The Shanghai Aquarium

We decided to visit that aquarium, since we take a shuttle by it almost every other day. It is located near the Oriental Pearl TV Tower (see previous and soon to come entries for definition). It was a pretty good aquarium. It is important to note that since one of the first aquariums that Anne saw was Sea World she compares every aquarium to that. At 110 Yuan (13 US) it was not quite comparable to Sea World, but was similar to the Underwater Adventure in the Mall of America. The layout was a lot of fun. One looked like it was out of an Indiana Jones movie. In another area you took an escalator down into a fish tank. There was an underwater travelator path (that is where you just stand in place and the floor moves you around the tanks). Now please enjoy my picturator path (where you sit in your chair and see the pictures as a post them).

May I introduce your tour guides for your trip to the Shanghai Aquarium - Bill I can't hold by breath and talk Berger and Anne now look to the right Chang.

Ah.. Lunch time (Notice - no ducks were harmed during the making of this blog)


Sea Horses and Jelly Fish oh my.

Poor guy, he can see the all you can eat fish buffet, but he can't get to it.

Some More on Food

I find it very amusing to see the innovation of companies or individuals marketing to foreign groups. Two of my favorite examples in the US are fortune cookies and cream cheese wontons. For those of you not familiar with these they can be found at any Chinese restaurant in the US, but they are not at all Chinese. I have yet to see anything even close to them here. I have discovered a couple innovations here that I have to share with you back in the states.

The first is the ice cream mooncakes and you know the makers - Dairy Queen, Häagen-Dazs, and Cold Stone Creamery. We saw tons of people walking around with boxes of Dairy Queen Mooncakes (they are not sold separately), but we have yet to find a Dairy Queen. As the Dairy Queens here are all independently owned they have no website to research. The Cold Stone Creamery mooncakes were all sold out when we finally decided to try them so we had the Häagen-Dazs ones. With basic western favors of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry I am sure they would be a hit in the US too.

The second is Lays chips. You can still find the western flavors if you like, but at 6-7 dollars a small bag I would recommend the local flavors. They tend to be less than a dollar a bag and are actually quite good. I have included a picture, but some of the other flavors are French Chicken and Spicy Sichuan Meat. Hmm… Meat flavored chips. I can see this trend taking over the market in the US soon.

The last actually has nothing to do with innovation and is just a comment on the snack food here. Most of it is low in fat (though not advertised as everyone here is skinny in the first place). The nutritional value I can’t comment on as I can’t tell if they are nutritional values listed in Chinese. Here are some examples. Individual sealed packs of 5 paper thin seaweed strips. Very good (if you like seaweed). Individually wrapped organ meat or dried meat. Try the smoked and spiced duck gizzards. These are good, but it is a little weird eating room temperature none dried meat out of a bag.

Konnichiwa

Greetings Everyone! This is a blog from Chang-san. Work brings me to Tokyo this week and I just arrived yesterday. After listening to countless hours of earworms Japanese and reading the Japanese language map, I realized the same thing I did when I arrived in Tijuana - everyone speaks too quickly. Oh wait - they are speaking a normal pace, I'm just not at that level yet! I'm not sure why I thought 12 hours of earworms would make me conversant in Japanese. Luckily, most people here speak English. Since Berger-san seemed to have two recent lengthy blogs, I'll try to keep this one short. You know you're in Tokyo when:

1. Driving is on the right side. This also means pass on right and not left. Same thing goes for pedestrian walking. That was the first sign that I must be a tourist.
2. You start learning your numbers with Dora the Explorer on TV.
3. You use up all your bills and are left with 5 pounds of coins to use.
4. If you press the right button or panel, new spaces show up in your hotel room.
5. The air is clean, the roads are clean and even though there's (20 million?) people here, you don't feel crowded or congested.
6. Just because the restuarant's name is in English, doesn't mean the menu is in English. But it didn't stop me! I still ended up ordering a very nice meal :) I know, I know, nothing can come between me and food!!

Sayonara

The Mid-Autumn Festival

That’s right. I already did a blog on the Mooncake Festival which is the same festival. I thought I could fool you, but you are too clever. Sorry to bore you with the same topic twice, but our apartment put on their own party and I thought I would share it with you. To start, they put up a small stage on a grassy area just outside our apartment. Note: this is part of the enclosed apartment complex. You will NOT find any grassy areas in Shanghai outside of their parks. They also put up a stand for free drinks and food. The fun started with 3 women in red playing some pretty Chinese music. They were followed by a mask changing performance. Basically a person dancing around and very cleverly changing from about 20+ masks. Afterward the Asian version of Kenny J took the stage.

Upon reviewing this picture with the house cleaners they stated that he was a lowwai (The Chinese word for foreigners). If you grew up in the 80s or remember the movie Gremlins you might note that it sounds similar to mogwai (the creature named Gizmo). Looking in the mirror I have started to notice a weird similarity. Apparently if you feed a lowwai after midnight he starts to turns into a mogwai.

Anyway, back to the Festival. After Kenny J came the Chinese version of a clown. I can finally see why children often have nightmares from clowns. This guy laughed a lot and has one of the scariest laughs I have ever heard.

Following the clown they brought in 3 women in purple tights to do yoga. At this point I will mention the angle of the pictures. Due to the large number of people attending the performances I was only able to take pictures from the far left side. As a result most of my attempts to catch the women doing yoga by picture were cause for Anne to mock me for taking pictures of women bending over. Needless to say I will not include any of them here. Then they brought out a man to do yoga… but his flexibility still haunts my dreams so we will move on.

Next they brought out a group of girls ranging from 12 to 19 years old (Anne and my guess as to their age). They had been watching with boredom at the yoga folks and I can now see why. It was unbelievable… The human body should not move in such ways. It hurt just watching them.

And finally I give you fireworks… Here is one thing to note when seeing fireworks in China. They will calmly announce for you to move back a little so they can begin. They will then shot fireworks off 20 feet in front of you. When you feel the wadding from fireworks hit you, you know you are too close. As they go they will enjoy using larger fireworks so they can keep hitting you with wadding each time you feel safe. You might ask why you just don’t move way back… Well to remind you, you are in a gated apartment – you can only move so far back before you hit a wall.

Are we there yet?

Ok, you caught me; I have been slacking on the blog entries. So brace yourself for a long one. I am amazed at how quickly my days go by here. Everything just takes so much longer. “What takes so much longer Bill?” you say (and thank you for doing so, it provides me a good transition to explain). Well, for starters, just getting around. Most nights we leave the apartment to eat or experience the city. Our regular jaunts are the Jing’an Temple subway stop (in Puxi – downtown Shanghai), Times Square (they have one here too, it is in Pudong), or the Superbrand Mall (not quite the size of the Mall of America, but it is a couple stories taller- with one of them housing an ice skating rink, also in Pudong). This is how it usually works. We head downstairs from the 21st floor taking the stairs. Ok, we don’t take the stairs or even know where the stairs are located, but I wanted to have you think we were being fit for a minute. After a very short elevator ride we exit the apartment and either wait 10-15 minutes for the Yopark (a leasing company Medtronic is leasing through) shuttle to take us to the Superbrand Mall and/or the closest (least walking subway stop) or we walk 20 minutes to Time Square. Walk? Why not bike? Well, even the locals state that it is not very safe to bike - this being largely to do with the traffic which I will mention in a later blog. What? The suspense is killing you… ok I will tell you now, whiners. Traffic here is uh... interesting. There is one basic rule as far as I can see and since this blog is going to be a long one (sorry) I will add an activity at this point to retain your interests.

Can you guess what the basic rule for traffic is?

A. Follow all of the traffic laws closely.

B. The most efficient way of traveling is to move in an orderly fashion (there are 20 million people here can you imaging the chaos otherwise)

C. Whatever gets you were you are going the quickest is acceptable.

Hold your breath here it comes… And the answer is… C. What does that mean really? Well here are a couple of examples. We have discovered that red lights are really more of a suggestion not a mandate (the suggestion being, if there is perpendicular traffic - those likely to hit you - you should stop; if it is parallel there is no need to). A key word to note here is "should". If you feel that perpendicular traffic is slowing you down you could find a way though it. Another example is which side of the road you need to drive on. It is officially on the right slide, but if the car in front of you is too slow and you will not immediately be hit by opposing traffic feel free to drive on the left side. I am not talking about just passing a car in the left lane. I am talking about continuously driving in it to avoid all traffic occasionally swerving back to the right when opposing traffic gets heavy. And the last example is a must to explain as it is mirrored where ever large crowds – of people or cars - are (this being almost everywhere). Lines are for tourists. The fastest way to get somewhere is to slowly push and inch your way through the crowd. Imaging 75 people crowding around a 2 person wide escalator inching there way or 4 lanes of traffic trying to all converge into 1 lane of traffic all at the same time. So, long story long – bike if you want to, but I won’t be!

So, I bet you forgot about what I was originally taking about. Feel free to take a coffee break and skim through the blog again to find out. Or read the quick recap and conclusion. A trip to Times Square will take you 40 minutes of walking round trip. A trip to the Superbrand Mall will take a 10-15 minutes to wait for the shuttle, a 10-15 minute shuttle ride (through traffic that will haunt your dreams) followed by navigating in a huge mall filled with tons of people. The 3rd option of traveling to Puxi starts the same as the trip to the Superbrand Mall or Time Square. They both have a subway stop, but it depends on whether you want to walk or not. Following that you enter the subway – called the metro here – or “De Tyeah” (my best phonetics) in Chinese (I will enter a separate blog for these). After a quick ride and a short walk you find yourself at your destination. I don’t know where the time goes, but it takes around half an hour to go anywhere in Pudong and an hour to go to Puxi. Note that we never travel more than 10 miles to Puxi. Again I apologize for the length of the blog, but each time we leave the apartment we feel as exhausted as you fell after finishing this blog.

The Comforts of Western Food

Anne and I decided that we wanted a little slice of home so we went to Pizza Hut. Little did we know that we would have probably felt more at home ordering Chinese take-out. To start with, the Pizza Huts in Shanghai are nice sit down restaurants. The kind you would usually see only for an upscale restaurant in the US. We found this quite amusing. As we looked over the menus we enjoyed the song “Girl from Ipanema” being played in the background. Unfortunately for us this song was on a continuous loop for the hour or so that we were at the restaurant. Like McDonald’s and KFC, Pizza Hut had added a couple local favorites to there menu. Mmm… Octopus, Shrimp, and corn pizza with a mysterious white sauce (I don’t believe it was Alfredo). Tempting, but we decided we would just like a sausage and mushroom pizza. Oh, how foolish are we. You see, a sausage and mushroom pizza was not on the menu and making changes, additions, or deletions to the menus in most of the restaurants is a request that will result in the waiter looking at you like you asked if the restaurant also sold flights to the moon. The typical waiter’s response to this is “hmm would you like” – followed by pointing to something on the menu that is something close to what you asked for. The other response that is common is the, “let me ask” approach. This results in the waiter wondering around, usually for a couple of minutes, only to come back and say no and point to something on the menu again. A bit frustrated, but determined to enjoy our meal we picked something on the menu and called it a day. Once the pizza arrived we were disappointed to find out that there was practically no marinara sauce on the pizza. Anne asked the waiter for more sauce. This resulted in more wondering and then the response of explaining to us what marinara sauce was and that it would cost more. We decided asking questions at this point wasn’t really helping. As we enjoyed our pizza we talked about how it was weird that a western company, likely catering to the 500,000 or so expatriates (what you call Anne and I) living in Shanghai, could be so unwestern . As we were talking, another Western couple sat at the booth behind ours. To our amusement the exact same scenario played out in full.

Shanghai Museum

Sorry folks I can’t think of anything clever to start this one out with so I am going to just jump right on in. Anne and I decided that we should check out the Shanghai Museum. It is located in the center of town which is called People’s Square. Anne’s coworker and friend, Hattie Fu, was so kind as to show us around. She told us that we should arrive early as the museum was just recently made free to the public. So we sauntered in at around 10:00am to find that the line was roughly the length of a football field. Since the line moved very slow we went to an Olympic Museum close by instead.

Attempt number 2
The following weekend we decided to give the Shanghai Museum another shot. We woke up earlier and took the subway to People’s Square. As a side note the subways have roughly 4-5 exits to the street on each stop depending on which roads you want to get on and on what side. The one we would normally exit from was closed for another half an hour so we had to make a detour. We exited the subway only to enter a park where there was a horde of people in their 70s or so. They were doing Tai Chi and playing badminton, but most of them were looking at hundreds of white pieces of paper all over the place. This would have normally resulting in us find out what was going on, but we raced though it wanting to avoid attempt number 3 to the Museum. We later found out that the papers were names or children and grandchildren. The swarms of people were the Grandparents trying to match make for their decedents. Anyways, we made it to the Museum and only needed to wait 30 minutes or so to get in. Note, if we would have sent 5 more minutes looking at the papers in the park we would have had to wait another 30 minutes in line. I guess the Chinese like free things too.

I thought the little blue mushroom sign was cute. Turns out it is a "No spitting sign"

As you can see... more of Ultimate Truth #1 (see previous blog entries for explanation).

My apologies to the Shanghai Museum, there is simply way too much to be seen, to be included in our blog.

The Mooncake Festival

Warning bloggers this is educational so feel free to stop reading if you have already learned your quota today...

The Mid-Autumn Festival (better know as the Mooncake Festival) is one of the two most important holidays in the Chinese calendar - at least according to wikipedia. Fortunately we are currently in the middle of the festival. I have not seen any parades or local culture festivals other then a small local resident fired fireworks. There are however tons of tins of mooncakes everywhere. They are often sold in tins as gifts. Mmm... mooncakes. Fortunately, I have enjoyed many moooncakes in the US and was thrilled to know that the festival would be going on when I arrived.

I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce a part of the blog I would like to call Bills' Bizarre Foods. I love to eat and try new things. As a result I have always been of a fan of Bizarre Foods by Andrew Zimmern (a TV show where a entertaining host tries various, often intimidating foods around the world) Anne and I had the pleasure of meeting him through a work event which inspired me to make this section.

So without further overdue I present the mooncake. It is a form of a pastry consisting of various fillings. Generally speaking the better the mooncake the thinner the layer of the actually pastry covering the filling will be. My favorite would be red bean - which is grounded into a paste. Don't let the name fool you, red bean is actually very sweet and not like the beans one commonly thinks of in the US.

And to wash it down I will introduce a favorite originating in Taipei (though available even in Minneapolis) Bubble Tea. This is a milk based tea that has flavors added to it. I recommend taro (a purple potato like vegetable). This drink is also available and usually served with several black tapioca "pearls" - between marble and pea size balls. You are given a wide straw so you can chew on these pearls when you drink the beverage. Eating and drinking at the same time - Brilliant! For those of you who know and love Bubble Tea, here is one more reason to come visit. See the number 5 on the tea? That was its cost in yuan (the dollar of China). The current conversion rate is 6.83 yuan per US dollar. Which means this drink costs about 73 cents. For those of you not familiar with the cost of Bubble Tea in Minneapolis it is about $4.00. Hurray for China!

She Shan

On Friday 22/8 (8/22 for those of you in the US) Anne had a work convention at She Shan. She was told that it was a pretty tourist area. She asked one of her co-workers (in Chinese) if she thought it would be a good place for the both of us to see. This resulted in a slightly awkward moment followed by a big laugh. *Attention* here is your 1st lesson in Mandarin (Chinese). Like English there are words in Chinese that have the same spelling, but have different meanings. An English example is the word bat. It can mean the flying mammal or the baseball equipment. The Chinese solved this problem by using tones to differentiate which one of the several same spelled words they are talking about. Well, apparently the first word (She) pronounced “shuh” in the 2nd tone means mountain, but in the 4th tone, which Anne accidentally used (unaware of its meaning) means pervert. Essentially changing what I believe is (Snake) Mountain to Sex Mountain. Whoops..... Well I am sure both probably have a bunch to see, but I think we will stick to Snake Mountain.

Anne’s conference was held at the Le Mèridien Hotel (the dash on the “e” actually goes the other way, but I couldn’t figure it out on my keyboard). During which I took some pictures of the hotel. It was actually quite pretty, housing a wedding chapel on its grounds.

After the conference we went to She Shan. Though more of a big hill than a mountain it was quite pretty (and a tiring climb in 90 degree heat with 90% humidity. As I am still winded just thinking about it, I will let the pictures talk for themselves.

As it turns out simply watching the movie Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is not enough training to duplicate their battle on the tops of a bamboo forest, but I thought I would give it a try.

Ancient and beautiful. If you look hard you might actually see the "ski lift" that takes you up to it... Unfortunately it was closed for our visit. This Hill is home to She Shan Basilica the largest Christian church building in East Asia and was at one time the destination of pilgrims from across Asia. Feel free to Google it.

With all of the physical exertion and the time contemplating our Zen like experience up on Mt. She Shan we learned 2 ultimate truths.

1. Given a camera and time both Anne and I will enjoy making idiots of ourselves through pictures.

2. Apparently, I look slightly like Adam Sandler when I am fearful for my life.