Happy Thanksgiving!!

Happy Thanksgiving to my friends and family back in the states! Or, since it's now Friday, more like, Happy Tryptophan Induced Coma Day!

Mom made her train and is settled in Beijing, reportedly enjoying banquets by night and managing to see a sight or two during the day, despite record low temperatures. I'm finally done with an incredibly long week of work, late nights, punctuated briefly last night as a fair number of expats (mostly non-Americans oddly enough) gathered at the Moon River Diner in Thursday night for Thanksgiving dinner. It ended up being so much better than I could have hoped, the company was good too.

I'm headed to Hongqiao Airport in about 15 minutes to hopefully catch my own flight up to Beijing and get some more quality time this weekend with my mother. I also get to work out of the Beijing facility on Monday, which is exciting, since I will be returning to a massive pile of budget work, with no end in sight. Well, except for that whole leaving in April thing, but you know what I meant.

So, once again, enjoy the holidays, sacrifice a credit card or two to the Gods of Consumerism during the after-Thanksgiving sales and wish me luck.

Mom’s Visit Part 1

Other than having to endure the worst traffic I have experienced in Shanghai, everything went smoothly picking up my mom from Pudong International Airport on Friday. Mom made a heroic effort to stay awake and we managed to make an appearance at Scott's birthday party... which also gave mom a chance to meet some of the American expat crowd I hang out with (and watch football games with.)

Saturday ended up being a lazy errand day. The weather was dreary and we got a late start after I struggled to keep up with my mom's routine of morning exercises. We eventually started the day with a stroll down Xianxia Road (the main road in my district) and a trip to the Bank of China to exchange dollars for RMB. After we headed to Carrefour for what I thought would be a quick shopping trip... silly me.

Even with a light drizzle outside, Carrefour was a madhouse and we decided to grab a bite at Sushi Express, a great little restaurant where you sit down and pick individual plates of sushi off of a conveyer belt as they go past. Surviving lunch, we headed upstairs, grabbing lightbulbs to replace the ones that had been burned out since I moved in... no kidding, you know the bachelor lifestyle has gone bad when you won't even buy bulbs. Another floor up and I discovered with glee that the store had recently expanded (doubled) it's already sizeable wine selection... so in addition to the actual necessities (like bread, water, etc) I also picked up a nice mix of red wines recommended to me by the surprisingly helpful and not-snooty French manager of the store. We discovered, to our dismay, that the taxi line in the basement was backed up all the way into the store... ultimately, we waited 45 minutes to get a taxi for a 10 minute ride to my apartment... sweet. After unloading the groceries and cleaning my apartment to "mom" standards, we had a great meal at Micasa, the new Tapas restaurant on Hongmei Road.

Sunday was a long, long day... literally, we walked everywhere. Starting in Old Town in the morning, we browsed the Antique market and made our way to the Yu Gardens, which even in the rain were spectacular. After lunch, we walked up to the Bund and then all the way up the river to Nanjing road and made the impressive walk to People's Square. Grabbing dumplings-to-go from my favorite street vendor, my mom and I headed back to my apartment and enjoyed them while watching "When do we eat?" Mildly ironic.

Monday was slated for an all-day trip to Suzhou and ended up being an all-day adventure in transportation. Because of the rain, it was hard to get a taxi to the Shanghai Railroad Station in the morning and the cab we did finally hail down had a rookie (literally first week on the job) driver at the wheel. He got us nowhere fast, and we jumped ship when he finally got us to the metro station closest to my apartment. From there we rode line 3 directly to the station but missed the 8:20 train to Suzhou. The ticket office signs were entirely in Chinese and the staff spoke zero English. This led to the first of many tests of my blossoming knowledge of the Chinese language... which I passed with flying colors, securing tickets on the 9:00 express train for my mother and myself.

Suzhou is famous for the many gardens and pagodas scattered around the city, an equally impressive number of silk factories, and is the home of sandalwood carving. A tour-guide who picked us up (sketchy) as we exited the Suzhou train station ended up providing all day taxi service and location recommendations, as well as a chance for me to practice more Chinese, for about $10. The whirlwind tour of the town was great and the weather cleared up for most of the day making the trip even more enjoyable... one of the highlights I'll mention was a trip to the Suzhou's first silk factory where we given a tour of the entire production process before being deposited in a massive silk-product store (surprise, surprise.) Impressively, our only purchase was a Hugh Heffner-esque black silk robe for me with red dragons on it. We made it back to Shanghai safe and sound and called it an early night after another long day of walking.

Yesterday morning we finally found the mecca of tourist shopping, the Hongmei Road Pearl City Shopping Center. This eighth wonder of the world has small shops which carry every conceivable intellectual property and trademark infringement as well as small trinkets, a wide variety of silk products and an entire floor of real and imitation pearl jewelry. Mom stocked up on a few gifts but sadly I had to be at work in the afternoon and after a nice dinner with Justin and Nellie at the Uighur Restaurant (it's an ethnic minority from western China... look it up) we packed up and went to bed early again.

After helping my mom meet up with her Beijing traveling companions I endured a truly exhausting day of inventory reconciliation... it was so bad that I am truly looking forward to hours of sitting at my desk with budget work tomorrow.

The plan right now is to grab a flight late on Friday and meet my mom up in Beijing and hopefully catch a break with the weather that would allow us to see the Great Wall and me to check off one of the bigger items on my "China To Do" list.

I finally got sick...

It was bound to happen eventually, and at least it isn't bird flu...

In retrospect, three straight nights of over consumption of ETOH (that's ethyl alcohol for the non-medical group) probably wasn't the best way to boost the old immune system. Either way, after the fun at Micasa on Thursday night, I managed to pull myself together to actually be productive at work and around 5:30 my boss Alex, his girlfriend Ann, Sarah from the business office and I headed to Blue Frog for happy hour. "Happy Hour" is actually three hours, from 5-8 and provides 2-for-1 deals on every drink on the menu... on Friday, that drink was Double Margaritas on the rocks. Tequila is nobody's friend, especially with nothing but a plate of nachos in your stomach, and by the time I stumbled out of blue frog (at 8:30 pm) I was forced to dedicate a large portion of my mental capacity to maintaining my balance and a semi-straight path as I attempted to make a bee-line for the taxi stand. I made it, don't worry, but was at this point craving pizza like a pregnant woman at 36 weeks so called Larry and met up with him at Sasha's for some amazing wood-fired pizza. At home, in bed by 10:30... and by "in bed" of course, I mean "passed out on the couch."

Saturday was boatloads of fun as I had to go into work to fix some issues for our tax auditors all day. I was there until 8:00 when I realized I was an hour late for Justin and Nellie's dinner party. I rushed over and after profuse apologies enjoyed a "grown-up" night of wine and mildly sophisticated conversation. The caliber of the conversation took a rapid dive when Larry and Nathan realized that they both received a truly astonishing number of phone calls on a daily basis, from the same crazy Shanghainese girl, a stalker named Gina. Gina's M.O. is to meet a white guy once or twice, wrangle his number from him and then proceed to call the unfortunate individual as many as 9 times in a 24 hour period (the current record, held by Larry.) The Gina Phenomenon had turned into a running joke between Larry and me and when we discovered that there existed a whole group of guys who were on the receiving end of her unwanted attention, we both nearly fell out of our chairs laughing. As the dinner party wrapped up, we made our way as a group to a club called "Guandi" which I had never heard of before.

There was a reason.

That reason, is that no Laowai (that's foreigner in Chinese) with half a brain goes there, except, of course, the creepy white dudes who can't get laid in the states so come here where the novelty of their skin color and the commonly held misconception that all Americans are rich overcomes their lack of good looks, charm and/or personal hygiene.

Regardless of how out of place I should have felt, the wine from the dinner party and safety in numbers convinced me to give it a chance. I may have mentioned before that the Chinese are addicted to mixing Chivas Regal (whiskey) with green tea. I wasn't blown away the first time I tried it up in Qingdao, but since I wasn't paying, decided to give it a second chance.

Alcohol mistake number two of the weekend (tequila was number one.)

Miraculously, I made it home without incident (Justin was asked to leave after refusing to remove his backpack while imitating an epileptic on the packed dance floor) and was up bright and early the next morning to meet Larry at Bubba's Texas Bar-b-que for the First Annual Shanghai Chili Cookoff. The event pitted 20 teams against each other with the title of "Best Chili in Shanghai" up for grabs. For us mere spectators, the draw was 20 chilis and bottomless beer all day for $12.50.

All-in-all, it was a great weekend, but evidently a little too good, as it left me with the sniffles on Monday, a headache and sore-throat on Tuesday and a full blown, incapacitating head cold by Wednesday morning.

On the upside, I pulled myself out of bed and cleaned my apartment top to bottom in preparation for my mother's arrival in a little more than 24 hours.

The Return of Thirsty Thursday

**Note: This post was written last Friday, but some issues between my computer, the blogger website, and what I'm guessing is the Chinese firewall technology, kept me from publishing it until today.**

After the revelry of the weekend, I needed a couple of days to pull my life together now that I'm going to be heading to medical school and all (I had really started to let myself go the last few weeks while I was waiting to hear back from Tufts.)

Tuesday night ended up being one of the best nights I have ever spent sitting in a small apartment by myself. By some miracle, Jacob's Creek, the cheapest bottle of wine I could find at Carrefour (the French supermarket that is one of the best sources of readily consumable food for expats) ended up being a really great Cabernet... which went surprisingly well with my frozen, pop-in-the-rice-cooker-and-steam dumplings. I made a serious dent in Mount Laundry, which had become too conspicuous to ignore as it towered ominously about a foot above the end of my bed, and also watched one of the better movies I have seen since I've been here, Thank You for Smoking. I highly recommend the movie as well as the combination of red wine and pre-cooked, frozen dumplings.

At work on Wednesday morning I got an email from Justin the New Zealander inviting me to the grand opening of Micasa, a new tapas (that's Spanish for appetizers or snacks or something) restaurant and bar, on Thursday night. The grand opening festivities included free food and drink (wine, beer and liquor) from 6 to 10 pm... needless to say, I was excited.

The event was all I could have hoped it to be! I met Justin and Nellie inside where they had ideally positioned themselves, standing about 10 feet from both the bar (far enough away to avoid the crowd, but close enough to get rapid drink refills) and the door to the kitchen (from which poured a seemingly endless stream of waiters carrying trays of tapas.)

I got drunk. Work on Friday was difficult.

Celebration weekend and my first visitor

The workday on Friday seemed to fly by, which is probably due to the fact that I spent most of the morning letting everyone I've ever met that I had finally been accepted to medical school, and around 5:00 I got a congratulatory text message from Jeff telling me that he was throwing a party for me at his bar to celebrate... I was amazed at the number of recent college graduates there are in Shanghai (most teaching English) that came out of the woodwork with about 6 hours notice at the mere mention of "Beirut tables."

For those of you slightly distanced chronologically from the college crowd, Beirut is a very popular (and often highly competitive) drinking game in the states which involves teams of two throwing ping pong balls across an eight foot table in an attempt to get the balls into your opponent's cups of beer, which are arranged in a "10 pin" formation.

Jeff and I ended up going undefeated all night, and I woke up with a much deserved hangover on Saturday. The celebration continued as I recovered slowly on Saturday and included such celebratory activities as watching Season One of the British version of The Office and... um... ordering pizza. It was way more fun than it sounds.

In the evening I headed to the Moon River Diner and had steak and eggs and then headed to the Bund to meet up with Megan Kahn, one of Miguel's coworkers at the consulting firm he works for in Boston. After a delicious, but ridiculously expensive Mango Mojito at Bar Rouge, we made our way to I Love Shanghai and had a couple more cocktails before heading home early.

Ahh... that's a lie. I just said it 'cause it sounded responsible... Megan headed back to her suite at the Marriot around 1:30, my night turned into poor decision Saturday, which I realized around 4:30 am when I found myself sitting in an absolute pit of a bar called Windows Scoreboard, debating the merits of French Fries versus Onion Rings with Jeff. We'll just call that the low point of Sunday instead, which works, because Sunday was awesome!

I inexplicably felt (and looked) semi-human when I woke up at 9:30 with 4 hours of sleep under my belt and took a cab over to the Bund to meet up with my tour guinea pig, Megan "very understanding of her tour guide's utter lack of knowledge of the city he lives in" Kahn.

The day turned into a shopping adventure, punctuated with a great meal at a Uigher (ethnic minority) restaurant for lunch and occasional factoids pulled from Frommer's Guide to Shanghai. Eventually we found ourselves in "Old Town", a section of the city I had never even heard, and picked our way past some of the most garish faux-Chinese architecture (that's right, faux-Chinese, just imagine how bad that is) to discover a great antique market where we picked up some gifts and I made the purchase of my life, a little something that will be with me for the rest of my life. When I figure out a name for it, I'll let everyone know, and post a picture. Until then, consider this a little suspense, you know, something to keep the readers interested... make it a little more real.

By the way, did I mention I got into med school??

I GOT IN!!!!

I'm in! I got accepted to Tufts University School of Medicine for the class of 2011!

Last night I was a little stressed out after not getting any information from the assistant dean of admissions when I called yesterday so I did what any normal person would do, I had a few glasses of wine... which put me out like a light around 9:30 pm. At 4:30 am, I woke up to find:

Dear Joel:

Congratulations! It is my honor and distinct pleasure to inform you that the Committee on Admissions has selected you for admission to the traditional M.D. program at Tufts University School of Medicine for the Class of 2011.

You have been selected amongst an exceptionally qualified group of applicants to become a member of the Tufts Medical Family. The Committee on Admissions was very impressed with your academic success and personal attributes. We realize that you may have several other medical school offers; however, we hope that you will strongly consider TUSM as your top choice.

You will soon receive a more detailed letter from Tom Slavin, Director of Admissions, via the U.S. mail that will provide you with specifics on the admissions process and instructions for responding to our offer.

Again, I wish you congratulations on your future career in Medicine!


Sincerely yours,


David A. Neumeyer, MD
Dean of Admissions
Tufts University School of Medicine

So I got that going for me... which is nice. I'm giddy, and it's 6:30 in the morning, and now that I'm headed towards a career in medicine I figure I should start being a little more responsible. So... instead of popping open the bottle of champagne I have chilled, I'm actually going to go to work and then celebrate after. Shocking, I know, but then, I'm going to be Dr. Sternbach... in like 5 or 6 years.