Long Weekend, Part 3

I felt great Sunday when I woke up and finished reading Freakonomics (which I do not recommend to anyone with strong political or moral views) and a couple of my Chinese lessons before heading to Senses Wine Lounge for their monthly "Shanghai Expat Super Bar-B-Que", which ended up being a great experience. The deal was 100 RMB (about $12.50) for a huge plate of meat (hamburger, steak, lamb and sausages), all you can eat salad bar and a beer or glass of wine; not the best special I've seen here but it was by far the largest crowd of actual foreigners I have run into yet. Around 4:00 I was talking to the bar owner, Mat, when he introduced me to his wine supplier, a 27 year old American guy named Dan and his group of friends. A few drinks with them later and we all headed to dinner at a Japanese restaurant called Yoshima which has ala carte style dishes and was delicious.

It was really great to be around a group of guys who have been here a while but are all from very different backgrounds. Besides Dan, there was Malcolm, a 30 year old French-African guy who has traveled all over the world working odd jobs since he was 21, Steve, who they call Sleaze, also in the wine business, Anthony, a 32 year old from New York who works with a cosmetics manufacturing plant here (that makes, among other things, all the MAC products and a lot of the lipstick sold in the states), and Roger, the old guy in the group at 36, who they call Uncle. The meal was great and it was interesting to hear the experiences and pearls of wisdom from guys whose Shanghai experience ranges from 8 months to 3 years. Around 9:30 we wrapped it up and realizing that we had been drinking for about 6 hours on a Sunday afternoon and evening, decided to call it a night and Dan and I split a cab back towards Changning District.

So it was quite the eventful weekend and today's a little rough to be back in the office when I feel like it should be Sunday, but I'm meeting the guys out for drinks on Wednesday and going to I Love Shanghai on Tuesday to see if the Ladies night lives up to the hype that Jeff was giving it on Friday. Sarah is picking up her kittens after work today and while I'm sorry to lose the companions, I'm fine having my bathroom back and I definitely won't miss the smell.

Long Weekend, Part 2

I slept in Saturday, which did nothing to alleviate the pounding headache that I had and I didn't make it out until around noon after downing some Ibuprofen, a lot of water and playing with the kittens for a while. I had read an article about a new flea market that had opened up downtown in a garden area in a courtyard behind an American bookstore on Changle Road.

I had an address for the place (325 Changle Road) but didn't have the intersection it was close to... a side note, all addresses are given here by the closest intersection and, except for major sites like People's Square and XinTianDi Mall, taxi drivers do not understand addresses, just cross streets... which taught me an important lesson about Shanghai: Never leave home without knowing the exact location of the place you are going. I took the metro to Jing An Temple, a beautiful set of building situated amid some of the largest skyscrapers in Shanghai, making for some pretty extreme architectural differences on the skyline. After touring the temple (which is directly on top of the metro station of the same name... I can't imagine the construction obstacles that created) I checked my map and found Changle Road on it, and started to wander in the direction I figured the bookstore would be... big mistake.

Checking a map in Shanghai and saying "oh, it's only 4 or 5 blocks, I'll just walk it" is kinda like saying "hmm... well, California and Maryland are only like 18 inches apart on this map, couldn't take more than a day to drive that." In other words, idiotic... there's no standardization to the block size here and street addresses are assigned seemingly at random, at one point I was standing in front of 709 Changle Road on my side and across the street the address was 914 Changle Road. So it ended up taking me about two hours to walk from JingAn temple over to the 1200 block of the street I was looking for and then all the way down to 325 Changle Road... oh and it was 96 degrees and really, really humid. I ended up getting to the flea market as it was closing so I'll have to wait for the last Saturday in August to get another look at it, but I did get a nice little workout out of the day so it wasn't a total loss. Needless to say, by the time I made it home, fed the kittens and showered I was in shape to go out for a night on the bars.

Long Weekend, Part 1

So it's been a while since I updated the old blog, and there's a ton to add so I'm splitting it up into three parts. Friday turned out to be a really interesting day with a trip to the Shanghai Racquet Club with my boss and Dr. Moreton to check out the Clinic our hospital runs there. The Club is located about 35-40 minutes West of where I live which puts it way outside the downtown area. It's located in a large development that was/is really popular with Expat families since the American International School, the Shanghai British School and some others are clumped together near the old International airport and a large number of upscale villas and housing developments. It was interesting to see the rest of the city but we had our closest "near-miss" of an accident yet on the drive back and I am now convinced that the drivers here are the worst I have ever seen. I can't imagine rolling the dice with my life like the nutjobs on bicycles do, let alone get on a scooter or motorcycle. There is a total disregard for traffic signals, lane markings and generally accepted "right of way" rules. The only thing keeping the death toll down is that speed limits are much lower and taxi drivers seem to have a sixth sense that lets them swerve to avoid accidents at the last possible moment. Never a dull moment.

After work on Friday I went back to Nanjing Road and exchanged my non-working DVD and the one that was in Russian for new copies and picked up dinner again from the street vendors. This time I hit the crowds at prime meal time and had to wait in a huge line until I realized that, like traffic lane markings, there is basically no respect for the concept of "the line" and people just push their way to the front as best as they can. Once I got the hang of sliding between people and using the "tap on the other shoulder and sneak by while they look the wrong way" move I actually got to the front pretty quickly, grabbed my dumplings and took the metro home.

The bathroom smelled terrible when I got home so I took some time to clean the litter box and sweep up the floor then opened a window and turned the fan on... none of which really helped that much, looks like I may actually need to invest in some incense. Larry called after dinner and I managed to pull myself together and take a really long cab ride over to the bund to meet him at a bar called "I Love Shanghai" (with a heart instead of Love... like I (heart) New York.) The bar's owned by an American named Jeff from Seattle and has only been open three months but has a really cool interior, great drink specials (ladies night on Tuesday features all you can drink open bar for women for 1 RMB... about 12.5 cents) and amazingly knowledgeable, skilled bartenders. We closed the place down around 1 and Jeff took us on a mini-bar crawl to some of his favorite spots around the city and checked out the lights of the bund from the other side of the river. Absolutely amazing architecture facing the river, left over from when the city was divided up between foreign countries and the bund was a part of the "British Concession." Got home late and forgot to drink water, which made Saturday a whole lot of fun... more in Part 2.

Long Thursday, Busy Friday, and A Nice Little Weekend...

Lots to catch up on and so much to do today. Yesterday I had all day hospital orientation and training which was suspiciously familiar to my Meriter Hospital orientation in the morning and then 100% identical in the afternoon (turns out the J-CO accreditation videos are international standards), so I got to sit through the exact same 4 hours (no hyperbole... four whole hours) of hazmat and fire safety and bloodborne pathogens videos that I saw last year. Somehow I managed to stay awake and then walked home and actually timed it (just under 20 minutes, door-to-door) and arrived sweating slightly less than the time before, so there may be hope for acclimation to this ridiculous humidity. As soon as I got home I started the first big cleanup of my apartment to get ready for my first guests in my new place. Oh, and for those of you wondering, I still haven't done laundry, I just went to Carrefour and bought more socks and white t-shirts (gets me to the weekend when I have a shot at getting it all done in one shot.)

So around 8:00 Sarah brought over her two kittens, litter box, food and mini-bed and set them up in the bathroom in the open space under my sink. They're really tiny and pretty cute and fortunately not loud at all... and they cuddled with me on the couch while I watched The DaVinci Code (a solid purchase at 75 cents.) Ended up getting to sleep early after depositing the cats on their bed in the bathroom... and this morning discovered why a lot of people don't like cats: they smell absolutely awful. To be fair, it's the litter box which smells miserable but it was so overpowering I didn't really make a distinction.

After the initial shock wore off it turned out to be a pretty easy cleanup of the litter box... there's something oddly satisfying about using the little shovel with slats to sift out clumps... and once I got the window open and the fan going and took a shower the place didn't smell half bad. Everyone at work suggested I get incense so that's now on the shopping list, but tonight I'm headed downtown to bar-hop on the Bund (the stereotypical image of China with a ton of people on a street between walls of neon signs everywhere) with Larry, my drinking buddy from Seattle, WA. I'm taking more pictures after being scolded by the parents and will figure out how to post them as soon as possible.

Getting to that Point...

That Point being the point where I have to try doing a load of laundry in the washing machine on my balcony. The washing machine does have detailed directions for the many settings... all in Chinese. So we'll see how that turns out after work today. Dinner last night with my marketing coworkers was nice, Sasa's mom served home-made dumplings, but there were a lot of spices and my stomach is not 100% today. I think my jet lag was delayed in setting in, because I was fine the first week but now I find myself constantly tired. After work I'm also going to try and track down "Will's Gym", the closest place to my apartment and the hospital that has a half-decent workout facility. Shaping up to be a busy night and I still need to get to the Bank of China to exchange travelers checks during business hours (which suck... 10am to 4pm if you're lucky.) Back to work for now, but possibly a trip to the Wednesday night ShanghaiExpat mixer at Mallone's bar downtown.

Tuesday at The Office

So work has finally picked up and I now have multiple projects to spend my time on... fortunately two of them, surveying the expat population of Shanghai and advertising the new Sports Medicine clinic, involve me getting out of the office and traveling around the city. Most of the new work was handed my way yesterday but we had an impromptu "Internal Marketing Training" session with the new boss which lasted all afternoon and then finished up this morning when we got into work. All told it was about 5 hours of basic marketing knowledge, or the worst part of Marketing 300, delivered in broken English. That kind of thing has a tendency to make a person want to take a power drill to his head... fortunately my tools are all back in Maryland, so instead I headed to happy hour at Senses instead. Senses is a new bar (opened in October, 2004) owned and operated by a pair of British guys that has become known for its wine selection and has great appetizers. Mondays at Senses, glasses of wine are only 25 RMB (about $3.00) which is a steal given the unexpectedly high cost of vino in China.

Around 10:00pm I started yawning and the owner, Mat, who we were talking to, and Ed, one of the guys who runs ShanghaiExpat.com, called me out and gave me a "wake up" shot called Rough Stuff. Turns out it's Finlandia Vodka that has had chili peppers marinating in it for a while and it tastes great at first, but then heats up everything it touches on the way down... better than any caffeine or energy drink I've ever had. Well, I'm off to my Chinese lesson and then everyone from the marketing department is headed to one of our co-worker's house for home-made dumplings and other various Chinese foods; I'll let everyone know what was on the menu and my first impressions of "The Bund" (the bar area by the big river in the center of Shanghai) next time.

Back to Work

Turned out to be a great weekend, but, just like in college, it went by way too fast and now it's Monday morning again and I have to get ready to go to work. The event on Saturday at Starbucks was small, but it was nice to meet some other foreigners my age. After grabbing coffee eight of us headed to "A Future Perfect", an American-Italian-Chinese fusion restaurant and had a great dinner followed by a solid night out bar hopping until we ended up at Tapas Bar late getting a last round and ordering Tapas (appetizers.)

Yesterday I made it up for the noon ShanghaiExpat mixer at Coffee Bean downtown and saw a couple faces from Saturday but a much larger crowd and a huge variety of nationalities and ages. Whereas most of the younger group from Saturday were either new or had been here less than a year, these were the "senior" members of the Shanghai expat community, a couple of people I talked to, Cameron and Ed, have been here for seven and nine years respectively. Vinh, an Austrailian guy I met on Saturday, and I left around 1:30 for the new "knockoff market" that had its grand opening yesterday since the famous outdoor market was shut down about a month ago in a show of "good faith" on the part of the Chinese in the war on Intellectual Property piracy. Either way, it was pretty incredible to see basically a whole mall of small vendor stores selling anything you can imagine from every designer I've ever seen. I also got to one of the famous DVD stores and picked up five new movies (including two still in theaters) for about $7.50... total. Only one of them ended up not working and in this case it was just that the movie was entirely in Russian, but apparently they have a really good return/exchange program... it's a great country.

First Friday in Shanghai

So there's at least one thing that I now think is pretty universal... people everywhere can't wait for Friday afternoon to roll around. Managed to make it into work on time by setting all three of my alarm clocks (the two I had and the one on my new Cell Phone!) I had my second Chinese lesson which started getting into some of the more difficult initials and finals.

A little background, the pinyin system (Chinese spelled out phonetically using the 26 letter alphabet) uses a combination of 21 "initial" letters and 39 "final" sounds plus 5 tones (high and flat, rising, falling then rising, falling and neutral.) Anyway, lunch was another interesting experience as I went down and had the free meal with most of the other employees. It's called a "Chinese Lunchbox" and it looks like a TV dinner packaging, but filled with rice, veggies, and then some type of meat... plus we had green-bean rice porridge and winter-melon soup. The food is definitely different but on the whole very good.

After work I went straight to happy hour with Alice and Sarah at Blue Frogs Bar and had a quick dinner and rounds of 2-for-1 drinks from 6-8pm. After a quick stop back at the apartment to change we headed over to a music club and heard a Chinese band (from Beijing) play some (apparently famous in China) rock covers and a few of their own pieces. Super crowded and really, really thick with cigarette smoke, the beers were 30 RMB (about $3.75) a piece and it was way to hot for an air conditioned venue... besides that I did like the music and afterward we went to a Taiwanese restaurant and got some really awesome cold noodles and some chicken dish that I couldn't pronounce but really liked. Got to sleep in this morning, which was also great, and now I'm going to get ready and head to my first "Expat Mixer" for foreigners at the Starbucks downtown.

It's A Start...

Walked to work again this morning, didn't get lost, but it was hotter and more humid (I was pretty sure yesterday that if it got more humid it would rain... clearly I was incorrect) so I still showed up to work sweating, but on time... I guess, I still haven't gotten anything that resembles an employee handbook and people come and go at different times in the day. Moving on. I did finally get an assignment this morning that I'll be working on for a while to track down all the health clubs, gyms, sports teams, etc. that expats use and compile a list, then get them to tell their members about the new orthopedic/sports medicine specialist at the hospital. I also get to give my first tour tomorrow... so that should be interesting, as I know some stuff about medicine, less about the hospital and basically nothing about Shanghai in general.

Had my first Chinese lesson with my tutor this morning, and I have a lot of respect for her because I pretty well butchered her language, but she claims my pronunciation is very good and that eventually I will be able to speak conversationally, or at least be understood by taxi drivers. Left work a little early and Alice took me to the big shopping district downtown where she bargained with an electronics store owner for a while and eventually got me a new cell phone for $50. And, the hospital picked up my SIM card and the service! Plus they managed to figure out today that there was a bunch of kitchen gear somewhere in "facilities" (like a warehouse, but instead of being in a separate building and well organized, everything is spread around the hospital where ever it will fit) that I could have and by the end of the day had tracked down an odd assortment and wrapped it up in a bed sheet... if I had tossed it on a stick and thrown it over my shoulder or balanced it in a seemingly impossible way on the back of a small scooter, I would have looked just like a local.

After the little shopping trip I took my first Metro ride, very successful. Other than the horribly over-crowded buses that sometimes don't have AC, the public transportation here is incredible. For 3 RMB (about 40 cents) I got across town to a huge indoor stadium where I met up with Lawrence from Patient Services and Sarah and did some indoor rock climbing... and discovered that I'm a triple threat on the wall; that is, I lack technique, am totally out of shape and have absolutely no grip strength. Fortunately it was super cheap, like everything except booze in this city. Exhausted, so I'm off to bed early.

Long Second Day with a Happy Ending

Today started out with the first twinges of isolation since I got here, I tried hailing a cab for about 10 minutes (I found out later it's basically impossible to get a taxi in the morning) and then got lost trying to walk to work... so not a great start. After I showed up sweating bullets and stumbled through some marketing research in the morning my new boss treated our department (the three ladies, Ava, Sasa and Chunyi and myself) to lunch at a Hunan style Chinese restaurant, my first real Chinese meal. Totally different than anything they serve in the US but all outstanding... the highlights were three different types of bamboo cooked in a spicy sauce (kinda taste like mushrooms) and yu, small fried fish you eat whole (very small bones) that are sweet and crunchy. The ladies informed me that not only can I get free Chinese lessons at work they may also pay for my cell phone service (I find out tomorrow.) I ran into Alice, a 24 year old English tutor from southern California (Asian-American), after lunch and she offered to help me buy a cell phone and showed me a bunch of good places to shop in the city... oh, the big pickup was the "Tourist Map" from Dr. Moreton, the senior Medical officer (and the guy who hired me) which is a big, well labeled map of the entire Pudong and Puxi areas.

After work I started wandering towards the shopping mall Sasa had pointed out while we were at lunch and ran into a woman from the finance department at the hospital that I had seen on the tour, Sarah from Pennsylvania (grew up in Beijing and speaks fluent Chinese), and ended up grabbing dinner with her at a sushi restaurant at the mall. After dinner she was kind enough to take me to IKEA where I stocked up on some key things for the apartment that were missing (trash can, broom, utensils, etc.) While we were there Alice texted her and we ended up meeting her at a massage parlor where I got my first taste of "real" Shanghai. We each got a two hour massage, one hour foot, one hour body, for... get this, $11 (not a typo, ELEVEN dollars.) So all in all a pretty great day, but I need to hit the sack cause it turns out the workday here is 8:30 am to 5:30 pm and I need to give myself enough time tomorrow to walk to work, I'm pretty sure I know the way...

Day Two at the Hospital

So I made it through my first day at the Shanghai United Family Hospital, and I even got to leave early to try and get to the Bank of China (the only place you can exchange traveler's checks.) I used my first Chinese Taxi... fortunately one of the women I work with wrote down the adress for me in Chinese on a little piece of paper, so that helped a lot. I'm working for the marketing department at the hospital, which consists of my new boss (who was hired yesterday, just like me, so things are a little hectic) and three women who have been there at least 6 months. The hospital isn't that big as far as square footage goes, but they squeeze just under 200 employees into the building.

It looks like a lot of what I'll be doing initially is going to be market research... for those of you who are unclear on what that means (like I was until yesterday) it basically involves me, with surveys, out in the city looking for foreigners to get their opinion of health care in Shanghai. On the plus side, I'll get to see the city, on the other hand, my feet hurt from the walking I've done in the past two days and I sweat what I feel to be a socially unacceptable ammount... it's not so much the temperature as the humidity, no... actually the temperature sucks too. Regardless, I need to shower and head off (I'm walking to the hospital today but I'm still not 100% on directions.)

First Day of Work

Well, I eventually managed to feed myself yesterday but only after I enjoyed a nice 36 hour fasting diet to start the trip... and a seven mile hike on an empty stomach around the Chang Ning district where I live trying to change money or at least find a restaurant that took visa (thanks Erica for the suggestion.) Eventually I made my way to what passes for the "downtown" in my area, where the architecture suddenly turns very western and modern, and found the Sheraton Grand hotel, a nice little 27-story five-star hotel where I definitely did not fit in, sweating my ass off and wandering around in shorts and a drenched polo shirt. The hotel also wouldn't let me change money unless I was a guest (rooms start at $240/night) but they did have the famous Braunstube Deli where I stocked up on meats, some cheese and bread, and hiked it back to my blessedly air conditioned apartment.

After wandering around not being able to communicate with anyone (outside of the big hotels, I only ran into ONE person who spoke English, and he was a skater from Ireland) I eagerly started my Chinese lessons when I got back to the apartment... and promptly lost all hope of ever being able to speak it. I did learn how to say dog and cat, but the accent thing really screws with me, even when I hear it spoken, for some reason I can't replicate it... looks like you were right Robert and Mr. Chao. Anyway, don't want to be late for the first day of work at the hospital so I'm off to shower and eat some more bread, meat and water, truly the breakfast of champions.

Made it to the Mainland

Wow... so I'm actually in Shanghai, China now sitting in my new apartment and I finally got the DSL Internet set up. I arrived yesterday after a pretty easy 14 hour flight and cruised through immigration and customs and was picked up by a driver. Issue number 1 (which becomes important later) I forgot to change any money, so all I have is dollars and traveler's checks. About an hour drive west of the airport, we arrived at my building and the driver helped me up with my bags after struggling to figure out the electronic key pad (everything in chinese). My new address is:
Room 1001 Number 5 Lane 188 Shuang Liu Road
Chang Ning District
Shanghai, China

The apartment is really nice, with a full kitchen, air conditioning, TV, phone, internet (took me a day to figure out the PPPoE system and get the password), bathroom, laundry machine, and a big couch in the living room. I have yet to venture outside the apartment so I can't say much about the city yet but there are already small differences that are pretty funny, such as: Light switches press down to turn on, there are no large trash cans, just a lot of really small waste baskets scattered around, and of course I can't drink the water. Also finally managed to get SkypeOut working this morning and called the parents who were much relieved to hear I was okay.

The only real issue I face now is food... I haven't eaten since the airplane yesterday morning so I'm working on a nice 24 hour fast, and I don't have any local money (it's Sunday, no banks are open, except on the other side of the city in the PuDong district) and I have no idea where I am, let alone a restaurant. Wish me luck, I'm headed out.

Done Packing

About 6 hours before I have to be at Washington-Reagon International Airport, I'm finally done packing everything up and am getting ready to hit the sack. I did score a really sweet new digital camera (special thanks to Sean B. and his Circuit City deals) the Canon Powershot SD630, so if all goes as planned I should be uploading pictures from the trip to flickr or shutterfly... I'll link it once I have it figured out. Best wishes to anyone who I haven't talked to recently or wasn't part of the train of well-wishers that stopped by the house today. Next post should be from the People's Republic.

T-minus 4 days

Somebody had a case of the mondays today... and by "somebody" I of course mean "I". Nice little trip to the dentist for a regular checkup ended up lasting an hour and a half as various rotary hand tools were used to drill into my teeth. No one to blame but myself... and the coca-cola company for putting so much acid in their tasty carbonated beverages. Now I'm starting the fun task of packing two suitcases with everything I need for summer, everything I might need for winter, and a bunch of stuff that will probably sit on a shelf in Shanghai like it did in Madison, WI for the past five years (no joke, I have unopened batteries and eight cans of tuna fish from fall semester freshman year.)

One Step Closer

In what turned out to be as smooth a process as I could have dreamed I applied for and was granted an "F" visa for travel to China good for 180 days and renewable twice; for those of you lacking Andy Johnson's math skills, at the most I'll be in the People's Republic for 18 months. I also finally got a copy of Frommer's "Guide to Shanghai" (I always thought Frommer's was made up for the movie "Eurotrip"... evidently I was wrong) and am getting really excited about seeing the city literally transform while I am there as they prepare to host the 2010 Olympic Games. Planning on spending some serious time unpacking the boxes from Madison and figuring out what's going with me for the rest of the day and then eating a great dinner of anything besides Chinese.

A scary thought from the Pennsylvania Turnpike...

It occurred to me as I was cruising along the Penna Turnpike that a few days ago when I rented the 12 foot truck I was driving I was never given any tips or asked if I had any experience driving such a large vehicle... a few minutes later I realized that there were other moving trucks on the road, a lot of other trucks, including a 26-foot version of my own Penske truck. This means that more likely than not there are extremely inexperienced drivers on the road, behind the wheel of 16,000+ pounds of death-mobile. And even scarier is the follow-up thought that there are DISCOUNT truck rental agencies... so not only are these drivers probably first timers, the equipment isn't exactly top notch.

Back in Maryland

I am now officially moved out of the city of Madison and back home in Silver Spring, MD! Thanks to Rick, Peters, Timpone and Link for helping me pack up the 12 foot Penske truck and to Timmy B for diligently watching the truck and grilling some sweet hamburgers on the front porch. My parents flew in yesterday morning and we made it to Chicago before hitting really bad traffic, so we ended up stopping in for the night in Coldwater, MI at the awesome lake home of Bill and Renate Brenneke. Back on the road at 9:00 am this morning and a little less than ten uneventful hours later I was back home... at which time my father decided we (and by that he of course meant Jon, David Spitzer, my neighbor Mimi and myself) should get everything unloaded and into the basement tonight so the local thugs wouldn't get my bags of laundry and IKEA furniture.

I'm out of here in a little more than a week and there's a lot to do but I'm going to try and get in the habit of posting at least once a day. Hope everyone is well and keep in touch.