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.
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