in the midst of winter in July, it was still quite a shock to step into forty-degree temperatures fourteen hours after the San Jose summer heat. We had our jackets prepared but were missing other key items of comfort, like closed-toed shoes. Fortunately, when carrying all your worldly possessions on your back (or luggage cart), seasonal clothes can’t be too far away.

We spent the rest of the day walking Sydney’s city center, which features a surprisingly dense array of towering glass and metal, interspersed with historical sandstone buildings. We stopped first at the old barracks, a building constructed in the early 19th century to house the convicts sent from England. I had wondered if Australia's convict past would be hidden away, it was exciting to see it so frankly displayed. The barrack's self-reflective museum featured an engaging deconstruction of the building, walls that had been chipped in layers to show the transformation of the structure across two centuries of use. We didn’t have time to walk through the whole museum, but were treated to a very informative presentation by a docent in the free gallery. She had a most refined Australian accent and hearing it juxtaposed with a more quintessential Aussie twang forced me to start thinking about the subtleties of dialect even here.

The city’s central park and botanical gardens were our next stop. Staring up at trees filled with large sleeping bats helped me to appreciate that we were really on a different continent, ---we just don’t see those in San Jose. It’s hard to get a sense of real foreignness in a modern English-speaking country, but I’ve heard Australia’s flora and fauna provide it in spades. I hope the bats are just a taste of the exotic animals we’ll see on the trip.

After lunch, we continued our stroll around the city center, including the Queen Victoria Building and Darling Harbor, both clearly tourist draws. Fortunately, the middle of a Monday in winter kept the crowds small. The QVB featured lovely glass and metal lattice work that reminded me of Paris and a friend of London. Sydneysiders are a well-dressed lot and walking through this swanky set of shops and those surrounding it showed the origins. We were very happy to see few typical American stores, though a lot of international brands are here as well as in the US. Darling Harbor was blustery and cold, entertaining us mostly through a “drawbridge” that turned ninety-degrees to allow ships to pass. The engineering display was interesting, but forced us to stand in the cold and wind just a little too long. We also found remarkable that Sydney’s monorail, like that of Seattle and Disneyland, serves almost no functional purpose. Let me know if you've ridden one somewhere that does!

It began raining, first in a “oh, just a little nip” sort of way and then, after fifteen minutes or so, turned towards a full “aww, what the hell.” Umbrellas hadn’t made the 35kg cut and we found ourselves arriving at the famed Sydney Opera House wet and uncomfortable. I was cloaked in a five-dollar poncho that set the guards’ looks askance. We decided to return for a tour and more picturesque perusal of the Sydney icon another day and caught a bus home. Besides, it was four o’clock, in a country where QE2 still graces the currency, thus certainly time for tea.