Remember that bullshit about me being so happy to live with less than I'm used to, having so few clothes and possessions, and free from the desire to purchase all that dumb crap that I know I don't need? Well, I ended up buying a shitload of clothes while I was here. See below:
That's 4 knock-off polo shirts, 5 t-shirts, 9 pairs of shoes, two tailored jackets, 1 tailored suit, and 12 tailor-fitted button down shirts. Half of this stuff was purchased in Beijing at the silk market, and half in Shanghai at the South Bund Fabric Market. The total cost for everything seen here was about $600.
The only reason I don't feel like a total hypocrite for buying all of this stuff after talking about how much I hate spending money is that I feel like I was taking advantage of a time in my life when clothing is the cheapest it will ever be. When am I ever going to get custom fit shirts made for me for $10?
I can't imagine that its very common for people to sue one another here. Specifically, it must be fairly rare for corporations (and the government, obviously) to face a lawsuit from an individual.
My theory - not that anybody asked, or that I've made an attempt to research this in any way - is that Chinese cultural conventions and legal customs are much much older than those in the US. The United States is less than 250 years old, younger than the modern concept of corporations and only slightly older than the liability laws that permit Americans to bring a myriad of stupid suits every day. So maybe because America was formed within the context of all these modern legal concepts that people seem so much more careful to protect themselves from fault.
I want to say again that I have no idea what I'm talking about. But some of the things I've seen here seem so dangerous and negligent that I find myself dumbfounded. I guess there are no Chinese Ralph Naders.
The thing that scares me the most is the window-washers in Shanghai. On every building in the city (except for one near our apartment that looks to have a two-man apparatus) the window washers hang from a single rope. They dangle off the side of 50-story buildings with one rope, a squeegee, and two hip-holstered buckets of water. The looks to be merely tied around their waste too, but I have to believe that they have some kind of carabeaner thingy that holds them steady.
This is four guys cleaning our work building:
closer-up:The next scariest thing about Shanghai is rain. When it's wet, this place is infinitely more dangerous. The steps mike is descending (one at a time, 10 second rest between each one) are the subway station steps at one of the most populated stations. The picture doesn't do a great job of showing this, but the stairs are uncovered near the top, meaning that a river of water is constantly pouring down these steps. Most shoes slide like ice skates on the slippery stone surface, and that we've managed not to crack our heads every time we go to work on a rainy day is a testament to extreme patience, guard rails, and lots of luck.
This is an even worse picture of a construction site near our apartment. That's a tractor on the left though, digging out a sidewalk while pedestrians and cars pass right through the middle of the site. Twice I've had to dodge giant backhoe loaders on the way to work to avoid having my head taken off. Another time, a tractor ran over the front wheel of a guy's scooter, and nobody even looked twice. For most of the time we've been here, a bridge has been under construction that crosses a popular pathway of ours. If it were to collapse during commuting hours, dozens of pedestrians underneath would surely die. My first two weeks in this city were spent wandering around wondering "are you allowed to do that?"
He's back out on the corner like nothing happened tonight. Even though we had a Chinese speaker with us when we visited tonight, she didn't find out shit. All he said was that a "quarrel" happened last night. Nonetheless, he said he built himself an all-new cart today and was back in the saddle.
Just after 10pm tonight, Mike and I headed down to our favorite street noodle vendor. We've been visiting the same guy on a regular basis for our entire three months here. We affectionately refer to him as "noodle man" and continue to patronize his noodle stand even though there are about a dozen similar stands lining the corners of the same intersection.
We get noodles from noodle man quite often. Three nights a week, probably. He seems like such a nice guy. I would guess that he is about our age, clean cut, and always really jovial and upbeat. He tries to speak English with us, and Mike can communicate the basics with him in Chinese.
Noodle man has a variety of noodles (chow mien noodles, thinner more spaghetti-like noodles, thick flat noodles, and rice) that he fries up in a propane-powered wok with all kinds of mysterious oils and powders. Noodles costs four yuan (like sixty cents), and its easily enough food to fill you up. Lately Mike has been visiting drunk and tipping noodle man ridiculous amounts of money. The most egregious was the fifteen dollar tip - on a sixy cent meal - a few weeks ago. This may or may not have something to do with what happened tonight, but it is certainly part of the reason noodle man is always so happy to see us.
The intersection where noodle man works is in the middle of the red light district near our apartment. Keep that in mind.
By chance, I brought my camera with me because I'm leaving the country next week, and wanted a picture of noodle man before I left.
Tonight, he wasn't there.
This was bizarre because he's occupied the same spot on the same intersection every night (except Saturdays) since we arrived. The other vendors were all in their normal spots, but no sign of noodle man. Though we were confused by his absence, I took a picture anyway, and ordered 10 meat sticks (skewers with various types of meat - ten cents each!) from the guy on the far right.
Notice also that the street is completely deserted.
After snapping that picture, I walked back up to the meat stick vendor where my food was cooking. As I arrived, a van screamed into the intersection from the south and screeched to a halt. Inside were about six men dressed in military uniforms. Before I could even tell Mike to "look!" every one of the food vendors had spun their carts around and were running with them down the street away from the van. Each of the carts is mounted on large bicycle wheels. Apparently this is why.
So within five seconds of complete calm, Mike and I are standing alone in an intersection, fifteen feet from a van gushing uniformed men. Suddenly, police cars with lights on and sirens blaring came from the north, south, and east, trying to contain the scattering vendors. Luckily, the vendors we were dealing with fled west. The policemen seemed to consider chasing them but decided not to. When it was clear that they weren't being pursued, my vendor stopped running, boxed up my still-cooking food, and jogged the container back to me, where I still stood, quite stunned, in the intersection.
After the police cars arrived, so did a large truck. It looked like a blue dump truck. This got parked right in the middle of the intersection, and another load of policemen dismounted from its large open bed.
By this time, a crowd had formed on the other side of that dump truck. People in their pajamas were still pouring into the street. We crossed the intersection and worked our way into the forming crowd to witness the commotion. What we saw were six or seven policemen wrestling with a Chinese man. The man was struggling against the officers' attempts to wrangle him, and as they tried, he was repeatedly thrown into the side of the dump truck. When they spun him around, we couldn't believe what we saw.
It was noodle man!
I have no idea where he had come from, because his cart - like I mentioned - wasn't in its usual place. But there he was, in the middle of the fracas. While he was being wrestled by the military dudes, another group of people were systematically dismantling his noodle cart. First one policeman disconnected the propane tank and disappeared with it around the other side of the truck. Next they removed the wok and food from the top of the cart. Then a number of officers hoisted the cart up into the bed of the dump truck and started securing it.
Mike and I were the only two white people in the crowd (about one hundred big now). I'm not sure exactly what our presence meant, but we were definitely drawing attention. A few Chinese people began talking to us, in a manner that seemed (to both of us) to suggest that they felt an injustice was being committed, and wanted us to help somehow. Unfortunately, we didn't understand a word of whatever they kept repeating. An officer noticed the conversations, and quickly ushered the Chinese people away, an obvious warning against talking to us.
I pulled out my camera again and took about 3 minutes of video from my hip. Unfortunately, I didn't capture anything of terrible interest. Oddly, one of the military guys was filming the whole thing (with a video camera that had to have been made in 1988), so maybe if I can find out his youtube username we can all get some insight as to what the hell went down. Harhar.
The good news is that after the cart was in the truck, it took off along with most of the police cars and noodle man was released. He was still very flustered, and immediately got on his cell phone to start figuring things out.
If I find out anything about why the fuck fifty policemen decided noodle man (and only noodle man) shouldn't be in business anymore, I'll be sure to post an update. Though I don't imagine I'll ever know why ransacking a noodle cart is a higher priority than cracking down on the hundreds of brothels within the same city block.
Eerie also that today is the 19th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square craziness. Happy Anniversary, noodle man!
There is a three-floor grocery store called E-Mart that we've visited to pick up staples like alcohol, chips, and tp during our time here (we realized shortly after our first purchase that the apartment refills our tp, so we still have 19 of the 20 rolls we purchased in early March). This second floor, where the entrance is, contains the non-edible things like clothing and linens, toys, and household tools.
Upstairs pretty much has only electronic items, mostly appliances. Refrigerators, microwaves, heaters, and things like cell phones and MP3 players. Like most of the other places that sell electronics, this floor is a grid of brand-centric vendor stands, each manned with a few salesmen each. The stands are usually squarish, measuring ten by ten square feet, stuffed with products and a surrounded by a glass showcase separating you from the vendors themselves. Its eerie up here, mostly because its almost always empty. It's usually 2 salesmen to every customer. I've never spent longer than twenty seconds on this floor.
Downstairs has everything that Safeway might have, except for all the familiar products. It's a huge floor. It looks like equal parts WalMart, Costco, and Albertsons. Albertsons because of all the live sea-animals, which I'll get to momentarily.
I've spent a lot of time down here. You could basically divide the floor into six sections. Drinkables, Junk Food, Cosmetics/Cleaning, Foreign Food (hilarious), Meats, and Cooking Tools (drinkware, pots, ricemakers, etc.).
All of the alcohol is the same stuff you find in America, and its about the same price (as California that is, it's generally cheaper than in Washington). All the expensive wine you can buy is from France and Northern California. Or, for about 1/10th of the price, you can buy Chinese wine. We haven't bought much wine, but have gone through our share of scotch and rum for whatever reason. We buy a lot of beer too, but usually from the convenience stores. Its about 50 cents (US) for a 600ml bottle (one and a half cans) of TsingTao, which is the Budweiser of China.
The cosmetics corner is pretty normal too, except that I can't read anything, so I have to look at what the people on the bottle are doing with the product to judge what it does. We searched for fifteen minutes trying to find dishwasher detergent the other day. Apparently there aren't a lot of dishwashers in China, so that's why this stuff may not be so easy to get ahold of. Oh, and the dove body wash we got smells like dirty chemicals.
The foreign food section contains mostly boxes of crackers and crappy spaghetti, so that's where we spend most of our time.
One of the craziest areas is definitely the meat section. Here, you can buy whole (dehydrated, I think) chickens, or pigs lets that look like they were sliced straight off the hip. There is a section with various aquarium-sized tanks of fish, frogs, snakes, and other things that you can presumably pick up (either alive or dead, I'm not sure how it works) and cook for dinner.
I don't know if the frogs are sedated, but for some reason they don't jump out of the enclosure. Pictures below (chicken, frogs, turtles, snakes).
Friday was supposed to be our final day in Beijing (day three), and it wasn't quite as touristy. Actually, it was much more panicked and hopeless. Here's why.
Bonehead move #1 by me occurred weeks earlier. I can't remember why I booked an overnight train from Beijing back to Shanghai. I mentioned before that saving the cost of two nights in a hotel were factors in my decision (then I said "fuck you, don't judge me"); but somehow I failed to recognize that we weren't saving any hotel costs in Shanghai since, well... I LIVE THERE. (The cost of a one-way flight was only slightly more expensive than a one-way train ride.)
So, yeah, I'm an idiot. But after I realized how dumb I was, I thought no big deal. We'll just take the train back, I'll get to pretend I'm five-years-old and on my way to Capitola in that ugly Toyota box-van we used to have, and we'll be in Shanghai for all of Saturday. Then I thought "I hope our tickets arrive at the hotel on Thursday!" Guess what happened.
If you remember the convenient experience of online purchases in China, you probably already understand where this is headed. I purchased train tickets three weeks earlier, but adherent to Chinese Railway's motto, "fuck e-tickets and fuck planning ahead", tickets are issued (physically printed) no sooner than ten days in advance, and must be issued and delivered in the city from which you are departing. So, when I purchased the train tickets, I had to tell the vendors what hotel I would be staying at, and they said they would deliver them to our hotel on Thursday, the day before departure. They were not there on Thursday. Luckily, they were also not there on Friday. My calls and email to the vendor that booked them for me were going unanswered. It was 10:15 am on Friday morning, and my blood pressure was close to making my ears bleed.
The train was scheduled to depart at 7pm. Okay, I figured. We'll head down to the train station, purchase new tickets, and get our refund from ChinaTripAdvisor.com later.
When we arrived at the train station, it was a complete mess. People. Everywhere. There was one ticket window (out of maybe one hundred) labeled "foreign guest ticket office", which took an hour for us to find. The woman barely spoke English (not her fault, mine, I know) and did manage to tell me that the earliest train from Beijing to Shanghai with available seats would be Sunday morning. Staci was scheduled to fly home (from Shanghai) Sunday morning, so that wasn't an option.
We sat down on the curb outside the train station with most of our bags - we had already checked out of our room - and tried to come up with a plan. My internal dialog was very clear: "fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. oh fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck".
Staci was being a complete pro. If she was panicking, she didn't show it. We decided to head back to the hotel to make use of the internet. The internet fixes everything. We needed to figure out if flights were available on Friday/Saturday, and potentially find a hotel for the evening if we couldn't fly out on Friday.
We hopped in a cab headed back to the hotel. After one giant traffic jam, a few travel agency visits, an emergency phone call to a colleague in Beijing, some tense conversations (hard to believe it, but Staci was slowly losing confidence in my decision-making ability), and one business center later, shit was mostly figured out. We checked into a cheap hotel nearby, and later that night barely made it in time to pick up our boarding passes for Saturday's flight (hey, entrepreneurs of the world, introduce e-tickets to China, you're welcome).
Crazily, we still had time to visit the Silk Market on Friday, which were our only plans to begin with, so it was a success by most measures.
And because I can't stand the thought of writing yet another post about Beijing, let me just say that its too windy (and when its not windy its too polluted), and too crowded.
That's 4 knock-off polo shirts, 5 t-shirts, 9 pairs of shoes, two tailored jackets, 1 tailored suit, and 12 tailor-fitted button down shirts. Half of this stuff was purchased in Beijing at the silk market, and half in Shanghai at the South Bund Fabric Market. The total cost for everything seen here was about $600.
