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.
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 31st 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.
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!
Postscript: Thursday evening
The weather really did turn for the better today, so when I went up to the "sky gym" on the 34th floor of our apartment building for my workout, I decided to snap some pictures. You can see them here.
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