By Dan
Other than sleeping, I can’t think of a better way to spend the 12 hours on Air France Flight 111 from Shanghai to Paris than writing a blog post. I’m returning from my first ever trip to Asia and still feeling like the first impressions are pretty fresh in my head.
So the trip started ten days ago – very late the night of May 1. I was at CDG airport in Paris boarding the plane when my cell phone buzzed with a text message from Danielle: “1st 3 cases of swine flu reported in paris.” I had been nervous about leaving her alone with the kids with the hysteria about the global pandemic peaking at that point (we were calling it “Hamageddon.”) But I took solace in the fact that it hadn’t reached Europe yet when I left, or so I thought. Anyway it was too late to turn back.
When you fly east in the summer, taking off at midnight, you barely get any night. It seemed like it had only been dark an hour or two when the sun started to come up. From my window seat I watched sunrise over very pretty countryside, and saw a huge city with a massive winding river that stretched on as far as I could see. The video display on the seat in front of me showed that we were flying over Moscow, and I guess that was the Volga River below us. I had never been farther east than Moscow in my life until that point.
We arrived Sunday afternoon and after checking in to our hotel took a cab to meet my friend Derek who had arrived earlier in the day and was staying at a nice hotel downtown. I was travelling with Carlos (aka Old Carlos, or Brazilian Carlos – though German/Brazilian Carlos is more accurate) from my program. The core of my social circle this past week was Derek, Old Carlos, Blake, and New Carlos (aka Mexican Carlos.) The trip included seven other students who I know well from my program, and seven who I didn’t know well but grew to like from our sister campus in Casablanca.
Bike and mopeds everywhere. Bamboo scaffolding. Laundry hanging from telephone and power lines.
Six of us gathered that first night and wandered out for dinner in downtown Shanghai, ending up at a big restaurant with a long menu with lots of pictures. We ordered everything that caught our eye. Almost every meal in China that week turned out to be like the one we had that night: tons of dishes, maybe ten or twenty, with each meal. Surprisingly little rice, if any. The dishes are brought out in waves and put on a lazy susan, and you grab a couple bitefuls as it passes by and drop them on a small plate in front of you. Some dishes are straightforward, not unlike what I’ve had in Chinese restaurants in the U.S. and France. Others I still don’t know what they were.
In general they make use of the whole animal in China – I saw the cooked heads of lots of animals this week. That first night I ate whole duck tongue, and beef cartilage, and some delicious spicy crab. Later in the week some of the more noteworthy things I tried were beef tongue – which was great – and chicken heart – which wasn’t. We ordered several beers that first night, and when they arrived we discovered that each bottle was 22 oz. I had been up for 30+ hours at that point, and that pretty much put me under. Dinner, and in fact everything that week, was incredibly cheap. Many of the higher-end meals – multiple courses and lots of drinks – were about $15 or $20 per person. Lots of meals were much less.
Derek's room with a view
Heading back to the hotel that first night, massively sleep-deprived, the cab cut through a narrow underpass where a cement truck was entering from the other side. We slowed to let the truck pass through first, and as it entered the passageway the top of the truck scraped and then got stuck right in the middle of the underpass. We skirted around it as debris and chunks of cement fell to the ground.
In our seminars, and in general during the week, a constant theme was how developed China is. I went there thinking I was visiting a developing country, but Shanghai (which leads the country in many ways) appears to already have arrived. I felt safe the entire time I was there. The roads were well-maintained. The city was remarkably clean – much more so than Paris. There are normal stores, a very clean and efficient and navigable metro system, taxis everywhere, good food, and extraordinarily nice people (also much more so than Paris.)
Tabs on soda can lids - something I hadn't seen since 1993 when I was in Russia.
The roads and traffic infrastructure, however, have grown at a much faster pace than the level of driver education. I think I finally figured out the main rule that guides their driving philosophy: if a bike or pedestrian or car is in your way, rather than try to slip in behind or in front or around it, drive straight towards it and assume it will be gone by the time you get there. I was pretty sure I’d get in an accident at some point, and figured it would be an opportunity to witness the Chinese health care system first time. We were all surprised when we survived the entire week without an accident.
So we got back to the hotel in one piece that first night and the hotel courtyard had an amazing smell that I would not have expected to find in a city of 20 million people. It was a beautiful night and I was told the smell was orange flower – it smelled sort of like jasmine to me.
In the hotel room I collapsed into bed and realized that I had made a huge mistake in not feeling the bed before falling into it. It was literally as hard as a board, like sleeping on a wood floor that had a soft comforter or carpet on it. I ended up sleeping pretty well though after a couple nights of adjusting to the time difference. While the food was pretty good all week, breakfast had some unpleasant surprises. There were eggs that looked like they were hardboiled
Antique Market
but they were black and I didn’t touch them. There was some root that looked a little like ginger, twisted up and nasty, not remotely appetizing in the morning. I ended up having leftover greasy noodles every morning, which was ok but got old by the end of the week.
The week was packed full of seminars, gatherings with alumni from our sister school in Shanghai, and company visits and tours – most with an alumni connection. A few were dull but most were extremely interesting and enjoyable. In between, and in my two free days, we explored lots of neighborhoods, ate at lots of different types of restaurants, and hit many of the sites in the guidebooks. My favorite sites were the Urban Planning Museum, the Jade Buddha Temple, the Shikumen Open House Museum, and the Yuyuan Gardens. Favorite non-Chinese restaurants were Japanese (so good we went twice,) Malaysian, and Brazilian. I saw plans for the world expo coming to Shanghai in 2010 (the first world expo in a developing country,) saw pearls removed from an oyster, got tours of a textile factory, a pharmaceutical factory, a car parts factory, saw kitchen knives being made, bought two custom-fitted suits for less than $100, and saw how houses have been renovated in the French concession.
Of the eight companies we visited, seven appeared to be doing very well financially despite what I have read in the papers about China suffering from the economic downturn. Most have seen sales increase in 2008 and 2009, though at a slightly slower rate. Most western companies we saw came to China primarily to sell to the Chinese market, not to take advantage of the cheap labor and export products back. Exports do appear to be flat, or down, but domestic sales continue to grow at an impressive rate and outweigh the export losses.
On Thursday and Friday we went to Suzhou, a very nice city an hour away from Shanghai. It feels like a small city, “only” six million people, and is home to two massive industrial parks where we visited several companies. More than 100 of the Fortune 500 have offices or factories in Suzhou.
The highlight of Suzhou for me was the massage place next to our hotel. Massages in China are amazing: generally less than $10 for a full hour massage. Several friends got massages in Shanghai – because of my numerous back and joint problems that have gotten a lot worse this year I was worried about getting a massage from someone with whom I couldn’t communicate. This place had a foot massage option and I figured that sounded relaxing and relatively safe on my back. Blake and Derek went in for the full massage while New Carlos and I opted for the foot massage and were led into a small room together with huge comfortable chairs, a big TV, and subdued lighting.
We turned off the TV when the two masseuses entered the room, and one of them picked up the remote and turned it back on to a loud MTV-like station that entertaining but far from relaxing. They brought in two buckets of hot water, took of our shoes and socks and plunged our feet into them. It was scalding hot, incredibly painful, and the only thing that kept me from yelling was that Carlos was in the room and he wasn’t screaming so I tried to keep my cool. They didn’t speak any English and understanding where we were supposed to sit or stand or position ourselves was tough. While our feet were soaking, or burning, they gave us neck and back massages which in my case was just intense pinching and poking but not very therapeutic.
The foot massage itself lasted about 45 minutes. She started by trying to pull each toe off my foot one by one. When she couldn’t pull one off, she’d move to the next one. After that, she started karate-chopping my calves and ankles, I figured she was trying to loosen them up to pull my whole foot off. The she moved on to my feet, pounding and twisting and mutilating them. I really didn’t think I would be walking out of there under my own power. However by the end I had pretty much succumbed and was sort of enjoying it. I walked out in a daze and ran into four girls from my program who were standing at the reception area looking at the menu of different massages. One of them, Carmel, took one look at my glossed-over face and said “I want what he had!”
The next day my feet felt fine but my back and arm were killing me. Carmel reported being so bruised in her next and shoulders that she was in pain the next day and had to take painkillers. One other friend was uncomfortably sore; several others said they loved it.
Afterword
So that was written mostly on the plane on the way back. I am now back in Paris, one day later, typing up the blog post and enjoying family time. I didn’t quite finish all I experienced and all the anecdotes that keep popping into my head, but this post has gotten long enough.
It is great to be back. I felt bad missing Rachel’s first birthday, and Mothers Day. We had a little celebration for Rachel when I got back and I slept very soundly last night and feel pretty human. Anyway it looks like Danielle has gotten serious again about the blogging and I have some reading to catch up on.
