Adventures Galore August 13-19

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So the pictures are from the left, hot pot (see below explanation), my gigantic nose and a rock formation in Yu Yao that looks like a face, and the inside of the church that I go to.

So it’s Tuesday right, and we are off to get some food. Let’s try a noodle shop. This place is known for their homemade noodles. We walk in and there isn’t a place to sit, and this is a good sign. The place is packed. Chinese are particular about their food and if a place is crowded, usually it’s a good bet. I guess universal everywhere. Seen the line at Pats or Genos? Anycase, we finally get a table for the five of us and we got our man Fu Yi Lin with us. Great guy. He’s an intern and supposedly a heck of a basketball player. Since he didn’t bring his shoes to shanghai, I just have to go visit him at his university and play some ball with him. Anyways, I order some home made noodles with beef. I get the noodles in a separate plate and what beef meant was lots of green stems (probably spinadch stems) finely chopped and tossed in some ground beef. The greens definitely outweighed the meat. Not preferred by the carnivore, your humble bard of shanghai. But the noodles they’re great, really damn good noodles. So I’m chomping my way through and hold on, wait what’s that. Look a little closer, nah, that’s not it. Hold on bub, just for a minute. Wait a minute, that is, no that is a caterpillar. About as thin as vermicelli and a couple centimeters long. Well now don’t that just ruin a meal. So we complain, and of course normally that would be it for me, but you know I’m with company, and besides it’s just a caterpillar right? Stop being such a pussy. So I order another dish, a clay pot dish with a beef soup and get on with it. (yes I believe I did pop a cyproflaxin after I got back to the office, just in case)

So lemme explain Hotpot. There are different kinds of hot pot, but the principally you sit at a table with a stove and they bring a pot of broth (seafood, beef, chicken, satay, vegetable, mixed) and you order all kinds of raw food from leafy vegetables to noodles, to thinly sliced beef and lamb, fish paste (not bad really), fish, sausages, whatever, right…and you dip it in cook it and of course you get a spoon and a chopstick. If you come to china, learn how to use a chopstick forks are not standard. So this can be either a communal pot or individual. Individual is definitely preferred. Some pictures..

So how do you like to get your ass whopped on by a fifty year old? In Ping Pong, that’s table tennis for you sophisticated folk. Man this lady took me to school and back and then just for good measure, took my damn lunch money too. I’ve played ping pong and usually I am okay, well okay in China means you can’t return a damn serve and getting smashed even when you do manage to return it. I could get a couple of points against the old lady and then I played Anton, a colleague’s boy friend, and I felt so bad because I felt like he was wasting his time. I think I might have been lucky to get maybe 1 point out of 7. ridiculous. So add it to the list, Chinese, pool, badminton, and now ping pong. Krieky.

So Saturday, I made a friend of mine wait freaking 45 minutes. Now most of you are used to this, but this was horrible. She was doing me a favor by taking me to this place where they sell cell phones for cheap. But I promised her I would take her out to dinner to a really nice restaurant. I need one that can play Mp3s. So this place, I have no idea how they get their cell phones, but it’s like half the freaking price for the one I got, which I think technically has not been released in Asia. It has to be shady. So now I feel somewhat guilty about perpetuating the black market culture. Egh. Of course, as always after the fact. What a little bitch. Oh boo hoo I feel guilty, hey did you check out my new phone? You’re not going to believe the deal I got. Oh and let me cry some more about feeling guilty and not doing a damn thing about it. Of course places like this, there are no return policies and the receipt you get definitely is not official. Now I’m gonna enjoy my 4GB memory phone and rock to some 50.

Oh Sunday I go to Carrefour and Carrefour is pretty much like walmart, but it’s French. Freedom fries anyone? So this Carrefour is a really nice (there are like six in shanghai, and some aren’t so nice), and it’s got a fruit selection that is unbelievable. Fruits from my childhood that I could never get in the States.

Let’s get to Sunday dinner. So my boss tells me about this Thai place across the street from where I live and recommend I try it. Well he’s got good taste and I’m down, what the hell else am I going to do? Sure as shit aint’ gonna cook right now. So I go across and walk through this alley, pretty interesting sight. See a group of old ladies playing Mahjong, little kid and his mom playing together, I say hi. Well I walk into the restaurant, and it’s all guys, and the bartender sashes across to me, and points me to a waiter who does the catwalk walk and leads me to a table and I realize well, shit George, I do believe tonight is gay night. I sit down, go over the menu order the chicken curry and two ladies (American and Chinese American) sit across at the table across me. Should have asked them to join me, but me being the sissy little girl I am, I didn’t and ate alone. Well that’s it. Now that was an adventurous week.

Blue Skies are smiling at me. (august 7-August 12)

So here’s their shizzle my mateys. After that weekend, no partying for a while. Good gravy. Then again how many times have I said that. Also, all week we could see blue skies in Shanghai. Now this my friends is an event because normally it’s just the haze of pollution blocking out Apollo himself. But when there is typhoon is Taiwan and the winds are blowing, we shanghainese get to gaze at the blue wonder, cloud figures and if we are so lucky see a coupla twinkles in the evening. Good times. You have no idea how much it helps with the heat and your overall mood to see blue skies until you haven’t seen any. At least for me. So now I know how depressed those poor bastards in the Matrix were. Live underground with no sun for a lifetime? Fuuuuuuuuuck that…..please plug my defeated ass into the matrix and make me Jordan.
Anyways, so last time I wrote this, I was on my way to JEDA (Jiashan Economic Development Zone) where one of our plants is located. We had a meeting with one of our suppliers for our automatic tank cleaning machines. We’re having some problems. Back later entourage time.

Oh boy, that was addicting. I gotta stop these DVD binges. Well anyways, you know what I’m excited about Rosetta Stone Chinese. Heard good things about it. Well we shall see. Wanted to buy that sucker for a long time. So back to the Jiashan meeting. So Jason our intern who speaks English and Chinese fluently, is the translator and he has a cast of a freaking thousand talking to him, and my man is getting pissed because everybody has a different opinion about what’s wrong. The German salesman who doubles as an arrogant prick, is also getting legitimately frustrated. There was foreman for the plant production personnal who was only recently hired and he doesn’t know what the hell is going on, but to because of his position he feels like he should be the fucking expert. Now these are the guys who fuck shit up. The idiot who is in position but does not know the details of the operation, but cannot humble himself because of his ego to admit that he doesn’t now what the shit is going on. This is true everywhere, America, Europe, but especially in China. A person will say he understand you, and says yes, but he doesn’t in reality have a clue. Now part of it is due to translation, but a lot of it is due to the fact that admitting you don’t know of course is embarrassing or “losing face”. So cutting through the bullshit sometimes is more than half the job. Well that was the point of that whole story. In the end, we got some of the conclusions, but not all. Oh and get this, the German does a presentation the day before and at the end of the presentation, he shows random porn. How freaking unprofessional is that? (no ladies were present in the room).

Oh man I had this stuff called lions head for lunch, and what it is a giant meatball (2in diameter). Good stuff. So tender. I have to start taking pictures of these dishes. So because everyone the team turned int heri mntly reports in time, the bosses take us out to dinner to this pretty nice Italian place. Pane e vino. They had this pancetta (fancy word for bacon) and oil dressing that was pretty darn good. Anyways, so this was probably the first time a lot of the team has tried Italian like this, or maybe Italian period. And for a lot of people, even a filet mignon didn’t taste good to them. It’s just not what they are used to. And etiquette wise, you know you gotta think, how much Chinese etiquette does an average college graduate in the U.S. know? So like I said, it works both ways, but if I worked for a Chinese company, I sure as heck would make it a point to learn. Also, I think the company should provide cross-cultural learning on basic stuff like dinner and meeting etiquette. In China, if a phone rings anytime, most people will answer it. Meeting or even during a one on one conversation. I’m used to it now and don’t care, but visitors have been known to get annoyed.

Check it out, a guy I played basketball with works for an ad agency that represents a major show company. He was gracious enough to let me check out his work and sit in a couple of meetings. The difficulties of the Chinese market, (active life isn’t a part of the culture, parents’ priority is education over athletics), how the relationship works between the ad agency and the client. Pretty cool stuff. Since I’m an obsessed sports junkie, this stuff was pretty cool. I need to start training for a Beijing half marathon in October. Better get on my damn horse and start running. Need to find a track. Maybe if I can psych myself into doing it, Shanghai full marathon in November. Yeah who knows this will be one of many unfinished projects in my life. Add it to the fucking list right? I can’t wait to train in this pollution. Playing ultimate Frisbee here and man after a sprint for the disc, my lungs are on freaking fire. I mean holy cow it’s like my aioli are getting seared or something. It hurts to breath in heavy. Apparently I’m going to get used to it or so the guys on the team say.

Oh and I figured out why I got sick last weekend, it was the milkshake I had after Frisbee. It’s a pretty good restaurant; apparently I can’t handle their milkshake. Wasn’t that good anyways. You know what is pissing me off, sometimes I feel like I’m getting by a cabbie or the driver takes a wrong turn or like this past Wednesday, the restaurant screws up our order and we wait over half an hour to get food, and I don’t have the skills to argue with them. Work in progress. Oh and since there are different accents and shanghainese is different than mandarin, the some cab drivers pronounce the street names differently. Differently meaning, Mandarin is a tonal language. So different tones have diffent meaning. And something simple as “Ma” can be pronounced four diffent ways for four different meanings. So when I tell them the intersection where I live, it can be an adventure sometimes because I get the tone wrong without realizing it, and they are all sorts of confused. It is getting less frequent now. Allright that was a boring ass blog. Next time kiddies, next time. Oh and if anyone knows some private equity or venture capital contacts, you gotta holla at me.

Food Poisoning round 3

July 28-August 07

So I continue to be late to everything. It’s unbelieavable. The good news is that its no longer like half an hour or anything, but more like 5 to 10 minutes. Which still is pretty annoying. You think this would be something easy to fix, but anyways enough self analysis.

NOTE: pics are being added to old blogs as I refer to the subject matter. the pic here is Jing'an temple close to work. it was rebuilt recently. new temple for the new sky scrapers right?

So let’s see what the hell did I do after I got back from Tianjin. I guess shit just wasn’t memorable enough. Mission: Get forks for party. So go to the grocery store, and I walk around for a little while and then I just decide to ask. I ask for forks, of course in English, what the fuck you think I’m china or something? (mmm my bad…) and my main man takes me over to the battery section….now tell me that isn’t funny. Anywys, I had to go to another place and got some plastic forks. Vietnamese food, freaking excellent. We’re building a plant in Vietnam, man I hope I get to go work there for at least a little while. Trying to plan a vacation, I’m thinking Fiji, Cambodia has been suggested, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan? Now the dilemma comes in, do I write stuff that you can write up elsewhere (such as Chinese holidays), or do I write daily nuances that are just so damn quirky at times. China has 3 sets of holidays. You work a weekend, and then you get a whole week of off around the time of October 1, June 1 an Chinese new year (don’t know exactly when that is). So October 1 is coming up and I got a vacation to plan and during these holidays you want to get the heck out of China because all the Chinese go to the tourist attractions. Greatwall, suzhou gardens, wherever. So get out of china, avoid Thailand (because Chinese take their holidays here as well). So trust me when over 1 billion people take holidays, I’m sure they can cause a freaking semicontinental transportation mess.


Lost in the playoffs for bball, first game. Great game, we came back to tie it with 20 seconds and they went up by three, and missed a last second three. Pretty damn fun. Well shoot let’s just get to a food poisoning story. This past Saturday after bball, I go out to play a little ultmate, we played for like one point and stopped because it was pretty hot (not as hot as 2 Saturdays ago where when I walked out of the gym, and I just wanted cry. It was freaking ridiculous. I wish I had just passed out so I didn’t have to deal with that awfulness, it was that bad, factor in the smog and humidity, you got yourself a grown man (that’s debatable) wanting to cry himself to sleep. So this Saturday was mild in comparison. Anywho, I go back to the apartment, lie down for a while and get a call from my friend to go get some dinner. I start walking and I feel terrible. I pounding headache, and my stomach is killing me. I should go back, but I my boys are waiting for me. I get there and we decide to try a new brazilian bbq place, doing a comparison test. So now I’m doubled over at the table and I’m pouring sweat. Maybe I just need some bread and fruit to settle my stomach. NOPE. No dice. Okay I have to go home. So I get out with paying half the price and get out. Grab a cab and about 3 minutes later, I know whats gonna happen next. Thank goodness I have a cool cab driver. I tell him “no good” start patting my chest with an open hand (you like the details there? Makes you feel like you’re almost there, yeah that’s right descrfiptive narrative for my faithful, you know how we do) and show trouble breathing. (okay in hind sight, that might be misinterpreted as having a heart attack, next time I’ll get my broken Chinese and miming down a little better). My man pulls the car over to the curb, I open the door, and HEL-LO nurse. All water, nothing but water and the watermelon slices I just ate. Stop myself from dry heaving and get back to the apartment. Pop an antibiotic pill and take a nap for 3 hours. I wake up at about 11:00 and I’m good. Good as new. Good enough to walk 30 minutes to city diner, have a phone conversation with a friend, and order breakfast to go. I love city Diner. get back and stay up t'll 1 PM the next day (that's right a 12 hour stretch ) watching season 3 of the Wire. What a great show. Season 3 was just ridiculously good. I watched season 2 and 3 in less than a week. now you know why the dearth in the blog entries. Don't know if it was the KFC sandwich I had in the afternoon or the cow tongue, surprisingly okay.. (cooked) or the beef sashimi (that’s raw beef) I ate the night before at the all you can eat and drink Sushi place. This place was pretty good though. I’d go back there again. The grilled lamb chop and sirloin and the sashimi was pretty good. I think it was the mayo on the KFC.

Oh and Bubba’s, the BBQ joint here, its overnpriced and not that good. That was the smallest ribs I’ve ever seen. Come on dude, that just aint cool. Wish I just had the balls, time, and money to open a restaurant. There, there’s the dream, open a restaurant. Maybe when I retire in 50 years.