Shanghai Wars - A new hope

The title of this post isn't really meaningful, but who said it had to be? I'm picking up again where I left off... dealing with ShunYi and Liu Qing. I asked them to find me an electronics store to buy some goodies and then we'd go to supper. Now according to ShunYi, only the expensive stores are open late, and we should go in the afternoon. So I'm going to see if he can go this afternoon, it's not like I can't stay in the office late anyways, I could spit from here to my hotel.

Anyways, they picked a different Hunan style restaurant for supper, a very fancy, very new restaurant. So off we went. Everything here that's expensive is on east Nanjing Road, it's the tourist trap. As far as tourists go, most of them are Chinese. I get offered "bagwatch" or "dvdshirt" all the time on east Nanjing road... I find it funny how the salesmen have combined the two words into one. Some even spout out "Hi sir, bagwatch, dvdshirt" while opening a menu of items you could buy.

We get to the restaurant at around 7:30pm, and we're greeted by the waiting staff with a chorus of "good morning". Seems like no matter what time it is, it's always a good morning. I think it's what they're told to say, but it's pretty funny anyways. Now speaking of the waiting staff, there are two kinds of waiters (Fu Ya, I dunno how to spell it but that's what it sounds like, fu ya is waiter or waitress). Anyways, the two kinds of waiters/waitresses are "regular" and "beer". So there's the girl who hangs out in the restaurant, dressed all in yellow, with Kirin printed on her rather short dress (stupid me forgetting the camera, that reminds me, I keep forgetting to bring the camera to food outings). This Kirin girl's only purpose in life is to sell you beer. She's the girl with the bottle opener. So after you order food from your regular Fu Ya, the beer Fu Ya comes by and offers you a beer. This is where it gets funny...

The Kirin girl comes by and says something in Chinese, ShunYi and Liu Qing talk rapidly in Chinese and then ShunYi looks at me and asks "Would you like beer?" I answer "Sure, why not" Then ShunYi speaks to Liu Qing again and I swear it looked like two underage kids saying "This guy is really gonna buy us beer!" So ShunYi then turns to the Kirin girl and says something. He then asked me if I preferred a cold beer... honestly, is there any other kind? So I say yes. I hear him say Bing, which means cold and off she goes in her little yellow dress.

She comes back with one single huge bottle of beer. ShunYi tells me that he just ordered one to share. So she pours out the beer into our glasses, it's 750ml or something, so whatever. Well this beer is pretty weaksauce, ShunYi says the label said 3.9%... It's not bad though, so we start eating. Unfortunately, the guys wanted nothing to do with turtle so they didn't let me order what looked like a turtle swimming in a giant bowl of soup, but hey, that's life. Instead we got the much more reasonable spicy fish head dish. Who eats a giant fish head and shies away from turtle... I mean really? We had bbq duck with cool sauces, some cabbage in a soy based sauce, sliced beef in some crazy red sauce, and maybe something else, but I don't remember. Anyways, Hunan style dishes tend to be interactive! So after we ate the meat off the fish head, the Fu Ya came by and gave us a bowl of noodles in hot water. The idea is you take the noodles, dunk them in the fish head sauce and then eat the noodles. Awesome!!!

Pausing... more adventures await... I think I'm going to an electronic store.
Woot, electronic store worked... but let's keep going with the story...

As I was saying, I like interactive food... we had another dish the first day for lunch where you ate the rabbit meat and then the veggies in the plate were cooked with the rabbit drippings. Excellent idea, why don't we do that back home?
Man my English is getting pretty bad or something. Maybe it's from talking in broken English to the Chinese guys so that they understand what I'm saying.

Anyways, supper was great, then I went back to the hotel with the intention of taking a walk down to the Bund. But instead I talked to Trish over the web, slacked off and went to bed after trying to surf the web. As it turns out, the internets does NOT make the world united and easy. Trying to get a North American web page from China is a pain in the ass. Soooooooo slow.

So I sleep and dream of, well I dunno, cus I was rudely woken up this morning at 6am. I mean, there I was, sleeping and enjoying it, when the phone rings. I have no clue where the phone is, I don't even know what my room looks like or where the light switch is. I finally answer on the 6th or maybe it was 10th ring. "Hello?" "Good morning, this is your wake up call" says a lovely voice in broken English. "Uh.... ok thanks" I didn't know what else to say. Now some poor sap is gonna miss his plane or something and I'm awake. What jerk asks for a wake up call for the wrong room. And at 6am? I didn't even know there was a 6 in the AM.

So now I'm awake, from having searched my room for a phone that didn't stop ringing, so I decide to go for that walk on the Bund that I flaked out on last night. I get dressed and head out. Off to the Bund. Now I'm not entirely sure what the Bund is. It's one of two things, it could be a walkway along the river or the street next to it. The street probably has a name that isn't Bund, so I'm assuming it's the walkway next to the river. So I get to the street, it's only a block away from the hotel, this street is a monstrosity, it's about 6 lanes wide, there's about 8 lanes worth of traffic and people are honking like their lives depend on it. To be honest, their lives probably depend on how much they honk, so it's only fair that they honk a lot.

Anyways, on the other side of the cross walk at this point there's only construction, so instead of crossing the street, I turn left. That's where it started getting hairy. I walk a couple of blocks, and there's an underpass. Unfortunately the underpass is blocked by construction and therefore closed. So I keep going. And going. And well at this point the road turned left. So did I. Bye bye Bund. This road was cool though, tons of construction workers were walking to work, and then I got to a busy street, so busy there was a bike repair "shop" on the corner. I say "shop" because it was a guy sitting on a wooden lawn chair with tools on the ground in front of him and a small selection of spare parts, like pedals and a chain. He also had a wide selection of bike pumps, I guess that's like the air machines we have at gas stations.


I keep following the street and I get to a point where the street goes right into a building. I mean it, into the building. There was a sign that said no cars (well it was a picture of a car with a crossed out circle through it) but tons of bicycles and scooters drove right in. The street "hole" was about one shop front wide and two stories high. So I figure, if it's good enough for bikes, it's good enough for me. Well, 15 feet in the street narrows and turns, right into construction. People are driving around pillars and there's two way traffic going where even walking would be a tight fit. Due to the invention of the camera you guys will be able to see this in action once I figure out how to post pictures.


So it turns out that this tiny crammed street gives way about a block away from the office. So I walk by the office back to the hotel room. I take a shower and go eat. I think there was a fancy business guy and his date eating breakfast at the hotel, which is kinda funny, because when I was done I waved to the girls behind the bar and said xie xie while this guy had to stop and pay for his breakfast. And breakfast at the Manhattan is not cheap. 48 RMB, about $5 where you could get breakfast on the street for about 2 RMB, which is, in my mind, pretty much free.

So I head over to work, there is NOBODY at work at 8am, it's a ghost town. So I drop off my bag and go take a walk. There's a lot less "bagwatch" people in the morning, in fact in my half hour walk I was only accosted once about a "watchbag" I smiled at the guy and kept going, he didn't even give chase. I got back to work and grabbed some water out of the water cooler. There must be another name for this device in China because in no way does it cool water. It's more like a water heater. You can get room temperature water or hot water. Remember the blue spout is "I would like water at a random temperature" and the red spout is "I would like water at a consistent temperature: boiling hot". Speaking of warm drinks, I have only had 2 cold drinks since I got here, one coke (the coke zero was warm by the time I drank it) and one sprite (though the sprite was warm by the time I finished it).

Then I did some work, got some stuff done, Kevin laughed at me for not being able to find the Bund, and I selected my lunch victim. Chu WenJiang, the China Navstar guy who is going to be my code slave for the next month or so. I told him to pick a good Sichuan(that's how it's written here) restaurant. So we head to lunch, again Nianjing road, this time yet another building. The restaurant was again super fancy, on the fifth floor. We walk out of the elevator into an ambush of girls dressed in bright red Chinese dresses. You know the ones that look like kimonos. They all have ear pieces like the secret service and radios in hand. Chu says that there's 2 of us and one of the ladies guides us to a table.

We sit, and I tell Chu to order. He asks me if I like rabbit, I say yes, he says "I mean to eat, do you like to eat rabbit". Hilarious, did he really think I liked them as pets or something? I mean we're sitting in a restaurant and he asks me if I like rabbit while he's looking through the menu. His English is better than most, but I didn't really think he was picking a really weird small talk topic. So we get rabbit in a spicy sauce and I picked out eel cus it looked good in the book, I shoulda paid more attention to the five little red chili's drawn in the book. For veggies Chu ordered something that looks like baby Napa cabbage, Chu explained that they grow them in a dark box, that's why they're yellow, they never see the sun, and we also got some strange green vegetable that looked almost exactly like cucumber, had the texture of thinly sliced steamed carrots and tasted like neither. The green sliced veggie was served raw (I think) and on a large block of ice. Pretty cool serving technique. Everything was awesome. The difference between Hunan and Sichuan is the peppers. Where Hunan is very spicy, it's the spicy we're used to in North America. Sichuan is spicy that makes your tongue tingle and then go numb. It's like they found lidocane in pepper form. Very tasty and full of flavour. (The U in flavour is for Trish because she's awesome)

Then back from lunch I started writing this blog and Liu Qing sent me an MSN "Are you free now?" I answer "Sure" and the response I get is "Ok let's go!" Cryptic messages are the norm here in China, it would take too many English words to explain anything in detail which would take so very long to type or say, so they just don't. Why would you say "let's go to the electronic store" when you can just leave it at "let's go"?

So we head out to the street and hop in a cab. The cab price lights up 11.00 RMB. Ok, so a bit less than $2 start up fee... that's cool. It turns out that this is the minimum price, set for anything within a certain distance. I think this distance is up to 2km, but I'm not entirely sure. Anyways, we drove for 4 minutes before the price went to 12. By the time we got to the store it cost me 13 RMB. So... $2 cab ride, for about 3km and 7 minutes. Do you know how far you can get in a cab for $2 in the bay area? Oh that's right, they don't even let you in the cab for $2.

Anyways, we get to where these guys were told was a good electronic store, and there isn't one. It moved. So we walk, it's only 10 minutes away. We get to this store, and it's called CyberMart. From the outside you might think it's a best buy or a Frys. The inside is a little more confusing. It's an electronics emporium! There's a pile of tiny electronic shops, some no bigger than a counter, and the biggest ones were maybe the size of a small bedroom. This place was three stories high, but there was even a shop in between two floors! (I didn't get a picture, there was no angle that could show where the shop was located) So we go looking for a headset with a microphone and a cable for the camera. We find a shop on the third floor, I think the guys stopped at this shop because the girl behind the counter was cute. Anyways, she didn't have a camera cable, but she was very helpful in checking. She did however have headphones. She showed me the 65 RMB ones, honestly they looked fancy. Then she showed me the 120 RMB ones. Apparently they vibrate or something, I dunno, don't ask me. Then I was checking out the 120 RMB ones, and asked if this was the best they had, or if they had better. Well, after ShunYi translated the girl dashed off, and ShunYi asked me "The price doesn't matter?" Now in perspective, 120 RMB is a lot of money for these guys, but I spend that much on lunch some days. It's like $17. So I'm wondering what price they might come up with if money is no object, and I wasn't disappointed! hahaha... 230 RMB, top of the line, best of the best. Have you bought headphones with a mic on them recently? $30 does not get you top of the line, best of the best, or anywhere near it at Frys. It gets you discount Jim's slightly soiled headphones that will last at least 10 hours.

Now I'm faced with 230 RMB vs. 120 RMB. They both look nice and they both look like brands I've never even heard of, so I ask to try them out. She gets the guy in the next booth to give her his music thing, it looks like a Garmin, but it plays music. So I tried both of them on, and listened to the guy’s techno beats and let me tell you, these headphones were great. So awesome that I figure Bosh has got some heavy competition. But I can't tell the difference between the two, they both block out outside noise (since that place was really noisy) and they both sound great. The cheaper ones were a bit more comfortable, so I opted for those. I'm pretty sure Liu Qing was flirting with the girl because when I selected them she said I could have them for 110 RMB. I can't blame him though, she was really pretty. Armed with headphones (that come with a 6 day exchange policy and 3 month guarantee) we head for the Nikon store for the camera cable.

The guy at the store chats with ShunYi for a minute and once translated he said: "The cable you want is more than 100 RMB, but this card reader costs 45 RMB, you're better off with the card reader which doubles as a USB drive because there's a cap on the end where the card goes in protecting your card." So I buy a very small, lightweight card reader for 45 RMB, then he tries to sell me some memory cards, but they weren't super cheap so I turned him down. As a side note, when I got to my desk and tried the card reader, I noticed that my laptop has a built in card reader. So well, I didn't need one. But whatever.



I saw a Canon EOS 40D in one of the counters on the way out and the thing next to it said 1010... So I had to stop. I ask ShunYi if that's the price, he says no (dang!) and asks, the man tells him the camera cost 8000 RMB... sigh, that's over $1k... no dice. The funniest thing about the whole trip there was that the sales people sitting in the electronic booths looked like they wouldn't give the time of day to most shoppers, but look LauWei OMG, you want to buy my stuff!!! ShunYi and Liu Qing would walk by, no reaction, I walk by and everyone is telling stuff, I'm not even sure they were speaking English. They were waving merchandise at me, telling me things, some even realized that ShunYi and Liu Qing were with me so they'd yap really fast in Chinese at them. It is very important in this case that you do exactly NOTHING. If you show interest, you are doomed, they don't stop talking! Anyways, we had what I wanted, and the guys were happy with their road trip, so off we go and another 13 RMB cab ride later we're back at work.

Now at this point I was going to make some general comments, but I don't remember what they were about, so I won't. I don't have anything planned yet, but you can be sure that the adventures of Jonathan in Shanghai will continue, mostly because this place is crazy!

Soon there will be pictures... hopefully with captions.

I was going to make some general comments of things I notice