Tuesday, 29 September 2009

We're back from our excursion to Putuo Shan.

We had a great time, despite some challenges. We had an early call to the meeting point to catch the bus to the bus to the ferry (6:30 am), but there were mostly students in the group, and that age group can be a bit vague about time. We didn't depart on the first bus until after 7:00 am, and by that time Shanghai traffic is really beastly. Our tour guides manically cell phoned away and eliminated one of the buses (only "mostly necessary" not "absolutely necessary" — actually just a weird labor relations thing we never quite fully comprehended), but we still were over 30 minutes late catching our 9:30 ferry. But, no matter, they held the ferry for us (we were a large group, more than 70, and there is some power in numbers). The hotel was another challenge. For what was supposed to be a two star hotel, this one has quite a lot of ground to make up. The housekeeping staff begin their rounds at 6:00 am with gusto. This involves much loud screeching and bellowing up and down the long corridors, making sleeping-in an impossibility. Our room was right next to whatever medieval mechanism supplies the rooms with hot water, and that beast made the most indescribable noises while it was at work, intruding even further on our sleep time.

But just have a look at the pictures I took! (Here, here, and here.) The scenery was spectacular, the buddhist temples were fascinating, and it was great to get out of Shanghai for a weekend island getaway.

Having just got back, we are about to leave again.

All of China is set to go through a positive paroxysm of public patriotic psychosis this Thursday. Something called "National Day" is annually used by most Chinese as an excuse to take a week off from work. This year, National Day isn't just any old National Day, though. It is the 60^th anniversary of the 1949 revolution. Cities like Beijing and our Shanghai will become virtually edematous with a huge influx of visitors. Miles has eight days off (October 1 - 8) so we're clearing out, and heading about as far west away from the madness as we can. (We can always watch the parades on TV.)

We wanted to go to Tibet, but the authorities have closed the border, so we simply can't get there. As next best alternative, we're going to visit some provinces of western China that have Tibetan people and culture. Our itinerary involves visits to Tibetan monasteries (Labrang and Langmusi), an old garrison town (Songpan), and lots of natural sites (Tarzang Lake, Ganjia Grasslands, and Jiuzhaigou National Park). It is also involves some flights on some local Chinese airlines, so keep fingers crossed for us!

To close, here's another of those really special English signs:

I couldn't find the word "speel" in any online dictionary. I think most people ignored the English version of the warning. I certainly didn't see a lot of obviously falling people, however careful they might have been to do so.

Thursday, 24 September 2009

Another long(ish) gap between posts (sorry).

I suppose we've just about settled into our Shanghai routines.

For Miles, this means a discussion section and office hours on Tuesdays, his marathon 3-hour class on Wednesdays, and his own writing on other days. For me, it's piano practice and composition most days, with some "tinkering" with music notation software thrown in.

Then there's chores. We have by now started cooking some dinners in. Simple stir-fries. Nothing heroic. This, of course, entails shopping for ingredients. When we feel like it. The weather has settled into a gray-foggy-drizzly to actually-rainy sort of "palette," so sometimes it's just too icky out to want to go out and shop. This afternoon, though, it's started brightening up.

We do have our first real excursion outside Shanghai coming up tomorrow and going through the weekend. We're taking a field trip with the students in Miles' program to an island called Putuo Shan. I'll post more about that when we get back. Hope the brighter weather hold up! We also have a week long break coming up the first week of October for a holiday called "National Day." We have a major trek planned to western Sichuan province.

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I have a few random observations to share in the general category of "culture shocks" which I've been saving up for a post that needed some extra punch. Perhaps that's this one, so here goes:

• It is quite common to see people out on the streets of Shanghai in their pajamas. Usually this is pension-aged people, but not always. The pajamas are almost always quite nice silk ones. Very stylish, really. But, still, they're pajamas.
  
• Between all the mega-building for Expo 2010, which opens in Shanghai on the first of May, and just what happens generally in an economy which is still growing at 8% per annum, even in a downturn, one element of the city's "sound track" rarely cuts out, even at night: the jack-hammer. (Thank goodness we're up on the 31^st floor!)
• Mobile phone numbers are very long here. The way China deals with mobile phones, there's no prefix of the number you can omit (such as a city or area code). Mobile phone numbers are 10 full digits long.
• Those who run department stores here are not content to let package advertising communicate with the shopper silently. They hire staff to stand beside products on the shelves and "hawk" them very, very unsilently indeed. This can turn the shopping trip to Carrefour into quite a trial — if one doesn't understand Chinese.
• ATMs here absolutely bombard those using them with long recorded messages (again, only in Chinese). Most banks have a number of ATMs in a row, and each ATM will have a lockable enclosure about the size of a telephone booth. Some of the enclosures have recorded messages (perhaps to remind you that you can lock the door?) independent of the messages that the ATM will play. If you go to one of these places when they are fully busy, it's quite an amazing aural experience, as all these recordings play in multiple instances completely out of sync with one another.
• All of the major roads have painted lines on them. You might naively think that these have the same meaning here that they do on our roads. From studying the behavior of actual drivers, I've come to the conclusion that this is simply not so. There is clearly always a usable lane that is just about centered in between each adjacent set of parallel lines. Those lanes seem perfectly normal to us. But for drivers here, there is also a lane for each line. To drive "in" that lane, you make sure that your car has that line at about the car's center point, width-wise. Initially I thought this practice was confined to "temporary use". Kind of a prolonged change of lanes type of thing. Not really. There doesn't seem to be any upper bound on how long someone may drive in one of these on-the-line lanes. Cars doing this may be just a few centimeters from the neighboring cars to the left and right.

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To close this post, let me share with you what I dearly hope will be just the first of many compositions that I will create while here in Shanghai: Prelude, Shanghai, 22-23 September 2009. The link is to a midi file rendering of a short prelude that I wrote during the previous two days. It's my attempt to capture the raw, edgy, energetic, "angular" feel of this city. As I've only just written it, and it's difficult, I haven't nearly learned to play it yet. Thus, you are only getting this synthesized rendering, rather than an actual recording. This fast-paced music shouldn't suffer too much because of that, although it will sound a bit mechanical. On a Mac, midi files play in QuickTime. On Windows PCs, they will play in QuickTime and Microsoft's Media Player. Leave a comment if you cannot get the file to play for some reason.

Enjoy!

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Postscript: Thursday evening

The weather really did turn for the better today, so when I went up to the "sky gym" on the 34^th floor of our apartment building for my workout, I decided to snap some pictures. You can see them here.

Saturday, 19 September 2009

We took a walk among the towers of Pudong today.

This produced the bumper crop of pictures which you can see here, but you might want to read the rest of this post for some background before you look at them.

Shanghai is divided by the Huangpu river into two parts: Puxi (the west side and the part we live on) and Pudong (the east side). When Miles first started coming to Shanghai, there was almost no development on the Pudong side. In 1994, the first of the Pudong towers was completed. It's a beautifully wacky building called "The Pearl of the Orient." Its function is as a TV tower, but it sent a message to the world: "look out, Shanghai is on the move." Since then, at a dizzying rate, the Pudong side of Shanghai has become home to ever-taller towers. One of these, the Jin Mao Tower, was briefly the tallest. It has been eclipsed by the Shanghai World Financial Centre Tower, which has been open just over a year (it's first birthday was back in April).

The day started out very hot, very dry, and crystal clear — a real treasure after several days of rain and humidity. It should have been a great day for spectacular views from the top of the SWFC Tower — which has the tallest observatory deck in the world up on its 100^th floor. Unfortunately, haze and humidity developed in the late afternoon, so the views were not as great as we had hoped. No matter. We had a great time, including a very civilized afternoon high tea on the Riverside Promenade, a trip up to the trio of observatory decks in the SWFC Tower — on the 100^th, 97^th, and 94^th floors, and finally a pleasant dinner at a nice restaurant on the 3rd floor, almost all the way back down to the ground.

I can't resist including this wonderful picture I took of Miles up on the 100^th floor:

What a great day!

Now go look at the pictures.

Friday, 18 September 2009

I really hate to keep shifting this blog around.

Sorry! But now that I have finally managed to defeat the Great Firewall of China and have regained access to blocked sites like facebook and the google blogger site that I had always meant to use for this blog, I really had to move it here. It will be better for all concerned, since you'll have better options for following the blog, you won’t have to register and log in just to comment on posts, and the whole blog will be here, in one place, in one piece.

If you really want to go back to the old posts, you can still get them here.

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So how did I defeat the firewall?

There were several elements that went into this. (If you don't speak geekish, though, you might want to retract your ears until you have safely glided past the following section. I'll let you know when it's safe to tune in again.)

• set up a socks5 proxy on localhost using openssh's -D option: The command line to use is ssh -D 1080 {some-host}. This sets up a socks5 proxy on localhost, using the standard socks5 port of 1080. You can substitute some other port if you need to, perhaps to avoid conflicting with some service already running locally on 1080. The host you use for some-host should be a host on which you have log in privileges (i.e. you have to have an account there), it has to be somewhere you can get to from China, and it has to be somewhere that isn't trapped behind China's firewall.
  
• configure your browser to use your proxy: This is different for each browser, but you want to configure the browser to use socks5 protocol, with proxy host of 127.0.0.1, and proxy port of 1080 (or whatever port you used instead). With Firefox, you do this through the Preferences screen that controls "how you connect to the internet."
  
• configure your browser to make DNS requests using your proxy: Again, this is different for each browser. For Firefox, you need to browse to the internal configuration URL about:config. Once you are there, set a filter for network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and toggle the setting from false to true. (To toggle the setting, select the line for the setting, click with the right mouse button, and choose Toggle from the popup context menu.)
  

Please note, you pretty much have to combine all of these steps or you won't escape the China firewall. An ordinary socks5 proxy won't work. Openssh's socks5 proxy is encrypted and will work. The China firewall sees it as some point-to-point connection and doesn't know that it is being used for a socks5 proxy, because all of that is encrypted. Also, it is not enough for the browser to just use the socks5 proxy just for web protocols, it must also use it for DNS requests as well. The China firewall traps DNS requests and rewrites them for your "safety and convenience."

{End of geek-speak.}

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Now, on to the real subject of today's post.

I met a nice fellow expat yesterday who is a violinist. Score one for my campaign to do chamber music while I am here! If we find a cellist, we can do piano trios, and with a violist, we can do quartets! For now, just duets, starting next week.

Now I'm off to the local music store (Parson's music) to see if I can find some interesting violin/piano sonatas. Hope they have the Grieg C minor. I've always wanted to play that with someone.

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Postscript: Friday afternoon

I had a lovely walk over to the neighborhood of the Shanghai Music Conservatory, which produced a handful of pictures you can see here.

I'm afraid Parson's music was a disappointment for sheet music. Some shops adjacent were somewhat better, but selection was ultimately quite limited. I did manage to score a volume of transcriptions by Jascha Heifetz for violin and piano.

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Closing thought for today.

Shanghai seems to have a very great number of institutions of higher learning and specialized research institutes of all kinds. Below you will find a visual aid which may help you to "calibrate" your sense of just how specialized and downright ahead of the curve some of these are:

(Ignore the scooter. I waited five minutes to get an unobstructed view of the portal to this important research institute, but alas, no one came to remove it, I grew impatient, and in the end I snapped the very best picture I could.) You may not have known that there was a research institute devoted to "Real Estate Science" anywhere in the world. Well, there is one in Shanghai, and I've seen it!

We should not mock this.

A little over 25 years ago, when I was teaching in the Mathematics Department at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, three of us wanted to secede and form a new department of Computer Science. At the time, this was regarded with utter derision by a few of the more "conservative" members of the faculty. They had fresh in their minds how they had recently managed to quash a long-standing department they felt didn't have sufficient academic merit -- namely, the department of Typewriting. I'm afraid those faculty must have felt that we were trying to revive that department by some sort of subterfuge. The dedicated real estate scientists of this institute may well feel just as ahead of their time as we sadly misunderstood computer scientists did at Tufts back in 1983.

Wednesday, 16 September 2009

Food!

It occurs to me that I haven’t really written anything yet about the food in Shanghai. It’s a big topic, much more than can be covered in a single post. It’s also still quite early in our exploration of the cuisine here. But, what the heck, here goes.

First some theory.

You may have heard that the Chinese organize their world around a set of five elements (or forces): water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. Each of these has a relationship with two others, “giving rise to” one, “controlling” the other. Some of the “gives rise to” relationships make perfect sense to me: water gives rise to wood, which gives rise to fire, which gives rise to earth (in the form of ash). Earth is then said to give rise to metal — and I guess I can sort of see that. But then metal supposedly gives rise to water, and they’ve definitely lost me there. Anyone who grew up in Southern California as I did knows for certain that our hard water gives rise to metal in the form of lime deposits! The chain of control is also partly unclear to my Western mind: I get that water controls fire, which controls metal, which controls wood. I guess I understand wood controlling earth — a bit. (But isn’t it the other way around, though? Bad soil can kill a tree; good soil can make it thrive.) But I don’t really comprehend earth controlling water. It seems completely reciprocal to me: the banks of a river channel the water’s flow, but the river will erode the banks, given time.

Anyhow, there are supposed to be five tastes for the Chinese: salty, sour, bitter, sweet, and spicy (or pungent). And these are supposed to line up with the five elements, like so:

• water ↔ salty
• wood ↔ sour
• fire ↔ bitter
• earth ↔ sweet
• metal ↔ spicy

I think I would personally have aligned fire with spicy, and metal with bitter. Whatever. Enough theory already. What is the food here actually like?

The stereotype for the local Shanghai palate is that it has an appreciation for the salty and sweet tastes, and a dislike for spicy tastes. (The bitter and sour tastes don’t seem to figure in the stereotype.) In our experience, this is certainly true about salt. Some dishes we’ve had here are unbelievably salty. Perhaps not unpleasantly so, but enough to make one fear for one’s blood pressure. Many dishes are also very oily. When you shop in food markets, one thing you will notice right away is how oil is sold in large containers (4 liters, for example, a bit over a gallon, is typical). Perhaps it is the restaurants we have been choosing (which may be specializing in Hunan or Sichuan styles), but there is absolutely no shortage of picante food here. For our supper last night, we tried a restaurant around the corner from our apartment which had a sign in English claiming to serve Shanghai and Sichuan cuisine. We ordered two Sichuan dishes and one Shanghainese. That may have been too much. One of them had a huge amount of large chilis in it. They were pretty easy to pick around, and actually not as hot as they looked. The other used little red devils that were much hotter and much harder to avoid. But this may actually have had a healthy effect: I actually had a bit of a cold going into that meal. Today, it’s all but gone.

There are some local Shanghainese specialties that we have yet to try. And please be assured that we will try them. Eventually. One reason for mentioning them here is to help me make the point that there really doesn’t seem to be any limit to how unappealing the English term for a local specialty may be. Along these lines, I can cite two local specialties as good examples: hairy crab, and stinky (or sometimes smelly) tofu. On our visit to the vegetarian restaurant I mentioned a couple of posts ago (Vegetarian Life) we were struck by use of the term mud to describe a component of many of the dishes. We didn’t end up ordering any mud, so we don’t know if mud essentially equates to sauce, or paste, or something else.

Shanghai is known for its dumplings, both steamed and fried. We had a lunch last week out by Fudan University at a restaurant that specializes in them. We thoroughly enjoyed them (Miles is a special fan).

One of the most disappointing things I’ve had in my mouth is served at the Chinese breakfast that our apartment building (which also functions as a hotel) lays out. It is a kind of rice gruel called congee. Counter to the stereotype, this is made without a trace of salt. It tastes like water which has received a quick visit from a few grains of rice. It is pretty much without any redeeming value of any kind, social or otherwise. There are much better items available on the Chinese breakfast, thank goodness.

Something definitely in the category of “to be gotten used to” — Miles laughs at me because he’s been coming to China for 30 years or so and has long since become accustomed — is the screwy way that the Chinese will prepare chicken. I went alone to a restaurant while Miles was on his recent trip to Manila, and ordered “braised chicken” from the English menu. I wasn’t feeling particularly adventurous, and this sounded quite safe to me. Well, the chicken may have been braised, but by the time they served it to me any of that cooking heat was just a distant memory — it was actually served chilled. Whatever braising the chicken had been exposed to must have been very gentle, because the yellow skin on the outside looked precisely as it would if the chicken were still raw. Inside, it was plainly cooked, but the dark meat had a deep red color. I don’t know how it came by it. But the most striking thing is how the chicken was cut up for serving. It is for all the world as if they put the poor critter into a bread slicer. The array from left to right on the plate had the chicken’s decapitated head as the first slice, and its severed feet as the last, and 3/4-inch thick transverse slices from everywhere in between. This slicing method ensures that there are bones lurking in each and every slice. Don’t misunderstand — the chicken was very tasty. But lots of boning labor was required. I find now that this way of preparing and serving chicken is regarded as a delicacy in Shanghai. Hmm….

One thing I should mention before leaving this topic (at least for now) is how cheap food is here. If you are eating in an ordinary restaurant with a mostly Chinese clientele, you can dine sumptuously for anywhere from ¥35 to ¥50 per person (around $5 to $7.35). Add a bit more if you have a Tsingtao beer with your meal, though tea is cheap enough to be included in such a figure. At such prices, it is simply uneconomical to shop and cook for oneself. And, so far, despite having a modestly equipped kitchen in our apartment, we haven’t yet, not even once.

Time for lunch!

Tuesday, 15 September 2009

Yesterday was a bit of an adventure.

You may recall that I had gotten my rented piano installed into the apartment last Friday, but that it was out of tune to the point of unplayability. A tuner was (theoretically) supposed to come tune the piano yesterday, but I didn’t have any particular time to expect him, or any prearranged way for him to contact me. When I hadn’t heard anything by about 10:30, I decided to ask for our Fudan helper to make a phone call to the piano store, who should have set up the tuning to find out when to expect him, and to pass along the information of how to find his way to our apartment. She later reported that he was quite appreciative of the latter, as he was essentially wandering the street outside. He’d gotten close with what he’d been told, but wasn’t ever going to find his way here without help.

So he showed up around 11:30 and proceeded to “tune.” I’ve put that in scare quotes, because, although there was some superficial resemblance between his procedures and what a real tuner would have done, it quickly became clear to my ear that he wasn’t doing much more than making a modest, baby steps kind of improvement to the general tuning already done on the piano. In particular, for notes that have multiple strings (some have two, some have three) he was ensuring that those strings were at some common pitch. But he wasn’t particularly concerned just what that agreed upon pitch was. Sometimes it was higher than it should be, sometimes lower. There was no attempt eliminate the horrible dissonances between sets of notes (that ought to be consonant together) that are the inevitable consequence of his “method.”

He worked for about an hour. Then he made as though to leave. I signed that I wanted to try out the piano first. I played a bit of Mendelssohn (I chose this because there are relatively few intentional dissonances is his music). Many many growls were produced by the poor piano tuning. He was unmoved. I pointed out a few of the worst cross-tunings. No response. I got more insistent. I thought at that point that he had gotten the message. (In fact he hadn’t.)

I then got a brain wave. I remembered someone showing me an iPhone app called Cleartune that samples whatever could be picked up from the iPhone’s built in microphone and if it is a single tone, identifies the pitch.

I quickly purchased this from the app store (a few bucks well spent), fired it up, went back to the tuner, and quickly showed him how some notes were a bit under, some a bit over the correct pitch (assuming that A above middle C is at 440 Hz, the standard).

At this point he was clearly fed up with me. He got on his cell phone, and spoke a few words (to his boss, I suppose). He then handed me the phone. At the other end, whoever it was would speak a few syllables of English every so often mixed into a stream of Chinese. The upshot seemed to be that my tuner had no more time for me today, but could come back “in a few days.”
Hmm.

I’m ashamed to say that what happened next was that I got discouraged.

But I never stay that way for long. My mother didn’t raise me that way.

Nor will Miles ever let me pout for long. He always brings me around.

After we had a nice big lunch, I felt better. I first called the apartment rental agency helper who had helped me with my piano rental, and asked her to make another call back to the piano store to let them know I was not satisfied with their tuner. She reported that they would send one in the next couple of days. Then, I put plan B into motion. I went back to google translate and prepared a little “poem” that I could print and take with me that said (but in Chinese):

I’m sorry, I don’t speak Chinese.
Do you sell piano tuning wrenches?
I would like to buy one.

Armed with this, and a printed picture of just such a wrench) I set off for Jin Ling Road, where my piano store (and about a bizillion others) are clustered in Shanghai. After going into approximately half a bizillion of them, I finally found my way to one where I got an affirmative answer to the query on the middle line. Two minutes, and ¥128 (a bit less than $20) later, I was the proud owner of a piano tuning wrench. Not a particular noble instance of the breed, but one that looked eminently serviceable. I high-tailed it back to the apartment and the wrench and I together made a pass at the worst of the mess the tuner had left. In half an hour — and, please note, I am a total amateur as a tuner — I was happily playing my Mendelssohn and Miles didn’t complain or sigh.

In coming days, if the piano shop doesn’t actually send anybody, I’ll have a more thorough go at the piano with my trusty wrench. Enough baby steps and I’ll have that piano singing cantabile.

Postscript: Tuesday afternoon

The piano shop just sent out another tuner — and this one was much better. He did a real tuning. The piano sounds pretty darned good!

Sunday, 13 September 2009

Today, we went for a little ramble.

We started at People's Square (3 stops east from “our” stop on the metro line 2). We then visited the Shanghai Museum (lovely bronzes, porcelains, paintings, and more we ran out of time to see). Then we looked in on the lobby of the Marriott (it's located on the 38th floor!). And we finished up with a tasty dinner at a restaurant called “Vegetarian Life Style,” before returning back home from West Nanjing Road (2 stops east).

This produced a set of pictures – taken very rapidly, not really breaking our stride, so apologies if some are a bit “haphazard.” The last nine were not taken “on the run,” but may suffer from being taken “through glass” – as they were snapped from the bar in the Marriott lobby while we were enjoying our rather civilized sundowner cocktails.

You can see all these pictures here.

One of the pictures shows a pudgy little blue entity (perhaps you could call him a meat puppet?) called “Hai Bao,” which deserves a small explanation. Shanghai is poised to have a big international exposition, kicking off in 2010. Hai Bao (or, “Baby Hai”) is the official mascot of this Shanghai Expo 2010. He was actually chosen some years ago, even before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. One literally sees this baby everywhere in Shanghai, along with a countdown of the number of days til Expo 2010 opens, currently 230. To fill in some more detail on this critter, I could do no better than simply to quote this from his very own web site:

Haibao is a blue “人,” or “human-shaped form.” As a combination of tradition and modernity, the mascot represents “treasures of the seas.”

I do hope that clears things up for you.

A video about Expo 2010 can be seen here. The planned China Pavilion for the expo is already taking shape. You can see a picture of this iconic building here.

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Here is a piece of “subway art” I snapped the other day and forgot to share with you til now:

The top is clearly a schematic depiction of the Shanghai metro system. The part I found artistic is the colored part at the bottom. I instinctively thought this was quite beautiful when I first saw it. I wondered who the artist was, and why there was art like this adjacent to the subway map. It turns out that this isn't art at all – it's an extremely concise way of conveying the price of every possible subway ride. You look up your ride's start and end points, and the color of the little pixel where the start row and end column meet tells you the cost. Yellow is ¥3, blue is ¥4, pink is ¥5, green is ¥6, and finally, orange is ¥7. I still like it.

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Tonight's dinner at Vegetarian Life Style had just a touch of the surreal about it. It took both of us a few minutes to pinpoint just why. It was the piped-in music. Here's what we heard, in the order we heard it, as I made sure to note down in a memo on my iPhone, so I could accurately report it to you. Perhaps you know these works?

The First Noël
It Came upon a Midnight Clear
O, Holy Night
What Child is This?
Come, O Come, Emanuel
Do You Hear what I Hear?
We Three Kings
Adeste Fideles
Hark, The Herald Angels Sing
Silver Bells

Some of the pieces were admittedly hard to recognize, since they were at (approximately) one quarter of their respective usual tempos, and the instrumentation (if that's the word – it all sounded like synthesizer) was just a tad odd. I bet you were wondering when those Christmas decorations would start appearing this year in the states. Well, Shanghai has probably got most of the states scooped, because it's only September 13th and, at least as far as the sound track at this restaurant, it's already haute saison. Strangely, there were an absolute zero of visible signs of Christmas there.

Saturday, 12 September 2009

Sorry for the long gap between posts.

Miles has been out of town since Wednesday evening on his trip to Manila (back this afternoon), and I've been running around trying to find things for our life here, such as a cheap printer we can use in the apartment, and, of course, a piano for me to play (and, hopefully, compose on). Our Wednesday morning trip to the visa office went like clockwork. We went there this time without our helper, who had assured us we could do it alone. Both of us had managed to forget (block out?) the fact that we were going to owe the Chinese state ¥940 (around $140) for our new visas. So there was a “weird” moment when we both realized it at the same time, but then we both saw the glittering ATM at the same time, cleverly placed adjacent to the cashier, so that was fine. The main thing was that both of our passports were ready, adorned with the new multiple-entry visas. Miles and I then went in separate taxis, he to Fudan to teach his first class, and then to the airport, and me back to the apartment, to take stock, and start making lists of what life here would require, and in what order.

Our godsend shopping-wise turns out to be a shopping center (poetically called “Cloud Nine”) not too far away (about a mile, a longish walk) which has a Carrefour. Not familiar with Carrefour? It's the French equivalent of Britain's Harrod's or Spain's El Corte Inglés – a combination of supermarket and department store. It has everything, except, of course, whatever it doesn't happen to have. So I was able to buy a printer for the equivalent of about $40. But I was unable to buy any paper for it. Office supplies are actually quite thin on the ground here, at least in the neighborhoods near us in Shanghai. You can buy quite high end fashions more easily than you can buy a pencil.

Wednesday was spent on the shopping expedition which procured the printer. It was quite a bit cooler that day, so decided to carry it home. Also, I had seen a B---I---G sign for a Staples in the taxi on the way over to Cloud Nine. I thought I would try to stop in there for paper on my way home, and my non-existent Chinese is not up to asking a taxi driver to take me home with that as a stop along the way. But that turned out to be a place that only sells Staples' office furniture. Strike one. Meanwhile I printed a few things using sheets torn out of a spiral bound notebook, and was entertained watching 50% of the sheets I fed in immediately crumpled up by this printer's aggressive paper handling.

Most of Thursday was devoted to piano shopping. The service we used to find our apartment offers free after-sales “assistance” and so I called them up and got a nice woman to help interpret for me, and we set off Thursday afternoon for a street downtown which happens to have a lot of musical instruments stores. We found a few stores willing to rent pianos, and in the end, I chose to rent a Yamaha upright that was not new, but in quite good condition.

Renting a piano in Shanghai is really an educational experience. What you do is lay down a “deposit” about equivalent to the piano's residual value, i.e. you essentially buy the piano. When you're done with it, you sell it back to them for what you paid as deposit, less an agreed monthly rental. In this case, the monthly rent is really quite cheap (¥500 – about $73), but the deposit was ¥10000, or $1470. And they want that in cash. (Actually they want a bit more than that, because you have to pay for moving the piano both ways, and they need ¥200 for the first move with the deposit.) I had only a few hundred yuan on me so I had to ask my helper if they could take a “deposit toward the deposit,” and I would pay the remainder of the deposit on delivery. Thereupon, 15 minutes elapsed, during which time my helper, and just about everyone who works in the store, screeched at each other, at the very tops of their respective lungs. But, mind you, anger did not appear to motivate this elevated volume of speech. (I don't know what motivated it, but nobody looked angry at all.) After it was all over, and I was willing to poke my head back up out of the place down below the floor where I had mentally tele-ported myself to try to salvage something of my hearing – because, please note, there were also, during this interval, three or four people trying out pianos in the same store, as well as a technician tuning a piano – I did ask my helper what that was all about, and she just said one word: “negotiations.” Well, it must have worked, because I laid down my ¥500, and left with a paper saying that they would deliver my chosen piano, and I would pay them ¥9700 more the next day. Of course, they had not stipulated any particular time that next day. Since I now needed to drum up nearly $1500 in cash, I asked them to make it Friday afternoon. We left it that they would call me on my cell phone and say just two words: “Yamaha piano.” I would then come downstairs and lead them to our 31st floor aerie.

Previous to this piano renting outing, I had decided that Thursday would also be the day that I wrestled with the Shanghai metro. Miles and I had actually taken the metro before, but we had only used single-ride tickets which you buy from a machine whose interface is (partly) in English. True Shanghainese use of the metro system requires something called the Shanghai Public Transportation Card, known to the locals as:

上海公共交通卡

Got that? Oh, and you can only buy this thing by asking for it from a person. That person can either be at a convenience store, or at a metro station, but it has to be a person.

Thank goodness for a little-known service of google, called google translate. (Check it out at http://translate.google.com.) You can use it to translate a web page by entering its URL, or you can just type in some English text and get that translated. Having verified the exact precise verbatim et literatum name of the card I needed, I asked google to translate it and, lo, out came上海公共交通卡, which, at least to me, looked just like what I saw on the “official” web page for the card (it has its own page!) although that had been in “handwritten” characters and this was in “printed” characters, so you have to take some artistic license there. I then cut and pasted the Chinese characters into an email, sent that to myself, picked up said email on my iPhone, and set off on the 10 minute walk to the Jiangsu Road metro station. I then marched up to the only counter there with a person at it (labelled “Service Center”), showed them the Chinese characters on my iPhone screen, and handed them ¥100. We then spent about 2 minutes, with them trying to explain what I actually already knew from the web site for the card – namely, that ¥20 was for the card itself (and refundable) while ¥80 would be the value placed into the card, available to use for rides. I confirmed my understanding by performing a calculation on my iPhone's calculator app, starting with 100, subtracting 20, leaving 80. Everyone was happy.

It turns out that the card can be used for much more than just the metro. Almost any form of transport will take the card, including buses and taxis. Bus rides are cheaper than dirt, but I haven't figured out any bus lines yet. Most metro rides are ¥3 or ¥4 (45 or 60 cents). The most you can pay is ¥7 (a bit over a dollar). The basic taxi fare is ¥11 (about $1.50), but a cross-city ride can cost you the princely sum of as much as ¥60 (a bit less than $9.00). The cards themselves are way cool: they use RF ID technology. To a nerd, this means the card is read contactlessly. To a non-techie, this means you can leave the card right where you're carrying it, and just get whatever it is that has the card in it close enough to the reader to scan it. You see people touch wallets and purses to the reader, but you also see much more unusual behavior – such as people bowing to the reader (the card is in a shirt front pocket), or jumping up and sitting on the reader (the card is in their rear jeans pocket), etc. For ¥1 (15 cents) I bought a little plastic sleeve for my card (the “officially sanctioned container,” and it pleases me to know that my card is therefore protected from all germs, though not from prying eyes (the sleeve is transparent). Of course, the container itself gets all germy....

I was so proud of myself for my accomplishment, that after I said goodbye to the piano shop, I marched directly to a metro stop, went one segment, changed lines, went another segment, and got out pretty much where I thought I wanted to be – namely, at a shopping center that had an Isetan (Japanese) department store, that some one had posted on the shanghaiexpat.com web site was a good place to buy office supplies, including, I fervently hoped, some paper for my printer. When I got to Isetan, a 6 storey affair, I discovered that the 3rd and 4th floors were under construction. I strongly suspect these floors were where the office supplies once were, and may one day again be. Strike two.

When I got home, I remembered a little thing that I had been blotting out: I was meant to have nearly $1500 in cash by the afternoon of the next day. Ouch! I got on line and tried to coax my credit union into disclosing to me just what my daily limit with my ATM card would be. No luck. 5 pm in China is 2 am Pacific time. My credit union's web site was down for “maintenance.” My memory was that you could get something like $750 per day, but I was just trusting my memory. I decided to get started. The local ATMs limit you to varying amounts but none of them would allow you to withdraw anything like the ¥9700 I needed. In the end, I needed to go to 4 separate ATMs, getting ¥2000, then ¥3000, then ¥2000 again, and finally, ¥2700. Nowhere did any of the machines balk at performing the withdrawal, and more to the point, none of them ate my card. The resulting a wad of ¥100 notes was about 1 ½ inches thick, not exactly something you can fit into a wallet, so I high-tailed it home and put the wad into our room safe. Whew!

I was really feeling quite accomplished at this point, so I decided to really go for broke and try to mind-meld with the pint-sized stacking washer/dryer we have in the bathroom in our apartment (controls are only in Chinese). I had asked for someone to explain the use of these controls, but the person they sent had no English, so we pretty much had a grunting and pointing festival, and in the end, I thought I understood, but who could be sure? Once again, we live in a world of google's making, so I googled the model number of the washer (xqb22-19), which led me to a page that cited its feature set in marketing speak (e.g. "water level selection"). I then entered the English version of those features into google's translation engine, and got Chinese characters out, which I could then actually find on the control panel of the washer! Unbelievably cool! I was pretty pleased with myself, I can tell you! The washer only has a cold water hook up, which is fine, that makes it simpler to select the water temperature. It's limited to 5 lb loads, so it takes a lot of loads to wash any substantial pile of laundry, and even longer to get it dry. We'll probably only do socks and underwear that way, and send all else out. After I did four loads, I was exhausted, and retired for the day.

Friday was a trying day. Back to the web to find a real Staples store (with paper for sale), I found one all the way to one end of the metro line we live near. (It's actually about a mile walk from that last stop to the Staples. Plus about 15 minutes after seeing the Staples sign, before I could figure out how to get anywhere near the building with the Staples actually in it.) But I managed to buy my paper, trudged the mile back to the metro, got off for my walk back to the apartment – and immediately spotted a little hole-in-the-wall sized shop where I could have bought the paper in the first place. Is that strike three, or man on first?

The rest of Friday was spent waiting impatiently for the arrival of the piano movers, sweating the whole time. The perspiration was because I basically knew that the piano simply had to fit into one of the building's elevators to have any hope of ever seeing it in our 31st floor apartment. Now, any piano, even a compact upright, is, basically about 5 feet wide. That's what it takes for 88 keys plus a little wood on either side. My pacing off of the elevators using my shoes (which are just over 1 foot long) told me that the elevators were – you guessed it – just about exactly 5 feet wide. The piano either would fit or it wouldn't but either way it was absolutely going to be close. In the end the piano did just barely fit. The piano must have been in the hot truck the entire day, because it was much more out of tune upon delivery than it was when I picked it at the shop. A flurry of calls – me to my interpreter, her to the shop, then her back to me – and I have (I hope) an appointment for a tuner to come on Monday (sometime). Until then, I cannot bear to torture myself or any of the neighbors by playing the piano in its current state. But at least it is here!

As I sit and type this, it is early afternoon on Saturday. Miles should wander in from his Manila trip in a couple of hours. I spent this morning on another excursion to Carrefour, this one being a heavy lug back. After I put this post up on the web, I'm going to watch an entertaining program that is only shown on the insides of my closed eyelids.

But before I do that I have to share another interesting sign with you. Here it is:

The bakery you see in the picture is one of the first things we saw when we first looked at our apartment (it's one of the many shops in the ground floor of our building). We really puzzled over this: why is it called “Wash Bakery?” Could Wash be a Chinese name? Is this another total nonsense construction such as “meat puppet?” It turns out that the explanation is really very simple: this business is a posh French bakery in the front and a laundry service in the back. What are the chances that they bake the laundry? Again, too afraid to ask, don't want to know all that bad.

Tuesday, 8 September 2009

We are in our new Shanghai apartment!

It's really quite nice. It's the one I spoke of in yesterday's post (below). The actual apartment is on the 31st floor, so the views are pretty spectacular! (Pictures soon, I promise.)

Believe it or not, google maps knows of our building. Here is a link:

google maps link

Sorry for such a short post today, but it was moving in day and we're tired!

Monday, 7 September 2009

Today was a very good day for our apartment hunt.

We saw three different options downtown in the “serviced apartment” category. These are a cross between a hotel suite and an apartment. They are frequently located in high rise buildings. The one we liked best of the three is in a neighborhood called “Changning,” but it is just over the border with another somewhat more desirable neighborhood called “Jing An.” (We actually saw an option right in Jing An, but that apartment was a bit cramped, and would have been more expensive, since utilities were not included.) The Jing An neighborhood contains a concentration of trendy restaurants and up-scale shopping. We're still working on a characterization of Changning, but it appears to be one notch more sedate and stately compared to Jing An. We plan to sleep on this tonight, to see if we can think of any reason not to go with the Changning apartment. But, in all likelihood, we'll proceed to take it – and move in – tomorrow, or perhaps Wednesday, at the latest.

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I've been forgetting to write something about Shanghai traffic, so let me do that now. The traffic here is qualitatively and quantitatively unlike anything I've ever seen. Of course, it consists of the usual mix of pedestrians, bicycles, motorized cycles of various kinds, automobiles, and trucks. But they mix in much tighter proximity and in greater volumes than we are used to. Pedestrians, cars and trucks generally obey traffic signals, but bicycles and motorized cycles generally do not. Having said that, it is pretty normal to see the driver of a car proceed into an intersection on a red light – provided the driver is the first in his lane, the transition from green to red is recent, and the feels he has already waited “long enough” at that particular intersection (perhaps he waited patiently for some obstacle to remove itself from his path). Indeed, we have been in a car driven by just such a driver – the real estate broker who was showing us the apartments near Fudan last Friday. He also played the car's radio about as loud as the human ear can take, not even turning the volume down to make (or receive) any of the several cell phone calls he made (or received) during our hour or so together. It is also possible to see pedestrians ignoring signals, if they are in great enough numbers. We saw, for example, a veritable swarm (though nothing as formally organized as a parade) of tens of thousands of high-school-aged students – all dressed in identical polo shirts – migrating past our hotel towards Fudan University en masse. Their collective mass was definitely above the critical point for a totally self-sustaining flouting of all traffic signals. We happened to be in a taxi attempting to return to our hotel when we encountered them, and simply had no other option than to let the swarm pass before we could proceed.

However, I am most impressed with the behavior of the bicyclists and motorized cyclists. They wend their way through traffic with seeming effortlessness. Having been a commuting bicyclist – in the greater Boston area, no less – I can say from experience that it is quite unnerving to see these cyclists managing to make their way without even appearing to be trying. You won't see one, for instance, ever look back behind them to see if something is coming before making any small change to their path. The best I can say is that they already seem to know what's back there without having to look. I'm sure there are traffic accidents that do indeed occur here in Shanghai. But for all the near-misses I've seen – some by as little as fractions of an inch, and at breathtaking speeds – I haven't personally witnessed one.

I'm willing to risk speculating a bit on how all this could possibly work. I think it all comes down to the basic orientation of the individual with respect to society. The individual here isn't used to, or expecting, any great or essential conflict between the individual's trajectory and the trajectories of those nearby. This expectation is probably based on a deeply ingrained social contract of sorts. On the one hand, the individual must not act in such a way as to present an undue burden on those nearby to avoid a collision. In particular, if an individual cyclist needs to stop short, say, to allow a faster-moving car make a turn, or a slower-moving pedestrian complete the crossing of a street, then the cyclist will absolutely stop short. But you more often see the cyclist make a graceful adjustment to their path and avoid slowing down much if at all. On the other hand, those nearby must act as necessary to allow the individual reasonably free passage, and to do what is reasonable (but not more) to avoid collision. Contrast this with the way we are taught in the West to “drive defensively.” Clearly, we have deeply ingrained within us the expectation that the individual trajectory will essentially conflict with the trajectories of those nearby. We expect conflict and, sadly, all too often, that is just what we get. Here they don't expect conflict and, astonishingly, quite consistently manage to avoid it.

Sunday, 6 September 2009

Ah, cell phones!

You hate them, right, but can you live without one (or two)? We are traveling with our iphones on international roaming, so we already have a working cell phone each. But international roaming is quite expensive. So we've gone and procured a local cell phone each.

Foreseeing the need, we brought two phones with us for this purpose. One of those was a China Mobile phone that has been passed on, like a disease, from graduate student to professor to professor (Miles being the last professor in the chain). This phone was easy to get working. We just had to buy some prepaid time and then get the credentials for that paid time into the phone. This is easy, which I know because I personally saw our helper do it for us, and she definitely didn't break a sweat. I don't think I could have done it for myself, though, as I believe she did it by means of a phone call to an automated system, that it takes some command of Chinese to navigate.

The other phone I brought with me turned out to be endless trouble, and in the end, never worked. It was a phone Sprint sold to us just for international roaming in Europe, years ago, back when Sprint was our provider. It's apparently locked in some evil way by Sprint. The China Mobile sim card we bought did not work in the phone. Some evil daemon in the phone's software pops up a dialog requiring some weird password to be filled in, and none of the passwords I know for the phone would satisfy the wicked imp. So, having already bought the sim card, I had to buy a local phone (simless) to go with it. My helper thought it would be educational to buy this from one of the myriad small market stalls one sees on any Shanghai street. This took about an hour (bargaining included; although I was happy to pay the full asking price, that would have been a shocking rending of the social fabric). The phone I bought surely says “Nokia.” Whether it was made by Nokia is far less certain. Perhaps it was, but just wasn't the new phone it was claimed to be. Every time it is powered on, it says “Enjoy Every Day!” How can one argue with that?

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The search for an apartment is taking longer than we had hoped. Basically, the choice boils down to this: take an apartment near Fudan University, or take one downtown. Apartments near Fudan are quite inexpensive but are pretty basic. Downtown apartments are nicer, but cost more. The Fudan neighborhood is where Miles needs to be for work, but the cultural life there is pretty arid. Downtown is where the best restaurants are and where all the musical events we'll want to go to are. It is also where most of the Shanghai expat community live. As Miles will only be teaching one day a week (one marathon 3-hour class) and coming to campus another day a week, we are leaning toward taking something downtown. But our Fudan helpers only have contacts with local real estate people, so, to date we have only seen 4 local apartments. For downtown, we'll be on our own, and we only got started looking yesterday just as the real estate offices were going slow for the weekend. Hopefully we can see some downtown apartments tomorrow. Of the 4 local apartments, we found one that was nice enough to do some bargaining on. We are in a position to take that one if nothing works out downtown (assuming it's still available).

Meanwhile, we soldier on bravely in our posh Fudan hotel.

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With not much happening on the apartment search yesterday, we took the opportunity to go sight-seeing, taking a walk through the old French Concession neighborhood. Pictures from that excursion may be found here.

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I'll close this post with a little amusement. Sometimes, while wandering in Shanghai, one will encounter a sign (partly) in English that is truly a thing of wonder. Here is one such that I snapped last night with my iphone:

As you can probably make out, the shop bearing the sign mostly sells bags. We were both way too apprehensive to go in and inquire about the meat puppets. I just don't think we wanted to know all that badly.

In any event, look again – there's something else on this sign. “Since 2003” or the like on a business' sign is quite common here. Given the pace at which Shanghai is changing, “Since 2003” equates to “old established concern.” One even sees signs that boast “Since 2007”, which, presumably means “made it through the downturn (so far).”

Well, this meat puppet will sign off here for now.

Thursday, 3 September 2009

I'm beginning this journal of my time in Shanghai at least one full day later than I anticipated.

That's mostly because our arrival in Shanghai was a day later than it should have been. We flew from Los Angeles to Shanghai via Tokyo, and missed our Tokyo connection. Wind shears from the remains of some typhoon were severe enough to prevent a normal landing in Tokyo. We diverted to nearby Nagoya for much needed refueling, and then made it back to Tokyo for a safe (if unsettling) landing in what were by then still quite strong winds. But we were 2½ hours late and the damage was done – our Shanghai flight had rather rudely left without us. The flight we were rebooked on wouldn't leave until the next day, so we were going to have to spend the night in Tokyo. Since the whole thing was put down to weather, our airline abandoned us pretty utterly. It would be up to us to find a hotel. We wouldn't have the benefit of our checked bags, as these had been checked through to Shanghai, and nothing could change that. We managed Japanese immigration and customs, found a sad little hotel near the airport and spent our stranded night there, frustrated but not defeated. The next day, we arose, donned the same clothes we had already spent nearly a day flying in, flew (uneventfully) to Shanghai – and immediately set about repairing our Chinese visas.

We had applied for multiple entry visas, but the Los Angeles Chinese consulate only saw fit to grant us single entry visas. As Miles needs to go to at least two conferences outside China during our time here (and I'd like to tag along on one – in Korea), we needed to get this fixed. As the first of these trips was, by the time we arrived, just 8 days away, and since it takes 5 working days to obtain replacement visas, there was little time to waste, so we got right onto this task. It all sounds quite straightforward. But nothing to do with Chinese bureaucracy is straightforward.

To begin, one needs letters of invitation. We already had these from Fudan University when we got our visas the first time, but we needed new ones, as the originals had been kept by the Los Angeles consulate. This involved a visit to room 703 in the east tower of the monumental twin-towered skyscraper built to commemorate the founding of Fudan. We had easily been able to see the twin towers from our 17th-floor hotel room when we checked in, so it seemed an easy affair to walk there. (It was actually a bit farther than it seemed – the better part of mile.) However monumental this building might be, and however clearly in use, it was nonetheless quite difficult to work out when we reached it just how one enters the building – since all the obvious entrances were closed, posted, in English: “gate shut”. We did finally find a strange little below-ground-level entrance, and a guard, who did not speak English, managed to make us understand the wisdom of rising to the 7th floor in an out-of-the-way elevator that looked more like it led to a chapter of a novel by Franz Kafka than to anywhere that would help us. Still, rise we did, and eventually we found room 703, and got our letters of invitation, and the various visa application forms we would need for our re-applications – but by this time it was really too late to attempt the visit to the visa office that day. We therefore retired to our cushy hotel for dinner and jet-lagged collapse.

Step two in the visa re-application process involves getting a “Registration of Temporary Residence” from our hotel. This should have been easy. But nothing to do with Chinese bureaucracy is easy. The very friendly and efficient woman we have had helping through the whole visa process attempted to do this for us, but in her haste, did not notice that they only gave her one form (for Miles), when we needed one for each of us, and that, though Miles' form was officially stamped, it was otherwise entirely blank. We noticed that there was no form for me, and remedied that the afternoon of our arrival, and that was when it actually became clear to us that Miles' form really was a forlorn cypher, compared to mine. Not only that, but we also realized that to fill it would apparently involve marking in some Chinese characters – not something we felt prepared to do. We had made a date for 8:00 am with our helper to set out for the visa office, but had to spend quite a time getting a form remade for Miles, since, apparently whoever does these forms only comes on duty at 9:00 am, and he had to be located and coaxed into action. At some point while remaking Miles' form, the hotel staff noticed that my form had not actually been properly filled in, so mine had to be remade as well. By the time we had two properly filled forms, it was nearly 9:00 am, and our hopes of getting to the visa office just as it opened at 9:00 am were fading.

Meanwhile, prompted by something I had wondered aloud about the previous day when I learned that the visa office would keep our passports for 5 working days – “if we have to give our passports to the visa office for an entire week while the visas are reissued, how can we actually rent an apartment, won't the landlord need at least one passport?” – Miles had spent some of his own quota of worrying time that night reasoning that it might also be difficult to change money without our passports, so we had to have our helper help us first change several thousand dollars worth of travelers checks into Chinese currency before we could go to the visa office. You see, we had been alerted that for a rental of only 4 months, a Chinese landlord would probably insist on all of the rent being paid in cash up front.

So instead of an early trip to the visa office, we made our way to the nearest office of the Bank of China. And waited for it to open. (Nothing in China opens before 9:00 am.) And continued to wait for a teller, despite getting a very nice number on entry to the bank – just 5th in line – those customers ahead of us taking endless time with whatever it is they were doing. And then waited while the teller attempted to get approval for such a large exchange as we were making, using a useless cordless telephone that might as well have been been a tin can with string, and then using a more reliable method we might refer to as “sneakernet”. At length we were able to accomplish our exchange and left the bank with a several inches thick wad of Chinese currency. Needless to say, we high-tailed it back to the hotel to put said cash wad into the room safe!

Finally, we were ready to headed off to the visa office. Having meant to arrive there at 9:00 am, it was somewhat frustrating only to arrive there around 11:00 am, but we did arrive there (after a lurching taxi ride – but on the basis of those taxi rides I've had so far, I'm concluding that most of these are of the lurching variety). The number we got at the visa office was translated to us as “at least two hours wait”, so our helper recommended that we try an alternative office about 20 minutes away by another lurching taxi. It was much newer, and should have much shorter lines. It did, indeed, have short lines – there was absolutely no one there but us as we got there. But we got no joy there. The officials there seemed not to know the first thing about the process for doing what we needed to do. Several phone calls by our helper back to her office – and several sometimes heated exchanges between her and the officials present, or her and whoever she was speaking with on the phone eventually established the utter futility of attempting anything further at the new office, so we went back to the old visa office (yet another lurching taxi ride). We were steeled to begin our wait for a teller all over again, but our helper proved to have been cleverer than even she realized. I innocently speculated whether if we showed up with our orginial number chit we could use it if the number hadn't been called yet. Our helper then frantically began digging through her little bag for the chit. After a minute or two of examining various impostors, the real chit was located! It turned out that we only had to wait about 20 minutes before we were served when we got back to the old visa office. Another 20 minutes later, we were bidding a wistful goodbye to our passports in hopes of seeing them a week hence – with the new multiple entry visas we need. The new visas will cost us “only” around $150 each, which is a bargain compared to what the first ones cost (more than $200 each). That is, if we actually do see them when we are supposed to, a bit less than a week from now, at 9:00 am on Wednesday, 9 September – the very day Miles is supposed to fly to Manila for a conference.

But enough about visas!

Having had several lurching taxi rides by now, I've gotten to glimpse at least a portion of Shanghai through the framing of a lurching taxi window. And the most obvious first impression is just how utterly vast this city is, and how filled with contrasts – new against old, rich against poor. Close up, there isn't much of it that is beautiful, in the way that, say, an alpine town in Europe might be. Close up, it is quite clear that whatever Shanghai is going through, it is going through it way too fast to be all that much concerned to create that sort of beauty. Besides, that may be out of character for China (or at least Shanghai). From a certain distance, though, most parts of the city clearly make up in character what they may lack in aesthetic beauty. This is probably clearest in the financial district, which is filled with really jaw droppingly wild post modern skyscrapers that prove that someone somewhere here has a really playful sense of architectural humor.

I'll close this already quite long post with just one other observation: If I had to “locate” what it's like to be out of doors (and, hence, out of the reach of air conditioning) in Shanghai in early September, using the ancient system of elements, there is no doubt in my mind – I would have to choose a combination of fire and water. Call it steam. It's not actually all that hot. It just seems that way because the humidity is so high.

So, there you have it. Yours steamily (with Miles) will now go off and get to work on the next steps required to get our life here going – finding an apartment, getting sim cards from a local (and therefore cheap) cell phone provider for our spare phones, etc.