Palm Springs - Capital Retirement

So this story starts on Thursday last week. I was bored and Trish was only back on Friday so I had a Thursday evening to kill. Fortunately, Rachel wasn't busy. So we eat supper and decide to go watch Terminator Salvation. We guilt trip Adam into joining us. I mean, dude, you're not working so bedtime doesn't mean much!

So Adam joins us, we meet at Century 22. Now the name would have me believe that they have 22 screens there to show movies. That assumption would be wrong though. They have 1 screen. They have 3 theaters though, Century 21, 22 and 23. I think 23 has 2 screens. Anyways, I wasn't there to watch the theater, I was there to watch the movie.

During the movie they mention Bakersfield and show a bombed out desolate little place. Rachel leans over laughing and she says "It looks just like the real Bakersfield". Funny thing is, Trish and I are headed to bakers field on Saturday. So we watch the rest of the movie. After the movie I'm a little hungry, so we figure we'll hit Jack in the Box. I've never eaten at Jack in the Box, and I figure I should try all the US fast food chains while I have the chance.

We get to Jack in the Box, but it's closed. Well the drive-thru window is open, but we want to sit down. Why do they call it Drive-thru anyways? Thru is not a word. Would people get confused if they wrote it Drive-through, would they not know what a "throw-ugah" is or something. Are people that dumb that "through" has to be shortened to "thru". If we're gonna put stupid signs like that up, we shouldn't complain that kids can't spell worth shit. That reminds me of the movie "Idiocracy" hehe "Would you like a big ass fries with that?"

So anyways, Rachel says that she knows a place... the Mini Gourmet. So we head there. This place reeks of class. The bathrooms are outside and they're coin operated, but not any coin, they give you coins inside that fit in the hole for the toilet. Interesting. We go in and get a seat. Normally diners and greasy spoons are cheap, but hey, when you own the only place that's open past midnight you can jack up the prices. I wonder if they have a late night menu and a day menu. The same menu with different prices... who knows.

We're feeling cheap, so we split a sampler platter. Ten bucks of deep fried goodness. Well, the zucchini sticks were ok, the mozza sticks I'm told were edible. The onion rings were tasty but there wasn't very many and the jalapeno poppers were so awesome that Adam almost spat it out on the table. So really, we woulda been better off taking a bit longer and going to taco bravo or something.

Let's skip to Friday, I work, eat, wait around and go pick up Trish at the airport. Trish is jet lagged and tired so she's not the happiest camper. Also her bags are laced with lead or something, cus they're crazy heavy.

Saturday, Trish wakes up early (still jet lagged), I don't cus I'm like that. We packs and take off for Bakersfield! Woo vacation. So we drive for four hours to get to a piss ant town that pretty much looks like Bakersfield in the movie. With less explosive goodness. Which made it kinda dull. We got some sleep and ate breakfast at Carrows and then hit the road. A few hours later we make it to Palm Springs.

American drivers are in some ways worse than Chinese drivers. Chinese drivers worm their way in a very illegal and dangerous fashion towards their goal. But they are aware of their surroundings. American drivers are oblivious. They love to drive in the left lane, doesn't matter that people are passing them on the right, or zooming past them as they joy ride in the fast lane. It doesn't matter to them if people behind them are going crazy or whatever, who cares, they're driving along in their lane. Then the guys passing them are no better, they swerve around like idiots, cutting off big rigs, or squeezing into tiny spots. If they cause an accident and they aren't part of it, who cares. Americans are self centered drivers (maybe I coulda left the word drivers out, but whatever). Oh and for all you Americans reading this, I know I'm generalizing, but some of you are guilty of this very thing, so whatever.

We get to Palm Springs and the first thing I notice is that downtown is less than impressive. We find the resort (Telenav missed a turn... who the hell works on the merging... oh right, me). We check in... how many towel cards would you like? WTF? Towel cards? So you get these cards that you trade in at the pool for towels, then when you're done at the pool, you trade the wet towels back for cards. If you don't have the same amount of cards when you check out, they charge you $10 per card. Who the hell came up with this plan? So stupid. She tells me that for a one bedroom place I can have 4 towel cards, so I say I'll take 4. I then have to sign a paper saying I got the 4 cards, but the paper clearly states that you can only have 1 card per person. So apparently my two invisible friends can have towels too, cool. Then she asks how many room key cards we'd like. I say 2, so she says "Ok so I'll give you 3". They have one of the power saver key card things, you have to put a card in the wall for the power to work in the room. So she gives me an extra card to put in the wall, so I never have to take it out. Sound plan, right, leaving the card in the wall clearly saves power. Also the card does not control the kitchen or the AC, so the dishwasher and fridge still work without the card, as does the AC. Interesting.

So we get to our room, it's pretty nice, they say it's like a 5 star hotel, it's not. But it's still good, probably between a 3 and 4 star. No everyday maid service though, but you get a full kitchen and a mountain of towels. So everything is cool. At this point we decide that neither of us want to cook anything, not that we really have anything to cook anyways, so we're better off going to eat someplace and then grabbing some food to cook.

Trish finds an all you can eat sushi place that looks pretty good, and with our room card we get a 20% discount. So we head there... I don't remember the name of the place, mostly because that's what I do; forget the name of places or people. So we get there, and we grab a seat at the sushi bar because we'd have to wait for a table otherwise. Turns out that the sushi bar was a cool idea because the sushi chef asks us right away what we'd like to eat. So I order just a couple of pieces of salmon and a couple of pieces of tuna. The fish was really good. Now here's a question... where do you get fish from when you're in Palm Springs. I mean, there's no water anywhere. The town is pretty much an artificial oasis in the middle of the desert.

Anyways, we eat some good sushi... the fish must have been frozen on the ship and flown in to Palm Springs pretty fast cus it tasted pretty fresh. We head to Ralphs grocery or something like that. It's a Safeway, you even need a "Ralphs card" or something like that. I understand that people want to get some data mining information out of my purchases, but how relevant is tourist purchases to these guys? I mean I bought eggs, bread, orange juice and premade salad. I assume that my purchases will fit right in with the demographic of what normal people buy at 9pm on a Sunday. Yup, everyone buys that on Sunday night.

So we head back to the ranch, and put our food away. We were gonna go for a late night swim, the pool closes at 10, but we were tired so we just went to bed. Trish still had some of that awesome fun jetlag stuff! Woot. Due to said jetlag, Trish woke up really early and decided to make breakfast. She made eggs and dirty rice (that's rice with beans in it, get your mind out of the gutter). Monday was gonna be our day of slacking.

So we head to the pool for a swim after breakfast. I'm crazy pale and my arms don't match the rest of me, so I tried to even out my tan. We did kinda notice that there weren't very many attractive people there. You had a good selection of jailbait or old people, almost nobody in our age range. Tons of kids though. You gotta wonder why everyone wants kids. They look cute when they're babies, but they cry. Then you wait for them to become interactive, but once they hit "interactive" mode, they cause trouble. Then they get older and move on to the "know-it-all" phase and well, that's even worse. And by the time they're reasonable, they're moving out. I was a kid once, I realize how much trouble I caused my parents... well I guess if everyone thought like me, we'd be extinct by now.

So after a little bit of sun and fun at the pool, we head out to meet Trish's Lola (grandma) for lunch. Now this lady is around 80 years old. She's crazy short, maybe 4'10" on a good day. She made Trish look tall. But she seems to be in really good shape and really active. When I'm 80 I wanna be that active (or more active). She lives in Palm Springs (along with most of the retired population of the US) because it's warm and dry. Humidity and cold make her bones hurt or some such. She'd love Ottawa in the winter, that's for sure!

We head downtown, because she doesn't really know the restaurants around, she's more of a cook at home or go to Denny's type of girl. Downtown is small and not very exciting. Most of the outdoor patios have mist things that make a cloud of mist overhead. I guess it keeps people cool, but it pretty much evaporates right away so it never hits your table. We went to the Fisherman's Market or something named kinda like that. We look for someone to seat us, don't see anybody, ok... no problem. We grab a table and sit down. After a couple of minutes of wait, a waitress stops by. "Is this your first time here?" that obvious huh? "You have to go in the other building, order your food there and pay for it, then tell them your table number and then we'll bring the food out to you." Ok simple enough, but the menu's are in the other building too. Thanks lady, you were no help at all.

So I go grab some menus, most of the conversation is in Tagalog anyways, so I have no clue what's being said anyways. I come back with the menu and we start looking through it. Half the stuff has no price, cus it's seasonal or some shit like that. Everyone makes their selection and since I'm the honorary waiter, I head to the other building again. I walk in the "Exit only" door because I can't see the entrance door. The first time nobody noticed, but this time I totally freak out some poor kid. He's all "can I help you sir?" with a confused look on his face. Like it's the first time some tourist totally ignores their rules and walks in the out door. I look at him and calmly say "I'm here to order some food." The guy looks at me and then the light bulb goes on, "Oh, you have to line up here!" No duh kid, maybe you shoulda stayed in high school and improved your social skills. Or at least learn to fake like you know what's going on.

So I line up to order some food, I thought it was a long line, but it turned out to be one group of 8 people who were not organized enough to pick what they wanted to eat before heading to the cash register. It did take a while seeing as they had to ask each other what they were eating and then tell the cashier type chick. As if she didn't overhear your long drawn out conversation. Once those guys were out of my way, I order some food and head back to the table. Trish and Lola (I'll keep calling her Lola which means Grandma in Tagalog because I've forgotten her name). Anyways, Trish and Lola were chatting away in Taglish and assumed that I would understand. Thanks, really... throw in one or two English words every now and again and clearly I will understand everything.

Lunch was pretty fun though, Lola is pretty nice. I don't know that I would hang around with her in my spare time, but I'd visit her again. After lunch we dropped Lola off at home, she invited us to come up to her tiny apartment. We looked at some pictures for a bit and then took off. We headed back to the hotel and decided to hit the pool again. Like I said, Monday was to be a lazy day. This time there was a few good looking girls, and possibly guys if I'm to believe Trish, but not too many. Still mostly kids.

We got some sun, then Trish cooked some pasta. Supper was good. I wanted to head out for a walk, but Trish was tired. She went to bed, and seeing as I had nothing better to do, I went out. The adventure started with my keycard not working for the pool area. It kinda sucked because I wanted to see the pool at night, well up close anyways. Instead I got to see it from 20 feet away. I walked around, and there wasn't much of anything that was interesting. A few couples making out in the pool (I hope they clean it in the morning). A few workers cleaning out the trash and that was about it. I saw a couple rabbits, no hat-trick of rabbits though.

The next morning Trish and I went to the pool again. Huge difference, I guess the kiddies were just there for the long weekend. This time it was mostly adults (mostly old adults but whatever). We got a bit of sun, took a little swim and then headed in. We packed and left. We stopped by some outlet malls, huge place, lots of stores, I bought two pairs of shoes to replace the pair I had that was full of holes. Then it took us about 8 hours to get back home, traffic was light, drive was smooth, etc etc.

Now that I've been to Palm Springs I don't feel the need to ever return. I mean, it's nice and hot and dry. And well, there's nothing to do there really. Some people might argue that you could take the tram up the mountain. Woop. I'm sure it's nice and beautiful. But if I'm gonna go on a vacation someplace, I don't want to have to look somewhere for entertainment, I want it to be thrust upon me. So maybe Mexico will be better. Swine flu aside, I hear it's pretty cool.

Shanghai Return - the flight home

Well, this will be the last entry on my trip to Shanghai, seeing as I'm back home now. The day started when I woke up. I guess the day really started with me sleeping, but for me, it started when I woke up.

I grabbed breakfast at the hotel today, same old same old. I had some meat dumplings and some fruit. I smiled at the cute waitress that's always there. I think I saw her in the "lady club" a few days back, but I can't be sure. Most of these Chinese women look similar to me. I could probably just bucket them into a few categories based on body type and face shape. In any case I didn't get a good look at the girl in the lady club cus I tend to avoid looking down the hall for too long. They seem so excited to see a guy walking towards their door, it's kinda creepy. Who knows what kind of massage they give there.

Anyways, I'm not sure the cute waitress understood that when I said goodbye, I really meant goodbye. I never said goodbye to her before, I just said thanks or xie xie. So maybe she clued in. If not she'll clue in after a couple of days of me not showing up. But really, who cares, I don't even know her name.

I head downstairs with all my stuff and check out. The bill was a staggering 5670 rmb. Roughly $850. Once that's done I ask the bellhop type dude to order me a cab to the airport. He says, in a horrible English, that it'll be 10 minutes. Ok, no problem, I have lots of time. I have lots of time you see because my stupid plane is delayed until 4pm. I called the airport just before checking out from the hotel. The airport says that I should still check in at the correct time, but I could call back at 10am and see what the latest time to check in is.

That's very sweet of them, giving me until 10am, but here's the problem. The plane leaves at 12:25 normally, that means that I have to check in by about 10:30. It takes an hour to get to the airport. So if, miraculously the plane is fixed and I call at 10, and they say oh yeah the latest you can check in is 10:30 or even 11, I'm screwed. So I got a cab.

The cabby was late, like 20 minutes late. Dude told me 10 minutes, so I sat in the lounge area. Some dude was chain smoking in there, but the ceiling is really high and the air flow was such that the smoke never reached me much. It smelled a little like cloves. Chinese cigarettes smell bad at the best of times and downright horrible most of the time. This was the first time I smelled some that smelled like cloves, which is still horrible mind you. This guy was sucking them down as if they were better than air. He also had a rattling cough that sounded like some cancerous tumors had gotten loose in his lungs and were jingling around. All in all, really gross.

Now I coulda handled 10 minutes of this guy, but 30 minutes was pushing it. There I was sitting in a leather chair that was huge, so huge that it made me look small. I swear you coulda fit at least 3 Chinese guys comfortably on this chair that looked like it was built for just one really really big guy. Smokey the bear was a couple of couches away in another section, so that was ok, but his cough rattled the whole building. So I look at him put out yet another cigarette and I see that he's stubbing them out in one area of the ashtray and then lining up the butts in another area (it was a big ashtray). What kind of OCD person lines up cigarette butts in an ashtray? Crazy chain smoker guy, that's who. He musta had 8 or 9 lined up already. So I go ask the bellhop dude and he struggles with his English some more. "The cab called and he said he was stuck in traffic, should be maybe some more minutes."

How long is "some more minutes"? Long enough. The cabby shows up and he's trying to apologize, but it's really hard to understand what he's saying cus he doesn't really speak English. He was making the funniest gestures though, arms flailing all over. After we get my stuff in the cab, I hop in and he drives off. The bellhop had already asked me which airport so I knew we were heading to the right place (I hoped). The cabby gives me a menu, and says something like "to help you". I look at the menu and it's a selection of airlines. At first I didn't see United Airlines on there. Turns out that the symbol for United was printed in grey instead of colour, even though other airlines had colour. Odd. So after reading each entry on the menu individually (they weren't sorted alphabetically), I point to the United symbol and show it to the cabby. He nods and stores the menu.

Off we go... well really we had already been driving for 5 minutes at this point, but whatever. The cabby is a mad man, he's swerving in traffic, cutting people off, fitting his car where it should never fit and honking like mad all the way. We get onto the freeway, he starts speeding, where the hell is my seat belt. Righto, no seat belt. The cabs have seat covers, big white form fitted sheets that go over the seats. This makes the cabs look nice and cleanish. The downside is that they cover the seat belts. Well, that would be the case if the cab had seat belts. Apparently this VW didn't come equipped with rear seat belts at all... who needs those anyways? Right?

So, we're going breakneck speeds down the freeway, cutting off at least 2 people per minute. He's gotta keep his racing license by cutting people off or something. In North America people complain that the jerk in front of them cut them off when the car in front of them comes into their lane with less than about 5 meters between the two cars. This would be a regular or careful lane change in China. Cutting someone off in China would be regarded as driving someone off the road in North America. Cutting someone off consists of starting to change lanes once your driver's side door has cleared the front bumper of the car next to you. Yes, this means that if the other driver stays his course, you will hit him. Mostly people slow down and let you cut in front of them. Otherwise they honk. And if you speed up fast enough you can cut them off even if they honk. I've even see people force other people to change lanes. Basically this is done by changing lanes into the other car when you're right next to the other car, just honk a few times and change lanes. If the person next to you can change lanes, they will. Otherwise they honk back.

Now if you follow my driving directions in China and you get in a car accident, injured or killed. Don't blame me. It's your own damn fault for driving in China. Are you stupid? You can't drive in China, take a cab. On with the story. We get stuck in traffic, dude is swerving around, weaving in and out of lanes, almost getting crushed by a huge truck in the process. The trucks there don't have trailers. They're more like the U-Haul rentals with the box top cut off. Everything is bungee corded to the truck. I saw some Inflatable Sporting Goods boxes strapped down to a truck. Nondescript brown boxes, with "Inflatable Sporting Goods, Made in China" printed on the boxes. So, according to this, if you see a beat up brown box containing the item that you're about to purchase, the dust covering it may have been accumulated on a Chinese highway. Interesting.

Finally we're out of the traffic. We must be going 100 miles an hour (that's 160kph) and I don't have a seat belt. The airport is still 10km away. No big deal I have lots of time and this guy is driving at mach two. Finally he points to his wrist, on which he has prayer beads, not a watch. I guess he never met the watchbag guys. Anyways, he clearly wants to know if I'm late. I give him a thumbs up, and a no worries hand wave (or at least, my best interpretation of a no worries hand wave). Dude gets the message and slows down a little. Ok, so, he was risking both our lives (he wasn't bothering with a seat belt either) because he thought that I was late for my flight. Hmm... if only I spoke enough Chinese to say "Don't drive like an idiot, I have plenty of time."

At the airport, he runs off to get me a luggage cart, I check the meter, 235 rmb. No big deal, I've got enough cash. That's a $40 cab ride for over an hour and something like 50km of travel. I pay the man, thank him and head off to the check in counter. Pretty easy to spot, it's the one with the giant line. Turns out that because of the delay, the check in agents are having to reschedule people's connecting flights. And so the wait begins. Took about an hour to get checked in. There was one couple who had something like 13 bags and 6 carry-on bags. When they got to the front they were each pushing two luggage carts, the check-in lady made the funniest face. It took then a while to check that guy in, but I was keeping myself amused watching propaganda so it was ok.

So China might look like a capitalist country most of the time. Everyone is trying to make a buck, everyone works whatever job they can find, just like the old US. But TV is where the government shines through. On TV, apart from the talk show which I didn't understand, there were these public advisory messages. I didn't understand the messages either, but I could follow along with the cartoon. They had a cartoon little girl going to a newspaper stand and at the stand there's a Mexican looking guy (nobody said they had to be PC in China). The Mexican has a red forehead signifying that he has a fever, and he coughs all over the newspaper and then gives it to the little girl. At this point a giant red X in a circle pops up. Don't accept newspapers from feverish Mexicans right after they coughed on them! Then we follow the Mexican and he coughs into a tissue (ding) and then he throws the tissue out in the trash can (ding) and then he washes his hands with soap (ding). Then the Mexican and the little girl are wearing face masks (ding), and some Asian lady shows you how to put on a face mask. Then everyone is happy and nobody has pig sickness! Yeah ok, so swine flu never really caught on in China. They have a hard time translating it. The funniest translation I heard was pig sickness. Take that Obama and your quest to keep the pig farmers happy by calling it H1N1. It's pig sickness! Hahahahahaha.

Ok so enough propaganda for one day, I'm checked in and they give me a voucher for an 80 rmb meal, but it's only usable in one restaurant in the whole airport. I get to the security place and make sure that the restaurant is passed the security post. I wouldn't want to cross security only to find out that my restaurant voucher is only valid on the side I was already on. So security in China is a little less paranoid than in the US. They don't make you take off your shoes. They had me step up on a little podium after the metal detector and they fondled me with some weird wand device. Unlike the large bars that look like oversized knives that North America uses as a hand held metal detector. The Chinese use a thin wand that ends with a big hoop about 6 inches in diameter. And instead of waving it over you, they kinda prod you with the hoop and rub it all over your clothes. Great. I hope whoever was prodded before me didn't have cooties.

I get to the departure gate and it turns out that the restaurant with the voucher is right next to it. Hope Star it's called. I roam around, the place is huge, vast open, and has a wavy roof. Pretty cool architecture. In the true Chinese fashion, there's windows open at the top, probably cheaper than AC or something. Anyways, it was pretty comfortable in the airport, not too hot, definitely not too cold. It probably just felt not too hot because everywhere else I ever went in China was way too hot.

So after roaming and looking in the shops I go and get a seat at Hope Star. The place is crowded, it's the only crowded restaurant in the airport. People probably think it's crowded cus it serves good food, but that's not true. It's never true in airports. Normally you can judge a restaurant more or less accurately by how busy it is, but not in an airport. How many locals eat at the airport passed the security check? That's right... NONE. The reason this restaurant was crowded is cus people had free vouchers! Eat at the other restaurants, I'm sure their food is equally as crappy.

I ordered the unagi meal and a sprite, came out to 109rmb or something. 20 rmb for a can of sprite that is less than 2 rmb in the corner store. Anyways, I settle in for a long wait, but hey, the seats are comfy and I have a book. The guy next to me keeps asking the waitress where his food is, and she keeps saying 5 minutes. She probably told him 5 minutes for half an hour until finally the 5 minutes was accurate and the food came out 5 minutes later. The two ladies on my right waited about 40 minutes then told the waitress that they were late and had no more time, they had to go catch their flight. The waitress apologized, refunded their money, cancelled their meal and they left while muttering probably something bad. It's your own fault ladies, why did you sit in the busiest restaurant in the airport? There another restaurant about 20 feet away that is begging for people to eat there.

It took about 50 minutes for me to get my food, I got a few chapters read. The food was so not worth 100rmb, it wasn't even worth 20rmb for China standards. But hey, you're in an airport, gouge the tourists! So I eat my crappy meal, I had to ask for my soup, and I never got my desert, which didn't matter, it was dairy anyways. So I finish my food and keep reading. I probably sat there another hour and nobody bugged me. Finally I took off and headed for the bathroom. Fancy bathroom, with hand dryers! woot.

So I read some more, and checked out the shops. I got Trish a present cus it was so cute. It's a little stuffed panda, it's round like a ball, really cute. Hopefully Trish doesn't read this before she gets home, but whatever. Then it was about 3pm, and the lunch had been not filling at all so I was still hungry and I had 30rmb burning a hole in my pocket. I asked the lady what time the flight would board and she said about 3:30, so I had time. I went upstairs to Burger King. The price was the same as anywhere else (almost) it was probably just a couple of rmb more than normal.

I grab a whopper junior combo, pretty much the only meal I can afford. It tasted almost exactly like a whopper junior combo in the states. That was a little creepy. How come Burger King and McDonalds can clone their flavours in China when nobody else can? Cue Twilight Zone music. Anyways, that was tasty, and filling. Better than the 100rmb meal at the other place. Stupid ladies shoulda come here, they woulda gotten their food immediately and it woulda been better.

So the flight is boarding, I line up, and I head to my seat in the plane. There's an old lady sitting in my seat. I tell her that's my seat, she looks a little insulted but gets up and moves over. Then by the time I have my bags in the overhead bin, she's already convinced the guy at the other end of the row (I had an aisle seat in the middle section). Anyways, she'd already convinced the guy to let her have the isle seat. So the guy sits down next to me... for such a small Chinese guy, he took up a lot of room.

The flight was long. I watched Marley & Me or whatever that movie is called. I missed the end of it because my headphones conked out. It turned out that it wasn't the headphones, it was the armchair plug, so I didn't watch any other movies. I missed Yes Man or whatever that Jim Carrey movie is, which I kinda want to watch but whatever. I read my book instead.

When the food cart comes by, I get the beef and mashed potatoes. Not great, but not bad as far as airplane food goes. The next time they come by, they hand out ham and cheese sandwiches. The cheese was something like Velveeta except white. The cheese peeled of easily, but half a sandwich isn't really food in my mind, so I grab a second piece when the lady walks by again to dump the cart. Peeled more crappy cheese and ate more ham. The last meal on the flight was some sort of chicken noodles, kinda bad.

This whole flight the guy next to me was trying to sleep and I kept having to push him off me. He would put his feet in front of my chair and then act all insulted when I shoved him away. What kind of idiot thinks that it's ok to put your feet in someone else's space when you're sleeping? Just cus your sleeping doesn't make you king. Also, the guy kept turning off my little air hole. I get hot on planes, so I turn on the air. And this guy was cold, but instead of getting a blanket, he would get up (the air things were pretty far) and close all the air things that he could reach. No matter where they were pointed. I tried to talk to him, but he didn't speak English, and I didn't know rude enough words in Chinese. So I'd just get up and open my air thing again. He would wait half an hour and close it again. So we played this game for a while. Every time I got up and left my seat I had to check the air thing when I came back, unless twit boy was sleeping.

So the flight lands on schedule and I head for the customs agents. There was a pair of em. One guy was training another guy. So I hand them my passport and they ask if I have filled out an I-94. I tell em the I-94 is already in my passport. They tell me I'm supposed to fill one out when flying in. Ok, whatever, they give me a new I-94 to fill out. They ask if I have some other form, I tell em, no, my Visa is just the I-94 plus the stamp. He says something to the effect of "Yeah Canadian Visa's are weird". He tells the new guy what to write, they staple a second I-94 in my passport, we chuckle about how the Canadian paperwork is screwed up and they let me go. As I'm walking away I think to myself "they never asked ANY questions, except about my visa", odd. Whatever, not my problem.

So I'm waiting for my bag, watching the couple starting to collect their heap of 15 odd bags. Some of their stuff is in DELL or Intel boxes, but it's funny to watch them pile em up. I ask one of the customs agents that's walking around if I can put my passport away or if I'll need it to leave. He asks me if he can see my passport. He asks me about my job, and what I was doing in China. I tell him about the cheap food and he and his friend pretty much want to go visit China after I'm done talking to them. Maybe I shoulda been a salesman?

Finally the guard tells me that I won't need my passport and he marks off my declaration sheet with a black sharpie. I put my passport away, grab my luggage and leave. I'm almost at the exit when another roaming customs agent walks up to me. "Can I see your passport and declaration form?" ok whatever... great, you suck guy. I take my passport out, so much for putting it away. He starts asking me questions about what I bought in China and stuff. He asks if I'm carrying large sums of money, I tell him "I wish I was carrying large sums of money, but I'm almost broke". He asks me why I'm almost broke and I tell him I spent tons of money on my trip. Wow guy, no sense of humour.

He marks my sheet with a black sharpie as well, and off I go. The last guy collects my sheet and points me down the "Nobody else will bug you" hallway. I get out of the customs area and head for the information booth. I don't have any cash on me so I ask the guy if taxis take credit cards, the guy says they do. So I head out and hop a cab.

The guy was Russian or something, thick accent, and pretty old. He drives a prius, he's been a cabby for 18 years in San Francisco, and he likes it. Apparently there's good money to be made because the cab ride to George's place (my car was there) cost $105. What the hell? 20 minute ride in the US is $105, 80 minute ride in China $40. Seems fair. George's wife was supposed to give me a ride, but since George is still in China, she didn't. She did give me my car keys when I got there so that was ok. I drove home a little groggy.

When I got home the house was a little stuffy, it was 1pm and that meant that for me it was 4am. So I went to bed.

Jet lag sucks.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my travels in China. It's probably not as fun reading about my travels than actually doing my travels, but seeing as you're not me, I guess this is the best you can get. You could try travelling to China yourself, but you'll probably have an entirely different experience. Some of it will be similar but most of it will be different. Anyways, I'll probably end up writting some general comments about China someday soon. Stuff like not all women shave their armpits and other oddities. But for now, this is it. Have fun.

Shanghai Shopping - the last day

Sunday... I wake up late, 9:30am, still kinda tired, but whatever. I text Jorge, he's up for something today. We figure we'll hit the museum and then the shopping district. I skipped breakfast, I was already running late. So I meet up with Jorge in the lobby and we head off for people's square. We get near people's square and we go into a tunnel under the street. There's a few places where the intersections are too dangerous or something that they build tunnels for pedestrians. Grumble grumble says my stomach... great, skipping breakfast was a bad plan.

I see a McDonalds and figure, what the hell... fast food in Shanghai, why not? I head to the McDonalds, and they only have pictures for 4 meals, the rest is just written in Chinese. Ok, I can see the big mac, and something that is most likely a quarter pounder, but what are the other two sandwiches? Never seen em before in my life and I've been to quite a few McDonalds. I've seen rib sandwiches, lobster rolls, and a gammet of beef and chicken burgers, but never these two things. To be honest it was really just one new sandwich, I couldn't tell the difference between the two pictures. So I grab Jorge and ask him what they are. Pan fried chicken leg sandwich. Sold! The difference is one is spicy, the other is not.

I grab the non-spicy leg sandwich with a coke and some fries. Breakfast of champions! The fries taste almost exactly like american McDonalds fries. The coke tastes almost like american fountain coke, closer to US coke than Chinese coke. (Obviously, we all know Canada coke is the best) The burger, well it was tiny. Tasted pretty good though. Much healthier than its deep fried cousins. But it probably wouldn't pass muster in the US because it's so small... maybe if they put two chicken legs in one sandwich it would work.

As I'm eating I see miss China-Emo. She's sitting there eating her McDonalds food with what I can only assume to be her boyfriend. Her face has white makeup on it, not sto strange since apparently in China, white is beautiful. But she has the hugest eyeliner ever, and it's pitch black. She also has a funky hairdo, kinda anime style with hair folded over in all sorts of directions so that it's spiking out all over the place. I was gonna take a picture, but the place was a little crowded, it woulda been about as obvious as walking up to her and saying "Hi, you look like a freak, can I take your picture?" Probably wouldn't go over so well. Come to think of it she was the first Chinese girl I've seen with any amount of makeup on. Mostly it's the older women who wear makeup.

Off we go to the Museum, we walk around people's square (it's a huge park type place, not much of a square). There's people flying kites, and one guy has the craziest rig. He's got a huge fishing reel style device, it's the size of a frisbee. He's got a handle bar on the far end and a flat piece that he can rest on his stomach on the other end. He's got a backback with a kite tube on it, and he's wearing gloves. I try to see his kite and I can't really make out which one is his, so I go right behind him. I follow the line, and finally I see it. It's crazy far away. And it's high enough to clip low flying planes. There's a kite that's even higher up than his, easily clearing sky scrapers. These guys must be flying 100 stories high. Holy crap!

So we watch crazy kite guy for a while, we have no luck spotting the kite flyer that has the highest kite, but whatever. We head off towards the museum again. We get to the door and it turns out it's the exit door. The entrance is on the other side of the humongous building, and we have to walk around... thanks guy. So we roam around the building and spot some statues. One statue called "Lion" is a weird almost native american style carving of a lion eating something. The something that's being eaten even has a face, it's awesome. My kind of statue.

We walk in the museum, and as always we guess what the price will be. I guess 50 rmb based on my Hangzhou experiences. Jorge guesses 20 based on some place he went to yesterday. Neither of us win, well... really both of us win, it's free! We just have to walk through an airport style security check. They even make people drink from their water bottles to make sure it's not explosive or something. There was a sign, no guns. Where would anyone find a gun in China. Not only that but it's pretty much illegal to carry a gun outside the museum, why would they have to specify that guns aren't allowed inside as well? Crazy Chinese, even their cops don't have guns.

The museum is pretty cool, a must stop for anyone hitting Shanghai. If you thought your country had history, you thought wrong. China has clay pots that are 8000 years old. That's 1000 times older than your average 8 year old kid. It's also way older than any recorded history in North America. I'm no historian but that museum was cool. Pottery, money, jade, scrolls, everything you see in your average role-playing game. The first coins were in the shape of farm tools like spades and blades, pretty cool. They were cast out of bronze. Not platinum, gold or silver. Not even copper (though bronze is made from copper). Just big bronze spades. By big I mean the smallest ones were the size of a cell phone and the biggest ones were the size of my hand. That's pretty big as far as coins go.

So we tour the museum, this little kid has shoes that sound like squeeky toys. It was entertaining for a while, but then it got pretty anoying. If I were her had, I would never have bought those shoes because they would drive me insane. But like pretty much all tiny little asian girls, she was pretty cute. (Hi Kylee! as Trish would say) Are you 4 and a half and a PC? Didn't think so... seeing as this blog really isn't meant to be read by 4 and a half year olds.

Anyways, we leave the museum and head for the subway. We're going to uh... I forget the name of this place. To be honest every time Jorge told me the name I promptly forgot it. Let's call this place XuYiZhu XYZ for short, cus I like short. So we take the subway heading towards XYZ, and it's pretty quiet. There's not enough room to sit, but still quiet. There's these two girls in the subway, one is leaning against the door (the one that doesn't open at every stop) and the other is facing her with her hand on the door next to the first girl's face. So it kinda looks like they're "together". Anyways, it was pretty funny, because during the whole ride, they're playing with each other's hair and fussing around with each other clothes. Odds are they are not lesbians, and that it's just culture differences. But it was kinda funny to watch.

We get to XYZ, an upscale shopping district in Shanghai. We look around, we find the electronics emporium. We get lost in the electronics emporium. We probably walked by the same shop at least three times. We see a preview for Grand Tourismo 5. We saw a Canon EOS 40D for 13000 rmb, the last shop I checked was 8000 rmb. So apparently upscale means expensive and overpriced. We looked around some more. Changed buildings, more shops.

This new building looked like a giant ball from the outside and there was an elevator going through it, so we found the glass elevator. Rode the elevator to the top floor. Pressed some buttons, stopped at almost every floor on the way down. Laughed like a couple of kids who pressed all the buttons in the elevator. Enjoyed the view of some construction outside the giant ball shaped building. We roamed around some more and found a place to eat. Macau style food was on the menu.

We had some pigeon, it's still delicious. We had some curried beef of some sort and we had some crispy fried fish. Everything was delicious. For drinks I ordered a grapefruit drink and Jorge ordered a corn based drink. Who makes a drink out of corn? I mean really... corn. So our drinks got mixed up and I ended up drinking the corn drink. It tasted like lemonade because they shoved tiny little limes in the drink. The limes are called calamancy or something like that in Tagalog. I don't know if they have a Chinese name, but I bet they do. Anyways, the drink was mostly sugar, with some lemon taste. Pretty good corn drink.

So we leave and start walking down the street looking for the subway. We see plaza 6 and I recalled that there was a subway exit that went to a plaza 6, so we go in. Turns out I was wrong. But plaza 6 was interesting none the less. It was huge, and had large empty spaces. It also had 3 audi cars parked in the front lobby. Shanghai is pretty space effecient, every available inch normally serves a purpose. This place on the other hand had alot of poorly used space.

We soon figured out how the poorly used space was being used efficiently. It efficiently said "We are so fancy and so rich that we can waste space". Truely a symbol of sheer oppulence. The bathroom was pretty much more of the same, and it was probably the only thing we could afford in this entire building, since it was free. There was a waiting lounge outside the loo where people could sit on leather couches to wait for their friends to finish using the facilities. The washrooms themselves looked like they had "next gen" urinals. They even had something to dry your hands with! An air blade hand dryer. These are pretty new, I've only seen them in airports so far, and well, in this center of oppulence.

We left rich kid central, and headed towards the subway again. Found the train we needed and started heading home. We got to Nanjing east (Oppulence land was Nanjing west). We looked around some more for the knife shop. Sorry Emily, I never did find your knives. Maybe next time I'll ask you for detailed instructions when you say "You can't miss it" I never even found the bank. Our shopping mission for knives and T-shirts had failed. But we had fun.

For supper we had ramen noodles. I was getting a little sick of Chinese food. Turns out I wasn't really sick of Chinese food... more sick of Chinese ingredients. So to me, the wannabe Japanese ramen tasted like Chinese food. After supper we just headed back to the hotel for a well deserved rest.

Next stop, home... I'll have to write that up soon so I don't forget.

Shanghai Reality - ZhuJiaJiao - the suburb

So I'm supposed to meet Lin Ying at some statue near people's square on Nanjing road. We decided on 10am. So I take off around 9:20, not sure how long it'll take me to get there. I'm walking down Nanjing road and it's still early, so the bagwatch guys have nothing better to do than follow me. So I've come p with a very effective strategy to get rid of em.

The bag watch guy approaches you, you wave the "I'm not interested" wave. This does not deter him, he'll still say bagwatch at you. You say "no thanks". Most of them don't give up. T-shirtdvd they say, and that's when you pull out the "Boo Yow". They typically stop, and repeat bu yao (or however you spell it). The delay in their walk this gains you typically means that you've now escaped their grasp. The problem with saying boo yow first is that they expect rejection, so you have to trick them... first no thanks, then boo yow. Of course this method is not fool proof. But it's better than most other methods.

Now I'm at the statue. I'm a little early, so I sit around, people come up to me and offer me bagwatches and tshirtdvds I tell em no thanks and since I'm not moving they seem to give up faster. Strange that. So as I'm waiting, I hear some yelling. A big fat Chinese guy who is shirtless is yelling stuff. He's about 150 meters away from me. He totally looks like a drunk guy from an old Chinese movie. So as he yells what I can only assume to be obscenities, he undoes his pants and starts peeing. Right there on Nanjing road, in front of hundreds of people, the guy is taking a leak. Not only that, but he's yelling stuff the whole time. This guy must have had a lot to drink because by the time he's done there's a huge puddle on the ground. Finally he pulls his pants up again and waddles off.

Crazy fat guy aside, the place is pretty quiet. Tons of people walk by, many of them stop by the "statue", it's not really a statue, it's just a stone sign that says Nanjing road walkway in Chinese. Anyways, people stop to take their picture with the sign, I don't get it. It doesn't really prove you were there, it's pretty easy to photoshop yourself in front of a sign like that, but whatever. Around 10am, Lin Ying shows up.

We start walking towards somewhere, she seems to know where she's going. She asks me how come I don't have an umbrella. It's sunny out, and she's using an umbrella to make shade for herself. I figured that she (and many other Chinese girls) used umbrella's to keep cool. So I told her that Shanghai was so hot, that even the little bit of shade an umbrella would supply would be useless to me. Plus the sun would give me a tan. As it turns out, that's exactly what she's trying to avoid.

In China, white skin is important. She told me that there's a poem that says that it doesn't matter how ugly you are, if your skin is white it will hide your ugliness. So white skin is beautiful. There's creams in China to make you whiter, and white makeup is popular (but too expensive for most). The cheapest way to make yourself white is just to not get a tan. I told her that in America there's creams to make you darker, people even get fake tans or sit in tanning booths. She found this hilarious. I mean, why would anyone want a tan? Crazy huh...

So after we both laughed at the culture differences we figured out that we were lost. What a great guide Lin Ying turned out to be... she seemed to be more lost than found. Anyways, we finally figured out where we had to go (at least her Chinese is way better than her direction sense). We asked a few people and ended up at a bus stop. Odd. I thought we were staying in the city. The way she had described this place it sounded like old Montreal.

So we line up for the bus, and when it's our turn to get on, the seats are full. So we get back off, she says we'll wait for the next bus. Ok. More people get on and then she says "oh, the next bus is in 30 minutes, but if we get on, we have to stand." I'm ok with standing, it's probably a short ride if it's in he city. So we get on the bus. "The bus will take an hour" she says after we get moving. Don't you think that that would have been an important piece of the decision making process of waiting for the next bus? I think it would have been a key piece of information.

So the bus ride is pretty long, so we chat and get to know each other. I'm going to condense all my knowledge on Lin Ying in this section, because I don't remember when I asked these questions. Basically we chatted the whole day because her plan was to practice her English. So here goes. She's 26, has a boyfriend of 2 years now, she's not sure he's "the one", and she didn't want to tell me how many guys she's dated before. She just graduated with a masters in computer science and started at Telenav last month. She lives in a room she rents from a family, this family rents another room to another girl. I think there's 5 people in a small house that the family rents. She has a sister, which means if she ever has a child it'll be a single child unless she leaves China. She doesn't think that it's possible for her to leave China (I'm not sure if it's because she doesn't want to leave her friends and family or because she doesn't think she has that option at all, it was unclear). She might want kids later. She wants to live near a mountain range or near the ocean, even preferably both. She likes warm weather and thinks that her home town is really cold because it hits -10 Celsius there. She's never been out of China, and she wants to go to Hong Kong, possibly next year. She only gets 2 weeks vacation and she works long hours. She normally spends her weekends cleaning, doing laundry and sleeping. She sees her boyfriend almost every day because they live very close. The only days she doesn't see him is when she works late (which happens more often than she'll admit I'm sure, I've seen her at work late almost every day). Her given name Ying is short for Y ing or something, Y is yes, and ing is working. So it means hard working. She likes food, she eats a lot. She's always the last one to finish the food when she's out with friends. She loves snacks, she thinks that most Chinese women love snacks (at least more than men do). She thinks she's big (she's gotta be at least a size -4 or something, she's tiny). She was happy when I said she was tiny, which is really true. She probably weighs 100lbs wet. She loves shopping too.

Ok so if you've skipped the "everything I know about Lin Ying" then you should start reading here again. We got off the bus and we were in what she called a suburb. It was more rural than I expected. Apparently this town might have been used in mission impossible 3. So a bunch of bicycle taxis are lined up just outside the bus station. And since Lin Ying really has no idea where we're going we take one. So that he'll get us to the place where we want to be, the old section of town. It took the old guy about 5 minutes to get us there, so it was pretty close, he biked slowly. She paid him 5 rmb, which is probably more than it should have cost, but whatever.

We get to the old town, and it's tiny little streets, about two meters wide, and shops on both sides. Tons of people are walking in the street but Lin Ying says "Oh, it's so quiet, I thought it would be busy on the weekend." Ok so apparently if you don't have to push your way through a sea of people then it's not busy at all. Odd. The stalls all sell similar things like paintings, jewelry, food, candy, toys, nothing I haven't seen before really.

We turns down a few streets and the shops start getting odd. Grain, food supplies, vegetables, turtles, utensils, pots, pans.... wait turtles?! That shop was selling turtles. I go back. Yup, right there in large wash basins, hundreds of little turtles. They came in 4 sizes, but the smallest size was the cutest. They were the size of quarters. I took pictures of em with my finger in there for comparison. My finger looks huge. I don't know what the turtles were for, I assume food because as I look around I see that in other wash basins there's crayfish and snails. Who would be cruel enough to kill little tiny turtles and eat them though? Oh right... me. Before you go on a rampage, I didn't... but I would. There was at least two hundred little turtles... they wouldn't all survive in the wild anyways.

Ok enough with the turtles, let's move on. The place had a river running through it, not that I'd ever want to touch the water, it was a sickly opaque green colour. The river boats were cool though. We never got a chance to ride one though. Oh well. Anyways, we hit lunch at a tiny shop. Just outside the shop, the lady was smashing open snails with a rock disk as a base and something big and flat as a smashing tool. Interesting. They send us upstairs in this tiny house to grab a seat.

We sit down at the table and the dishes are wrapped in plastic... I mean your tea cup, bowl, plate and spoon. They're all in a plastic shrink wrap thing, with stuff written on it. It's to be more hygienic or something. We order chicken feet (cold with no sauce, ok but not great) veggies (tasty) chicken soup (pretty good) and pork wrapped in some sort of leaf (really tasty). We also got a giant bottle of orange drink. It was so hot that I didn't eat much. I think heat is pretty much one of the only things that kills my appetite. I drank a lot of the orange stuff though.

Off we go back to the small alleys filled with shops. Lin Yin sees a needle point type stitching that she likes. The shopkeeper says 160 rmb, Lin Ying says she wouldn't pay more than 80. So we leave but the shop keep follows us and keeps yelling lower prices. She got darn right mad by the end of it. Anyways, the shopkeeper lowered her price all the way down to 60, but by then Lin Ying didn't want the item anymore. Anyways, we saw it again and again, the same exact one, in many shops. Price offerings ranged from 180 to 80. Because it wasn't as unique as she first thought, Lin Ying didn't want it anymore. She did end up buying a lot of sweets from different shops though.

The last bus leaving there was at 4pm, so we decided to head to the station at 3 to make sure we got on. We get outside the little alleys and find ourselves on the street with a signpost that has a map on it. Lin Ying reads the map and declares that she has no idea where we are and where we have to go. So I look at the map. I've been working with maps since I was a kid (thanks mom & dad). Clearly the "You are here" dot is where we are. And the little bus drawing is where we want to be. But what direction do we have to head in? That's what Lin Ying can't figure out. So I decipher the map, at least it has English street names, and there's English street signs. Ok we're at a T junction, so it's not too hard to figure out which way's north. Fair enough, let's go. "How do you know it's in this direction?" "Because I read the map" "But the map doesn't tell you which direction to head in" "Well, I figured it out" "Are you sure?" "Yep" "Really?". So why is it that people think that because I'm white I wouldn't be able to figure out a Chinese map? This isn't the first time someone's been surprised that I can read a map in China. Anyways, I got us to the bus station, and she said something along the lines of "Maybe you should be my guide" which was pretty funny because she volunteered to be my guide for the day and she keeps getting lost. Fun times though.

At the bus station some lady wants us to get on her bus. Lin Ying says it's not the express bus but we have lots of time so we can take this one, there's more stops and it's slower, but it's cheaper and we get seats for sure. Fair enough. On the bus we drive through many suburbs, real ones, and I got to see a lot of the real Shanghai. It's huge, dirty, run down and not at all attractive. Downtown is much nicer, but only the rich people live there. The again, with a city that has a population equal to half of Canada, it's bound to be a mess. That's right, 20 million people in Shanghai. The place is huge. People think that a 40 minute commute to work is short, an hour being the average commute. Crazy I tell you.

I figured out we were at the last stop the bus was going to make when the bus driver turned off the engine. We got off the bus and started walking. Lin Ying's first reaction was "I don't know where we are" followed quite rapidly with "I wonder why the bus stopped here". Awesome! Lost again in a Shanghai suburb no less. So we look for a subway station, but even though there's one on the map, we couldn't find it. So I get tired of roaming and we hop in a taxi. 20 minutes later the taxi drops us off near Lin Ying's old school. So we were nowhere near her school before, but I still have no idea where we are... at least she does.

We head to one of her favourite restaurants for supper. She used to always go there as a student. We had really good stuff, duck and pork and tofu, everything was great. The pork was kinda like cold cuts of all sorts of parts most of you folks never eat. There was tongue, stomach lining, lung and other bits I couldn't identify. When I asked Lin Ying what the parts of the pork were she said she didn't really know, they were "inside meat". So I told her the parts I could ID, and she said "Maybe we shouldn't talk about this while we eat". Lol! So it's ok to eat tongue and lung and stomach lining, as long as you don't say that's what you're eating? So funny.

Supper was pretty good, once we were done we headed out. Rain. Crap. Lin Ying has her little sun umbrella that also works for rain, but there's no way I fit under there too. And it's raining pretty hard. We run across the street and hide under the bridge. We walk along the road looking for a cab. We get to the intersection, and there's tons of people under the bridges. In China there's bridge everywhere... they're all highways. They run above the regular streets.

We get a cab and head to a shopping center nearby so I can buy an umbrella. Once we get to the mall, Lin Ying declares that she will do some "window shopping". Something I had taught her earlier that day, well at least the name for it. She failed miserably at window shopping. See, window shopping is a kind of shopping in which you don't try on clothes or buy clothes. I don't like shopping with Trish, much less with strange girls. But I have to say that this shopping trip was educational. Lin Ying bought a shirt and this is how it worked out. She tried on the shirt. Looked at herself in the mirror. Asked me what I thought (I said it looked cute). She tried on a different size (I think, it looked the same to me). Decided she wanted it. Got the lady to cut off the tag for her (ok, I've never see anyone wear a shirt they just bought right out of the store). Then the lady handed her a piece of paper. She ran off, leaving me there in the store. Came back a few minutes later. Gave another piece of paper to the lady and the lady gave her a bag with her old shirt in it. So it turns out that shopping malls in China have tons of tiny stores (like the electronics place) but for some malls you get a bill from the store, you go pay it at a central cash register and you bring back the receipt to get the item.

Anyways, when I finally bought an umbrella it was the same thing, paper - pay - receipt - item. Apparently I bought a good brand of umbrella. In China umbrellas are so popular (because of the staying white thing) that they have brand name umbrellas and fancy umbrellas. They had some ranging from 30 rmb to 250 rmb. Who in their right mind would spend $40 on an umbrella?

So we leave the mall, and with our umbrellas we walk to her school. Roaming around on campus was pretty cool. I've never seen so many people out in the rain before. It wasn't crowded like it would have been if it wasn't raining, but it was pretty crowded. The campus was awesome. It has a river and a park and a bunch of cool looking buildings. She said that dorms house many students per room. A lot more than 2 students per room like most of the dorms in America house. Strange but whatever, space is at a premium in China.

She decided to take me to try sheep meat. So we roamed around and the first shop she wanted to go to seemed to have vanished. It could have been in the hole in the wall that is now under construction. Oh well, we go look for another place. after we find the place, she orders one skewer of sheep meat. She tells me it costs 1.5 rmb because that's always the price. I had her 2 1rmb coins and smile. She pays the man and he pockets the coins. Pretty obvious from my point of view, I'm white. Had I asked what the price was he would probably have said 3rmb or maybe even 4. But she asked for change, and the guy looked all insulted and said that each skewer cost 2rmb. I tell her to give up, it doesn't really matter anyways. The sheep skewer tasted pretty good, though the meat was really fatty. A lot of meat in China is fatty though.

So we're near her house, and she needs to get home, so we call it a night. Seeing as I'll be leaving the country the next day, I figure this is goodbye for a very long time. So I ask her what the custom for saying goodbye is in China. She didn't know the word custom, but that wasn't really a problem, she has a translation program on her phone, so I spell the word out for her. She looks a little confused and shows me her phone, the phone has things like ceremony written on it. Close enough I say. And she says she's not sure what I mean. So I ask her how do you say goodbye, and she obviously answers goodbye. Doh! I tell her that some people hug to say goodbye. Hug, yet another word she doesn't know. So I get her to translate it with her phone. Lol! The face she made was hilarious! I think she understood what I mean by now, but she said something like "Oh we don't do that!" and then she said they waived goodbye. Who knows what the custom is in China, maybe there isn't one, but the look on her face was priceless. Hahahaha. For 26 she seems pretty innocent. Though really I don't know what her phone said "hug" was in Chinese.

Finally we find a cab and I hop in and wave goodbye. Off I go after telling the cabby where I need to be. Little did I know this would be the scariest cab ride ever. I was minding my own business when suddenly the cab lurched a little and the slowed down. Weird. Then the cabby brakes on the highway with nobody in front of us. Ok... this is getting a little worrisome. So I try to put on my seat belt (half the cabs don't have seat belts). This cab had one, but it didn't work. Great. I look at the cabby and he is straining to keep awake. This guy is pretty much passing out while driving. Then I hear him snore. I look at him and he's awake (I think) and he pretends that he didn't snore but that really he was snorting up some spit, so he spits ot the window. He keeps repeating this every time he snore. Which is like 8 times too many. Then we're finally off the highway. He's still passing out but at much slower speeds, so this is better. Then we pass by a guy pulled over by some cops and he starts laughing.

The guy is getting pulled over for being drunk. My cabby is laughing at a guy for drunk driving when not 2 minutes ago this guy was driving while sleeping. Crazy cabby, but laughing is better than sleeping. So I nod and say PiJiu (or however you spell beer) and the cabby nods and starts rambling some Chinese at me. He laughs, I laugh, everyone is happy. He keeps rattling stuff in Chinese, he probably though I understood him at least a little. His thoughts were pretty easy to follow because he was making jestures. I laughed along with him until we got to where I wanted to be, he pointed, I said dui dui (dway dway) which means yes yes. He drops me off. I go to pay him and I notice his meter rate is 3.6 instead of 2.1. Odd. The ride had been way too long, and 41 rmb won't kill me, so I just paid him and got out.

I hadn't been out for more than 30 seconds when a lady walks up to me and starts walking with me. "Hullo" she says. "Hi" I reply. Then she whispers "sex massage", well I guess I hadn't been offered everything before, I thought I had, but never had anyone offered me a sex massage. Mostly I got bagwatch, tshirtdvd, shoespants, ladybar, ladymassage (which is most likely a sex massage anyways), also I got hashish marihuana. Never a sex massage though. So I say "No thanks" but she had a reply "Not me, you can pick girl". Apparently if I didn't want to have sex with her, I could get my pick of girls... right, yeah. No thanks lady. She didn't follow me very far, she said things like any girl you like and very good girls. Thanks but no thanks lady. Making sure I still had my wallet I left her at the street corner and cross on over to bagwatch land. A couple of bagwatch offers later I made it to the hotel.

So, I get to the hotel and I have a message from Trish saying that my flight is cancelled. Great. I head to the office to call the airline. My flight is canceled they booked me through Tokyo with a 2 hour layover and a huge amount of extra flying time. 13 hours of flying is more than enough for me, I don't want to fly for 17 hours, thanks. So I ask the lady if I can book for Monday instead. Yes, good. I do that. And so, Sunday I'm still in Shanghai.

It's late now, and I need to pack, but eventally I'll post today's (Sunday's) adventres.

Shanghai Nights - not like the movie

So I'm sitting in my hotel room, trying to access my blog and lo and behold no success. There's a few possibilities... China might have blocked blogger, they've done it before. The hotel's Internet might suck or be blocking blogger. Blogger might be down (unlikely but whatever). In any case, I can't really blog. Last time I connected was on Friday when I wrote my last blog. So as I type this in an e-mail to myself it's Sunday here, around 10:30am.

On Friday I chatted with my new Chinese friends and Lin Ying invited me to spend the day with her on Saturday. Now this conversation was a little complicated because her English is not really good. Verb tenses tend to confuse her. So answering questions I asked to try and figure out if she was spending the whole day with me or just a portion of the day were kinda frustrating. Anyways, we made plans to meet up around 10am.

After work Jorge and I set off for Xin Tian Di, the french quarters. A short ride on the subway, even though we had to change trains in people's square. We got to our destination without too much trouble. Xin Tian Di is a touristy spot now, it used to be where the nightlife was at, but now it's all tourists wanting to see what the Shanghai night life is like. Which means that's it's entirely different than what Shanghai night life is like, since the Shanghainese don't come here anymore because it's overrun by tourists. So in reality it's tourists going to scope out the tourist night life.

In any case, Jorge told me that the dumpling shop there served the best dumplings in the world, so we had to go. We got a seat in the dumpling shop, there was about 10 guys in the back making dumplings. They worked in a fish bowl type place, big glass so people could see them work, hahaha. Anyways, we order just about every dumpling on the menu. Jorge said that anything else was just fluff, and after tasting the dumplings I had to agree. Unfortunately for some people, they didn't know this. The big table of 10 next to us didn't order any dumplings at all. They were a loud German group. I mean if you go into a restaurant and there's 10 guys making dumplings in a fish tank, and everyone seems to be eating dumplings, you order the BBQ chicken right? Morons. Oh and if you're reading this going I'm a drunken German, and I didn't eat a single dumpling while I was spilling beer all over myself in a fancy Chinese restaurant in Xin Tian Di on last Friday, then you're an idiot. On more levels than one.

So the loud German group didn't detract too much from our dumpling eating. You think you've had dumplings before, but really you haven't. You see in China they have a way of putting soup inside the dumpling. So you use a spoon, and you bite a little piece of dumpling off, then you can suck a bit of the soup out and then eat the dumpling. If the dumplings aren't super hot, you can just eat them whole and the soup will explode in your mouth, but that's a burning hazard, so you better know what you're doing. I'm told there's a couple of ways to get soup in a dumpling, but that the tastiest is to turn the soup into a jelly and then mix it in with the meat. These days they refrigerate the soup to turn it into jelly, who knows what they did back then. In any case, once you cook the dumpling the soup liquefies.

After the dumplings we roamed around looking at all the bars. During our travel this couple comes up to us and speaking in Chinese they tell Jorge a sob story about how they lost their wallet or something and they need a cab to get back to wherever they were going. Anyways, they were asking him for 20 rmb, that's the only part I understood, Jorge gave em like 4 coins and I made fun of him. I mean if you lose your wallet, is your first destination the touristy bar area? No. So after that we finally found a bar that didn't look half bad.

Apparently it's assigned seating in bars in China... odd. We're going to a table and the lady finds that nothing is really free, so she leaves us there and tells us she'll find us another table (I think, everything was so loud). So when she comes back and tells us she has a new table for us, she squeezes past this bar bench and a stool. Jorge also fits in this gap (I don't know how). But apparently my leg is bigger than the both of them put together. So I climb up on the bench (nobody was sitting there). Some people freak out, and I climb down on the other side. Anyways, we're plowing through the dance floor and because of my delay with the bench I get stuck behind this clearly touristy white woman. She's trying to tap on some guy's shoulder to say excuse me while he's dancing on the dance floor. She wants him to get out of her way so that she can pass. She must be new to China. After she finally squeezes through a little gap, I plow in right behind her. I probably moved the guy at least a foot, and he kept on dancing as my shoulder pushed him clear into three other people. Once I had passed he just backed up again, never missing a beat.

So we get to our assigned seating, two chairs at a table of 8. There's already a couple sitting on one side of the table, they seat us on another, and shortly after that they seat another couple at the table. We order a 500ml beer each, 75 rmb for em... ouch. We start listening to the music, there's a live band, kinda. The band is playing along to some recorded music, we're not even sure if they ever really played the instruments or just pretended. I'm pretty sure they were singing, Jorge thought they might be lip syncing. I say they were singing because the words they were saying didn't make sense. "Everybody dance now" sounded more like "Evydy dane no". And they sang a spanish song with no Rs in it... sounds unlikely to me.

So as we listened to the terrible covers we watched people walk by. So I have this running theory that Asian girls that white people find attractive are not the same as Asian girls that Asian people find attractive. Jorge is Asian, from Macao, so he's the perfect test for this plan. So every time a girl walked by we would say if we found her attractive or not. If there was a pair of girls we would say which one we would pick if they were the only choices available. Either Jorge and I have radically different taste in women or my experiment proved true. We would have been awesome college roommates, because we would never have fought over girls.

A bit later a hot girl (at least I thought she was hot, Jorge thought she was so-so). Anyways, a hot girl walked by wearing pleather. We both found her outfit odd looking... as it turns out she was a Jagermeister chick. Her job was to sell Jagermeister shots. Mike's dream girl, hahaha. Dunno if Mike reads this blog, but his favorite drink is Jagermeister. This girl finally came to our table and she asked me if I would like some, I told her no, she asked if I had heard of the drink. Maybe in China nobody's heard of Jagermeister but in Canada and the US just about everyone my age has heard of this disgusting drink. So no Jagermeister chick, I do not want your drink, and yes I've heard of it. But feel free to tell me more about this disgusting liquid because hey, I can look at you while you're talking to me and it doesn't count as staring! Anyways, when she realized that I was not gonna buy her swill she left.

When the music stopped in the bar, it just stopped. The band left and nobody turned on a CD or anything. It was kinda odd being in a bar without music. We finished our drink and left. We roamed around some more but it was getting late. We hopped on a taxi and headed home.

Saturday was a long day so it deserves its own blog posting. Speaking of blogs, Trish suggested that I try VPN in to work and it worked. If I VPN in I can access blogger. Odd. Anyways, stayed tuned for the weekend blogs.

Shanghai Dogma - Puppy Love

Muahahaha, I've been dreaming up stupid titles all week. Maybe "Hunt for Re-Dog-Tober" or "Shanghai Food - it's Dogtastic" but really... I like my choice, because it sounds really sweet.

So after I got some work done, I bumped into Jorge and invited him along for supper. JianZhong told me that Roy from lunch and someone named Lin Ying would join us. 6:30pm rolled around and I made plans to meet at around 6:45, I had to drop stuff at the hotel first. So Jorge and I headed off to the hotel, JianZhong was supposed to meet us in the lobby of the office building. Instead he met us in the lobby of the hotel. This guy is always in a rush it seems. So we head off to meet the rest of the gang, they were waiting for us near the office. JianZhong always seems to walk like there is an angry mob chasing him down. He is seriously always in a rush.

We get to the office and Roy had to bail on us, so we meet up with Lin Ying and Wang YeZhan, two of the map QA girls. In my mind, girls wouldn't be the first to line up for some dog, but hey, this is China. Actually it turned out that they mostly wanted to practice their English more than anything else.

We take the subway, this time it was much busier, and only JianZhong made it in the first train. Like I said... angry mob chasing him. The next train is only a couple minutes behind. So we cram in. You pretty much have to push passed people to get in the train. The next stop, under people's square, has a large hub for subways. So a large portion of the train cleared out a people's square, and the rest of the ride wasn't so bad. Not that we got a seat, but at least we weren't all smooshed.

Off the train, we find the restaurant. In the restaurant it's super hot. But hey, they've got dog on the menu so I don't really care. This restaurant was of the Gui Zhou province style. So now I've tried: SiChuan, Hunan, GuanDong, HongKong, Shanghai, HuBe and GuiZhou styles. Anyways, we order some stuff, I make sure that I hear Gou Rou, and all is well. We got some sour fish soup hot pot, you eat the fish, and then add in some tofu cubes, lettuce, cabbage and some seaweed looking mushrooms. Very good soup. We also had dumplings and noodles, but really the piece de resistance was the dog. It was very delicious, kinda like goat. In any case, it has a pronounced flavour so it's not like chicken.

Now here's where I can see people complain, I've just offended many animal activists and dog lovers all over the world. So be it, I don't care. Dog is yummy! You might think or eating dog is so cruel, the poor little dogs. Well, tough luck for the dogs, but think about this way, if our positions were reversed and the dogs were heading to some fancy restaurant. Do you think dogs would complain about other dogs eating the fancy "bald monkey" meat? I think not. If dogs were top of the food chain, they'd be eating us. Lucky for me, I'm at the top of the food chain.

See, if you think about it, people just assume that they are at the top of the food chain. But really, what have you done lately to be at the top of the food chain? Beef burrito? That gets you one up on herbivores. Nowhere near the top of the food chain. Well fish eat fish right? So you're probably up somewhere near the top of the food chain in the sea. Specially if you've had shark. But really, have you gone out of your way to claim a place for yourself in the food chain or are you just sucking down mass produced items from the grocery store? I'm out to conquer the food chain, one animal at a time. I can now honestly say that I'm higher up on the food chain than all your canine pets. Cus I ate one. You see, in the way of the world, now there's nothing you can feed your dog that would put him higher up on the food chain than me. Unless of course you fed him me... but let's not go there. You there, PETA guy with the whale harpoon aimed at me, go home.

So back to the restaurant, everyone ate some dog, and everyone liked it. JianZhong was most opposed to eating it, but in the end he tried a tiny little piece. He said it was nothing special, it just tasted like any other meat. Well, true, it's just another meat. But maybe someday I will come across the magical meat that is so awesome that other meat taste like dirt when compared to this meat. But how will I know unless I taste all available meats? Probably the only animals I wouldn't eat (apart from human, I'm no cannibal) would have to be dolphin. No dolphin eating, thanks. I might also pass on endangered species, at least until there's only 1 left... I mean, what good will one of a species do, might as well just eat it. Oh, there's PETA harpoon guy again.

Anyways, after the food, which was delicious, we went to play some pool. Hilarious. So I mentioned that man power in China is cheap, and if I didn't mention it, I'm mentioning it now. Anyways, we get a couple of tables and play a game. Then JianZhong calls over a waitress. Ok, maybe he's thirsty. Nope not thirsty, she's there to rack the balls for you. Hahahah, her only job is to talk around, pull balls out of the pockets and rack them up for the players. Wow, service with a smile. Crazy stuff. We played some pool, the 8 ball is called Hei Ba Qiu sounds like "hey bah chi-oh" it means black eight ball. I chatted with the girls, tried to teach Wang YeZhan how to hold a pool cue. She got better, I think.

It got late pretty fast, so we left. Lots of fun was had. JianZhong took the bus, the girls hopped into a cab and Jorge and I walked home. It wasn't very far, it only took 10 minutes. My hotel room was crazy hot, I think I've figured out the AC though. When it's really hot out (more than 25 degrees) they turn the AC on, and my room gets cool. When it's nice and "cool" out (less than 25 degrees) they turn it off and my room gets hot. So yeah, it was kinda better when it was 37 outside, cus at least my room was cool. Not so anymore, everywhere is 25 now.

This morning I had another hot dog egg cake for breakfast, with some orange juice. Then I got Wang YeZhan and Lin Ying on my msn, so we chatted for a while. Then I did some work. Then I went to lunch with Charles, GuoMing and uh... ZhuYuen probably not how you spell his name, but that's what I'm sticking with. We went to XinJiang Islam Restaurant, Muslim food from XinJiang province. Lots of tasty lamb, and we had some mountain horse, whatever that is. The horse tasted like ham, it was the same cut and prepared in a similar fashion. Very good though. They were all out of camel and mountain deer though. Oh well. I'll have to get those some other time.

Tonight Jorge and I are going to Xin Tian Di I believe. It's the foreigner's area. Should be fun.

Shanghai pedestrian - I need new feet

Last time I left you, I was bored in the office counting seconds until... "until what?" I thought to myself. It's not like I'm chained to my desk. And even though some people might look upon playing hooky from the office as bad, I think of it as an adventure. Mostly because every time I step out the office doors an adventure awaits. I was waiting on the LMoRE guys to finish some work for me anyways. So off I go, into the wild blue(read grey) yonder.

Here's my plan, I have yet to see People's square, and I haven't been to west Nanjing road. So I figure I'll kill two birds with one stone and do both. I read in the lonely planet book that belongs to Kevin that I borrowed from Autumn that there's some fancy shops on west Nanjing road. Of interest is Silk King. So off I go, I tell Jorge I should be back by 6 in time for supper, but not to wait for me.

I walk down Nanjing road, east Nanjing road, just like every other day... except this time very few people ask me if I want a bagwatch. Maybe I no longer look like the kind of guy who would want a bagwatch. We were talking about drugs the other day, I don't remember who I was talking to, but it was someone from the US office. The reason we were discussing the topic is because we figured with so many people pushing bagwatches around, there must be some drug dealers. Neither one of us had been approached by anyone selling drugs. With my long hair I normally get approached for drugs in just about any new city I go to.

So I walk down Nanjing road with a few offers of massages and bagwatches but as I near people's square some guy walks by saying chi chi chi, or something like that. He walked very close to me, whispered the chi chi chi and just kept on going. I think to myself "I guess China has their share of crazies too" and go about my business. The another guy leaning on a wall trying to look nonchalant says something that sounded almost like hashish to me as I walk by. Ok weird. Then later a guy walks by really close and says "hashish, marijuana" and keeps walking. So they do have drug dealers in china. Here's the list of strange things drug dealers do to look busy apart from just walking down the street. Some guy was pumping air in a bike tire, some guy browsing a small shop, some guy at a bus stop, some guy just sitting on the steps of a hotel entrance, some guy perpetually waiting at a red light, he would change his facing when the lights changed, so that he was still facing a red light. And my personal favorite, a guy in a phone booth, he opened the phone booth door as I walked by and said "hashish, marijuana" into the phone as if he was still talking on the phone. He was the loudest one because I didn't walk too close to the booth.

I got to people's square, it's not a square, it's huge, it's got a fountain and a museum, and some paved areas, some grassy areas. Anyways, it's pretty cool. I did not get approached for a tea scam sadly. As the scam goes, a couple walks up to you and asks you if they can practice their English with you, then they tell you that they're going to a tea ceremony, you go with em and you end up with a big bill for tea. I was going to tell them that they were in luck and that I was an English teacher, and if they paid for the tea ceremony I would give them tips on their English. I couldn't pay for the tea ceremony myself because I don't have any cash and clearly if I paid then I would be teaching them for free. Unfortunately, I didn't get to test my reverse tea scam scam.

After people's square I headed to west Nanjing road. It just so happens that people's square is what makes east Nanjing road turn into west Nanjing road. I walked around a lot, I took pictures, I found Silk King. I wish I had come to silk kin before going to Hangzhou, this place had really cheap prices for some good silk. I roamed around some more, there were many fancy shops here, some were even American brand shops like the Nike store. Not so many offers of drugs or bagwatches here. I did find a very interesting side street.

The side street was crawling with people and was bordered by small food shops. People were lined up for meat on a stick. Chu WenJiang taught me how to say dog meat, Gou Rou sounds like gow roe. But every shop I asked laughed at me. I guess maybe they thought I was accusing them of selling dog meat. I should have asked how to say I want to eat dog meat. Anyways, I ended up with beef, octopus and something pretty much unknown. I think it might have been beef tendon, but I'm not sure. It was chewy and tough, but tasty.

At this point I made up my mind to buy more silk. I roamed around looking for a bank I recognized, there are so many banks in China it's kinda funny. There's stuff like "The industrialized bank of Shanghai" or the "Shanghai cultural bank" or the "Agricultural bank of China" not to be mistaken with just the plain old "Bank of China" or the ICBC, one of the c's is China, the other might be Commerce, but who cares really. I found a bank, got some money and headed to Silk King. I bought some silk and the lady made a funny face when I paid for it in cash, she laughed and told her friend something to the effect of "holy shit, did you see all the cash in this guy's wallet?" She came up to me and said that they accepted credit cards. Look lady, the reason my wallet is loaded with cash is because almost nobody in China accepts credit cards. Had I noticed that your shop took credit cards I would not have scrounged around for a bank. That's not exactly what I said, I was slightly more polite, in fact I just said "Ok" and kept counting the cash.

Here's the deal, in China, you can get a good meal for under 10 rmb (people say Yuan, but rmb is faster to type). In fact, if you cook at home, it's probably even less than that. So 100 rmb is a lot of money, you can buy just about everything you need for a few days maybe even a week on 100rmb. So walking around with 1500 rmb in your wallet is crazy talk. I saw one local's wallet, and all he had was about 130 rmb in it, give or take a few because it's hard to count when you're looking in someone's wallet. Now, let's put this in US terms. 10rmb is $1.50, 100rmb, $15, 1000rmb $150. Tell me you've never walked around with $150-200 in your wallet and I'll call you a liar. It just so happens that if you're walking around with $200 in your pocket in China it happens to be 15 very large bright red bills. Making them very recognizable.

So I spent my money in the silk shop, there was a little mix up. I thought the lady said that the chiffon was 40 rmb per meter, and that the other silk was 88 rmb per meter, and the satin silk was 138. Turns out that the chiffon was 88 and the other silk 40, the satin was indeed 138. I ended up spending a bit more than I expected, but still dirt cheap compared to US prices.

I walked home from west Nanjing road, it was getting dark, I got a few good pictures though. Speaking of pictures, this whole walk I spent getting pictures of people. I took some pictures of many types of people, pretty much whatever caught my eye. Some of them were of good looking women hahaha, but a lot of them are of fashion victims. Fashion here is pretty much screwed up compared to anywhere else. There are so many different styles that make many people stand out. Super short skirts, bright pink dresses, sequin, polka dots, and the all time favorite, super short shorts, some even have short shorts with mini dresses that almost entirely cover the shorts. People where shirts with English written on them, some are brand names, but most are knockoffs. I guess to a Chinese person, Absolute Vodka and Asbeout Vodka look about the same. Some girl looked like she was in a Kriss-Kross video! Hilarious. The worst fashion though is nylons that start from just below the knee and go up. So basically it's like nylons with the sock part cut out so that it only covers the legs. Hopefully this fashion will never make it to North America. I will also post a picture of "Is this a guy or a girl?" because that one kinda threw me for a spin, and I could see the person. Talk about fashion victim.

Anyways my short walk to west Nanjing road took only 4 hours or was it 5, I lost count. I came back to the office, got a couple of pork buns from the guy across the street. I think he doesn't like that I overpay him for his buns. They cost 1.5 rmb, and I pay him 2. He's ok with me paying 2 rmb for 1 bun, but when I gave him 4 (instead of 3) for 2 buns he looked a little funny but pocketed the money without protesting. I think if I see him while I'm with a Chinese speaker I'll get the person to translate that I know his buns cost 1.5 but they're so delicious that I am happy to give him 2 rmb for them. I mean for me 1 rmb is 15cents, so overpaying by 7.5cents won't break my budget anytime soon. But for him 0.5rmb probably goes a long way.

Anyways, I hit the office to get my stuff and it turns out that the Internet at night is lightning fast compared to the Internet during the day. So I surfed a little, killed some time, waited a bit to see if Trish would log on. 10pm came around and the office was almost deserted, so I headed to the hotel.

I woke up this morning at around 8:30, headed up for breakfast from the hotel restaurant. The waitress there is really nice, I think she likes me because I make an effort to speak in Chinese, she smiles at me a lot. Breakfast here is almost always the same... so whatever. I had some good dumplings and some fruit. Off to the office, I found two little boxes on my desk, both with a little teddy bear glued to the lid. One had a pink bear and another had a blue one. I thought someone was having a baby, but it turns out it's for a wedding. It's a little celebration of people getting married or something. Inside the boxes were some Dove chocolates... Dove, the maker of soap, now makes chocolate. Anyways, I fixed some stuff, did some work and then George comes along.

George might have to stay a bit longer, so I'll be heading home alone. Not a big deal really until you take some time to think about it. Getting to the airport and on the airplane is the easy part, many people at the airport will speak enough English to help me out. The taxi there should be fine, I'll just give him a card that says take me to the airport. The big problem is when I land in SFO. The plan was that George's wife was giving us a ride. So now I'll have to cab it to George's because my car is there. But that's where there's more trouble. I gave my car keys to his wife in case she needed to move my car. But his wife might not be there. So she might leave my keys with Wan Feng, another guy from work who lives nearby... Wan Feng barely speaks English and he might not be home either, but his wife whom I've never met might be? This is sounding better and better. I think I'll get George to tell his wife to hide my keys somewhere and then I'll just grab them from there. Grr...

Anyways, last night I saw JianZhong, so I invited him to lunch. I thought he had forgotten, but he showed up around 11:45 and asked me if we were gonna go to lunch. I tell him sure, let's invite a couple more people. He invites the entire Map QA team. To be honest, I didn't mind at all. They do hard work for us, they deserve a treat. I tell him if everyone comes I'll have to stop by the bank first though. He just laughed, but then JianZhong laughs a lot. Turned out that only one other person joined us. Wang ChangHu aka. Roy. Roy's English isn't so great, so I had to try and include him in the conversation. He listened intently though, I think he was trying to understand what I was saying.

Wang ChangHu ordered lunch. It's the norm in China, one person orders for everyone, they only give you one menu per table anyways. He ordered off the lunch menu, which has never happened before, everyone always orders from the real menu. We got a lunch set: soup, rice, tofu, frog legs, cucumbers, bok choy, beef and mushrooms. Wang ChangHu asked me if I ate everything before he ordered. And by asked me I mean he asked JiangZhong and then JianZhong asked me. When I said yes, Wang ChangHu started ordering. Anyways, the food was excellent as always. But the surprise was in the bill. All this great food, granted there was not much meat, but all this great food for 78 rmb. $12... that gets you 2 subs at subway, and maybe 2 cookies if you're lucky. Clearly not enough for 3 people. Here for $12 you're afforded a lunch fit for a king.

Over lunch I told JianZhong that I would like to try dog, snake and turtle. Though, most importantly dog because it's illegal in the US. He said that he wouldn't eat it, but he's not against taking me somewhere where they serve it. So I got Ed to help me find a restaurant that sells dog and other foods, we found a good one that was apparently recommended to Ed earlier this week but not because they served dog. JianZhong called to make sure they had some available. So tonight I'm going out to dog town with JianZhong, Wang ChangHu and Lin Ying, that last one is a girl. I can not for the life of me tell the difference between girl names and guy names here.

There's a good reason for me not being able to tell the difference between guy and girl names in China. Not just that all the names sound the same but... even the Chinese can't tell! Apparently there are very few (if any) names reserved for girls or guys in China. Who knew?

So, I should finally get to eat dog tonight, and then we're gonna go play some snooker or something. Sounds like a blast. Hopefully my feet won't hurt too much, they're a little busted from the 5 hour walk yesterday.

Shanghai Adventure - the quest for deodorant

I left you last time with thoughts of heading out for some shopping. And I did. My old neighbour (whom I can't remember the name of... I mean all Chinese names sound the same really) we'll call him HuangHai, mostly because it sounds cool and his nameplate may or may not have looked something like HuangHai. Anyways, HuangHai wrote me a note that told the taxi driver that I wanted to go to the City Bank building in Pudong. The reason for this was that I discovered that there was a "City Shop" there and that City Shop stocks Expat gear.

Off I go, armed with HuangHai's note (yeah I'm gonna use the made up name as much as I can, because I'm cool like that). I see a white woman looking very lost walking around with her lonely planet book opened to a map. I followed her, since she was going the same way I was. She seemed a little less lost when she got to Nanjing road, so I never bothered to talk to her. I flagged a cab down and hopped in.

I handed my "HuangHai Note"(tm) to the driver and said Pudong. He pointed to where HuangHai told me he wrote the address and I said dui which means I agree or yes and it sonds like "dway" like "dwane", he seemed a little confused, pointed again, then I said dui dui and threw in a hao for good measure. That seemed to make him happy, and he handed me my "HuangHai Note" back. Off we went, in the wrong direction. Now this might worry some tourists, they tell the guy to go east and he heads off straight west after a very confusing explanation of where you want to go. But I knew better. We had to go west to hook up with the tunnel that goes under the river.

The drive was really quiet... normally the cabby is chatting with whoever speaks Chinese, seeing as nobody spoke Chinese except for him, he didn't say anything. When we were close to where we wanted to go, he asked me, in Chinese, where to let me out. But I didn't see the city bank building anywhere, so I told him city bank, and handed him the "HuangHai Note" and he quickly nodded and drove another block. I saw the City Bank building and said "hao hao" and I pointed to the building. He rattled something off and pointed to the curb so I said dui and he pulled over. I paid the man and headed into the building.

It looked more like an office building than a shopping mall, and there was a directory. City Shop was in room 105. Good, on the first floor. I go and walk all around the first floor. And then I do a second lap, maybe it's smaller than I thought. No dice. I walk back to the directory and the security guard that's hanging around gives me a funny look, this is the third or fourth time he's seen me walk by looking a little lost. So I walk up to the guy "Ni Hao" and then I point to the directory trying to make myself understood. The guy follows me to the directory and I point to City Shop, say "City Shop" and I was just about to say 105 in Chinese when the guy says "You want to go to City Shop?" LOL, this dude was watching me make an ass of myself when his English is more than adequate. Apparently it was complicated to get to, because he almost started giving me directions and then said "Follow me please".

The guard walks me through the first floor, yup, seen it twice, and then he walks out the door. WTF? It's outside!? So I follow him, and the he points back towards the building. Yup the shop can only be accessed from the outside, it's got it's own outside doors. I walk in, and it's like a small version of whole foods with really weird selection. This might be Americanized as far as China goes, but it's far from being anything like and American super market.

I walk down the isles, and look around. They have Italian style pasta, cheese and other dairy products. The toiletries isle is stocked with regular looking toothpaste, some Listerine, axe body wash and even some deodorant! The problem is you have your choice of spray deodorant or roll-on. For a country that produces 90% of the world's knickknacks, and probably half the stock of bar deodorant, you'd think they'd have some on their shelves. No bars of deodorant. I have a choice of Nivea spray or Fa roll-on. The Nivea spray is four times the price of the Fa roll-on so my choice is easy. I get the roll-on. I pay my 22 rmb and head out.

I decide to roam around Pudong, and check out the place. They have huge buildings, one of them is the pearl tower or something like that. It's a tall building with balls, I'll put a picture up. Anyways, when we were in cloud 9 I called it the ball building, and Jorge heard the bong building so now it's sticking, bong building it is. I walked by, way too many tourists. Everywhere you go in the world, there's always Chinese tourists. Nowhere is this more true that in China. There are something like 5 or 6 billion people in China, apparently, most of them are tourists.

I walked by the bong building, and found that there was an aquarium. I walked in, and found yet again that there were hordes of tourists crawling the building. I decided to hit the gift shop and head out because the map didn't show anything weird that I haven't seen before in an aquarium. The gift shop was a zoo, har har, not an aquarium... get it? Anyways, I found a couple of knickknacks that cost more than what most people spend in a day on food... $6. That's what the knickknacks cost, not the food. You can eat well in china on about $3 a day, and you don't even have to cook anything. If you're my parents though, food in China would cost you at least $15 a day. I don't seem my mom eating much from street vendor carts or tiny hole in the wall noodle shops. Not that I've been eating there (except to try em out) because Telenav is footing my food bill. I easily spend more in one meal than a whole Chinese family eats in a month. But then again I'm taking people out. And even then it's pretty hard to rack up an enormous bill.

Right, so back to my story. I left the aquarium, walked around some more, got bored of roaming and hopped on a cab. I handed him my hotel card, which says in Chinese take me to my hotel. They're always reluctant to drive us to the hotel because of all the construction. So I tell him Nanjing road. He points to the hotel. I gesture the length of Nanjing road on the tiny hotel card map and say "anywhere on Nanjing road". Obviously I didn't mean anywhere, I meant close by, but this got the cab moving. Kinda moving.

Traffic in Shanghai is crazy at best, and downright awful most of the time. But never have I tried to cross one of the tunnels during rush hour. Well, let me explain. Traffic doesn't really move along the tunnels during rush hour. The driver, not speaking any English therefore not trying to strike up some small talk with me decided to turn on the radio. Did you know that in the afternoon Chinese radio plays soap operas? No? Me neither! But they do! Now I know you're sitting there in your comfy chair thinking, this guy knows maybe two dozen Chinese words how could he possibly know that it's a Chinese soap opera? Well, prepare to be amazed! At first I thought it was a talk show, because it was just people talking. Then there was the sound of a phone ringing... call in talk show? Then there was some high pitched and animated talking. Then an OMG sounding part from a guy. Then a little dum dum dum tune. Then the sound of a Chinese ambulance. Then more talking. More little tunes. Clearly a soap opera. Plus thanks to Aurora I've been exposed to Chinese TV soap operas in the past.

Well, it took about 30 minutes to get back and the guy dropped me off on Nanjing road just like I asked, he dropped me off at the closest intersection to the tunnel exit. I guess he really did understand anywhere on Nanjing road. I was about 10 minutes walk from work. So I start walking, and of course "bagwatch". I want to invent a t-shirt that says in Chinese "I don't need a bag or a watch or anything else you're selling. And I already bought this T-shirt." So I can just point to my shirt whenever they ask me. Plus you could wear it in the US and it would just look cool. Just like the people hear wear English shirts without knowing what's written on them. Like one guy wearing a baseball cap saying "Beauty Hunter" and his girlfriend wearing a matching cap saying "Adult Model". Ok... well.

So after the first bagwatch guy, I took out my camera and started taking a few pictures here and there. I don't know if it was the camera or the slight rain, but no more bagwatch people bugged me for the rest of the walk. It was kinda spooky, but enjoyable. I got back to the hotel a little wet yet still sweaty. I took a quick shower and tried my new deodorant. Yep roll-on still feels like something is licking your armpit. Didn't this stuff get banned or something. Why are the Chinese still in the 1980's of the deodorant world? Anyways, now I smell a little like I put aftershave in my armpits, but it's better than nothing. I think.

Off to supper with Autumn, we grab FanFan and Lu Ye, and some other guy which I don't remember the name of. Unfortunately for the other guy, I've exceeded my daily limit of made up Chinese names after HuangHai, so no name for him. The 5 of us took to subway to go to supper. The subway in China is awesome, and busy. The train is wide open on the inside, no doors between cars. You could skateboard from one end of the train to the other if the train was empty. Unfortunately, that's never the case. The train is probably 500 meters long (if not longer) and full of people. It runs by every 8 minutes too. Apparently when we went it wasn't busy at all, you could even get a seat. During rush hour I'm told that you have to push yourself into the train and hope the door doesn't squish you.

The restaurant was HuBe style, FanFan is from the HuBe province so he ordered some stuff. He asked if it was ok to order the house special fish soup. 188 rmb per 500g of fish, and we'd need 1kg to feed the 4 of us (Autumn doesn't really eat fish). 400 rmb for 1 soup... uh, no. So we got the less expensive but very similar 160 rmb/kg soup. less than half the price for a similar tasting soup... but not the best. After the soup was done they gave us a dish of tofu skins and shrimp paste, and we had to boil the tofu and shrimp paste into the fish soup. The tofu tasted a bit like cumin, and they made shrimp balls out of the shrimp paste. The shrimp balls put every other shrimp ball I've ever had to shame. These were the highlight of my meal.

Back to the hotel... right, so where did we come from? Here's a little tidbit about China, they either build really small or really big. Houses are really small. Malls are really big. My hotel room is about 15 feet by 15 feet. This mall has 200 foot wide hallways and is 7 stories high with 3-5 stories under the ground. It took us about 8 minutes to walk the loop around one floor of the mall. We had gone the wrong way out of the elevator so we walked the entire floor before we got to the restaurant. So, how do you get back to the subway. We roamed, got lost, got more lost, found ourselves, or so we thought, got lost again, and then found again, and then we got to the subway. We paid our 4 rmb for the ride, the machine didn't want coins, it spat those out real fast but then when I gave it a bill is sucked it up really fast! Then spat out coins for my change. You know the US machines that take your bills take the really slow. The Chinese machines suck them up like a vacuum almost, it's crazy.

Anyways, one short subway ride later and we're back on Nanjing road walking to the hotel. I get to my room, shower and head to sleep. Wake up, shower again, my room got to 25 degrees again overnight... it cools off to 20 during the day and then heats up to 25 at night... screwed up world. The street cart where I normally get my breakfast had individually wrapped hot dogs in a can. Now this following conversation was mostly gestures, me speaking in English, and him speaking in Chinese, neither of us having any clue what the other person said save for the gestures. "What are these hot dogs?" "1 rmb" hmm, that's cheap but I still have no idea what they are "Do you cook them on the grill?" "Yeah, on the grill" ok "I'll take 1" I actually know that one in Chinese, it's YiGa sounds like iga and it means "one of". So he cooks my hot dog plus my regular sandwich. Then shoves the hot dog in my sandwich with some extra brown sauce. It was delicious, and it was exactly what you'd expect a hot dog to taste like.

At the office, work is boring, I talk to people, and head to lunch with Chu WenJiang, we had to talk about navstar. He's got an L1 visa so he's moving to the states. We went to a Korean BBQ place, I wanted to try dog, but they didn't have any. Oh well, better luck next time. The BBQ was awesome and they had some unagi style eel to go with it. Delicious stuff really.

Now I'm back at the office, Autumn and Robert are off to Beijing and George is back from Beijing. It's Wednesday so it's China office afternoon tea day. I got a cool bun with some jam and custard on it and an ice tea. Nestea Ice Rush with extra cooling action. Sounds like a deodorant. Anyways, the ice rush is like dentine ice except in drink form. It's got a bad menthol aftertaste. This afternoon I think I'm gonna go roam. Maybe find someplace fun to eat. Who knows, I may find dog after all.