Shanghai Style

After two days in Beijing, it was off to Shanghai for a couple more days of interviews. There was even less time for touristy stuff in Shanghai than there was in Beijing. I always used to be jealous of my wife's business trips, but they're not exactly fun. My trips have one advantage over many of hers: when she's at a trade show, she probably doesn't get to see much of the city. I'm moving from building to building and neighborhood to neighborhood all day, so I at least get to see a bit of the city I'm in.

I did get to go fairly high up in Shanghai's Jin Mao Building, the tallest building in the PRC and the fifth-tallest in the world.


The building is in Shanghai's New Pudong Area, a, well, new area east of the old downtown.


Pudong was nothing but farmland 15 years ago, and much of it is still under construction. The explosive growth -- I learned this at one of my interviews -- is the result of income tax incentives given to foreign investors who wanted to develop the area. Those incentives, along with other corporate income tax incentives, will be abolished January 1, 2008. This post is starting to sound disturbingly like my story, which can't be good news. You can buy a copy of my magazine for HK$640 -- about US$80. It is on sale at Hong Kong International Airport, believe it or not.

Shanghai is a scenic city, especially the older quarters, and the air was refreshingly clear most of the time I was there. The Bund is probably Shanghai's most famous sight:


(The main advantage of going to meetings high up in office buildings is that I get some decent photos from time to time.) Famous as the Bund is, the Pearl TV Tower is definitely a more iconic view of Shanghai:


Every time I got in a taxi and looked out the window, I felt like I was in Detroit: I can't recall the last time I was surrounded by so many Buicks, most of them badged not with a simple "GM" nameplate, but with a special "Shanghai GM" nameplate.


On my last day in Shanghai, I visited a local supermarket. I had wandered in and out of supermarkets aimed primarily at foreigners, with lots of imported goods at high prices, but I found only one where the customers were primarily local. Still, there were lots of familiar brands, just marketed in somewhat different flavors:


I didn't try them, but I was curious what "Italian Red Meat Flavor" would taste like.

On my way back to Hong Kong, I got to ride Shanghai's famous maglev train, which covers 30 kilometers from Pudong to the airport in just over seven minutes and reaches a top speed of 431 km/h -- 268 mph -- midway through the journey.


The train left precisely on time, exactly 56 seconds after I shot this photo:

Mao and Me

I'm back from China and have been gradually getting my story worked into shape. Since my return, I've written somewhere on the order of 10,000 words, which is at least a good excuse to have not gotten the blog updated. The other problem is that I probably would have done some updating while in Beijing and Shanghai, but the government sees Blogspot as an enemy of the state and hides it behind the Great Firewall of China.

I had no idea what China would be like. I've never been a Sinophile. It's never been a place of much interest to me, but I was glad to have the opportunity to visit and, while I'm still not exactly a Sinophile, I'm looking forward to going back someday.

My trip to China was not the typical tourist trip. I built in a few hours here and there to wander around and see things, but most of my view of China was from upper floor conference rooms and the backseat of taxis. I did manage to learn a lot about China's new corporate income tax law, and am probably now the office expert on that subject. I will not bore you here, but will be happy to send you my masterpiece if you're having trouble sleeping at night.

I went to Beijing on Easter Monday. Since that's a holiday in Hong Kong, I went early in the day in hopes of seeing a bit of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. A bit is exactly what I saw. By the time I got through customs and immigration (the immigration form lists one of the possible reasons for visiting China as "to settle down"), figured out the taxi queue, rode the 60 km into the city from the airport and got checked in to my hotel, it was already pushing 3:30, about an hour before the Forbidden City closes.

One cool thing I did see on Monday was at the airport, where I saw an old Soviet-made Air Koryo jet waiting at a gate. Beijing is one of the few places in the world where you can see the North Korean airline, which operates just a few flights a week from Pyongyang. As Americans are pretty much out of luck when it comes to getting a North Korean visa, this is the probably the closest I will come to seeing the Air Koryo fleet.

The one thing I was not prepared for was the distance between places in Beijing. On my map, it looked like everything would be close together and easy to get to. Things were definitely further apart than I thought they would be.

On Monday, I made it to the outside of the Forbidden City and then on to Tiananmen Square. I probably could have found time to see a bit of the Forbidden City, but my interests lie more in modern political history than in ancient Chinese architecture.


While inside the gates, I took a number of photos of soldiers drilling. I don't know if they're from the People's Liberation Army or some local or national police force. My knowledge of official Chinese uniforms is completely lacking in this regard.



After a quick ride on the subway -- just to get the hang of the system before I headed off for my first meeting on Tuesday -- it was back to my hotel where, in a nearby mall, I found dinner at Sizzler. Yes, yes, I went all the way to China and ate at Sizzler. But, as I told Shelly when she raised this point, I live in China. I also found a Dairy Queen, which I haven't seen in months and months since the one near our house in Manila closed. Best of all, I didn't have to share a Blizzard with Shelly. Instead, I had a small plain cone all to myself.

When I got back to my hotel room -- in hopes of posting these photos -- I started looking around at the electrical outlets. I found this beast right next to the desk:


The one on the left is a standard Hong Kong -- and Great Britain -- outlet. The one on right can accommodate several different plugs. The top, for example, could take an American plug, as long as it didn't have the grounding plug. Of course, the 220v electricity might fry whatever you plug in it didn't have its own converter, like most laptops have.

The street near my hotel was full of shops and pharmacies, including one where I saw the whole staff, clad in their white labcoats, doing their morning workout to music blasting over a loudspeaker. Having lived in Japan for three years and having taken part in this morning ritual a time or two, this did not shock me. If it had, I probably would have thought to get my camera out in time to take a photo. Instead, I got a nice shot of some interesting Chinglish, which I took to mean "We're open during renovations":


And that was about the end of the tourist portion of my visit to Beijing. The rest of the trip revolved around lots of walking, subway rides and taxi rides from one office building to another. I did, however, get the occasional cool view from the 34th floor conference room, like this one of the main north-south artery crossing the main east-west artery. Wouldn't you know it, my next destination after I took this photo was to the north, which is to the left in this photo.


Part of the coloring in this photo comes from the tinted windows in the conference room (I cleaned that up a bit in Photoshop), but most of it comes from the fact that Beijing is an amazingly polluted city. Rumor has it -- from Shelly, who says it came from "word of mouth" -- that Beijing will be shutting down all the surrounding factories something like five weeks in advance of the 2008 Olympics to give the smog a chance to clear out.

Photos of Shanghai should be posted soon .... maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, but soon.

Eating Spicy Piglet in Macau

Spicy piglet .... I couldn't convince Shelly to try it, but it was actually quite good. It would have been easy for her to try, as it was all over the gift shops in Macau, where we spent the first half of our glorious five day Easter holiday weekend.

The spicy piglet seemed to be pounded thin, cooked in some fashion, and then glazed with some kind of sauce. It was not unlike beef -- or pork -- jerky. Shelly warned me that I was eating some kind of weird street meat that had not been kept at a healthy temperature, but I did manage to not get sick. The stack of meat to the left of the spicy piglet has somehow been translated as "Wild Boar of Meat."

This was my third trip to Macau, and only now have I finally seen most of the tourist spots I wanted to visit. We arrived early Thursday afternoon and headed for the rural Coloane fishing village, which I really enjoyed when I visited in February. After having a cup of tea, we went for a wander and I showed Shelly the spot where I first saw China, eight weeks ago. Here I am, all excited about Zhuhai, which we could only barely see across the channel:

Coloane is an old fishing and junk-making village which is now turning more to tourism. There are a number of restaurants in town, and it's nice to stroll along the waterfront. You can also buy all sorts of dried fish. Sorry, Fat Choy, we didn't bring one back for you:

Perhaps the most interesting thing we saw in Coloane was this ferry from Zhuhai. It chugged over to a concrete slope and six or eight tourists hopped in. An immigration official watched them board the boat before heading back to his office.

After a wander, we hopped on an extremely overcrowded minibus and headed to another old village, this one with a much more colonial feel. Macau is changing so quickly -- in 2006, it had more gambling revenue than Las Vegas -- that most of the territory no longer has the "old" feel I felt when I visited in 1996, but some of the old charm still exists. In Taipa Village, for instance, there are five villas built in 1921 to be the summer homes of wealthy Macanese. The villas are now a museum, including one that looks much like it might have in 1921.

The Church of our Lady of Carmel also made a nice early evening photo:

We spent Friday at museums, including the really fantastic Macau Museum, where Shelly demonstrated how well she had paid attention by answering five of five questions correctly and receiving her own personalized certificate. Despite two tries (3 of 5, then 4 of 5), I couldn't get one of my own. (I knew important ones like the fact that the Portuguese first met the Chinese in Malacca [not Macau] but not that some kind of Chinese puppeteers stand up rather than sit down. Psssh.) You can bet that I heard about who won for a good while after we left the museum.

We spent the rest of Friday wandering through an interesting neighborhood called Barra, where we saw a temple to the god of fishermen and a woman walking a dog which was wearing not only a sweater, but also a pair of pants (sorry for the bad photo ... it was near dusk when they wandered by):

As we were leaving town today, we had lunch in a high-end department store, then walked next door and saw three chickens hanging in a kitchen window:

It's not exactly how I'd prepare my chicken...

Busy Week(s)

My first two weeks have gone well, but have been busy, busy.

I've cranked out 8,000 words spread over two stories (well, one feature story and one set of news briefs). I've learned about corporate governance, Indian employee stock option plans, Japanese patent law and a host of other topics, most of which are surprisingly interesting to me.

Did you know that China recently passed a law giving private property the same protections as public property? Did you know that Japan recently completed a high profile criminal trial in just over 12 months, when a comparable trial in the past might have taken eight years? Did you know that the Khmer Rouge trials have been delayed because the Bar Association of the Kingdom of Cambodia is demanding foreign lawyers pay huge fees to the Bar in order to take part in the trials? It may not be interesting to you, but it has been to me.

Plus, I'm traveling next week, sooner than I had anticipated. I'll be in Beijing for two days and Shanghai for two days, interviewing lawyers, accountants and other business types to learn all about China's new corporate income tax law, which is also -- perhaps, again, surprisingly -- a fascinating topic. I seem to have found a great niche!

Plus, every night when I wait for the bus at Statue Square, I get this view:


That's the Bank of China Tower rising over the Legislative Council (Legco) building. My commute costs about 90 U.S. cents a day for a 20- to 30-minute, double-decker bus ride each way, depending on traffic. When will I ever again have such an incredibly cheap commute?

Flowers, Flowers

Shelly texted me this weekend, urging me to get down to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel with our camera, telling me that there were loads and loads of white roses and other flowers on the corner, all in tribute to some guy named Leslie.

She wasn't kidding.

Turns out that it was a memorial for Leslie Cheung, a Hong Kong-born singer and actor who committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the hotel April 1, 2003. Cheung was one of the founders of Cantopop (Cantonese pop music) and his memorial service was apparently a huge deal: tens of thousands people from around the world came to Hong Kong in the middle of the SARS scare for the service (which, according to Wikipedia, was also called "Yellow Pneumonia." Hmmm.)

Bamboo Scaffolds

One of the things I remember from my first trip to Hong Kong in the mid-1990s is the bamboo scaffolding that you see all over the city. It's interesting to watch the scaffolding rise around a building in just a day or two, with guys hauling bamboo poles up from the street and building the scaffold as they go. This one went up across the street from our place a few weeks ago and now -- as we discovered over the weekend -- there's plenty of noise coming from the work site, which is now covered with the green plastic that's on the left side of this picture.


I wondered, when we moved in, why we hadn't been shown any of the apartments in that building, because a number of them were standing empty. It just got emptier and emptier, and will probably now reopen with much more expensive units than it had before.

One of the coolest things about the scaffolding is that the height of the building doesn't seem to be an issue. I've seen bamboo scaffolds on buildings much taller than this one.

A More Structured Phase

Ah, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?

I’ll be lucky if I ever get half of my previous readership back, I know. That’s sad, but the last month or so has flown by in a big Chinese blur and blogging has not been at the top of the priority list. Or anywhere near the top, for that matter.

The good news is that I am moving into a more structured phase of my life, which will probably lead to more regular blogging on my part. The bad news – from a blog perspective, at least – is that “a more structured phase of my life” means I’m back at work, which means I’ll likely have less to blog about unless I want to blog about work, which I do not.

(I’m happy to share anything you really want to know about in private e-mails. I’ll just be following the same policy I’ve had towards Shelly’s work for the past 18 months: Any mention of work will only be in a generic sense, and nothing specific about work shall be mentioned.)

In the five weeks or so since my last post (in which I visited Macau in order to activate my new dependent visa), I spent most of my time 1) battling a ferocious head cold that just wouldn’t go away, 2) working on four or five different freelance projects which all came along at the same time, 3) looked for a job, 4) found a job, and 5), failed to have any free time to play tourist in the final days before the job began.

The job is quite a good fit for me, I think. Generically speaking, I’m writing for a company that produces trade journals in a field that actually allows me to use my graduate degree. (This is, I might add, the first time I’ve specifically used my graduate degree since I was actually earning it. I’m sure Mom is happy that her investment in me is finally paying off.)

It’s been an interesting first few days at work, and I’m quite certain that by the time I move back to the US, I’ll be completely unemployable. Why? Well, our style guide is somewhat schizophrenic on when to use US English and when to use UK English. (We typically stick with British conventions like colour and centre and practise but, for some reason, use US English when it comes to centralize or specialize.) Add to that the fact that I’m picking up Britishisms here and there – last week I told Shelly I would empty the bin after I did the washing up – and I will most definitely not write like an American.

Ah, well, that makes things all the more interesting, doesn’t it?

Macau

Weather-wise, last Thursday was not the ideal day to visit Macau, but with government offices closed much of this week for Chinese New Year and me in need of a Hong Kong ID number to apply for jobs, I braved the coldness and overcastness of the day and boarded a high-speed jet-powered ferry for Macau, 65 km west of Hong Kong.

Macau retains much more of its colonial charm than does Hong Kong, where tearing down historic buildings is one of the government's favorite pasttimes. The same may be true in Macau, I don't know, but if it is, the tearing down must be at a much slower pace than it is here. There are a number of areas in Macau where you almost feel as though you're in Europe. There are no areas of Hong Kong (that I've found, at least) that give you that feeling. Of course, I would not have had to spend all day in Macau, but it seemed like a waste of money not to play tourist since I have the time to do so.

One of the things I like about Macau is many signs are in both Chinese and Portuguese, adding to the European feeling.




Since I had been to Macau a decade ago, I wanted to see something different than what I had seen last time. The problem is, my memory wasn't as good as I thought it was, and I couldn't remember all that much. Looking at my map, I knew I had not ridden a cable car up to the top of a big hill, so I started at the Flora Garden and rode the Guia Cable Car. It was only 3 patacas round-trip (US$0.37), so I figured I couldn't go wrong.

(One Hong Kong dollar is worth MOP$1.03, and both currencies, along with Chinese RMB, are accepted just about everywhere. Shopkeepers will try to give you change in the currency you use to pay the bill, but I often found myself mixing currencies throughout the day. I only took a couple hundred patacas out of the ATM because while you can spend Hong Kong dollars in Macau, you can't spend patacas in Hong Kong.)

I rode the cable car to the top and headed towards the light house, which I thought I shot photograph for Mom and Jer. Once I made it the rest of the way to the top, I realized I had been to the old fort and lighthouse before with my friend Marilyn. The lighthouse (favol, in Portuguese) is the oldest on the China coast, built in 1865. Unfortunately, you can't climb to the top of the lighthouse, but the fort grounds give you a pretty good view of the city, including this one of a public square and Cemetery of St. Michael the Archangel, which we also visited 10 years ago.


The hill around the fort is full of bunkers from World War II and the Cold War, one of which has been turned into a small museum.


After a ride back down the cable car, I headed to the Kun Iam Temple, a Buddhist temple built in 1627. At this temple, the U.S. and China signed their first treaty of trade and friendship in 1844. I had not been here before, and found it to be more "atmospheric" than most temples I've visited in Hong Kong.



I had been trying to figure out Macau's bus system with little luck. I wanted to get out of the central city and visit an old fishing village on Coloane Island. I decided that it couldn't be that expensive to get there by taxi, so I hailed one and hopped in. In Hong Kong, I've never had much trouble communicating with taxi drivers, but the driver I had in Macau, well, let's say that his English was worse than my Chinese. I think he might have been a recent import from the mainland, as he didn't seem to know his way around and he had a picture of Mao dangling from his rear-view mirror. After an unintended detour and 97 patacas (about US$12), we managed to find Coloane Village. It was worth the trip.

It's not that there's all that much to see there; it's more the uniqueness of the village. It's only 65 km from Hong Kong but may as well have been on the other side of the world, the feeling was so different, with interesting old buildings in narrow winding streets.




The other thing I saw in Coloane was China. Looking across the channel, I realized I had never seen China before, which made it worth taking a not-very-good photo of the Zhuhai Special Economic Zone.


I had lunch at an English cafe that served really tasty Thai food and was staffed by a couple of young Thai guys who told me which bus I could take back to the city center, allowing me to save 93 patacas on the return journey.

The bus dropped me off next to the post office and another public square. The square was jam-packed with tourists and a New Year's market. I wandered into Watson's Drogaria looking for some acetominophen for a budding headache and found huge queues of mainland Chinese buying chocolates for the New Year. I pushed my way back out of the store and tried to ignore my headache. I threaded my way through the crowds and walked to what is possibly Macau's most famous attraction, the ruins of the Church of St. Paul. All that remains of the 400-year-old church is the facade; the rest of the building burned down in 1835, when it was being used as a military barracks.


And that was about it for the day. I was beat at that point as I hadn't slept much the night before and had been awake since 5 a.m. I bought a few postcards, had a beer at a streetside cafe and headed back to the ferry terminal. I got back to Hong Kong, activated my visa and texted Shelly to let her know that I am now legal. I went to Immigration on Friday to apply for my ID card, and am now ready to look for work. Wish me luck!

Chinese New Year, Day 2

It's Day Two of Chinese New Year here in Hong Kong. Last night's parade in Tsim Sha Tsui was somewhat of a disappointment, though that may be because I was not patient enough.

I arrived T-S-T, on the southern tip of the Kowloon peninsula, a bit before 7 for a parade that was to begin at 8. Even though the crowds were three or four deep in most places, my amazing gwailo height and a slight upward slope of the sidewalk gave me a decent view and I quickly found a decent spot to watch the parade from. An hour's worth of Bob and Sheri podcasts kept me entertained while I waited for the parade.

And then I listened to another hour. By 9, all I had seen were a bunch of kids doing bicycle tricks and a float from Cathay Pacific, the Hong Kong airline which sponsors the parade. After waiting 10 minutes after the Cathay Pacific float, I gave up and went home. I'm sure there were interesting things to be seen, but I decided that two hours and ten minutes were long enough to stand on a Kowloon street corner.

I did shoot some video on my cell phone and put together this minute-long clip. It's not great quality -- it was shot with a phone, after all, and you're watching it on the Internet -- but it's kind of interesting.

Gung Hei Fat Choy!

The first day of Chinese New Year is upon us, so let me be among the first to wish you Gung Hei Fat Choy! (Loosely translated, this means congratulations and be prosperous; it wasn't until after we named our cat that we learned her name might well bring us wealth. So far, though, if her vet bills are any indication, she's helping us spend, rather than accumulate, wealth.)

It's the Year of the Pig, so Hong Kong's streets are full of pig decorations, including these at the nearby Times Square shopping center, which were part of the "Piggies My Love" public art charity, each designed by a different local artist. I could have bought one of these pigs. Being from Iowa -- the hog capital of America -- I actually thought about it.




Chinese New Year markets sprung up around Hong Kong a week ago, so Shelly and I went to visit the market in Victoria Park Tuesday evening. In large part, the markets were full of tacky pig souvenirs, including the pig snout toilet paper dispenser a vendor tried to sell us:

Vendor: It's real leather!

Me: Really? Leather? (It looked more like pleather to me.)

Vendor: Really! Leather!

Me: Hmmm....

Vendor: I wouldn't lie to you!

Me: Hmmm....

Vendor: Okay, but you can just believe me!

With that last bit of honesty, I was tempted, but not quite enough to spend the HK$150 she wanted. I don't need a 20 dollar pleather toilet paper dispenser....

But the markets are also full of plum trees (for luck), kumquat trees (for prosperity) and chrysanthemums (for longevity). Since I'm about to start looking for a job, I'm hoping the plum branches Shelly brought home will bring me some luck.

In order to invite wealth into our home -- this is also job search related -- I placed nine coins in a red envelope this morning and then put in the apartment's "money corner," which is the back left corner. Shelly is not at all convinced this will work, but then she is skeptical about most everything that cannot be scientifically explained. It really is quite amazing that she married me, a guy who believes in ghosts, UFOs, conspiracy theories and things like red envelopes full of coins bringing wealth into the house.

Many expats get out of town during Chinese New Year (including Shelly, though she's on business rather than holiday). Many shops and most offices shut down for the week and, from what I've heard, there's really not much going on if you're not following the Chinese traditions of visiting family. I'm going to brave the crowds tonight, though, and go to Tsim Sha Tsui for what is supposed to be a great parade, and to Causeway Bay tomorrow night to watch the fireworks over Victoria Harbour. I expect to be fully squeezed and packed into spaces much too small for the number of people them, but that's one of the joys of Hong Kong...