Weekend Roundup

If you couldn't tell from the epileptic-like frequency of my postings, things have been a little hectic in Shanghai for the past couple weeks. This past weekend I told myself I would slow down, get some good rest, you know, recharge the batteries... instead I kept limping along like I was getting my energy from a car charger plugged into a cigarette lighter in an '89 Volvo Station Wagon. Hmm, that come out more obscure than I intended, long story short, no rest for the weary.

Saturday I woke up disturbingly early and couldn't get back to sleep so I decided to clean the apartment and do a couple loads of laundry in my sucky washing machine. I was on the fence about the big beer festival in KunShan that evening but Larry said he was going and I sucked it up, hopped in a cab and headed over to the apartment where everyone was meeting to get on the tour bus. In the end, the group totaled 36 solid-drinking expats and a really interesting mix of backgrounds. I'm really glad I went as I got to meet some cool new people, had a huge German buffet, and a bunch of beers (and in a throwback to freshman year of college, walked out of the huge tent where we had a group table with two big steins and two pilsner glasses tucked into my waistband.) Most importantly though, I sat next to a couple from Purdue at the table who have a SlingBox! For those of you who aren't tech-geeks, this amazing invention consists of two units, one tucked away back in the states, hooked up to a cable line and an internet connection, and the other, with the subscriber, anywhere in the world they can find relatively fast internet access. Basically, it lets you watch TV like you were sitting in your living room in the states, while living in Shanghai. These wonderful people happen to be huge fans of college football, specifically Big Ten football, and they invited me to come watch games with them on Sundays all season... brings a tear to the eye.

Sunday was a little fuzzy, mentally and physically, I'm guessing due to the large consumption of German beer the night before. I did however, manage to pull myself together and meet a guy who is really good friends with my Dad's cousin's son in Geneva, Switzerland. A bit of a stretch, but John and I had a great conversation over coffee and dinner with his business partner (in international commodity trading.) Made it home and finished watching season one of Arrested Development, which is incredibly funny, before getting to bed a little early in preparation for the next busy week coming up.

Last Week's Highlights

After getting back from QingDao, much of last week was spent working on med school applications and also discussing my contract which was somehow changed without my knowledge. A couple note-worthy events: I got a job offer to move up to Beijing and work with the corporate level United Family Hospital financial officers, helping them with Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 compliance. It's not the most interesting work but it would get me up to see Beijing and the sights around there (Great Wall, Terracotta Warriors at Xi'an.) Also, I mailed off a chunk of med school apps at the FedEx store near my apartment... by the way, mailing four application packets back to the states cost about $100, so that sucked.

Catch up time...

This daily blogging thing gets harder when you have nothing that even closely resembles a normal sleep pattern or day-to-day schedule, so I'm going to try and catch up on last week in two or three posts.

The End of the Qingdao Trip:

Alice and I got a late start Sunday morning but packed in a whole lot of tourism before our flight. Right next to our hotel was the Wusi (5-4) Park which has a huge red sculpture that is supposed to symbolize the five winds that the city is known for (if that last part wasn't so clear it's because I didn't really understand the significance myself.) Walking around the edge of the park we ate at the Bellagio Restaurant (no relation to the Las Vegas hotel unfortunately) and did a lot of souvenir shopping. From the park we hopped on a bus which, for 12.5 cents, took us all the way out to the fairgrounds of the 16th QingDao International Beer Festival. The festival was a lot like an alcoholic state fair with a lot more stages and pavilions. There was a pretty impressive array of carnival rides, which I'm not sure are the best things to combine with over-consumption of beer, and a lot of really good food. After a return to the Bellagio Restaurant (it actually turned out to be really fantastic) we made it to the airport running a little late to find our flight was delayed an hour and a half. Sweet.

The QingDao Trip Part 3

The plan was after walking all day along the coast to get back to the hotel, change, and grab one of the busses that runs from downtown out to the fairgrounds of the beer festival. Instead, we got back and passed out... hard. When I came to, it was dark outside and after fighting through the momentary panic of "oh my God, I slept away the whole night", realized that it was actually just 10 o'clock... which meant it was still to late to make the 40 minute trip out to the beer festival. So, as usual, we turned to our trusty local tour guide, the doorman, who pointed us in the direction of a "fun beer street." This "fun beer street" turned out to be white-guy-no-man's land and the crowd of locals treated me to a nice little walk of shame as I wandered down the street, a laowai (foreigner) with a Chinese girl... at least now I know how it would feel if I picked up a prostitute and wandered into Church with her...

The stares ended up being a small price to pay for the incredible meal we had at a huge outdoor restaurant. Seafood is the QingDao local specialty and we spent a solid two hours drinking beer and picking through mounds of steaming fresh muscles, clams, oysters, shrimp, prawns and fried squid. Very full, we decided to make a return visit to "Feeling", the dance club from the night before, except when we arrived, instead of listening to cool remixes by an awesome international DJ, the crowd was going nuts for a little Asian dude jumping around on stage and singing what I can only assume are popular boy-band-type songs in Chinese. Alice and I watched for a little while but it was sort of anti-climactic so we left the club and wandered down the street to a club called "Babyface" (which is a huge chain in China, there's a really big one in Shanghai and a couple in Beijing.) Besides ridiculously large Long Island Iced Teas, I also got to watch my first bar fight in Asia; let me tell you, they don't mess around like we do in the states with any sissy one on one or "fair" fights... this was a crazy battle royal that started on the dance floor when, seemingly for no reason, a guy got cracked in the head with a huge pilsner glass which shattered and caused a nice massive head wound. I'll save the rest of the play by play but eventually we managed to skirt around the edges of the melee and escape back to "Feeling" where we ended up dancing until about 4am and then cabing it back to the hotel.

The QingDao Trip Part 2

After a late, late night on Friday, I woke up feeling far better than I deserved and Alice and I stumbled downstairs to the large banquet room where the hotel serves buffet breakfast and lunch. It was a pretty impressive spread and I ate enough to put me right back into a food coma after eating that I didn't come out of until around noon. When we finally pulled ourselves together we got directions to the "#1 Bathing Beach"... we discovered after an interesting bus ride there that the number system has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with location from East to West along the coast. As it happens, "#1 Bathing Beach" could also go by more descriptive names, such as: "#1 Most Crowded, Covered-in-Shell-Fragments Beach", "#1 Place to See Asians in Inappropriate or Non-Existent Swim Wear" or simply "A Good Place Not to Go, And If You Do (Sucker), Make Sure You Don't Eat What Looks Like a Hot Dog and is Being Sold For 1 Kuai (12.5 cents.)"

What I can say for it is that "#1 Bathing Beach" is the site of the TsingTao Beer Plaza, which is basically a mini-beer festival and we got some really good kabobs with northern spices and some cold beer, which made me feel slightly better about having been 10 feet from the ocean but having not been able to go in because of the press of naked or semi-naked Asian children playing in the surf. The bitterness continued to fade as we wandered West along the coastline in the general direction of downtown and our hotel and stopped along the way at some of the cities more famous scenic spots. This weekend happened to also be the Qingdao International Regatta and we got to see tons of boats practicing off the coast while we had dinner at a semi-reputable looking seafood establishment.

The QingDao Trip Part 1

So, going back a little, I'll start out by talking about one of those "duh" moments: such as, "duh, there are going to be delays on every single domestic flight in China when the country of 1.3 Billion people has airports smaller than Dane County Regional Airport in Madison, WI (so real, real small... like 15 gates small.)" If the intro didn't give it away, after leaving work on Friday and having a nice Taiwanese meal, Alice and I were delayed at Hongqiao Airport for about an hour. No big deal, except it meant we first landed at about 11:00 pm in Qingdao. There was some brutal negotiations with the taxi drivers at the airport after they saw my white face and dollar signs popped up in their eyes, cartoon style. While Alice yelled at a couple of them in Chinese I wandered over to the huge sign that said "Airport to Downtown Bus" and discovered we could get to our hotel for about a quarter of what the drivers were trying to charge. So we hopped on the bus and started the 45 minute drive into town.

I had been led to believe this was a small, former German colony and port city that we had landed in... I had been mislead. Qingdao is a "small city" of just over 3 million, covering an area roughly the same as Milwaukee, WI. We arrived at our hotel and checked in, changed and then asked the guard/concierge at the door where we might find a fun bar. This resulted in the cab driver he turned us over to taking us to a KTV Night Club (basically a kareoke brothel), and after we politefully declined, taking us to a second, slightly classier looking KTV Night Club. At this point we got out and wandered towards what we guessed was the city center and happened to stumble upon a group of Americans coming out of a huge club called "Feeling." Through the slurred speech, we got the impression it was a good time and headed in to find it was "House/Dance-remix-of-American-songs" night. I tried whiskey and green tea for the first time (actually dangerously tasty) and danced to techno remixes of "West Virginia", the OC theme song, and Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." Turned in around 3:00 am after downing roughly a gallon of water.

Two days in QingDao

Wanted to give a quick post to let everyone know I'm still alive and back in Shanghai in one piece. The trip this weekend was awesome and I'll be posting more about the trip soon as well as a ton of pictures I took while there. For now, it's back to work, as things have suddenly gotten really busy. I'm learning everything I can about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 since I may be relocating to Beijing for a month or two to work on the company's section 404 compliance. I'll definitely post updates as I get more information.

Now I remember why I hate med school applications...

In bed real early last night and felt surprisingly refreshed when I got up at about 5:00 am this morning. Well, for those of you who don't know, I tend to wake up early, but am definitely not a "morning person." Despite this, I managed to have one of the more productive mornings I've ever had as I slogged through the emails in my inbox inviting me to complete secondary applications. As I opened them and proceeded to examine said secondaries, I rediscovered the bane of every pre-med, the "why are you special/why do you want to go to _____/why do you want to be a doctor/why should we accept you?" essays. Plus, as this is my second shot at applying, I get to heap on some variation of the "what are you doing from June 2006 to August 2007/what have you done to improve your application since the last time you applies/why should we take you now when we rejected you once already?" essays to each of the applications. This put a noticeable damper on the morning.

Fortunately, work was a nice respite as I gave tours to a group of very pregnant expatriate women, a couple from Minneapolis, MN, and a really funny woman who somehow managed to keep a running conversation going with me with her four children in tow. I also finally got my plane tickets and booked my hotel for my trip to Qingdao (which leaves tomorrow... lotta pre-planning went into this one.) So I'll be out of touch for a few days as I enjoy the beer festival, many cultural/historical sites and the sunny beaches (which the city conveniently named Beach 1, Beach 2, Beach 3, etc.) Tossing a load of laundry into my ridiculously small washing machine and hoping that when I get back from happy hour my clothes aren't permanently ruined. Have a great day everybody!

Another Tuesday, Another Assignment

I finally got a new job today that is actually a really interesting application of the fact that I'm a white male in Shanghai. Starting Thursday, I will be visiting all of the competing expat hospitals, clinics and dental offices and collecting as much information as possible on pricing, marketing materials and media, promotions, etc. It should be fairly interesting and it sure beats surveying, which is actually going much faster than Dr. Moreton or I thought it would thanks to the school trips. I finished and sent off my first two med school secondary applications today and have received 9 total so far, I'm hoping to have the rest of those done by the end of the week.

Good luck to everyone back in Madison during Move-in/Move-out.

The Shanghai American School Field Trip

This would be a field trip taken by the marketing department to the Shanghai American School that I am referring to. The SAS has two campuses, one in Puxi (translates to "West of the HuangPu river") and one about an hour and a half away in PuDong (you guessed it... "East of the HuangPu river")and as part of the marketing plan, we go out to each and set up an information booth on orientation day for the new students and their parents. If you can follow that last run-on sentence, congratulations, you read at a 12th grade level.

We left extra early from the hospital in a small van packed with information sheets and posters and displays of all sorts only to discover, when we arrived in the auditorium where the orientation was held, that we only had a 3'x6' table to use for the day. This is when I learned an important lesson about the Chinese (or at least the Chinese I work with.) That is, that the Chinese do not handle deviations from plans or routine very well and are definitely not experts at improvisation. Fortunately, I was able to grab my clip board and retreat to the center of the large room to survey while the marketing "team" hurled what I can only assume were profanities at each other. While things didn't go so smoothly as far as the marketing info booth was concerned, I, on the other hand, was rolling in surveys as most parents were more than happy to take a few minutes to talk to a fellow expat while they waited for their children to get back from the school tour (a truly captive audience.) Even better, I found out on the trip back that we have four more of these school fairs in the next two weeks, so I shouldn't have too much trouble hitting 200 surveys and putting that assignment behind me.

I also finally got my gym membership to Will's Gym, in the Maxdo center in downtown Hongqiao (about a 10 minute bus ride from the hospital.) It's pretty much exactly what you get at any other fitness club (or so it seems, I'm sure I'll have some interesting observations after my first few trips.) Well, I'm off to work on a secondary application or two before I head to Senses Wine Lounge for happy hour(s).

One month down already...

A couple exhausting days of surveying, after a really exhausting night on Wednesday at a night club called Mint, had me in bed by 10 the last two nights. When I woke up this morning, I realized that today marks one month since I arrived in Shanghai. It's scary how fast the time is going but things look like they're just going to get busier. After 32 days my AMCAS med school application was finally verified and the first three secondaries arrived by email last night! I'm going to try and get as many done as possible before I leave for Qingdao, and the closing ceremony of the beer festival there, on Friday. For those of you who don't have a guide book, the small port city of Qingdao used to be a small German colony (hence the beer festival) and among other impressive sights is now home to the huge home appliance company Haier (who, coincidentally, made the TV, DVD player, air conditioners, and fridge in my apartment.) I put some more pictures up of Wednesday night: Steph's going away dinner at Crystal Jade and the party afterwards at Mint.

It was interesting being a new guy looking in on friends saying goodbye and realizing that it is a cycle that the expats who are here long-term go through every six months or so when one group leaves and the new batch comes in... really strange dynamic. A dynamic I'm off to be a part of... have a nice Friday night.

Those Brits can really drink...

Got through the tours yesterday and then stopped by Carrefour with Alice to restock on bread, noodles, tshirts, etc. On the way out, I realized I was starving, and had just gotten an invitation from Dan to go to happy hour at Cotton's lounge, so I dipped into McDonald's for the first time in Asia. My low expectations were unwarranted! Not only were my chicken nuggets and double cheese burger identical to the ones I've been eating for the last five years at Wisconsin, they were cheaper too! The whole thing, with fries and a coke was about $3.75, so not a lot cheaper, but considering I thought I would be paying the import premium, it was a pleasant surprise.

Moving on... I got home and dropped my bag before running back downstairs and snagging my first "special needs" cab driver (never a good sign when he checks the map at the first red light.) He managed to actually get lost, I know, because we hit a dead end, and then tried to charge me full price, including the detour mileage! Eventually I got to Cotton's and met some more new people... Steph, a journalism student from London, Jack, who does something with television and is also from London, and July, Dan's Asian friend who works marketing and events planning at the Shangri-La hotel. I had planned on a quick happy hour and a nice early night (had meetings in the morning and afternoon today)... well, you know what they say about "best laid plans..." About an hour later we met up with Laurie (a guy from New Zealand, it's pronounced like Larry) and Larry, the Microsoft guy from Seattle (the two Larry thing gets a little confusing after a few cocktails) at I Love Shanghai down by the river. We also met another Steph there, from London, who became Steph 1 (she was at I Love Shanghai first)... and added to the confusion.

Turns out, one of the British contingent, Steph 2 is leaving tomorrow so it was a big night out and we ended up at the "ultra-lounge" Bar Rouge, located on the top of one of the old buildings on the Bund with a spectacular view out over the river. It did have stupefying drink prices to go along with the amazing views and plush couches on the huge open air balcony. All told, it was a slightly more expensive evening than I planned, but I met some great new people and got an unexpected treat with the trip to Bar Rouge on a night when the balcony isn't completely packed.

The night would have been near perfect if I hadn't gotten "special needs" cab driver number 2 on the way home. Taxi drivers here are rated with 1-5 stars on their cab license (5 being the best) for experience, quality service, years without an accident, etc. This character had ZERO stars... a fact I didn't realize until the driving got so erratic I considered copying down his medallion number... then the pieces fell into place and for the first time since I started taking taxis here, I told the guy to pull over, stop (which involves yelling TING, TING, TING over and over) and let me out. I paid the 15 kuai fare (15 kuai too much) and fortunately hit the jackpot on my third try, nailing a 4-star driver who got me home without further incident. Everyday's an adventure, some just happen to be less life-threatening than others.

Heading to Steph 2's goodbye dinner at 7:00, so we'll see where round two with the Brits gets me tonight.

Tuesday is now Tour-day

I'm not sure what's special about Tuesdays, but for some reason, relocation companies love bringing new expats in droves to our hospital for tours. It's nice, because it means I'm not out in the heat chasing people down with my clipboard only to discover they speak fluent German, and nothing else. On the other hand, I have only been here three weeks so I'm not up on all the details of the hospital (including anything about cost, specifics of getting unique prescriptions, the experience and schools attended by our pediatrician, etc) and it can get a little awkward when I get the occasional curveball question. Fortunately, most people are so happy to hear clear, unaccented English that they don't really mind when I tell them "I'll look into it" or "Let me check on that for you."

Stayed in last night and read a little bit and ended up going to sleep around 9:00... it was glorious, I actually feel well rested and managed to track down the closest gym to my place so I'm headed there after work to check out the membership cost. I'll also try and get some more pictures taken and uploaded, for those of you who don't want to scroll down for the url, it's sterny.smugmug.com.

Still no news on my AMCAS application but I should be right at the top, I've got my fingers crossed that I didn't mess anything up with my transcripts. Off to give another tour in a few minutes so I'll sign off; sleep well everybody.

Nice, laid back weekend

So I really took it easy this weekend, and ended up going to an Indian restaurant on Saturday with about 10 people from the ShanghaiExpat group instead of hitting up the bars early. After dinner we got invitations to the grand opening of a new bar downtown called "The Den" and got nice couch seats plus free drinks. Bowed out of the impromptu bar crawl and headed home early so I could get some sleep and be ready for today's adventure at the famous Fabric Market. It's three huge floors of vendors selling every kind of fabric you can imagine and they'll tailor any piece of clothing you want. As long as you're willing to put some serious time into the bargaining, you can get some amazing deals. The only thing I picked up was two meters of a nice cotton which will eventually be a dress shirt. I did find some really nice material for a suit but it was towards the end of the day and I didn't have the hour it would probably take to get to the price I wanted, or the exact design of the suit I want... but it's not going anywhere, so I'll try again another weekend.

The big news is that I finally found a good website for posting my pictures that I can actually access from China. So this evening, while watching Superman Returns, I uploaded the first batch of photos to sterny.smugmug.com. There'll be more soon, but the upload speed is miserable in my apartment so I could only get so many up in one sitting.

The other big news, which I have been waiting on for about 4 weeks, is that my primary med school application through AMCAS (the American Medical College Application Service) should be verified Monday or Tuesday, at which point I will be able to start filling out the secondary applications for the many, many schools I am applying to this time around. As soon as the process gets underway, I'll start putting regular updates on the blog. Well, it's late and I suspect I have a long day of surveying tomorrow, so I'm off to bed.

Just a quick update

I haven't posted for a few days but I am doing fine, just busy... things at work are starting to pick up and then last night (Friday) after work I went and ate at a kinda sketchy Thai restaurant in downtown Hongqiao... had pork cheek and deep fried spring rolls, one of which had left me with mild nausea for the first time since I got here. Stayed in last night and am feeling a lot better today so I'm going to head out and try and make the expat mixer at Starbucks... more updates soon.

"Would you like to take a survey?"

Me: "Would you have a couple of minutes to share your thoughts on health care in Shanghai?"

Most People:"Piss off"; "No"; "No, f--k you" (in a few languages)

Me: "Thank you so much"; "Okay, well enjoy your day"; "That's really not appropriate"; "You've never even met my mother, why would you say such horrible things?"

So if you can't guess from the examples of my interactions with strangers today, this afternoon I took my first shot at surveying the expat population at XinTianDi about health care. Not exactly what you would call "successful" or "a pleasant experience" or "something I ever want to do again." It wasn't all bad, XinTianDi, the sight where Mao and others formed the communist party in China, is quite a sight and the few people who did agree to be surveyed were pretty nice about it. The other interesting thing is that spending a few hours outside in the afternoon heat and air pollution is a great way to make a person not want to do anything else for the rest of the day... I got home last night, took a shower, ate a little and then passed out watching a movie around 8:00 pm. I'm supposed to go try the same thing at Carrefour, a huge shopping center that caters to expats... at least it's air conditioned, but if things keep going as depressingly as they did yesterday I'm going to have to ask that they toss a valium or prozak prescription in with my tiny monthly stipend. Have a great day everybody.

So work sucked... and then it didn't...

I thought today would be the day where I would finally get to leave the office early and head out to XinTianDi (a nice shopping mall/development in the middle of the city) and find foreigners to survey about health care... but nay, instead my boss called for a marketing staff meeting from 1:30 to 4:00. Okay, so not the excitement I had planned but sometimes the meetings give an interesting look at hospital operations or new marketing gimmicks (like umbrellas with our logo. Alas, wrong again. This afternoon we met from 1:30 to 5:30 to discuss where everyone was with their current projects... ideally, this would have been a constructive and informative meeting... it was not so.

When the discussion went off on the eight or ninth tangent (I think about the proper coloring of the pens we are ordering... clearly a decision for the whole marketing team) and I had finished using my shoe to clean up all the stray marks on the floor around my desk I was finally saved by Dr. Moreton who called me out of the room to talk about how the surveying was going. We ended up wandering over to Brilliance Mall for dinner after work and he agreed to postpone the surveying until the weather got a little more humane and more expats were back in town... happy days! So instead I'll be working with the web developer to revamp the website which is painfully outdated with content almost exclusively about Beijing.

Sarah just picked up the cats, and while they were nice to have around for a weekend, and I was glad to do a favor for a co-worker, I am absolutely, 100% a dog person. Off now to I Love Shanghai for a few cocktails... pictures coming soon, I promise.