Cabbage Confessions

Random Confession - My First House

2009-01-08T16:55:00.000-08:00

I'm buying a house! I made an offer last Friday (2-Jan-2009) and it was accepted today! It's a foreclosure but in near perfect condition (aside from some scuffs on the floor and wall that can just be cleaned up). Here are the pictures I took when I went and saw it.

Chinese Confession - Huang Shan II

2008-08-26T19:25:00.000-07:00

Today’s blog is dedicated to my capstone project and two finals that should have been the focus of my attention when I wrote this back in December. I also dedicate it to procrastination, since this also took place about 10 months ago. Procrastination is an amazing thing. Whenever I find myself being extra productive, it is almost always because I am putting off something else, and because I am not the type to do absolutely nothing. When I am procrastinating, I instead find marginally productive things to do so that I can still live with myself. So yes, procrastination is a great thing. Without it, my room might never get cleaned, blogs might never get written, and photos might never get posted. So next time you think procrastination is a bad thing, remember that even procrastination has its potentially good qualities.

Okay, it has taken me a bit longer to document my hike up Huang Shan that I originally anticipated (obvious understatement). Fortunately I took hundreds and hundreds of pictures, and I easily could have taken more. For some reason, all of the typical cliché statements like “breath taking” or “awe inspiring” fail miserably to do justice to how amazing Huang Shan really is.

Huang Shan is easily among the most beautiful places in China. It’s actually not just one mountain, but rather several all in one area. I haven’t been everywhere in this country, but I certainly can’t argue against it. Lonely Planet, which is basically the bible of tour guide books, certainly thinks so. It specifically mentions Huang Shan as being a must-see and one of the top scenic places in the country. I think it is actually ranked as #1, though I don’t have a Lonely Planet book, so I can’t verify. But you don’t have to just take my word for it. I have pictures and even found some videos on youtube. Check them out:

We arrived at the base of the mountain fairly early, and the crowds had already begun making their way up the steep path. Being from Colorado, with an elevation of about a mile above sea level, I expected it to be a fairly easy hike. The peaks of the mountains are barely above 1,000 meters, so I figured it would be a breeze. How naïve of me. Unlike in the Rockies, where mountain trails usually feature switch backs, which make a hike much easier, the Chinese seem to be a bit more hardcore. They go straight up the mountain with little side-to-side deviation. In fact, the path was actually made almost entirely of stairs.

The first few hundred meters were a good warm up. I figured it would then level out and we would climb a bit more gradually. Nope. They kept going. Staircase after staircase after staircase after staircase. That’s how it went. It made the Stairmaster machines at the gym seem like so easy! It didn’t take long before our legs were burning and it seemed to take everything to keep from taking a break. Meanwhile, there were Chinese people who actually had the job of carrying heavy loads up the same path as us. And when I say heavy, I am not exaggerating. They had a bamboo pole across their shoulders, behind their head. Each end had an equal load in a sack or box that was strung to the pole. My friend Kirsten stopped and asked if she could try carrying one. One she had it on her shoulders, she couldn’t even move with it. It easily weighed over 100 pounds, and these people had to carry these things for miles up these steep stairs to the small shops along the path that sold drinks, trinkets, and snacks. After seeing these guys carrying such heavy loads, I told my friends that I am not allowed to complain one bit, and if I do, they can smack me.

I didn’t complain.

The hike wasn’t easy, but the view and the experience overall became more and more amazing with every step. As we climbed, I would look down at these steps – so carefully carved and shaped from cement or stone – and I just had to wonder how many people had to work so hard to make this path so that we all could enjoy such an amazing place. Then looking out at the steep valleys below us, the blue sky above us, and the trees, rocks, and plants all around us, it all seemed so perfect. The weather was absolutely beautiful and, to be honest, probably couldn’t have been any more perfect. It was clear and we could see for miles around us. Had there been any clouds, they would have made the scene even more amazing. Clouds often form at a pretty low elevation around Huang Shan, and when they do, the mountains rise above them so that they are like islands in the sky.

After several hours of hiking, we reached the top of one of the peaks, took some fantastic pictures, got even more pictures taken of us because we were foreigners, and then moved on to the next peak. It seemed a bit odd because as we moved along, the crowds were getting denser. At some points, the path resembled a rush hour traffic jam with people all stopped. Then I remembered that there is a cable car line that can take people from the base of the mountain to an area in the middle of all of the trails and peaks. There are also a few hotels, restaurants, and some places where tents can be rented. Staying overnight in hotels is pretty popular, but apparently they don’t have heat and it gets really cold at night.

At one point, we stopped to take a break in an area between two peaks that had some restaurants and tourist stores. As we sat there watching the crowd, a few Chinese people with video camera equipment came up and asked us if we would like to be in a movie since we are foreigners. Of course our answer was “Heck yeah!” So the next moment we were doing whatever they told us to do, which included letting Kirsten climb up on my shoulders as we provided entertainment for the crowd that had gathered around to watch us.

Once our moment of popularity had passed, we moved on with the rest of the hike. Along the way we came across some Buddhist monks from Vietnam, took even more pictures, gave me the nickname “National Geographic” because I had the fanciest camera and was taking the most pictures. When we finally began our descent, it was about 3 miles and getting dark. Fortunately most of us had some kind of flashlights. Just before the end we ran into our driver who was supposed to meet us at the bottom and take us back to the train station. Because it was getting so dark, he had busted out his flashlight and proceeded up the trail to find us in case we were stuck without light. I just have to say, as a former taxi driver, there is no way I would have gone out of my way so much to help people out. I was really impressed.

Finally we got back to the city, had dinner, and took our overnight train back to Shanghai. Then after nine months, I got around to actually posting this blog!

Chinese Confession - Cilantro

2008-08-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

For the most part, I consider myself to be a very non-picky eater. I really appreciate good food, but at the same time, I can find the good in a lot of food. At times it can be problematic – for example, when trying to decide what restaurant to eat at with friends. Even that isn’t usually much of a problem though.

One thing I do more and more frequently request is that we don’t go to a place that puts cilantro in their food. It’s something that I’ve been emphasizing ever since I first got to China. They put a lot of cilantro in a lot of food in Shanghai, and seemingly in a lot of Chinese food in general. When I go out to eat with people, normally my only request is that the food not have cilantro. This is the same whether I’m in China, the US, or wherever. As long as there is no cilantro in the food, I am good to go. If someone is making Mexican food, I plead for them to not add any. For quite a while I thought that perhaps this made me more of a picky eater than anybody else. I seemed to be the only person I knew that really disliked it. Just thinking about it makes a grimace break out across my face and practically ruins my appetite. I couldn’t understand why so many people would like it, yet I would find it so utterly vile and repulsive. Even more, people usually had a complete look of shock when they found out just how much I hate the stuff.
As time went on, I started to consider that maybe cilantro just tastes a bit different to me than everyone else. I didn’t think much of it, though, and merely contented myself to avoid it as much as possible.

Well, last night I finally learned something that shed a lot more light on this whole cilantro ordeal. While playing our weekly game of trivia at a pub in town, one of the trivia questions related to this peculiar herb. As I am pretty vocal about my disliking of cilantro, I was talking with my friends about it. Then MC of the game mentioned as a side note that some people have an enzyme that makes cilantro taste like soap.

*Metaphorical smack in face with a frozen turkey*

It all fell perfectly into place. I couldn’t really describe what it was about the taste of cilantro that I hate so vehemently, but I just didn’t see how people could like to add it to food. It had such a powerful flavor that seemed so unnatural and didn’t mix with or compliment any of the other foods it was served with. No matter how powerful something would normally taste, if it had even a tiny spec of cilantro on it, that would be all I could taste and it would make me gag and want to spit it out.

Finally! I have a fully justifiable reason to use when I ask people, as kindly as possible, to not put cilantro in food. I have this enzyme!

So, in case you can’t quite relate, just picture yourself sitting down to eat some Mexican, Chinese, or Indian food that smells really, really good. Take a bite and chew it for a second or two, then reach down and grab a bar of soap, put it in your mouth, and take a nice big bite. Voila! Now you know what cilantro tastes like to me, and now you know why I can’t help but grimace at the very thought of eating something containing it.

If you want more information, just check it out on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriander

Also, when I was researching this a bit online, I came across some humorous things other people say cilantro tastes like:

* Aluminum foil
* Air freshener
* It tastes like a migraine
* It tastes like hitting yourself in the head
* It tastes like how a closet might smell
* It tastes like shoes
* Powdered soap and metal shavings
* Stink bugs (this one is most accurate in my book)
* Soapy lawn clippings
* A moldy swimming suit that’s been left to fester in a high school locker

One woman on a site (http://www.culinate.com/articles/features/Mixed+feelings?page=0&pageSize=1) who moved from Southern to Northern Brazil said she lost 17 pounds because she “couldn’t eat the cilantro-laden food.”

I checked on facebook and there is even a group dedicated to those who hate cilantro as much as I do! I just couldn’t resist posting some of their pictures on here.

Finally, I can find rest for my weary soul simply knowing that I’m not the only person in the world who absolutely cannot, cannot, cannot stand cilantro.

Update: Graduation and a Change in Life

2008-06-21T14:31:00.000-07:00

They were the best of times; they were the worst of times. This statement – like so many of the clichés out there – is so overused that it has pretty much lost meaning. In this particular case, however, I find it to be a really good description of my experience over the six years that it took me to finish my undergrad college degree. That’s right – I’ve finally graduated! I half expected to see a news flash or people in the LSC plaza on CSU campus hoisting big signs in the air shouting, “Repent now! The end is near! Joe has finally graduated!”

Now that my position in the journey of life has changed so substantially, I’m trying to figure out where to go with my cabbage confessions. It is probably already sufficiently evident that I have enjoyed writing these immensely, and I’m also glad that people have read them and hopefully been able to appreciate and/or laugh at the things that I have experienced. I guess it reaffirms the knowledge (or at least the illusion) that I am a reasonable human being to know that my friends, family, and any potential mystery readers can get something of value from them.

Okay, I suppose it’s at least time to offer an update on what my new status is. In April I accepted a job offer to work at Colorado PERA as a Portfolio Associate. Colorado PERA is the state pension fund for public employees like teachers and law enforcement. I will be working in investments in the fixed income (technical term for bonds) division. I interned there last summer, and it looks like they liked me enough to hire me permanently! Fortunately, when I went down to interview for the job, I didn’t have the same experience as last time, when my gas pedal stopped working on Speer Boulevard in the middle of downtown and I had to roll through a red light to get off the street and fix it while somehow avoiding getting a ticket. It’s a funny story now, though it was a bit freaky at the time. Nope, this interview was completely drama free, so that was a welcome change.

If you want to see a picture of where I work, I used Virtual Earth to get a computer snapshot of downtown Denver, showing my office and where it is in relation to the other landmarks around it. It’s a pretty decent rendition too, at least according to our current technological abilities.

When people ask me to describe what I do, I find it extremely difficult to explain it in a way that they can understand. Even a lot of my classmates in Finance at CSU had a tough time understanding it. As I mentioned, my title is “Portfolio Associate.” In financial speak, I create and use numerous spreadsheets and reports that integrate data from several different sources in order to monitor the performance of our fixed income portfolio and benchmark it to the Lehman index.

If you didn’t fully grasp what that means, I’ll try to simplify it as best as I can. It basically means that I work with the overall bond portfolio at Colorado PERA. I don’t pick the bonds – that’s the job of the portfolio managers. But I do track and monitor how well the bond investments are doing, and that’s a pretty big job when you consider we have about $10 billion in bonds alone. My job doesn’t just end there though. We use a benchmark to determine our performance, so I track the benchmark as well. To accomplish this, I make a nearly unimaginable number of reports by day, week, month, quarter, year, and other undefined periods. I give these reports to the portfolio managers and our director, and they use them to help devise strategies to make more money.

And that pretty much summarizes what I do now. It’s certainly not as bloggable as driving a cab or living in China, per se, but I’m at least hoping to find something interesting to write about. I’m thinking I may start out blogging about the craziness of the financial markets. Like it or not, the financial markets never get dull. Every day is a different adventure – a new tale of what breakthroughs humanity is making or how the world is coming to an end, yet again, despite centuries of such predictions proving otherwise. Whether people are freaking out about the price of a Big Mac in London, some chickens getting sick in Guangdong, or the outcome of the elections in Turkey, it impacts us all to one degree or another. And hopefully I can find some reasons to be amused or at least poke a little fun at it all.

Real Life Confession - New Year's Resolution

2008-01-27T21:24:00.000-08:00

Well, my first week of the semester is now over, including the weekend. I now find myself wondering how the rest of the semester will roll out. As usual, I maintain my optimism that things will go smashingly well and that I will, more-or-less, be happy with everything. It’s certainly off to a great start, and I think I might actually have the discipline/determination to make sure it continues that way.

Starting off, my new year’s resolution is proving to be a really, really good one. I should have done this sooner. And to make sure that I have a higher chance for success, I made only one resolution this year. It just happens to be a resolution that facilitates the accomplishment of other desirable ambitions. Okay, before I divulge what my resolution is, I have to preface it with a confession. I’m not very proud of this, and I’m sure this is going to result in the cutting off of one of the corners of my man card. Okay, here it goes: I play the Sims. I don’t play it often – perhaps a couple hours per month on average. For any of you who don’t know what it is, it’s a game where you create people and run their lives. It’s kind of like taking barbies or “house” to a much higher level. If you want your little sim to be a major league sports star, you can do it (though he or she will have to put in a lot of hours on the weight bench and possibly develop some charisma by practicing their romance skills in front of a mirror while being locked in the bathroom). This sim might even manage to mess up cold cereal in his or her haste to catch the carpool to get to work, but it all works out in the end because cooking skills can be developed while slaving laboriously over that bowl of Wheaties.

On the flip side, if your sim has a different aspiration, such as “pleasure” or “family”, his or her desires and related aspirations will be different. You can lead your little sim along, for better or worse, and see what kind of person he or she will become. If you really want to get your hands dirty, you can even get your sim to get married (though I strongly encourage you not to propose until the other person has had a hearty meal, gone to the bathroom, had enough fun, doesn’t think the room is too dirty or poorly decorated, doesn’t find your ripped muscles and expensive eau de toilette to be tasteless, and that the person considers your relationship strong enough. This is also really good advice to follow in the game.). Once your happy little sim becomes a happy couple of two sims, they can have their own sim children or adopt. You can even get them to marry aliens, vampires, hippies, or even the scantily dressed maid if you really want to live life on the wild side.

One of the big keys to success in The Sims is to keep your sim’s task list sufficiently busy so as to keep the character from being slothful and spending all of his or her time playing a snowboarding game on the computer or having pillow fights with other sims. I will overlook the irony that as you do this, you yourself are spending all the time at the computer running someone else’s life while your own personal task list is occupied by “Play The Sims”. To really achieve some of the more ambitious goals, it will take a sizeable amount of your character’s lifespan to achieve all of the prerequisites. So, managing their task list is critical.

And with this, I decided that this would be a great thing to apply as my new year’s resolution. For this year, I am aspiring to go about my day according to how I have it planned out in my daytimer, as opposed to going about the day in a more whimsical, mood-based manner like I have in the past. I’m generally a hard worker and pretty organized, but this endeavor is helping to take me to an even higher level. It takes more discipline, obviously, because after doing homework for hours and going to class, my motivation to go swim a mile may be a bit lacking. But I have already made my decision about what I am going to do, so I do it, and once I have swum that mile, I feel really, really good. Of course, I really love swimming anyway, so it doesn’t take much to persuade me to go, but the same concept applies with getting myself to do homework and projects before the night before they are due, or spending my Saturday afternoon working on a cover letter for an investment banking job rather than spending hours on Facebook.

I like to think that this will allow me to not only be a whole lot more productive, but it will also help me balance out my life more. By planning out my days and sticking to the agenda, I can get things done a whole lot quicker and more efficiently and also make sure that I am taking time to, say, get exercise, have a social life, keep up with the news, keep in touch with people, know when somebody’s birthday is coming up, etc. I will skip that part about practicing romance in front of the mirror while locked in the bathroom though. Sorry Sims, that’s going a bit too far. I’m also getting better sleep so far, though that’s probably not saying much since it is just the first week of school and the projects haven’t yet started really piling up.

And so this is where I am at this point in the New Year and school year: my man card is missing a corner thanks to The Sims, but I’m getting a whole lot more done and am even managing to make it to the gym, which should redeem that corner of my man card. How ironic. The Sims has helped improve my life and make me be more disciplined and use my time wisely. Now if only I could find a way for Starcraft to make my life better, aside from finding more efficient and ruthless ways to crush my opponents and more efficiently use hotkeys, then I would really be on a roll. Maybe that will help if I have to negotiate a corporate merger in the future.

Random Confession - City Block Disappears

2008-01-15T12:54:00.000-08:00

Shanghai. Officials are left scratching their heads after an entire city block disappeared late last night.
You Peng Jing, a local student, was the first to notice this strange phenomenon when he went out during a study break to buy a bottle of Perrier.
“I had been studying the periodic table of elements for 14 hours straight and found myself quite parched. Nothing quenches my thirst quite as well as a bottle of France’s leading mineral water.”
When he tried to enter the Jiadeli supermarket he usually frequents, he was in such a haze that he didn’t even realize it was no longer there. He ended up falling 20 feet into a hole in the ground.
“Fortunately there was a pool of run-off water from typhoon Hillary. I was able to get out by performing some simple moves of Taichi that I had mastered back when I was volunteering at nursing homes.”
In the meantime, scientists are finding it difficult to determine exactly what caused such an unusual occurrence, largely because of the large crowd of cats that has gathered around the site. Police brought in dogs in an attempt to disperse the crowd. Upon arrival, however, the dogs wet themselves and fled in fear. Some believe this could be a feline-led act of terrorism.
“I suspect this is an act of protest because the restaurant Hao Hao Chi, previously located on that very block, planned to begin serving kitten cordon bleu.” said a resident of the neighborhood who prefers to remain anonymous.
When the mayor was informed about the disappearance, he laughed hysterically and said “that’s one less Christmas card I will have to send out next year.” He then followed by saying, “don’t quote me on that.”
As officials continue their investigation of this event, they ask that residents not panic and that they avoid any sudden movements around cats that could startle them into hastening the launch of phase II of their malicious plans, should they prove to be the culprits.

Chinese Confession – Xitang – A City of Contrast

2007-11-24T02:00:00.000-08:00

To say that a certain country or city is “a place of contrast” is one of the biggest clichés out there. That doesn’t mean, however, that it is not true or is a superficial description of a place.

China

has more contrast than any place I have ever seen in my life. From the brand new BMWs and Mercedes that share the roads with rusty bikes that are barely even holding together to the transition that nearly every city here undergoes as the sun sets and the lights come on. I think the city of Xitang is quite possibly the best example of this exact phenomenon. We had the chance to see the city first at night, with the traditional Chinese lighting complimenting the amazing Chinese charm that it has maintained, even despite the explosive growth occurring almost everywhere in this country. The following day we had the chance again to go back and see the same area by day, and it was hard to believe that we were even in the same place as the night before.

To start off, here are some of the pictures I took.

http://picasaweb.google.com/joeechols/Xitang

Xitang, much like Suzhou, has a canal running through the city, which gives it a Chinese-Venice feel. It’s just a whole lot less expensive and, in the humble opinion of one who has not personally been to Venice but has heard about it and seen pictures, not overpriced and certainly not overrated. It wasn’t without its array of tourist trap shops, but the people were very friendly. They are also huge fans of fireworks. All along the canal, there were people shooting off fireworks and playing with sparklers. There were also people who sold origami boats with candles for about 13 cents. I bought one and sent it off into the water. Of course, you are supposed to wish for something while you send it off, so I tried to think of something, but in all honesty, I had a tough time thinking of something to wish for. I guess that’s a good sign that I’m really happy with my life and where I am going.

We also got to take a ride in a small boat up and down the canal and see the city by night. It was quite beautiful, actually, but impossible to capture fully with a camera. Since night shots require that a camera be held completely still to keep from blurring, it was virtually impossible to do so in a rocking boat. I tried as I could, and I also discovered that blurry pictures bear an uncanny resemblance to impressionist paintings. This, of course, can easily be illustrated with the use of some basic Photoshop skills.

The reflections in the water were amazing though. The whole scene was surprisingly calm and pleasant, even if it was a bit crowded. I finished the night in a local bar where I played drinking games with some friendly Chinese locals. They had beear, I had Coke. I obviously did much better since I was able to do statistical analysis in my head, whereas he was probably just doing random guessing. But we got some great shots and discovered, yet again, how amazingly friendly the Chinese people are. We also played some Jenga, and even had those hand-held plastic hand clapper things to try to mess people up. I tell you – the Chinese people are the best kept secret in China.

When we came back the next morning, it really was hard to believe that it was the same place we had been before. For starters, the buildings were generally pasty white with dark grey, traditional roofs. The bright reds and other colored lights of the night had all vanished. The water, which by night looked so beautiful and reflective, suddenly looked absolutely filthy and stagnant. Its bright reflections were replaced by a homogenous hue of a pale brownish green. It was a wonder that it didn’t fill the air with an undescribable, putrid odor. It didn’t mean the city was not pleasant. In fact, it made it feel even more calm and relaxing than before. We walked around the area, saw an old but very large traditional Chinese home that had been converted into a button museum. They even had what must be the biggest button in the world, considering it was probably 5 feet in diameter.

Along the canal, the tourist trap shops all had their doors open again and were doing business, which was one of the few things that actually remained the same. The bright lights were gone, but seemed to have been replaced by helplessly cute animals. I am not joking. I am quite sure that some of the shop owners would just get tiny kittens or puppies and put them on the ground in front of the store. They always drew the attention of the people walking by, which would allow the store owners to try to lure them in to buy things. I came across one ginger kitten who was so tiny and young that it couldn’t even really move. It just sat there curled up against the step, hoping to not get stepped on or something. Another store owner had a tiny puppy who was trying to stand up, but its legs were so wobbly that it could hardly maintain its position for more than a few seconds before it would collapse against the wall. I saw another puppy, which was at least old enough and strong enough to stand up and wander around a bit.

I saw a few rusty Chinese bikes, which I just had to take pictures of even though they honestly can be found on almost every street in the country.

I guess it’s a token tribute to one of the most overdone subjects in art school, aside from naked people, which – for obvious reasons – were not as readily found. And on the topic of art, there were several shops selling traditional Chinese ink paintings. At one in particular there was a man actually doing one of the paintings at a table in front of the shop. I shot a picture and found that the prices were actually very reasonable, so I bought one. They obviously are not all unique compositions, because the man was sitting there painting a scene of the city without even looking up. But it still had its charm, and I still appreciate it as art, so I bought it. Aside from the art shops, there were also a bunch of art students all along the canal that had setup their easels and were painting the scenes around them.

After exploring for a couple of hours, I found a small staircase leading down to the surface of the canal, and I just sat down. I sat there for one hour and just enjoyed the whole scene. I watched the people walking by – the tourists, the locals, an occasional dog. Shelly, a friend of mine, came along and sat down as well and we just people-watched. People watching is a great pastime, and it is especially enjoyable in China because it is so lively and unique. There is always something going on, whether it is 9am, 3pm, 9pm, or 3am. We watched people come to the water and wash their clothing and sheets. We saw a father and his young son, who had gotten sticky, sweet goo all over his clothing, stop at the canal and attempt to wash it off.

It was honestly one of the best hours I have spent in China. I loved just being able to see everything that is going on. You don’t need TV or movies for entertainment here. You can just stop and watch and appreciate the things all around you. You can try, somewhat in vain, to try to capture it all in pictures or on video, but you really only capture a miniscule portion of the true beauty that lies underneath, that lies in the moment.

Chinese Confession – Yiwu – The City of Socks

2007-11-21T18:08:00.000-08:00

One of the many perks of this study abroad program is that travel opportunities are abundant. In fact, some are even mandatory, which is great for peeling me away from this computer and classes and out into the real world. Early this month we had the chance to go to a couple of cities near Shanghai. Well, I use “near” in the loose sense, meaning that they were both within 3 hours of the city by train.

The first city we went to was Yiwu. Okay, some background information on Yiwu: if you have even heard of the place, I would be quite surprised. None of us had. It’s a tiny city with just 650,000 people. What the city has going, however, is nothing short of amazing. In all of the world, amongst its 6 billion inhabitants, there are somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000 components manufactured (I have the actual number written down somewhere, but I can’t find it. Either way, it’s a lot). About 2/3 of all of them can be found in Yiwu. It is basically the wholesale market of the world, and it makes Sams Club look like a lemonade stand. No other place anywhere in the world even comes close to it. And we got to see firsthand where it all takes place.

There is a three phase development in the city that is basically a giant wholesale mall. Phases one and two are already complete, while phase three is under planning and construction. It would be virtually impossible to get a picture of it, but here’s a top view of it from google earth:

http://www.wikimapia.org/#lat=29.332278&lon=120.099514&z=16&l=0&m=a&v=2

By the way, it is relatively new, so this only shows phase one as being complete. The area for phase three isn’t even on the map yet.

It’s enormous. It’s way bigger than any mall, but I suppose that’s to be expected if it has 2/3 of all the different things manufactured in the world. All of these manufacturers come here and set up a store front in a small shop about the size of bedroom. There they display everything they produce and have a representative or two to negotiate purchases, shipping, and everything else. It’s not much of a retail front, so don’t plan on going on a shopping spree unless you really can’t resist buying 3,000 meters of LED rope light, 100 Chinese throwing stars, a few hundred vacuum cleaners, or a few dozen ATVs. You could even get cotton candy machines if you’d like. Actually, there is a “small” retail tourist shopping area where they actually sell things at great prices.

There are so many of these wholesale stores housed in this giant complex that they actually name the “streets” and alleys, have “blocks” and addresses, and have maps. If you were to spend just three minutes in each store, looking at what they have to offer, it would take you an entire year to see them all. And then, of course, you have to go back and see the ones that opened up over the course of that same year. Oh, and don’t forget phase three that is under construction. When that part is done, it will be bigger than phases one and two combined. That means you would have to spend another year or two seeing all of those stores there along with the ones that would open while you are spending three minutes in each. It would basically be never-ending.

The place is just mind-boggling, and yet so few people have ever heard of it. It is a very recent development, which is one of the reasons. There are also virtually no Americans setting up or doing business there. The way of doing business is so different that most who have tried have given up. This, of course, does mean that there is tremendous opportunity, but it will require a lot of patience, hard work, and devotion. Yiwu will be an incredibly fascinating place to see it in twenty years or so. It is a pretty small city, but it felt very, very international, especially in terms of the presence of people from Western Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The city is just in the beginning phases of its explosive growth, and it looks like it will be an incredibly wealthy, entrepreneurial area. It is already the most entrepreneurial area in all of China, and a staggering amount of companies can trace their roots to this specific area and province. Right now the entire city is pretty much one massive construction zone.

One of the things that kept going through my mind is that it would be so easy for someone in America to set up business with connections in Yiwu. You can get direct access to 2/3 of everything manufactured in the world, so the possibilities are endless. You could just contact a supplier in Yiwu and buy the products directly from the manufacturer. Or if you don’t want to find them yourself, you could easily find a buyer’s agent readily available that could help arrange the logistics and get the products to the US or anywhere else in the world. As long as you aren’t positioning yourself in an oversaturated niche of the market, it would be quite easy. Suddenly it just doesn’t seem so impressive when I think about those people who “know someone who knows someone who knows someone” who can hook them up with inexpensive wholesale goods direct from China. I know exactly how it works and I’ve seen it first hand. Not even Wal-Mart seems impressive anymore.

I got a picture of one of the entrances to phase two:

Here is a model of phase two that was on display. It’s huge.

Just for kicks, I decided to walk around the Christmas section of the mall and snap pictures of Christmas trees, pretending like I was actual doing product research. It must be a pretty common thing for company representatives to go around like that because it didn’t seem strange to them. There were still plenty more that I didn’t even get to check out before we had to leave.

Here are some outside shots of the commodity center phase two.

And if you can stand it, you can even buy the biggest sticks of incense that you’ll probably ever see, as shown by my friend Kirsten.

And on a random note, here is a picture of the round-about outside our hotel. If you look in the middle, there is a screen that displays the volume of the commotion in the city. As noble of an effort as it seemed to be, I don’t think it actually did anything because it always read between 68dB and 70dB morning, noon, and night. I figure it was meant to just impress tourists who wouldn’t actually take a closer look.

Another random fact about the city: they produce over 3 billion pairs of socks every year. It’s the sock capital of China. Actually, it’s probably the sock capital of the world. I doubt any other city produces nearly that many.

After Yiwu, we went to Xitang, which is another canal city not far from Shanghai. It is a lot like Suzhou except it has preserved more of the traditional Chinese feel and character. I have a lot more photos of that city, and I will post them with a new blog once I get them all sorted and organized. Of course, I also have to apologize for the randomness of my recent blogs. They aren’t exactly in chronological order, but rather in the order of ease of writing. Hopefully they at least offer an interesting view of China.

Chinese Confession - Beijing, Nanjing, and Joe Completely Confused

2007-11-18T18:20:00.000-08:00

Well, the week-long break from school and classes is coming to a close. We got back to Shanghai last night, and I am definitely glad to be back here. It was an interesting week, and although we didn’t have our trip nearly as planned out as we should have, it was still quite good and we saw a lot.

After seeing the Great Wall outside of Beijing, we saw several of the other major sights. My favorite was definitely the Summer Palace. It was so peaceful and beautiful. We spent an entire afternoon there, which was more than we were anticipating. We tried to check out the Olympic Park, but there was so much construction going on that we really couldn’t see a whole lot. Beijing will definitely be ready when the Olympics kick off next August, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have an astonishing amount of work ahead of them. They also have to get several metro lines open and running, on top of their current 5.

A lot of our sight seeing was severely limited because of the weather. It wasn’t too rainy most of the time, but it was really, really cold. Apparently all of China was cold, so it wasn’t just Beijing though. I went around bundled up in my coat, a scarf, knit hat, and occasionally gloves, but I was still almost always cold. I’m really not a big cold weather fan, but I just deal with it.

We got to see Lama Temple, which is one of the Buddhist temples. It was really neat to see, actually. The most fascinating thing about it was seeing Chinese people still practicing a religion, including burning incense and bowing and the other parts of the ritual that they go through. We were just standing back and watching it all. I shot a few pictures. I won’t lie – I kind of wanted to join in and burn some incense, but I just felt that would not be appropriate, especially since I am not a Buddhist. They also had an absolutely enormous Buddha statue in the tallest building in the temple area. It was probably about 40 feet tall, which is extremely tall. That’s actually probably close to being as tall as the tallest buildings in downtown Loveland. That’s either really impressive for a Buddha statue or else really pathetic for Loveland.

On the topic of cities and size, Beijing really didn’t feel all that large to me. The city supposedly has somewhere around 14 million people, which makes it 4 to 6 million smaller than Shanghai, but it is so much more spread out and there really aren’t many tall, tall buildings. It felt more like a city of perhaps 2 million. I don’t know where they crammed the other 12 million, but they are in there somewhere. Perhaps they are all on the subway. That would explain why those metro lines were so insanely crowded. Many times we tried to hop on the metro only to be unable because there literally was no room anywhere. The city cut the metro fare down to two Yuan as a flat rate, which certainly has assured that there is an innumerable amount of people that take it. It probably helps alleviate traffic, though I wouldn’t have known because we only took a cab a few isolated times. The traffic is supposedly horrendous though.

Forbidden City was also pretty neat. It was absolutely huge. I had no idea that the palace could be so massive and have so many rooms, but it did. We spend about three hours there and saw hardly any of it. They were doing a lot of renovations on it, which meant that a lot of it was inaccessible. This, of course, was on top of the many areas that were already inaccessible for other reasons. There certainly wasn’t enough time to see the whole thing though, even if it was completely accessible. My attention span is decent, though not quite as good as some people’s, but even I started to tire of seeing corridor and room after corridor and room. The novelty definitely wears off after a while, which can be said about a lot of places and things.

The last day in Beijing we went to try to see some Millenium Monument, which ended up being a huge disappointment, coupled with the fact that we couldn’t even find the entrance. That coupled with chilly temperatures meant that we gave up soon enough and went to the Military museum. The museum was interesting for a while, but I guess I’m just not huge into war and military things. They had all kinds of guns, tanks, and aircraft that have been used by the Chinese over the past 100 years. Steve really gets into that kind of stuff, so he knew a lot about them all. For me, most of the time I was just going through the motions looking at things, my eyes hazy and unfocused as I wandered around in “Joe Land” in my imagination, barely sparing any mental processing for the multitude of guns, armor, tools, and Chinese documents in front of me. This is usually the same thing I do when I’m bored in class or have some idle time.

There wasn’t a whole lot written in English, though everyone once in a while there was a big paragraph explaining the big picture of what was going on. I knew enough about Chinese history that I could usually put it at least somewhat into context, and that was what made it more interesting. Steve and Will were also there with me, and Steve is a big history buff, so we could discuss things as we came across them in the exhibits. Beijing, as the capital of China, is also the political center of it and the government’s showcase to the world. I wondered if this museum is something the government will encourage foreigners to see when they come for the Olympics. It was replete with propaganda and things that, if not taken in a historical context, would lead you to believe things in history weren’t quite as they were. Of course the government certainly won’t deny this. They already plainly admit that they control education, media, and a lot of the books and intellectual things that are allowed or taught in the country. With the blurbs offering historical context for the things displayed in the museum, it was particularly interesting to see the word choices that they selected. They provided information that, although not terribly inaccurate, still didn’t reveal the full picture of things.

It’s really tough to describe just how much propaganda was there. You certainly could see it in the paintings and sculptures that were placed around the museum. The soldiers and workers labored tirelessly in some sculptures, wearing bright, wide grins on their faces. Women and children stood around them, also smilingly as if they were in an idealistic paradise. Obviously these sculptures weren’t meant to be historically accurate, because I really doubt they would all be grinning as they wheel cannons around to engage in a civil war that has engulfed the country or trekking through feet of snow, high up in the mountains in the winter. It just felt like these were more like expressive works of art meant to glorify the system they were all working to build rather than to document history. Perhaps this was the only way the artist that sculpted it could get the government to pay for it and put it on display. Perhaps it was forged during the Cultural Revolution, as the whole nation was swept by a unified vision for a completely new country and world. Perhaps they represented an attempt to revise history somewhat, or even rewrite it. I really can’t say, and it’s rather unfortunate that the sculptures and paintings themselves don’t have voices by which they could speak for themselves.

I’m not trying to be political or bashing in this, I am simply trying to provide an illustration of the things that I saw around me and show some of the inconsistencies with how they are presented, how they are meant to be interpreted, and how I interpret them because I have heard of them from multiple sources. I took a picture of one of the more, ummm, “colorful” blurbs offering context for China’s civil war that took place after World War II. I will include the picture here, so anyone can read it if they wish. I highly recommend it.

I found it interesting to see how they present the Communist Party as being the underdog, the will of all of the people of the country, and outright blaming the other side (and the US, of course) for “launching a nation-wide civil war.” The second paragraph is even more interesting, especially with how they tackled the topics of Tibet and Taiwan: “Up to June 1950, [the People’s Liberation Army] had liberated the whole country except Tibet, Taiwan and a few islands and won the War of Liberation.”

The last line is my favorite line of all: “The Party finally realized the objective of its long lasting struggle–‘to liberate the whole nation with its people and establish a new democratic China.’”

The last few hours in Beijing we spent mostly just wandering around and experiencing the city. Beijing is a very unique and interesting city, and there are many, many things to do. As I mentioned before, you really feel the presence of the government there though, and it really was like a weight I just couldn’t get off of my shoulders the whole time I was there. I’m glad I went, and I really did enjoy my time there, but I must admit that I was glad to be able to leave.

We took another night sleeper train to get down to Nanjing from Beijing. Nanjing is a decent sized city of about 7 million people. I think it felt bigger than Beijing, but it is also much more dense. Beijing is horrible to get around if you just walk and take the subway because it is so spread out. Nanjing only has one metro line and is fairly dense. I really liked it. The two days we were there, though, it was raining the entire time. It wasn’t as cold as Beijing was, but it still wasn’t balmy. This meant pictures weren’t quite as picturesque, even though the city really is beautiful.

We were pretty tired by this part of the trip. We also didn’t have a guide book for the city, so we didn’t really experience it quite like I was hoping we would. Fortunately, the city is only two hours away from Shanghai, so if I want to go back, it makes for an easy weekend trip.

The main tourist thing that we did was seeing Dr. Sun Yatsen’s Mausoleum at a huge mountain near the middle of the city. It is amazingly beautiful and clean. The trees, plants, flowers, and rocks are abundant. The tourists normally are as well, though there aren’t as many westerners in this part of the country as in Beijing or Shanghai. Unfortunately the clouds and fog were also extremely abundant, so the visibility was close to nil. I took what pictures I could, but I was unfortunately limited.

Our hostel was at the end of a main shopping area in the heart of the city. We could just step out the door and walk a few meters and find ourselves in a huge pedestrian and shopping area with just about anything you could want. It’s actually a lot like Nanjing road in Shanghai, surprisingly, except that in Nanjing there are far fewer tourists and no people trying to get us to get prostitutes. My favorite thing to do was to just walk up and down the streets in this area.

They had some amazingly delicious fruit skewers that proved to be nearly addicting. They just took some fruits like oranges, kiwi, cherry tomatoes, and grapes, and put them on these wooden skewers. Then they put a very thin hard candy coating on them that locks in all of the fresh juiciness without being too sweet, and then they sell them all around the area. They actually have these things all over the country, and they are absolutely amazing. I could probably eat them all day and still want more. Plus they are really healthy, which makes them a true guiltless pleasure (not that I, of all people, would have to worry about calories).

At night time, the people all flock to this part of town and just walk around, shop, and eat food. It really is a big social thing.

I decided to join the locals of Nanjing and experience it like they do. Based on my experience, I concluded that the locals of Nanjing go there to enjoy the amazing food, see the dazzling lights that illuminate the area, take lots of pictures, and shop. The clothes shopping is actually the most interesting part. Unlike in the US, the main objective here is to go to these überstylish stores, browse through what they have to offer, and try to determine if the clothes are for guys or girls. Once they determine that the article of clothing is one that their gender wears, they purchase it and wear it everyday for a year straight.

Okay, I am exaggerating a little. But in all honesty, I walked into these clothing stores and I seriously could not tell which ones were for guys and which were for girls. I would then turn to one of the workers, and ask:

这是男孩子的还是女孩子的？(Is this guy’s or girl’s?)

They would then stop, look at me like I had three heads, smile awkwardly, and try to find out what my size is. Needless to say, it made for a completely new shopping experience. I can see it now: I will go back to the US, start up a retail chain where part of the shopping experience is determining whether something is for guys or girls. It will be genius! Now boyfriends and girlfriends will have to go shopping together to determine which one should wear the pair of jeans they just purchased. Purses are still safe though – they seem to be only for girls here as well as in the US. Outside of those, anything is fair game.

When the time finally came our trip to come to a close, and I was still completely unsure of what clothes were for guys and for girls, we took our last train back to Shanghai. We took a D-train, which are almost the nicest trains in China. We got “soft seat” tickets, which basically are the equivalent of first class, so we rode in style. It felt more like flying than taking a train. Not only did it hit 249kmph (about 150mph), it made for a very, very smooth ride and the seats were very roomy and comfortable. It was certainly a transition from our hard-bed sleepers that we took everywhere else on our trip.

We did have to forgo the massages we planned on getting in Nanjing because we couldn’t find a massage parlor. But we can probably do that here this week. Getting back to Shanghai was really, really nice though. It felt like we were coming home. It’s so much warmer, denser, and more fast-paced here, which are big pluses in my book. But this trip really made me see just how unique Shanghai is. It is, hands down, my favorite city that I have been to in China (aside from Hong Kong, of course). It is also much more western than the other places I have been to, even Beijing and all it is doing to prepare for the upcoming Olympics.

Now that the trip is over, I only have about 5 weeks left here and a couple of really, really big projects that will be taking up a lot of time and effort for me. I will face those tomorrow, along with classes as they restart. I certainly feel like my spoken Chinese has improved tremendously with all of the speaking that I have been doing. I’m pretty excited to hit Mandarin class again and put it to work again and see how it goes!

Chinese Confession-Xi'an and a Certain Rectangular Place

2007-11-11T02:30:00.000-08:00

I know it has been a while now since I have written anything of substance. Hopefully this will at least make up for some of the lack over the past couple of weeks. In all honesty, however, things have been getting increasingly busy and my time here in China is drawing rapidly to its close.

Right now I am actually writing this in a hostel in Beijing near the Lama Temple. We started our trip around China last Thursday, with the plan being to spend two days in Xi’an, five days in Beijing, and three days in Nanjing. Before leaving, however, we did have our midterm test for Chinese class. We went over review for it and it honestly seemed so easy that I didn’t feel that I really needed to study too hard before hand. Normally I would dismiss that as laziness, but in all actuality, I think it is quite the opposite. Preparing for a test in Chinese does not depend on how many hours you put in the few days before a test, as you cram and cram and cram and focus entirely on that one test. I find that the true preparation takes place everyday that I make the decision to go to class, to bring the language to life, go above and beyond what the minimum is, and most importantly – make it fun. I’ve been doing that the whole time I have been here in China, so I felt really well prepared for the test. And I think it went really well. Even the oral part, which normally is a challenge, was not too bad. It just came naturally. I told my teacher about being in France for two years. That gave me plenty to talk about for the entire time.

After the test, I packed and tried to finish a few things before we headed off to the Shanghai train station. We took an overnight train to Xi’an. We ended up taking a slower train (one that makes more stops), so it took us 16 hours to arrive there. It was fun though. This first part of the trip I spent with five other American classmates: Steve, Will, Mark, Monica, and Shelly. Although we speak English amongst ourselves (some just began Chinese this semester, so conversing is very difficult), I still am getting a fair amount of Mandarin practice in because I seem to be the best speaker amongst us. That means I get to be the one to buy the train tickets, ask directions, ask other questions, and help out in whatever ways possible. I don’t have a dictionary with me either, so I really have to work to come up with ways of saying things that can be understood and understand what is written on signs and such. It’s really good language practice, to say the least. I think my Chinese professor from home would be proud.

Xi’an itself is a pretty neat city. It has a lot of history, for those who are interested in that. It is home to the Terracotta Warriors (兵马俑), which are its most famous attraction. Those are a huge draw for people. The city itself has some other cool things like a HUGE city wall that goes all the way around the city and has been really well preserved. It also has some parks, gardens, and even a great mosque in the Muslim neighborhood. We certainly didn’t see everything there was to see in the two days we spent there, but we saw enough that we were ready to move on by the end.

As for my actual opinion of the place and its people, they are still quite friendly. They don’t see foreigners nearly as often as in Shanghai though, and that was pretty evident. We got a lot more stares than in Shanghai, and some people seemed to not be able to communicate with us very well. The cab drivers, in particular, were really bad at trying to understand us. We tried with three different cabs, and each time the drivers ended up kicking us out. I don’t know if it is because they couldn’t understand me (which is possible, but I am not so sure) or because they just didn’t want to have to deal with a foreigner. Maybe they’ve had bad experiences. But each time we got in and explain where we wanted to go, they said “I can’t! I don’t know!” and made us get out. I got really angry at the last one because I told him what street we wanted to go to and he said he could take us there. Just to make sure, I pulled out a map and pointed to the exact intersection, which was really easy to get to and was literally perhaps 10 blocks straight ahead. He wouldn’t even have to turn. I told him “there is a restaurant there and that is where we want to go” But once I showed it to him and told him this, he said he couldn’t and it didn’t know where it was and he kicked us out. I won’t lie. I was pretty angry about the whole thing, especially after being a cab driver in the US. Those were the easiest directions in the world, and I couldn’t have made them any clearer. But he didn’t even want to try to understand. That’s probably the first time I’ve really gotten mad at a Chinese person here, and hopefully it will be the last. I didn’t yell at him or lose my cool or anything, but I walked away rather annoyed. We were all extremely tired and hungry anyway, having just spent an hour looking for a place to eat, but finding none and having walked at least 10 miles already. Either way, I hate to paint a generalization, but I have to say that the cab drivers are not very dependable in Xi’an. So if anyone plans on going there, I will recommend trying to get a driver from the train station that is more specialized in taking tourists around. You generally have to pay them for the whole day, but they know the city and can take you where you want to go. You just have to negotiate a price.

Our hostel was pretty interesting though. It appeared to have been converted from a couple of the old, fancy traditional Chinese homes with courtyards and a bunch of rooms. Our hostel here in Beijing is probably nicer and more modern, but it is also a bit more mainstream and not quite as unique of an experience. It’s still better than I would expect elsewhere in the world for the price we pay (about $7 per night). I’m happy.

Beijing so far is also a pretty unique city. It’s pretty lively, mostly because the government here is so huge and so many people work for it. It does have a very different feel from Shanghai though. We saw Tiananmen square today and walked around it and some of the surrounding area, just getting a feel for the place and getting familiar with the surroundings. On the square itself, I really felt aware of the presence of the police and soldiers. The square is huge, and there was a pretty big crowd, especially for November, which is not a big tourist season. There were soldiers all around the place, some standing completely still at their stations at certain monuments. Others were walking around a bit more. There were also numerous police stationed at the entrances to the whole square, performing searches of the bags that people carry in. I only had my camera, so I was okay. Some others had bags but they didn’t get searched for some reason. There was also a police van driving around on the square itself the whole time.

It’s really difficult to describe, and perhaps it was just because we were more aware of what had happened there before, but the feeling was very strange. Chinese people are completely unaware of what happened. I have had a couple of my teachers here make mention of it during lectures, but they do seem to be a bit more hushed about it and don’t dwell on the topic too much. The intangible presence of the government just felt heavy, like I could feel it bearing down on my shoulders. I can’t explain it any other way. It was almost surreal seeing all of these Chinese people smiling and taking pictures and such, often coming up to us and wanting to take pictures with us just because we were foreigners. I find myself wondering if they felt the same thing that I did. As I was talking about it with Steve, my classmate, he mentioned how its pretty similar in places in DC in that there are military and police, and yet the feeling is so different there. Perhaps it’s a case of national pride. Perhaps it’s a trust issue. Maybe the Chinese on this square feel like Americans do at the tomb of the lost soldier or the Lincoln Memorial. Most of the police and soldiers didn’t even have weapons. It is as if their mere presence and the government buildings around are enough to keep things peaceful and orderly.

After a few days of being here in Beijing, it will be interesting to be able to compare it with Shanghai and Hong Kong, and possibly Shenzhen and Xi’an. They are all very unique and have completely different feelings. The pace of life, the way the people see us, interact with us, and respond to us, and even the cultures of the cities are all pretty unique. Beijing certainly doesn’t have the same modern, cosmopolitan, international feel that Shanghai does. But then again, Shanghai doesn’t quite have the same modern, cosmopolitan, and international feel that Hong Kong does. This place is definitely all about the government and seems destined to be the face that the Chinese government presents to the world. That, of course, will be displayed next summer when the Olympic Games finally arrive in China. What happens with the city after that point, however, is anyone’s guess.

Tomorrow morning we will be seeing the Great Wall, which should be a pretty amazing trip. It’s quite far out of the city though, and I am not quite sure how to get to the two places along the wall that people in my group want to go. We’ll be working those details out later tonight. In the meantime, I will save this and get on to experiencing Beijing!

Off for a few days

2007-11-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

As the time has flown by, I have not been able to post my pictures from Huang Shan. I will get those up as soon as is feasibly possible. We actually have all of next week off, so I will be heading out tomorrow after my Chinese midterm with a few friends, hitting the railways, and kicking off the grand tour of China! It's actually pretty exciting.

The plan is to take an overnight train up to Xi'an, which you can check out with this link:

http://www.wikimapia.org/#lat=30.143791&lon=118.17976&z=13&l=0&m=a&v=2

In Xi'an we will be seeing the Terracotta warriors, an ancient city wall that surrounds a large portion of the city, seeing the Muslim district and eating some reputedly delicious food. Then Saturday night I will take another overnight train (about 11 hours) up to Beijing.

Here's a link to find Beijing:

http://www.wikimapia.org/#lat=30.143791&lon=118.17976&z=13&l=0&m=a&v=2

Since Beijing is the capital and there is so much to see there, including the Great Wall, the Olympic park, a certain square that starts with 'T', the Emperor's Palace, etc., we will spend five days there. Once Friday rolls around, we will take another overnight train (about 9 hours long) to Nanjing.

Here's a link for Nanjing:

http://www.wikimapia.org/#lat=30.143791&lon=118.17976&z=13&l=0&m=a&v=2

I don't know a whole lot about Nanjing, except that it has a big museum about Japan's "rape of Nanjing" (a political hot-topic), a big mountain that you can take a gondola up, and a bunch of Chinese people. I figure that by this point we will be so traveled-out anyway that we will just want to take it slow and mellow and just enjoy the city. It should be good.

Nanjing is really close to Shanghai, so we will take a train back on Sunday afternoon at the latest, then prepare for classes to begin the following day. When this trip is over, I think it will be safe to say that I have seen more of China than I have of the United States. I can't decide if that is really cool (having seen so much of China) or really lame (having seen almost none of the US).

And as usual, I will be sure to take an obscene amount of pictures. At this point I have close to 20 gigs worth, which is exceeding what I even expected in the first place, and my expectations were high!

Chinese Confession - Huang Shan I

2007-11-05T05:56:00.000-08:00

At this point, I think it is pretty safe to assume that

China

is an amazing place. Shanghai is amazing. Hong Kong is amazing. The people are amazing. Being from Colorado, however, I always had the mountains just minutes away. That is something that we don’t have here in Shanghai, so I had not been able to see how the mountains of

China

stack up compared to those in the

If you’ve ever seen the movie “The Painted Veil”, it takes place in the mountains of China. They looked absolutely amazing. I also remembered the pictures I had seen of huge mountains jumping straight up out of the ground amidst fields of rice. Patches of fog here and there provided just cover to give the whole scene a divine, peaceful feeling. Needless to say, I had pretty high expectations of the mountains here would be like.

When a classmate of mine asked me if I would be interested in going with him and some other friends to Huang Shan (Yellow Mountain), I was quite eager to leap at the opportunity. In fact, seeing some mountains was high up on my priority list.

Okay, here’s a little bit of background on Huang Shan. It has a reputation of being a pretty beautiful place. Okay, that’s too modest. “The Lonely Planet”, which is basically the bible of tour guides (especially for China – don’t come to this country without it, like I stupidly did), actually says that if you go to any place in China, Huang Shan should be it. It’s probably the most famous mountain in this country, aside from Mt. Everest which is on the border. Although it is not one of the sacred Buddhist Mountains, it is pretty close in how much the Chinese revere and honor it. There are some beautiful parks and countryside around it as well. One park in particular is where they happened to film a movie that is fairly well known in America, called “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”. I confess that I have not seen the movie, but I assure you it is on my list now.

Our trip started out with a train ride from Shanghai to Huang Shan city. We could have taken the bus, which would have taken five hours, but we opted for the train instead. The train took eleven hours. I am honestly at a loss for why a train would take twice as long as a bus, especially considering the train usually takes the most direct route. I still don’t get it, but that’s what we did. We actually went all out and took a sleeper train, which is what they call cramming a whole bunch of people into an oversized sardine can. It was actually quite fun. We somehow ended up next to a group of people from Germany, so we chatted with them for a few hours.

I should probably also mention that this trip was in mid October. Yeah, I’m a little bit behind with my blogging. And since time is so precious, I will save my illustrious descriptions of the minutest of details and provide a rapid, continuous stream of thought summary of what happened. If you want a visual, picture this as a montage. You can pick your own song to play in your head as the scenes flash before your eyes. Or, if you’d prefer, imagine this being read at a speed that renders it nearly incomprehensible. Whatever suits you.

We arrive in Huang Shan city. Considering none of us have been there, we somehow manage to get around the city pretty well. This city actually was named something different, but I have no idea what it was and apparently nobody else does because they just decided to rename it Huang Shan city to make life a whole lot easier for tourists, although it ends up more complicated because the actual little city at the base of Huang Shan is about 45 minutes away. There is a cool, traditional-styled Chinese street about ¼ mile long that has hundreds of stores all selling almost the exact same thing. It does mean that they got a bit monotonous after a while, but it also means that comparison shopping is a breeze. If you are kicking yourself for passing over that little 3-inch Buddha statue, morbidly obese and happily so, based on the grin he has stretching from ear to ear, you are in luck because the store 20 meters down has the exact same thing. You just have to be able to barter because even in America, $30 is not a decent price. Needless to say I am not buying any Buddha statue. This is just for illustration. Instead, I am buying a Chinese watercolor painting of a beautiful scene of rugged mountains rising above some low lying clouds and a beautiful waterfall. It’s pretty big, and it ends up only costing $15, which is a decent drop from the $55 the man was originally requesting. I’m pretty sure it is actually an imaginary scene, but I don’t really care because it is amazing and I will love it forever. It is definitely worth the $15 I pay. And it was hand painted by a real Chinese person, which is more than I can say for almost anything by Andy Warhol. I’m so glad he’s dead.

I step out of the shop. The architecture on this street is amazing. It’s so Chinese! I snap some pictures. I see an old-styled Chinese pharmacy. It’s still a pharmacy. I’ve seen these before. They’re crazy! One of them had a 3 foot long snake coiled in huge jar of who-knows-what-liquid. I don’t know what it is used for, but I’m going to guess that it is supposed to make children do chores or a man stop watching the football game and mow the lawn or fix the toilet. It’s easy, actually. I mean, nobody would actually want to eat this 3 foot snake. Trust me. If you were presented with the opportunity to eat this snake or else fix the toilet or mow the lawn, you would pick the latter too. It was not pretty. Okay, confession time – I thought it was amazing and would make for a great conversation piece, but none of the girls agreed with me. Whatever. I guess I’m weird like that, but I also happen to want to buy one of the tarantulas that they have perfectly preserved by placing it in a glass mold. I don’t seen any tarantulas for sale though, so I move on.

We eat lunch. Or do we? I can’t remember. Maybe we just snack. Either way, we have to be quick and hop a bus up to Huang Shan. We will be staying in a hostel there at the base of the mountain and hiking up the next day. In the meantime, we have a couple of parks that we will be seeing on the way up. We actually get a van that will drive us up. It is only about $15 to get all of us up there, which is pretty good considering it takes us 45 minutes. The driver is insane though. He is spending more time in the left lane than the right, and I am pretty sure the shocks were either optional in this van that is about the size of a Toyota Camry or else they were worn out about 300,000 miles ago. I don’t dare fall asleep.

We arrive in the small town at the base of Huang Shan. We get in an even smaller van about the size of a compact car and enjoy a non-communal religious experience as we al pray for our lives. We arrive at one park, walk up the trail, and watch in awe as a man actually has a job to sit up here all day and do almost nothing except when tourists arrive at the end of the trail. He then makes monkey calls, throws out some kernels of corn into the forest as we watch, and wait for dozens of native Chinese monkeys come out, climb through trees, flip over rocks, and collect and devour every last kernel. Occasionally they steal a glance at us as we watch, utterly amused. After about 15 minutes, they’ve had their fill, and our camera memory cards have too, and we all go our own ways. We head down, get in the van, pray some more for our lives as the tiny thing zips around on the narrowest roads I’ve ever seen, and drops us off at the entrance to the park where they filmed “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.” I’m sure it has a name, but I don’t remember what it is and it would disrupt my stream-of-conscious to stop and dig for it.

The park is amazing. There are hundreds of Chinese people who love to take pictures of the most random things you could imagine. If we were all in Paris, we would be taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower while they took pictures of the pigeons or a patch of grass. But that’s okay. It’s one of those interesting things about Chinese people that I just love. As we hike up the canyon that makes up this park, we pass pools of pristinely clean, turquoise water. A waterfall here, a giant boulder there, majestic mountains rising up over our heads – all is calm and perfect. It’s no wonder they shot the movie here. I didn’t realize the Earth could hide such beautiful places

When we finish, we walk back down the canyon to the entrance of the park, taking a path through the bamboo forests. Once again, we fear for our lives in the tiny van, then arrive at the hostel, eat some dinner, and go to bed.

The next day our hike up the mountain begins, but that will have to wait for my next blog! I took 573 pictures during the whole trip, so I’m still sorting through them and getting the good ones ready to post. But here’s a Huang Shan teaser to build anticipation.

Chinese Confession - Hong Kong

2007-10-18T23:59:00.000-07:00

One of my lifelong dreams finally became a reality. For more years than I can count I have wanted to go to Hong Kong. Needless to say, I was extremely excited to finally be able to go. I had heard great things about the city and entertained even more spectacular visions of what it would be like to be there. Finally I would be able to see if it measures up to all of the hype. As high as my expectations were, I think it is pretty safe to say that it even beat those.

Hong Kong has almost everything that I could possibly hope for in a city. It’s lively, vibrant, affluent, not too prohibitively expensive (unlike NYC or London), extremely international, clean, modern, and orderly. It has amazing architecture, with some of the most widely recognized skyscrapers in the entire world. As land is extremely scarce, it is incredibly dense, easily rivaling Manhattan Island. In fact, much of the flat land where the buildings stand has actually been reclaimed from the ocean. Majestic, rocky mountains set a beautiful back drop that offers a unique contrast with such an urban environment, and a deep-water harbor welcomes both small ferries and massive ocean vessels.

When darkness falls, the lights bath the city in a dazzling, energetic glow. Every night at 8:00pm, you can stand at the edge of the harbor in Kowloon and listen as music is played overhead and the skyscrapers on both sides of the harbor come to life and offer a light show unmatched anywhere else in the world. Synchronized with the music, the lights dance and streak across the sky, meeting each other in the middle, while stationary lights on the building flicker and change color, offering free entertainment for the millions who come every year to see it.

Above this spectacle, on the peak of Hong Kong Island, is an observation deck that offers a breathtaking, unobstructed view of all of Hong Kong. As you stand there and gaze out over the magnificent eye candy before you, you truly see just how beautiful, dense, colorful, and dazzling the city really is. The lights reflect off the water of the harbor below as yachts and ocean liners make their way through. Stargazing is definitely out of the picture here.

If you want to find a quiet, uncrowned beach where you can take a swim in the warm, water of the Pacific Ocean, you can easily find that on the South side of Hong Kong Island in Stanley, or venture of to one of the many other beaches elsewhere around the city. The climate is very warm, with temperatures jumping well into the 100s at times in the summer and dipping into the 50s in the winter. So, if you are dreaming of a white Christmas, you had best look elsewhere. If, however, you dislike the whole of winter like I do, from the biting cold winds to scraping frost off of your windshield in the early morning before the sun rises, then Hong Kong offers a wonderful refuge. In fact, you don’t even need a car. The public transportation system on the island is so good that getting around is a breeze. Double decker buses, innumerable cabs, subway lines, ferries, and trams can take you anywhere you need to go. The prices are quite reasonable as well, which is more than can be said for the Lamborghini dealership which was mere blocks away from our hotel. But if you do want to drive your car, be prepared to not feel too wealthy. Mercedes and BMWs are as common as Toyotas, Nissans, and Hondas in the United States.

Overall I would say that prices in Hong Kong rival those in the United States on average. A decent meal in a restaurant will cost about US$10, which was definitely a transition from the US$1 to US$2 I have been paying in Shanghai. The variety is amazing though. Do you want authentic Indian food? How about Turkish, American, French, Italian, English, German, Vietnamese, Korean, or Japanese? Hong Kong has it all, and it is readily and abundantly available.

One of the most enjoyable things for me was the availability of information. English bookstores were easy to come by. News and internet content is unfiltered, which means you are free to spend as much time on flickr, blogspot, or BBC.com as you would wish. For the first time since I have been in Asia, I felt like I was truly free to say what I really thought about things and didn’t have the feeling that there was a government hovering over me, watching my every move. Perhaps this was a mere delusion, but it was a welcome feeling nonetheless.

Beneath the glimmer of Hong Kong, however, lies a culture and environment that, since the 1800s, has developed a unique fusion of Chinese and European style. It does have some similarities with Chinatowns in America. Still, there is no place in the world quite like it.

So what is my impression of Hong Kong now that I spent five wonderful days there? If Shanghai is the pearl of the orient, then Hong Kong is the diamond.

Chinese Confession - A Place Called Shenzhen

2007-10-12T23:52:00.000-07:00

Last week during our trip to Southern China, we had the opportunity to visit a very unique city. If you have never heard of it, do not worry because most Americans haven’t. In fact, merely trying to pronounce it correctly would be enough of a task to deter someone from learning more about it. This is where I can come in and, amidst my random thoughts and photos, possibly offer a brief glimpse of it. The city is called “Shenzhen”, and it pronounced “shun jun” where the “j” sounds like the j in “just” and the –un’s rhyme with “sun”, as in the bright thing up in the sky.

Now, ugly introduction aside, Shenzhen really is a fascinating place. It’s not fascinating in the same way that Beijing, Shanghai, or Xi’an are fascinating. Those places each have an incredibly rich history and culture. Shenzhen is fascinating for exactly the opposite reason. It has almost no history because the city is literally about 30 years old, as opposed to being 3,000 years old or even older. Its culture is almost completely eclipsed by what has been happening there over the same period of time.

Okay, now I am going to offer a comparison by which we can benchmark the growth of Shenzhen. I was born and raised in a quiet city in Colorado called Loveland. If you go there and ask people if they think Loveland is growing fast, they will almost all unanimously agree that it is. Some think it is growing way too fast, and they are tirelessly striving to bring its growth to a standstill. There is good reason for it to be growing so quickly. It’s a close neighbor of Fort Collins, which was named as Money Magazine’s best place to live in all of the United States for the year 2006. Both cities regularly draw in people, and have grown relatively fast compared to other places in the country. Loveland currently has somewhere between 55,000 and 60,000 residents. If you rewind to 1979, it was considerably smaller. I don’t have an official number, but it probably had 30,000 residents at most. At the exact same moment, on the other side of the Northern hemisphere, there was a sleepy little fishing village near the Hong Kong-China border. Its population was a mere 20,000, which is extremely tiny by Chinese standards. At this point in time, Loveland was about 50% bigger than this small Chinese village.

In 1979, China was going through the initial phases of economic reform as it turned away from a fully planned and controlled economy and began to experiment with market economics. Deng Xiaoping and the leaders of the nation decided to setup a small area in which they could be tested, monitored, and contained. They decided on this small little fishing village because of its ideal location on the coast and in close proximity to Hong Kong. They declared it the first “Special Economic Zone” (SEZ), and Shenzhen was born.

This SEZ was able to attract businesses in a way that the rest of China and much of the world were unable. They generally offer incentives such as free trade zones, export processing zones, industrial estates, etc. If you don’t understand the allure of this, think of it as offering delicious zero-calorie ice cream that sacrifices no flavor to a bunch of people dieting and anxiously sweating away on treadmills and stationary bikes in a hot, non-air conditioned gym in Phoenix in the middle of the summer. That’s the kind of allure Shenzhen had for businesses.

Our little fishing village of 20,000 people began to grow. And grow. And grow. And grow. It basically exploded, but rather than the typical explosion that features chaos, disorder, destruction, and death, this was an explosion of growth. During the 1990s, people would refer to it as the city where they would finish one high rise building every day and one boulevard every three days. The city was well planned, though the actual construction of some buildings may have been a bit hasty as there was so much incentive to complete construction. Some already began to look old by the time they were completed. Others have been built to high standards and still stand glistening and tall today.

During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a modern city wall of iron and barbed wire that encircled the city – a vain attempt to contain the experimental capitalist economics that had such a powerful effect on the region. People had to pass through gates to get into the city where they could work, and if they didn’t have the documentation, they tried to find other options. All around the country stories were whispered of people making millions in this new, amazing place. Shenzhen was the modern day Pied Piper of China, drawing people in with a comforting melody of offering hope to millions who were stuck in poverty, unemployment, or starvation in the rural countryside.

Shenzhen’s growth was too much to contain. Businesses and high rises sprang up all along the outside perimeter of the city. Many factories would also build on-site housing where their workers could also reside and eat. This agglomeration made it challenging to get an accurate count of the population, and so the actual population of the city is higher than official figures.

Okay, now it is time to make use of our American benchmark city of Loveland. As stated before, Loveland’s population was probably about 30,000 in 1979, whereas the small fishing village of Shenzhen was 20,000. About 30 years later, Loveland has a population of between 55,000 and 60,000. Shenzhen, however, now has about 9 million. That amounts to a 24.38% annual growth rate, compared to 2.51% for Loveland.

Think about that for a moment.

Suddenly Loveland, this “rapidly growing city,” looks like a snail in a drag race against a Ferrari. This is basically like another Chicago being built in just 30 years. If Loveland had grown at the same rate at Shenzhen, it would currently have about 13.5 million people, but it has 60,000 instead. This doesn’t even come close to a rounding error in the population of Shenzhen.

If you want to see some actual pictures of Shenzhen over the past 30 years, here is a great compilation that shows what a tremendous transformation it has undergone.

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=330015&highlight=shenzhen

We also happened to be in Shenzhen on October 1^st, which is China’s national holiday. There were some pretty crowded areas and some other cool sights we passed while on the bus. I was able to take a few pictures, but not too many because we only had a few hours of free time to experience the city on our own. Most of the time we were visiting companies and factories to see them first hand.

It’s amazing how fascinating it can be to look at life, things, and places outside of the United States. It helps put them into perspective, and suddenly trivial little things can be seen for what they truly are. A good example of this that was going on while I was on this trip was illustrated when I was watching an American news station while in Hong Kong. People on the news were having a very lively debate about the meaning of two measly words that were mentioned on an AM radio talk show. The words were “phony soldiers”. People (Americans) were up in arms over it, some saying that the man who said them (Rush Limbaugh) needs to offer a formal apology because he was insulting all soldiers, while others were saying that it was not at all what he meant. I won’t take sides because, (1) I think that people are entitled to their own opinions and that America does have something called “free speech” and maybe people should turn off the TV and actually read about it and find out what it means, (2) I hate the petty, immature bickering that is so prominent in politics. A bunch of supposedly mature adults are acting like pre-pubescent teens with their mud slinging and immature bickering. And don’t even get me started on the logical fallacies that are too often used to support arguments.

The main reason I am bringing this up is because something else was going on that, in my opinion, was much more important. They didn’t mention anything about it while I was watching the news for two hours, though it did pass as a small headline on the bottom of the screen. The leaders of North and South Korea were meeting together and finally talking about a peace agreement that could finally bring the half-century Korean War to an end. Now, a considerable amount of the population of the United States couldn’t even point out Korea on the map, let alone understand how great of a development this would be. Korea has a very painful history of constantly being influenced by or subjected to other countries’ wishes. If it wasn’t China, it was Japan, or Russia, or the United States, or some other country. They are basically the skinny kid that was always picked on and pushed around by those who were bigger than him. They have had very little time, especially in the past several centuries, where they have been free to be united, autonomous, and truly at peace. Even now, the Koreans see themselves as one people, but politics keep them from being with family who may just have happened to be on the other side of the line that was drawn through the peninsula in the beginning of the cold war. I hope things work out so that they can actually finally have their own united (and hopefully free) country. I also hope, probably in vain, that more Americans will open their eyes and become more aware of things outside of the borders of the United States and stop bickering about such trivial things as what is meant by the term “phony soldiers”.

Chinese Confession - Travels, Monsoons, and Typhoons Oh My!

2007-10-07T08:44:00.000-07:00

Time goes on, and Wipha fades from my memory amongst everything that I have been experiencing lately. As I prepared for a week-long trip to Southern China and Hong Kong, I was thrilled to hear that the weather was expected to be more-or-less pleasant. And for the most part, that’s exactly what the weather was – beautiful.

As fascinated as I am with big storms, I certainly did not want a much anticipated opportunity to travel be shattered amongst a torrential storm. The monsoon South of China pressed its way to Vietnam, where it unleashed its fury. When we arrived in Shenzhen on October 1^st – the Chinese national holiday – the storm made its raw fury manifest despite it being so far away. It wasn’t devastating for us; instead, it brought massive, powerful waves to the beach that provided hours of entertainment.

We spent that night in a hotel on the beach, and decided to make the most of our time by going out on the beach. It didn’t matter to us that it was 11:00pm. In hindsight, it was actually probably better that way because it kept us from being able to see just how dirty the ocean is around China. Our attention was too focused on the activity of the water and the thousands of people around us to spare any thought for cleanliness. I am not exaggerating when I say that there were literally thousands of people on the beach. Most people would likely estimate this particular beach as being able to accommodate about 400 people. This one was so crowded that there was hardly any room to walk. Family and friends would come in groups, find a place in the sand, and mark their territory by building a big sand wall around their bamboo mats, belongings, and baskets. It was so Chinese. Amongst all of these micro walled territories, there was also an area of the beach that was roped off for people to come in, set up tents, and stay there for the night as they enjoyed vacation. They most likely didn’t have hotel rooms. Others merely ventured off from the beach and found places in the grass of a nearby park where they could sleep.

I unfortunately do not have any pictures of this crazy beach experience, but I did get a shot of the crowd in Shenzhen during the daytime. Hopefully this will act at least as an indication of just how crazy it was.

I tried to meander my way through these groups that were so tightly bunched together, each on their own little plot of beach. Of course, we drew many curious looks as we headed toward the water. We were, after all, the only westerners out of the thousands of people there. I still couldn’t get over just how many people would be out so late at night. Even in the afternoon of the 4^th of July with perfect weather conditions, you would not see this concentration of people on a beach in San Diego or anywhere in the US. Perhaps it was because Chinese people are so averse to the effects of the sun. Perhaps it was because of a holiday. Perhaps it was the 6-foot waves that came crashing in against the beach every 10 seconds.

It was probably for all of these reasons that so many people had come. We certainly made the most of it in any case. We ran into the water Kamikaze style, well past the line of the most courageous Chinese kids in ankle deep water. We got to the point where the water was about waste deep, then slowed down and looked up. It was coming. It was huge. Soon enough it was rising up to bear all of its weight and force down upon us. We were thrown back like rag dolls as the wave crashed up against the beach. For a brief moment, it stopped as the crowded cautiously stepped backward. Then it began to retreat and pulled us with it, exercising nearly the same force as it brought when it made landfall. Finally it retreated fully, only to be pulled beneath another raging wall that advanced fearlessly toward us.

We were grinning ear to ear. I was especially excited because this was my first real time in the ocean, and it was a very memorable first experience. There I was, a skinny white guy with two other friends: one an average height, toned white guy, the other an incredibly muscular, tall, black guy. I could tell you which was more entertaining for the thousands of Chinese people around us: the crazy, relentless waves, or us three being thrown around as we made sure to have as much fun as possible. If we lost our footing, we would find ourselves at the mercy of the waves around us. My really muscular friend would practically act like a human bowling ball, being thrown by the crashing wave into the feet of the crowd, causing entire groups of Chinese kids to come crashing down around him.

We certainly weren’t without our wounds. I got a few scrapes on my left shin. I’m sure they will leave some scars, but those are true souvenirs. In fact, they are almost like war trophies, as they represent the battle we fought against nature’s fury. Actually, it was more like our battle that we waged against a tiny little miniscule side-effect of a side-effect of nature’s true fury that was being unleashed thousands of miles away in Vietnam. It is certainly a moment we will never forget.

And this brings me up to the present moment. I will fast forward through Hong Kong and the rest of Shenzhen, as there is entirely too much to write for just one blog. We left Hong Kong amidst beautiful weather and touched down in Shanghai late this afternoon. Apparently we made it just in time, because there is another typhoon that had been raging not far from here in the Pacific. This one is called Krosa.

I don’t actually know as much about Krosa as I did about Wipha. That’s probably because I barely even learned of her existence after she made landfall South of Shanghai. Since we arrived back at our residence in Shanghai, the airport has been preparing to close down to incoming flights. She already had her way with Taiwan, and now she appears to be enjoying the coast of China and is quite content to just spin around South of us. Of course, she is sending big cells of heavy rain our way just for kicks. I haven’t ventured out, especially since it is nearly midnight, but I imagine things will be nice and soggy in the morning. I have class all day tomorrow, so I don’t know when I will be able to post pictures from this trip, but I did a count and I have about 1,000. Needless to say, I will need to do some sorting and pick out the better ones.

Chinese Confession - What If?

2007-09-27T06:00:00.001-07:00

What if…? We probably all ask ourselves these questions on a pretty regular basis. As I often do, I allowed myself to get lost in thought today as I thought about some of these classic “what if” questions. For some people, these two words are almost completely retrospective. It’s as if they open up feelings of pain, regret, remorse, or despair. “What if I had only done this?” or “What if I had done that instead?” are classic examples.

Perhaps it is just naïve of me, but I actually don’t find myself pondering these kinds of questions. I don’t have any major regrets, and I am pretty happy with how life is going for me. I am happy with what I have done, what I am doing, and what the future may have in store. As a result, my “what if” questions tend to reflect more of an optimistic outlook. They also are a good source of laughter every once in a while as I contemplate those random things that can happen in life.

One of my “what if” questions came into my mind as I was watching a boat travel up and down the Huangpu river that runs through the heart of Shanghai. This is by no means an ordinary boat. It’s literally a giant television. I am not joking. This boat just goes up and down the river all day and night showing video clips and advertisements on the largest television screen I have ever seen in my life. It’s rather far away, but I would say it’s easily over 30 feet wide. It’s huge. I snapped a picture of it, of course, and I decided to use my Photoshop skills to see what it would look like to have one of my paintings on display in the most public and conspicuous place in the entire city. I picked my piece “Tropical Storm” as a tribute to the typhoon that gave Shanghai the cold shoulder recently.

And so, with no further ado, I present to you “Tropical Storm in Shanghai”:

Chinese Confession - A Brief Glimpse at the Beauty of Shanghai

2007-09-24T06:39:00.000-07:00

Every once in a long while the elements all line up perfectly and harmoniously. You can put life on pause, even for just a few short minutes, and appreciate life and the world for how amazingly beautiful it truly can be. These priceless moments are very rare. Tragically, often times we are too busy and our thoughts too focused elsewhere to stop and savor such an amazing moment. I know I am certainly guilty of this. Yesterday, however, was one of those amazing and rare days.

The early morning drizzle unexpectedly cleared out by the early afternoon, leaving behind a freshly cleaned and lively city. The clouds broke apart, allowing the sun to shine down on all of Shanghai. This alone is a rare treat, but the fact that I had an entire day to do whatever I wanted meant complete liberation. The temperature was perfect. The humidity was perfect. The clouds were perfect. My schedule was perfect. I could stand out on the balcony, nine stories up and rising above all of the nearby buildings, and see to the end of the horizon. Well, I would have been able to see to the end of the horizon were it not hidden behind the endless sea of skyscrapers in every direction. But even this sight was amazing.

I wasted no time in deciding what to do for the day. I quickly grabbed my camera, a little bit of money, my transit card, and headed out the door. I wanted to take as many pictures as possible, and I certainly did not hold back. Shanghai may not have the same kind of beauty and awe that is so prevalent back at home in Colorado, where virtually everyday we enjoy an unobstructed view of the mountains as they rise majestically from the great plains. The beauty of Shanghai, however, is equally present. If you make too much haste, however, that beauty can too easily be overlooked.

The beauty of Shanghai is in the faces of its people and their immeasurable kindness. It is in the harmonious parks that are so abundant and truly cherished, where the locals come together and, in unison, execute the careful, controlled movements Taichi. It is in the rotting, dilapidated building that looks over the same park, a witness to what Shanghai was just a few decades ago. It is also in the newly built steel and glass skyscraper across the street that also shares a witness of what the Shanghai has become. It is present in the blood that pumps through the veins of a young and amazingly talented artist as he looks so carefully at my face, creating a flawless portrait of me as I am seated on a bench with an unobstructed view of the modern skyscrapers of Lujiazui on the other side of the Huangpu river. It is present in the hasty flight of a man running recklessly and as quickly as he can while pushing his Korean barbecue cart down the wide, elevated sidewalk, crowded with tourists, vendors, people flying kites, and even those just out for the day enjoying the scenery. It is simultaneously present in my own mind as I ponder what could possibly have caused him to so abruptly take flight. It is present in the moment that shortly followed when the artist took a pause from the picture, hid his folder and supplies, and tried to look as inconspicuous as possible as a local police patrol cart slowly drove down the same wide sidewalk. It was present once again as I wondered what kind of sketchy operation this artist had, even though he was only charging me about $4 for the portrait. It was present in the conversation that I struck up with a local Chinese man as I walked down the sidewalk, and even more present in the fact that I have been able to learn enough of this challenging language to even be able to have a pleasant conversation. It was present when I arrived in the neighborhood that displays the breath-taking architecture of the China of yesterday, either perfectly preserved or perfectly recreated as a way to draw in tourists. It is present in the lights of this same neighborhood as they lit up these buildings by night, adding to their brilliant beauty the vibrant energy of the city at night. It is equally present in the reflections of the light upon the water of the pond that surrounds an old tea house. It is in the fact that I am even able to be here in this city, in this country, at this time, with these people, and can appreciate it first hand. It is even in the flu or food poisoning that I somehow caught that is affording me the time to sit down and write this blog in the first place.

Fortunately you don’t have to rely on my insufficient words to see what I saw. Here are some pictures that I took as I tried to capture the beauty of Shanghai.

http://picasaweb.google.com/joeechols/20070924Shanghai

Chinese Confession - Life Post-Wipha

2007-09-21T03:40:00.000-07:00

She’s crafty, that Wipha. I admit that I was a bit skeptical when I was watching her on the weather maps and the predicted path didn’t seem to be lining up with what I was seeing. She ended up unleashing her fury south of Shanghai late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning. She must have detected my building anticipation for witnessing a true storm firsthand. Rather than give me even a slight taste of nature’s fury, she decided to rein down upon Fujian, swing to the north over Nanjing, then ditch China to go torment Kim Jong Il for a while. *sigh* My hopes were crushed. I won’t lie though: if I were a typhoon, I would do the same thing. That man has got such a Napoleon complex that I wouldn’t be able to help myself. But I digress…

After landfall, we received no more than half an inch of rain at the most and the winds weren’t too bad either. Well, being in a city this size with so many big buildings, it’s natural for the winds to die down, I suppose. The bulk of the crazy weather that we received was on Tuesday, a full day before Wipha landed. As I mentioned in the blog, the rain was coming down pretty heavily at times, and we probably got close to two inches the entire day. When I decided to head out to the store to get some water and such, I brought my camera along just in case I saw anything interesting. The narrow two-lane street that runs on the north side of our campus, which gets completely jammed even in the most ideal of conditions, had become a soppy, chaotic parking lot. Horns were blaring. Somehow two lanes had turned into three. Cars had pulled over on the sidewalk and parked, most likely to conserve gas. Meanwhile, scooters and bicyclists zipped through the whole contorted mess. Water had filled the streets so that it was 6 inches or deeper in some parts, and it relentlessly continued to pour down upon all of us. I had my trusty umbrella that I purchased from a street vendor for $1.40 – the best $1.40 I’ve spent here so far – but it did little to keep me from getting soaked from the waist down as an occasional gust of wind would send the rain in a completely different direction. It was a blast. Who would have thought that a trek to the supermarket could be so exciting?

Here’s a short video clip I took as I navigated my way through the insanity:

I was actually really impressed with how Shanghai and the other provinces in this part of the country handled things. China is an extremely populous country, but they are quite capable of moving large numbers of people very promptly. Even before the arrival of Wipha, they set to work and relocated about 2 million people in this entire part of the country – a feat that would be far more difficult for the United States, as is clearly illustrated by Katrina. Most of these people moved on Tuesday, and there were shelters set up for them already. Just think of it: 2 million people have to leave their homes to seek shelter, but everything maintained order. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are things that can be learned from China, just like I am learning so much while I’m here. As for the effect of the storm, the last number I heard for the death toll from the typhoon, at least for Shanghai, was six. Everything is pretty much the same. There is a staggering amount of buildings that have been built in the past twenty years, and they are all said to have been built to high standards. My room is on the 9^th floor of a 12-storey building, and it seems quite well built. Even in the wind, it didn’t sway at all. The storm hardly even delayed construction on the 101-storey Shanghai World Financial center. Typhoons, after all, are expected in this area, and the buildings are designed with that in mind.

The rain let up enough Tuesday evening, despite the approaching typhoon, that we all decided to go to the World Cup match between the US and Nigeria. The stadium is a mere 10 minute walk from campus. We fully expected to be completely soaked within five minutes and to keep warm by jumping up and down, screaming our lungs out, and engaging in all kinds of riotous behavior that is appropriate for such an event. Much to our surprise, however, our seats were sheltered by the roof hanging over our head. Those down in the lowest seats, and the actual players of course, were the only ones fully exposed to the elements.

I can now personally attest to the fact that Chinese people are much mellower at sporting events than most other nationalities. I had not bought a ticket before the game, so I ended up in a completely different section, but I had a couple of friends with me. The stadium, which has a capacity of over 25,000, only had 6,000 people in attendance that night. Those of us who did show up were the true die-hards. As our luck would have it, we ended up in the same section as the loudest, most fanatical group of Nigerians. With so many open seats, we moved down as close to the game as we could, and ended up sitting behind a group of Japanese and in front of these Nigerians. The three of us cheering on the US somehow managed to be extremely entertaining for Japanese people perhaps more so than the actual game. As we would commence our spur-of-the-moment three syllable cheers, they would occasionally join in, scream, and share some high fives. At one point a crowd control person came and told us to sit down, which lasted for about five minutes. All this time, of course, there was a huge group of Nigerians jumping, singing, cheering, and waving large banners behind us. Only occasionally did those banners happen to be upside down, not that we would tell them when such was the case. All-in-all it was a fun game, and we didn’t even get too terribly wet in the process.

One strange thing I noted while I was there was the crowd control group they had seated in the same row, forming a ring that wrapped all the way around the field. They all remained there at their seats for the entire match. I could not resist snapping a picture of the sight, just to show how ridiculous it seemed because the crowd was so few in number. For some reason it just makes the word “commie” come to mind.

Now that Wipha has moved on, we are getting excited for our trip down to Shenzhen and Hong Kong. We will spend a couple of days in Shenzhen, where we will also celebrate

China

’s national holiday on October 1^st. The following day we will head to Hong Kong and spend five spectacular days there. I promise I will take a ridiculously large number of photos. It will be amazing.

Chinese Confession - A Storm Called Wipha

2007-09-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

One of the hopes that I expressed before I came to China was to be able to see a typhoon while I am here. Well, this morning I woke up to the thoroughly exciting news that my hope is going to be a reality. Let me introduce you to Wipha.

She packs quite a punch as she creeps along at an eerily slow pace. She has been battering Taiwan to our South for a couple of days already. Her screaming winds are in excess of 150mph, qualifying her as a category 4 typhoon (the Pacific equivalent to a hurricane). She has an eye for just one place: Shanghai. Literally, the eye is expected to make landfall right here in this very city, which, naturally, has all of Shanghai on maximum alert. She could be the most powerful and destructive storm to hit the city in the past 10 years. She is saving up all of her force and energy, becoming even more powerful, and will then unleash it in gales of wind and torrential downpours when she makes landfall near southern Shanghai sometime in the next day or so. You have to admit, when Mother Nature speaks, she commands respect.

All morning the rain has been off-and-on, and the storm is still hundreds of miles away. Right now as I type this, rain is falling like endless ropes from the sky. Traffic on the elevated highway outside our campus is at a standstill, visibility is a half-mile at best. Someone wearing a bright blue raincoat is riding a rusty bike across campus, while another person is scurrying across the central garden and plaza under the limited shelter of a flimsy umbrella.

The storm isn’t exactly coming at the most convenient of times. The Women’s World Cup is going on right now in Shanghai, and the US is scheduled to play against Nigeria tonight at 8:00pm. Almost all of us have been planning on getting painted up and going to show our unabashed support for our team. There has been a lot of excitement in the air for us as the anticipation builds, but most of us did not even hear of the typhoon until today. I haven’t even purchased my ticket yet, but given the weather, I don’t think it will be difficult to secure one or even to find an unoccupied seat with the rest of us Americans.

I wasn’t able to attend the match between Japan and the UK last week, much to my dismay, but I heard it was spectacular. Actually, I heard those from our group that went were spectacular. Literally. They were shown on TV because of their lively cheering. Actually, it’s not very difficult to draw much attention while cheering. Apparently the Chinese are relatively quite and orderly spectators. This contrasts sharply with Americans who are used to jumping, yelling, screaming, singing, and making the most of virtually every favorable (or particularly unfavorable) play or call. If you want in illustration, just think of baseball. The game can bore you to tears. The fun of it is being there with people and cheering to your heart’s content.

We don’t know if the football (US Soccer) game will be cancelled, postponed, or if it will go on as planned. None of us have heard of a match being cancelled because of rain, but then again, none of us have been planning on attending one just before a typhoon hits.

Brief weather update: the traffic is still at a standstill on the highway, and visibility has dropped even more as the rain pounds down even more fiercely than before. And this is just the beginning. Rest assured – I am loving this. I do need to trek out to the store, however, and get some clean drinking water and a few munchies. I am down to the last bottle-full of my water after brushing my teeth following lunch.

So far 200,000 people have been evacuated from coastal and low-lying areas. The central commercial district is also being evacuated as people prepare for the incoming storm, but people are still much calmer here than they would be in the

. In the past I had heard that people considered typhoons to be lucky. Maybe that was

India

. Maybe I am just making this up. I don’t know. But one thing I can tell you, they do appreciate them for one thing: they clean the city. A big storm making landfall is like the entire city taking a huge, long shower. It cleans out the air and makes things fresh again, if only for a short while.

I honestly don’t anticipate that things will be all that bad. Shanghai gets hit by typhoons often enough, so the city should be well prepared. I just hope the power and phone lines (thus internet) don’t go out. At least the Chinese are smart enough to not build a city below sea level, so this is hardly likely to look anything like Katrina.

Chinese Confession - The Ramblings of Insomnia

2007-09-16T00:18:00.000-07:00

When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep...and you're never really awake. I echo these words of Tyler Durden. They are all too true.

It is 5am. I have never had the luxury of being a morning person – one of those lucky people who, with every passing day, hold the future of the world in their hands. Their ability to shake off the shackles of sleep and vanquish the foe that is their own mind holding them captive to innumerable, random illusions of its own creation is something beyond my own comprehension. They wake up bright eyed and filled with optimism and appreciation for those little things that make us non-morning people nauseous. The beauty of a sunrise as the light breaks out across the sky, the smell of the morning dew on the grass, the taste of a well prepared breakfast, or even the priceless moments of peace, quiet, and meditation that are so seldomly found during the daytime hours but are so richly abundant during that short time before the world swings into motion. These are the true beauties of life. To appreciate them, to find solace in them, and to relish in them is to know the truly good life. I hate them all.

I don’t hate morning people; I just hate mornings. Morning is like one of those ideas that sounds great on paper but is horrible when it becomes reality. Even now, as I stare at this screen with my eyes blood shot and my empty stomach screaming for substance, I can hardly tolerate any of it. I do not enjoy the luxury of being a “morning person”. Instead, I am subject to it. For me, nearly everyday I must begin with a full-fledged war. Somehow I have to raise my own eyelids, which have inexplicably become about ten times heavier through the night. I have to clear my foggy mind and somehow get the nerves that run through my brain and my body to fire at their normal breakneck speed. Then I have to somehow dislodge myself from the comforts of a warm, welcoming bed. How any person can do this is incomprehensible, especially if must be done at a moments notice with an alarm tearing through the silence that was once a blissfully peaceful night. If this particular moment happens to be before sunrise, then it worsens immeasurably. Every time an alarm goes off, a kitten or a puppy dies. I’m just sure of it. This moment then ushers in the battle of will versus physical tendencies and (thank Galileo and Newton for this one) inertia. Yes, the very concept of inertia, I am convinved, was actually discovered while observing the sleeping habits of people. After all, it does state that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, while a body at rest tends to stay at rest. Perhaps the key then is to become somnambulant. If anyone has any suggestions or information on how to become somnambulant, please let me know. It would be especially nice if the exertions could be channeled into something productive like doing my homework or cleaning the bathroom. But I digress.

At this point in my rambling, I’m sure that you are wondering why I of all people would be awake and even engaged in the process of writing this when it goes completely against my nature. Believe me when I say that I wish this were not the case today. However, there are forces that are so strong, so compelling, and so unpleasant that I can hardly bear to speak of them. These very powers have the ability to shake walls, to make babies cry, to drive others to complete madness. They may even be carcinogenic. Who knows? I don’t think anyone has actually done a study on it, but since everything seems to be linked to cancer these days, why not this too? Not everyone has this divine power nested within themselves. What is so amazing is this power cannot be called upon at will. It is beyond their control. They may not even realize that they have it, and they never witness it for themselves. Only when they are completely unaware of it does it truly break free and wreak havoc on the calm and unsuspecting world around it. I wonder if the people that foster this power know just how much damage they truly do. I often ask others if I engage in such destructive and purely evil behavior. Thus far I have proven to be free from it. But even as I type this, my roommate is demonstrating a particularly unique talent for this action. I am talking, of course, about snoring.

Yes, my morning died quite prematurely today. My dreams were wrenched from me when my roomate found what must have been a delightfully comfortable position during his nighttime shifting and turning. His head was cocked back at a hazardous angle, his legs bunched up, and his arms rested carelessly and extended to each side. It was in this position that suddenly the quite of the night was destroyed. I opened my eyes abruptly to search for the source of such an unbearably raucous noise, and lamentably found it to be merely a few feet from me. It was him. I tried everything I could to vanquish this unwelcome predator to my sleep. Nothing prevailed. My pillow is too stiff to be wrapped around my head to cover my ears. My own attempts to retaliate by raising more commotion would be entirely too much, especially considering the walls that separate us from our neighbors, although capable of bearing the weight of the floors above them, offer the acoustic protection of merely a couple of pieces of paper put together. So convert my pillow into a carefully aimed and finely tuned weapon would probably cause a breach in our international relations. Truly I was at odds.

The snoring is vile beyond description. Every intake of breath is accented by rapid, low pulsations that echo throughout the chamber that is our room. They are so low and powerful that not even the pillow that I tried to hold strategically around my head and covering my ears was able to block it. I can only compare it to the violent sound of a tommy gun and a jack hammer combined. I can distinctly hear every single pulse in this rapid succession, and I hate each one more than the last. Just when they become so intense that I fear my own retaliation and nearly lose all self control, they stop. Relief. It is over. This thought, however, is premature and truly ignorant. Just as this feeling of relief brings comfort to my afflicted self, the air is once again pierced, but this time by the horrid sound of expelling gas that lasts for seconds. During the daytime hours, I hear it all the time. It’s that same noise that issues from the airbrakes of the buses that run through the town. It is powerful and loud enough that it can cause serious hearing damage if one is too close at that critical moment. Somehow, this very force is being produced by my roommate, and not just by him, but merely by his lungs and nose!

This pattern continues endlessly. The jackhammer. A brief pause. A sudden expulsion of air. Jackhammer. Expulsion of air. Jackhammer. Expulsion of air. Jackhammer. Explusion of air. This is the cycle of insanity. I am beginning to lose control. I am so tired that I could just as soon kill or destroy anything that would dare to stand between myself and sleep. My roommate is doing just that, and I hate him for it. It’s not a true, long-lasting hatred, but certainly an at-the-moment kind of hatred.

Jackhammer. Explusion of air. Jackhammer. Explusion of air.

I can’t even think clearly at this point. It shocks me that my simmering anger is not audible at this point, and I want nothing more that to lash out and strike the source of this unbearable uproar – repeatedly. I want it to physically feel the agony and affliction that it is causing me, but I can’t. I just can’t bring myself to do it, at least not yet. Who knows? If it goes on for long enough, I may just go insane.

Jackhammer. Expulsion of air. Jack hammer. Explusion of air.

Unable to bear any more, I jump out of bed. I no longer hate my roommate at this moment. I loathe him. I look out the window. It is dark. A strange cloud has filled the air of the city that I see. This I discovered only after opening the balcony door to step out and hopefully find peace in the more quiet air outside, making as much noise as possible in the process in the vain hope that it will disturb my roommate and cause him to shift positions. Barely had I begun my first step out onto the balcony when a noxious air pierced my nose. It is fowl. Never has it been so thick and deplorable. The air here is by no means clean, but this night it is particularly bad. You can literally see this pernicious filth. Visibility has been reduced to a quarter mile at best. I wonder how anyone is even alive at this point. I can see a few lights in the high rises outside. I wonder if these people had breathed in the fumes, and in their desperate fight to not die from the poison, had turned on their lights, as if its presence alone would spare them from certain death. Or perhaps these same people have been awoken by the same disturbing raucous that my roommate is producing. It’s possible. They are, after all, a mere quarter of a mile away. Their building is barely visible amongst the smog. It’s so bad, in fact, that I make a note to myself to try to not go outside the next day (a sign of the naïve hope that I perhaps will be able to enjoy the luxurious comfort of sleep again soon). I close the door quickly and lock it. I begin pacing the room.

Jackhammer. Expulsion of air. Jackhammer. Explusion of air.

He mocks me. In his dreams he is holding a giant magnifying glass and I am a tiny ant. He focuses the sunlight on me, and it burns my flesh as I writhe in pain. This is the only possible explanation for such brutal treatment. All I want to do is sleep! I continue pacing the room.

Jackhammer. Explusion of air. Jackhammer. Explusion of air.

I throw open the door that opens to the hallway, again making as much noise as possible. I half expect to see everyone out in the hall talking about what could possibly be making so much noise. To my surprise, there is nobody. Instead my nostrils are greeted again by the very noxious smog that is so pervasive in the nighttime air outside. There is no doubt in my mind that this air truly is carcinogenic. The doors to the balcony at the end of the hall are open, and the smog has crept within our building. I quickly retreat to my room, making a note to myself to try to not go outside of our room the next day (naïve optimism speaking again) because not even the air in the hall is breathable.

Jackhammer. Explusion of air. Jackhammer. Explusion of air.

Suddenly, the harsh reality of the situation truly weighs down on me. I am trapped. My hatred for my roommate and his compulsory snoring is no longer simmering. It is boiling and consuming me. I could beat him with my pillow right now. It would save all of us in the building from continual nights of agony. But I give up. I move to my desk, turn on my computer and pull out my headphones. If I can’t sleep, I can at least turn on some music and drown out the echoing roar that fills my room. That is, of course, assuming that these headphones are even capable of drowning out such noise in the first place.

And thus I am found in my present condition. My eyes are red and blood shot. My body is fatigued. My brain stretches to pull these words from nowhere. I’m hungry, but I have no food. I’m thirsty, but all I have is water, which is hardly appealing to my cravings at the moment. I write this blog as means of coping. It’s relaxing. It helps me identify those things that torment me (not that such a feat is particularly difficult at this very moment, seeing as the source of the walls shaking and the dust falling from the vibrating ceiling is quite obvious). I really don’t want to kill my roommate, but this raucous is unbearable. He is a genuinely good guy. He has expressed nothing but kindness, consideration, and welcoming to me. Perhaps this snoring is just the other side of his personality lashing out against the world that may have treated him so unfairly in the past. I have no idea. So for now, my writings will have to be my escape.

Chinese Confession - Kung Fu, Fish Follies, and the Grand Canal

2007-09-10T23:39:00.000-07:00

At this point in my

China

experience, I think it is pretty safe to say that Americans, overall, have a rather distorted perception of what

China

is like. That’s actually a best-case scenario. It would probably be more accurate to say that Americans have a completely wrong image of

China

. I can now dispel at least one more rumor: it’s really easy to get around in

China

because (1) everybody in the big cities speaks English, and (2) all the cab drivers speak English.

One of the delightful things about China is that many of the things that are so expensive back in the US are much more affordable here. Take taxis for example. If I decide to take a taxi to People’s Square, which is basically the busiest, most central part of this city, it would cost a bit over 20 Yuan, which converts to about $3 in the US. The best part is that if I have four people in the cab, it’s the same price. The bad part is that if I am unfamiliar with the city and the routes, the drivers can sometimes take a less direct route and drive up the price (no pun intended) by another dollar or so. The trip takes us about 10 minutes – 15 if there is traffic – and is also much quicker than taking the metro, which takes about an hour. It’s also about 50 cents less expensive. I know it’s not much, but you’d be surprised what al you can get here for 50 cents. The bad thing is that I have yet to meet a cab driver in this city who actually speaks English. Fortunately I can actually pronounce things in a semi-comprehensible manner, so the driver can usually figure out where I’m wanting to go. The bad thing is I can understand about one out of five words that they say, at best. So it makes communication a bit challenging at times.

This weekend I went to a nearby city, Suzhou, with a few friends. We took a high speed train to get there, which topped out at 248 kmph (153mph), enjoying the luxury of first class seats for about $4.50 each. Suzhou is widely known for its beautiful parks and canals. Dubbed “the Venice of the East,” it is clearly apparent why it merits such a title.

It also happens to be a “small” Chinese city with a mere 5.1 million people in the greater area of the city. To be quite honest, I was surprised that the population was as high as they said it was. I would have guessed its population to be closer to 500,000. A population of 5.1 million people makes it about twice as big as Denver, but it didn’t even have a business district. It didn’t have very many high-rise buildings either, which lets the truth really sink in about the living conditions for the people. Chinese people really pack into the places where they live. It’s pretty normal for an entire family to live in a tiny one or two bedroom apartment with a kitchen about half the size of an American bathroom, no living room, and often no balcony. Owning an actual house is a luxury affordable by very, very few. In this country, you quickly learn to eliminate your bubble of personal space around you. If you bump into someone, you don’t say “excuse me”. Rubbing up against people is not just completely normal, it’s expected. On the roads, the vehicle with the most mass usually rules. That makes buses seemingly lethal. They are the craziest drivers out there too. If I can make it home without an all-out phobia of public buses, I will be doing well.

In Suzhou, we decided to skip the hassle of getting around the city by bus, and instead opted to hire a couple to drive us around the city in their van all day. Actually, this service was offered to us the moment we emerged from the train station. Now this is living it up! Our own personal guides that knew the city, that were able to drive on the roads without allowing us to get killed by a monstrous bus, let alone even get in an accident. We had our list of places we wanted to go to, and our guides knew the best way to get there, whether they were good to see or not, and helped make everything go smoothly. However, just like the taxi drivers and the vast majority of the people here, they spoke no English. That was okay though because my Chinese was the worst of the four of us, and a lot of people think my Chinese is pretty good. We also bartered the price for this convenient form of transit for the day down to 100 Yuan, which is about $15. Honestly, I don’t know how they make it worthwhile for that little money, but somehow they do. Had we taken cabs all day, it would have easily topped that price and taken twice as long. Gas alone here is well over 80 Yuan per liter, which converts to about $5 per gallon. I expect that they probably got a share of the money that we spent at the places we visited, including the restaurant where we ate lunch. Oh, we also didn’t pay them until the end of the day, so there was no risk that they would take our money and run. It was great!

We saw a park, which was absolutely jaw-dropping with its Zen-like feel and meticulous attention to every detail imaginable. It was a huge park too. We walked around for about an hour and a half and I still never got to see all of it. I have heard, however, that many parks in China are very similar, so I’m not terribly disappointed. The admission to the park was almost $10, which was admittedly a bit steep by my standards, but it was amazing.

We also got to see the canal that runs through the town by getting a couple of men to take us aboard a long, very Chinese looking boat. This was about $6 for each of us, and it was amazing! It took us into the narrow canals of the town too, where people live in these tiny, somewhat dilapidated-looking houses with doors that sometimes open directly to the water of the canal. The white paint of the houses peeled away at the corners, exposing the rustic masonry that made up the irregular and incredibly picturesque homes. Clothes hung out to dry just feet away from us, a seemingly vain effort to dry the laundry in an environment where the humidity is almost always 100%. We passed under low, tight bridges, sometimes by mere inches and carefully navigated by the skill of the boat driver. We passed countless doors and windows, many of which rest ajar with an unobstructed view of the lives and the people inside. One woman was busy making lunch. In another window was a child playing, pausing momentarily to look at us as we passed, curiosity etched in his eyes. Another doorway opened to a dark room where the water of the canal entered into the house. They must be quite accustomed to this kind of life and lack of privacy, but again, this is something you get used to in a country of 1.3 billion people. Although this is definitely a tourist hotspot, we still drew many stairs from people along the banks of the canal, taking a break from their work. In another place, I saw two women wearing wide peasant hats to further shield them from the sun which was already blocked by the thick clouds and smog of this industrial city.

Industry is hardly new to a place like this. The grand canal of China was started as an ambitious project by the Chinese all they way back in 486 BC and was finally completed in its entirety after 600 AD. It’s 1,100 miles long, making the Suez or Panama canals look like mere driveways. It was also constructed during an era when the European nations were too busy bickering amongst themselves to accomplish anything of this kind of scale. It stretches from an area southwest of Shanghai all the way up to Beijing. This would be close to the distance between New York and Atlanta. Needless to say, it’s an amazing project, and we got to see a tiny section of us up close and personal. Oh yeah, our boat drivers didn’t speak English either.

We saw a neat factory where they make silk, which was surprisingly interesting and short enough to accommodate my attention span.

We then went to another park that featured part of a defensive wall that is over 2,500 years old. Okay, at this point I have to change the topic just a little bit. We all know those Kung Fu movies that we associate with Chinese cinema. Perhaps we jokingly think that all Chinese people know Kung Fu and that people just break out into random, impossibly-choreographed-yet-totally-impromptu fighting scenes. I definitely dismissed any expectation to run into something like this. That’s Hollywood, after all. So you can imagine my surprise when we were walking along the base of this really old, huge, and amazing wall toward the entrance part of it. We stopped there, and just gaped at the scene in front of us. We were standing in a big gate about 10 feet wide, with a big sand pit before us and walls at least 20 feet high all around us. In this small area, there were dozens of young Chinese men all waiting for something. We stood there at the entrance gate mere feet away from all of these people, when suddenly one guy in a harness ran straight up the wall at the exact same moment one of my friends tried to ask him what was going on. It must have been a cue, because everyone started fighting. It was obviously not real fighting, but it was still cool to see, if not quite random. Who would have thought that, in coming to China, we would be wandering around and actually randomly see a bunch of people fighting like in the Chinese action movies? Well, it happened. They even did some of the typical moves like having one person fighting 8 others and throws them all off at once. Others were doing flips and dodging swipes, kicking, hitting, shoving, running. It was crazy! I even got pictures! It was really cool. Then they abruptly stopped. I had no idea why or what they were doing. I’m going to just pretend that they did it just for us. It’s either that or this is what it’s really like in China. Who knows, really? This country is nuts!

We wandered around the garden section, which I found to be even more amazing, peaceful, and picturesque than the first one we visited.

When we got to a big pond, there was a whole lot of commotion coming from one area that quickly drew our attention, awaking us from our state of blissful peace. There, along a balcony that overlooked a side of the pond, where hundreds of brilliantly colored fish all splashing around in one tight area along the side with a dozen people looking down at them. We went over there to see what was going on. There was a vendor there selling small bags of fish food for 15 cents that you could drop, pour, or dump into the water and watch the fish all clamor and fight in what must be an oft-repeated feeding ritual. When I got to the side and looked down, it seemed unreal. These fish were HUGE! There were hundreds of Coy, all brightly colored, and as you fed them, the fish would congregate, then get more crowded, and more crowded, and soon enough there were so many of these giant, brightly colored fish that it looked more like a giant feeding frenzy/fish mosh pit. I’m not exaggerating either. You would look down and at any given moment see dozens of colorful mouths gaping wide open, anxiously trying to get some of the food that was so generously falling from above. These fish were, on average, between 12 inches and 18 inches long, I estimated. There were some really big ones that were probably 24 inches long or even longer. They would get so crowded that some would get pushed up from out of the water, then flap their fins and tail wildly because they were out of the water and on top of all the others, eventually working their way to the side of the swarm where it was less dense and they could sink back into the water. They would then turn immediately and fight to get back into the swarm, where they would stick their mouths out of the water, mouths gaping open and closing every couple of seconds, and fight to get yet more of the food. This would go on as long as someone was pouring out food pellets. Once the flow of food stopped, they become eerily silent and the swarm would slowly begin to disperse. It was a very strange sight to see after they made such a ruckus. Within a couple of seconds of food hitting the water again, however, they turned and swam toward that place. It didn’t take long at all for the craziness to resurface (no pun intended).

After this park, we went back to the train station to get a bite to eat, paid our chauffeurs, and waited for our train back to Shanghai. I’m not sure exactly what happened or when it happened, but somehow I ended up losing my ticket while we were at the station. I didn’t realize this until about 15 minutes before our train left, and by then there were definitely no seats or tickets available for purchase. The trains here are almost always filled to overcapacity. What they do is sell all of the tickets for the seats on the train, but they also sell standing-only tickets. When you get one of those, you get to do just that: stand. This was what I had to do, since there were no seats left. I actually had no choice but to buy a ticket for a train that was to leave at 9:00pm instead of the 7:20pm one that we were all planning on taking. I bought the ticket, and we were trying to devise a plan by which I would be able to get on board and still make it back with the others. I was basically going to pretend that I am an ignorant American and can’t speak any Chinese (which isn’t too far from the truth, based on my ability to communicate sometimes) and that I got sold a bad ticket. We were hoping that the crowd would be so crazy that they would just check that my ticket was for Shanghai and that they wouldn’t pay any attention to the time of the train my ticket displayed. When they opened up the gates for people boarding the train, we got through in the mad crowd (these train stations are insanely crowded and even more insanely pushy) and there wasn’t anyone checking tickets. Then when the train arrived at the platform, we were certain that the staff on the train would be checking tickets in each car as people boarded. We were sure that I would get kicked off and told to wait for the next train. Fortunately things worked out and there was nobody there checking tickets either. I did have to stand in the isle of the train for an hour, as did many, many other people all throughout the train (Chinese trains are insanely crowded), but I got home safely and without incident, so I was completely happy. All in all, it was a truly crazy day. I experienced a bit of everything: history, craziness, meditation-enducing gardens, craziness, first class tickets on a high speed train, craziness, standing-only tickets on a low-scale train, more craziness, random Kung Fu, craziness, crazy fish, and even some craziness in there. So, if you ever find yourself in the Shanghai area, I highly recommend you check out Suzhou. I certainly wasn’t disappointed. It didn’t contribute to my phobia of the fearless, crazy public buses.

Chinese Confession - Growing Pains

2007-09-07T08:21:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to a completely unexpected but thoroughly welcome sight: blue sky. The bright sunlight illuminated my room and seemed to lighten everyone’s mood, though we are all in quite high spirits to begin with. I ate breakfast from our small balcony at the end of the hall, where, being nine stories up, the view is impressive on a hazy day. Today, however, with the sky being so clear and the smog and haze dispersed, the true depths of Shanghai’s sea of high rises could be fully appreciated. The view was no longer impressive; it was breathtaking. As I savored a meat dumpling, a red bean paste bun, and a kiwi and cucumber flavored yogurt smoothie, I took advantage of the 180 degree view as a priceless opportunity to step back and try to take it all in. There were 24 cranes that I could clearly see in the skyline before me, though this was hardly a complete view of such an enormous city. Some other objects in the distance could have been cranes, but I couldn’t be sure. As impressive as it is, however, this number could also equal a mere rounding error as the urban planning department has plans to add an additional 1,000 high rises by the end of the decade. They already have 4,000.

This city is huge. It’s already big by today’s standards, being one of the ten largest in the world. When you see this place and just how fast it is growing, however, you don’t just see Shanghai for what it is at the moment. You see it for what it will become. It is nearly impossible to separate the two. This is one of the things about Shanghai that is so incredible to experience but no camera can capture. No video can capture it. Words cannot even fully capture it. But it is very much present, alive, and thriving in the air all around you. It is not a question of if Shanghai will reach its potential, but of when. This whisper of things to come is discernable above all of the abundant noises of the city – the rapid poundings of a jack hammer on asphalt, the sound of a shovel as it cuts a muddy crevice, the honking traffic on the elevated highway, the theft alarm of a parked scooter that pierces the morning air, the metro train as it zips overhead, or the welding in the upper level framework of a new apartment building.

When night time falls, the city changes its face but not its pace. Just like your heart keeps beating, nerves keep firing, and body keeps metabolizing as you sleep, Shanghai remains alive, vibrant, and booming through the twilight hours. Even now at 10:00pm as I write this, bright lights shine up from the stadium a few blocks away, drawing bright streaks high up into the night sky. Next door, brilliant neon lights dance on top of a four story building, drawing people in to take a spot on one of the multiple levels of bowling alleys and pool tables. Farther in the distance, I can see the Aurora skyscraper in the Lujiazui financial district lighting up with LED lights all along the face, transforming it from a golden-colored glass and steel building by day into a giant television screen by night. The Shanghai World Financial Center, still under construction, is brightly illuminated as work never ceases. Closer by I can distinguish the flame of welders constructing a new building to house some of the hundreds of thousands of people who come to this city every year, or perhaps some of those who find prosperity and a more comfortable standard of living through their hard work and fortunate circumstances.

Aurora building by night

Shanghai World Financial Center (behind the Jinmao tower)

Shanghai is truly a land of opportunity, as are many other places in China. For some this opportunity will be much easier to capture than for others. The people here do not have the same degree of mobility that we enjoy back in the United States. Some who are born into the countryside will never be able to go to the city, where the vast majority of the nation’s prosperity is taking place. Some will be able to go, but not legally, and once they arrive in the city, making ends meet may be more difficult and painful than they imagined. For some it will be painful and difficult, but not nearly as bad as it was in the country. For some it may be worse. Some of the more fortunately will be born into a well-positioned family, be able to pursue an education, and enjoy the kind of life that their parents dreamed they would have.

I saw a man yesterday who may be one of these people. I followed in his footsteps as he pushed a rusty bicycle laden with stacks of cardboard and numerous, voluminous sacks. I used my camera to record this short scene, if only for a minute. His pace was steady and determined, though slow. We were walking up a narrow that cuts through a scene of massive urban redevelopment – something that can be seen all over the city. He is obviously poor, and he will most likely take this cardboard and the contents of these plastic bags somewhere to be recycled. The money will likely be used to provide food for himself, his family, and perhaps there will be a little bit left over for savings. The whole time I followed him I never really saw his face. He didn’t even know I was behind him. He could be anyone. His story is like that of so many others.

I am going to go ahead and post this short clip here in this blog. It certainly doesn’t have any of the glamour of Shanghai, but it does show life as it truly is here for some of the people. This man, like so many others, works to provide for himself. He doesn’t ride around on the back of a large garbage truck collecting cardboard that has been set out and stacked neatly. His story is much more modest and the truth of his situation is hardly disguised. He collects cardboard and whatever is in his plastic bags. A couple of girls walk in front of him, carrying bags filled with things that they purchased from the large shopping district behind us. People pass by on scooters, bicycles, or on foot, hardly even noticing us and busy going about their own lives. Another person passes by in an Audi – a luxury dreamed of by many but affordable to few in this city. Around us, dilapidated buildings are blocked off for demolition or have already been leveled to make room for new, modern high rises. The road, crumbling in places, may be redone, or it may simply be touched up. Either way, this short scene shows some of the growing pains of this city. The pain doesn’t necessarily mean that things are bad, but it is a necessity for a place and a people with such ambitions and aspirations. After all, the people of Shanghai are all in it together to transform their city into a beacon of prosperity that will awe the world, and each person has a role – even an old man collecting cardboard for recycling.

And with no further ado, here is the short clip.

A Weekend on the Town

2007-09-03T02:17:00.000-07:00

It is now four days that I have officially been in Shanghai. Time isn’t quite flying yet, but I am pretty sure that it will soon enough. I actually hope it does go slow because there is so much to do and see here that I feel like it would never get dull. It’s a fascinating city.

We were asked to name some adjectives that would describe the city. I think a few good ones would be lively, booming, bustling, full of contrast, polluted, cosmopolitan, international, and smelly. It’s lively because there is always something going on, no matter what time of the day it is. This city never sleeps. It’s obvious how much it is booming and bustling by how much commerce and industry there is here, all of the buildings under construction or demolition, cranes visible no matter where you are, and every street being full of people going about their daily routine. The city is full of contrast because you quite often see someone driving a brand new Lexus or Mercedes down the same street where another person works all day at their little square in the sidewalk selling trinkets for pennies, lucky to go home with $10 at the end of the day. It’s obvious how polluted it is when you can hardly see more than a mile away during the day time, let alone see any blue sky or even the sun. It’s cosmopolitan because people fuss over brands, images, and lifestyles of conspicuous consumption. It’s a trend setting city for China. It’s not uncommon for people here to save for many months to buy a cell phone that would make many Americans envious. It’s obvious how international the city is when you step foot into Lujiazui, the financial district that is booming so quickly that it is catching all of the world’s attention. Multinational companies are racing to set up offices in this city, especially in this particularly prestigious area. The city is smelly because every five feet I walk down the sidewalk, the odor of the air changes. As I venture out into the markets in the morning in search for some breakfast, it’s not uncommon for the smell of cooking meat to be followed by that of dirt, clay, and pollution as a sidewalk is being torn up, then to be followed by warm cake, then live fish. Truly there is never a dull moment here.

Since I last wrote, we have had the chance to venture out into a few parts of town, such as a large park, Lujiazui, a truly massive 8+ story mall, the historic French quarters along the Bund, and Nanjing road.

Despite all we’ve done and seen so far, we have barely even scratched the surface of all there is in this city. My feet ache from all of the walking we have done, but I yearn to continue on. Even as a sit here, with my feet completely lifted up, no weight bearing down upon them, they throb with pain as a constant reminder of the many miles of walking we have done, not to mention the bit of running I did in the morning. If only these shoes could talk, the stories they could tell would be amazing. But alas, my select words will have to suffice.

One of my most important goals with this blog, aside from keeping people informed about how things are going, is to expose China for what it truly is and not dress it up or down. I can already cut to several stereotypes. First off, Americans generally think that Chinese people are short. Yes there are short people, especially amongst those over 50 years old. But as I walk along and look around, they are quite close to the average height in America, particularly amongst those my age and under. I have already met several students that are well over 6 feet tall. I even saw one who easily topped 6 feet and 6 inches. So, the rumor that Chinese people are short is false. They are definitely taller than the French. That is something I can personally attest to. Congratulations France, you now have yet another reason to be made fun of. Oh, and the Chinese are much nicer to people than you are too. Strike two. But I highly doubt you are reading this blog anyway. I figure you are too busy preparing all of those terribly arduous but amazingly tasty hors d’oeuvres that make your 35 hour work week seem too demanding. Or perhaps you are crippling your cities by allowing all of the public transportation employees to go on strike for 3 weeks straight. But I digress.

Speaking of French, I have had a surprising amount of opportunities to use it here. There are several students here that are studying French because they will be doing an exchange program with a university in Nice. I admit that I am almost envious. Nice is, in my opinion, in one of the most beautiful areas and climates in the world. Words don’t quite do it any justice. See, there is redemption for France after all. And besides, I lived there for two years and consider it to be a home away from home, so I am allowed to make fun of it. I may end up helping some of these students practice their French, especially the accent, because it would be quite fun.

We also just happened to get a bit disoriented today while taking the metro and ended up in the completely wrong place. While we were there though, a really nice Chinese man started talking with us. He threw in a few French words, which we noticed, and so I told him that I also speak French. We talked for a few minutes as we waited for our train to arrive, and it was a lot of fun. He had pretty good pronunciation, and his French was definitely better than his English. As I have already said, people are incredibly kind, friendly, and curious here. He and his wife excitedly waived goodbye to us as we boarded the train and got back on track (no pun intended, so stop rolling your eyes!).

The metro system here is surprisingly good. The city has 20 million people, but only 5 lines. That’s pittance compared to how many lines there are in New York or Paris. But these 5 lines get used quite well. The metro trains are very long too. Of all the metros I had been on back in Europe or the US, they were no longer than 4 cars long. This one is so long that I can get on board, look to both ends and not see either one. It’s good because the trains get really packed. There are so many people here!

Even late into the night, it’s surprising how many people there are everywhere. We were out on Nanjing road, which is famous world-wide for its many upscale boutiques that would be found in the most upscale parts of London, Los Angeles, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, or Dubai, and it was completely packed with people at 10:00pm. In fact, this was just the beginning as most of the clubs, occupying the floors that rose up in the buildings and overlooked the street, don’t really get crowded until midnight. It was just four of us exploring the area. We were actually a very interesting group. There was a huge, well-built and tone black American guy that drew everyone’s attention, a guy who is all-around cool, easy-going, and instantly likeable, myself – the lost-in-thought and always observing type that was also described as being the “Spiderman of the group”, and our Chinese colleague Benjamin (his English name). Here are a few pictures from our stroll along the street.

Yes, we were quite the group. On this very road we met an English girl who had been in China for a month, spoke no Chinese at all, and had been longing to meet some English speaking people. She joined us as we wandered down the road, taking in all of the bright neon lights that would rival Vegas, and trying to avoid all of the people who ran up to us asking us to buy things ranging from flowers to DVDs to wheels that clip onto the heels of your shoes to “massages”. Some were extremely difficult to get to leave us alone. I snapped a picture of a couple who had been pestering us for a while. Here it is:

The picture is kina blurry, but I actually like it that way. It reflects the crazy environment the street has. One of the people nagging us was the lady in orange trying to get us to follow her off of the street but “only a minute away” (according to her). Another was a the guy with his hand on his hip trying to sell us “massages,” but based on the pictures of the girls that were on the cards that would be performing the massages, I certainly had the impression that they were offering other services as well. And by no means do I mean manicures or haircuts. The guy on the right in the purplish shirt is Benjamin. He has been studying English for over 10 years and still hasn’t been to an English speaking country (such a luxury is quite rare for the Chinese), but his English is quite good. We ended our adventure up by People’s Square where we hailed a cab (the metro stops running around 9:30 or 10:00pm). Things are incredibly inexpensive here, even cab rides. Three of us took a 15 minute cab ride back to the school and it was only $3.80. That’s not bad considering back in Fort Collins, a cab ride starts at $3.50.

I’m pretty much adjusted to the time schedule here. I admit that I would rather keep things as they are right now, because I am getting tired at about 10:00pm and wake up between 5:30 and 6:30am. Unfortunately, I doubt that will last more than a week. But who knows? I have giant windows in this room and it’s bright by 6:30am, so maybe I will be okay. Being a morning person would definitely be better for my studying routine, not to mention the fact that I have to wait an hour after turning on the water heater to be able to shower.

Classes start tomorrow morning. It feels like it has definitely been a while since I’ve been in class, but I’ve actually been quite diligent in studying and practicing my Chinese over the summer. I’m obviously making much more progress and at a much quicker rate here. I suppose that would be a given considering that hardly anyone really speaks English here (despite the rumors that everyone speaks English, which is not true.) This is pretty obvious when you try to buy something. When I step up to tell them what I want to buy, my Chinese magically flies out my ears and I botch it all up. I did much better today though when we went to the… umm… *cough cough*… “heavily discounted but posh brands” market… *cough cough* and I got to put my price bartering skills to work. Actually, it was easier than I thought it would be. First off, I have no problem just walking away if something is too expensive or a transaction is too complicated or if it’s something I don’t fully understand. I got a pair of sunglasses that I actually like (I’m really picky about sunglasses) and a really cool, rugged-looking Diesel shoulder bag (the only acceptable form of man purse) for about $15. Not bad, I say. My offer for a watch was shot down and they didn’t even chase after me after I had walked away. Apparently my offer was too low even for them. And I’m okay with that. I definitely need to go back though because I really need a watch and some clothes. We haven’t even been here a week and I’m practically out of clothes already. It’s laundry time!

And to wrap things up, here are a few more pictures. These first ones are some really awesome pictures I took from our residence hall. The first one is from my own balcony in my room! The second one was from the balcony at the end of our wing, and it shows the Pearl Tower in it. The lights are coming from a huge stadium a few blocks away. It had just rained, so the air was really clear and clean and the clouds were visible but the rays of light still lit up in the sky. This place is amazing.

These next couple of pictures are some that I took and offer a slightly more artistic perspective of Shanghai.

Chinese Confession - Life Under the Sea!

2007-08-31T18:41:00.000-07:00

Here I am in Shanghai. I hope this blog posts alright because everything on this site is in Chinese, so I'm relying on my computer intuition to know which button to push and where. If anything, however, it's a good way to learn Chinese!

I am quite sure that the day I spent traveling here was the longest day of my life. I mean this, of course, both the literally and metaphorically. The day technically began at 3:30am when I got up to go to the airport. The flight to Chicago was only a bit over 2 hours long. The flight from Chicago to Shanghai, however, was 15 hours long and landed us 14 hours ahead from Colorado time. The flight took us straight north from Chicago, up over Canada, the Hudson Bay, and even over the North pole! We then came down through Siberia, Mongolia, into China where we flew around Beijing, then finally landed in Shanghai a bit after 2pm on Wednesday. Had I had a window seat I would have taken some of those sweet pictures from up at 10,000 meters, but I didn’t. Oh, and my Cannon camera is a piece of junk anyway, so they would not have turned out well.

My first impression of Shanghai was a complete slap in the face. I had no idea this place is actually under water. Okay, it’s not actually underwater, but it might as well be. The humidity here is insane. I half expect to see goldfish floating in the air. They certainly have enough live, consumable aquatic creatures at the market. Perhaps that counts. Suddenly Colorado seems so dry. I don’t think you are ever really dry here. The instant we stepped out of the plane the humidity made all of our clothes about 10 times heavier. And the temperature right now ranges from the low 90s and dips down into the 70s at night. I am quite surprised, however, at how not unpleasant it is. I don’t mind it one bit. I sleep quite well at night when it’s hot and humid, unlike everyone else who came with me who has their air conditioning running at full blast and set to -3 degrees. I truly am a warm climate person, and that is definitely a good thing here.

As for the city itself…wow. I find myself at a loss for words. I now know why my friend Nathan said the best word to describe this place is “nuts!” I think I’m going to have to rely primarily on photos to describe this place. Even then, photos don’t do the city justice in certain aspects. First of all, this place is enormous. The population is estimated to be around 20 million and growing – fast. There are high rises everywhere. When I walk around the neighborhood of the school, it’s hard to get a true feeling of just how big the place is. But the city has a highly developed elevated transit system, and when you are driving on that, you see just how big the city is. You are about 6 stories up on these roads and as you drive along, you see and endless sea of skyscrapers. During the day, the haze grays everything out, so it’s simply a bunch of neutral colored buildings. But at night, everything changes. The lights flash, blink, dazzle, and inundate your mind. It’s kind of like Las Vegas, just multiplied by about 20 times.

At the street level, this place is replete with photo opportunities. It’s incredibly picturesque, but not in a romanticized, idealized, or mother nature-y kind of way. When you look around, you see things as they really are. You see people as they really are. A short woman in her 50s pushes an elder woman in a wheel chair, while another person sitting on the sidewalk asks if you want to buy some fish or crayfish – all piled up but still alive and squirming within a pail of water. A man rides a rusty, three-wheeled bike down the tight and crowded street ringing a bell. He is collecting cardboard. His clothes are dirty, his hair messy and unkempt. On his feet he wears old sneakers, dirty and abused – reflecting the nature of the work he does to provide for himself and his family. Two women wait as a man negotiates a price on a dish scrubber. This all is taking place within about a 5 foot radius. Oh, and don’t forget the other 8 people, 3 bicyclists, and 2 scooters who are merely passing through. Meanwhile, I am waiting for a woman in her late 40s making what I can only describe as a “Chinese crêpe” about 3 feet in diameter atop a giant barrel filled with what I assume to be boiling water. She spreads it so that it ends up paper thin as her husband spreads an egg, some seasonings, and a peculiar but tasty brown paste on top. They then put on something crunchy and rectangular, then fold the crêpe-like thing all around it, but not before I ask for them to put on a spicy sauce. This will be my breakfast. The cost: two Yuan, which is about 30 cents. Not bad. It certainly beats a $0.99 Egg McMuffin at McDonalds, or a $4 cappuccino at Starbucks. A cool bottle of orange juice or a cup of fresh soy milk will help it go down nicely.

You see how the people here live, what they do, what they sell, and how they get around. They, in return, look right back at you with a look of complete, unabashed curiosity. They may stop and just watch you for about 5 or 10 seconds before they move on. Perhaps they will just watch you for a moment as they go about their daily routine. Or they may stop and start talking with you. You never really know. It’s quite an adventure. And this all happens within about 5 minutes in the morning as I seek out some breakfast. You can imagine what the rest of the day would be like.

If I had to pick one word to describe the Chinese people, I would pick “curious.” Although Shanghai is much, much more exposed to foreigners than most cities in China, everyone I come across or talk to is very kind, hospitable, and incredibly curious. Having also lived in France, I can readily compare both cultures. The contrast between the two is quite sharp. In France, people were largely apathetic. Maybe they would talk with you, maybe they would sneer at you and go on, or maybe they would be quite nice. But overall, they are quite apathetic. They are rather closed until you get to know them really well. At that point, they will remain your friends forever. Here, however, the people are incredibly friendly. They are so eager to talk with you, see what you do, find out what interests you, and just watch you. They ask you where you are from, not because they would judge you on your nationality, but rather as a representation of their curiosity of the world outside of China. Whether you are American, Canadian, Brazilian, or even Azerbaijani (we can pretend that’s the right word), they would treat you the same. You are a foreigner, and they want to know more about you.

We were at a supermarket getting some drinks and one of my colleagues said hello to a lady in front of the store on the narrow street. She instantly began asking him questions. His Chinese vocabulary consists of about 5 words at this point, but she had no hesitation or frustration as she kept asking him questions, even though he couldn’t understand a thing. She had seen his cross he wore around his neck and asked him if he was “Hallelujah”, which meant she was asking if he was Christian. As we emerged from the store to catch up with him, more Chinese people walking and biking down the street stopped and just watched. A crowd began forming, and as it grew, more and more people stopped. They didn’t watch from a distance. They would walk right up in the middle of the circle where we were conversing and look right up in to our faces. It’s simply amazing how eager they are to learn about people from outside China. They aren’t rude or anything. They are quite the opposite, in fact. You may feel like they are stepping into your space on a perpetual basis, but that is the norm here. It’s hard to have 1.3 billion people in a country without people getting a little cozy.

Whenever we go around as a group of 30-some American students, we draw a lot of attention. Today we all went into a gallery that was selling some incredibly amazing Chinese art. The ironic thing here was that the people who were working in the gallery busted out a camera and we taking pictures of us! I took a few pictures too, including a giant stitched panoramic picture of the Shanghai skyline. I hope it turned out well, because it was jaw-dropping amazing. They even had a dozen chairs set in front of it for people to sit down and just look at it. It looked more like a painting than something stitched, and that’s saying quite a lot.

We were also at a bus stop waiting for a bus to come to pick us up, and I looked up and saw someone opening a window in an upper-floor restaurant across the street. They pulled out a tripod and a camera, setting them up on the window sill, and took a picture of us. Of course, I couldn’t resist documenting this moment by taking a picture of someone going to that much effort to get a picture of us. As I said, this place is nuts!

Person Taking Photo of Us

The Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, which I shall hereafter refer to as SUFE, is pretty nice. This school actually has three campuses in Shanghai, but we are on the smallest one. This is where the graduate, international, and highly gifted students go, and all of our classes will be here. We will have an economics class taught by one of the most important economists in China, which is pretty impressive. Apparently he often travels all over the world to speak. I will also have a finance class and a management class. This will all be in English. We also will be doing a relatively extensive research project on a topic of our choice that will require us to go out and meet with people in the city, interview them, and write a final report. We even have a budget for this project! This will certainly be no equivalent to a spring break in Cancun or in Macau, and I’m quite happy about it. The opportunity to learn here is limited only by my own motivation, energy, focus, passion, and curiosity.

The Chinese students start classes a week after us, so the campus is pretty much dead right now, aside from a few faculty members, us, and the local wildlife. At CSU, the local wildlife consisted primarily of squirrels. We don’t have squirrels here though. What we have, instead, are kittens! Yes, I am completely serious. If you go out in the afternoon, you will see kittens lounging under bushes or sprawled on the curb of the gardens relishing in the heat. Occasionally one will get into a building, at which point you see someone scoop it up and carry it out in their hands, its disproportionately large head popping out from their two hands holding it. They let go of it outside, where it scurries off. I haven’t seen any fully grown cats yet. Sometimes a person will have some food and set it down for them. They see it and all come running, even from across the plaza and devour the meal. They are all very skinny and, up close, a bit mangy. They certainly don’t lead a spoiled life. But they do provide some great entertainment.

Speaking of food, Chinese food is also quite nuts. Well, sometimes it’s literally nuts, as peanuts are a popular dish. But it is certainly not much like Chinese food in the US. That doesn’t mean it’s bad though. At first glance, some of this food would look a bit unpleasant to someone who eats nothing but typical American cuisine. There certainly are some things that I don’t like, but it’s pretty good for the most part. At the more formal meals, they have a giant Lazy Suzanne in the middle of the table and the servers just bring out dish after dish of food. You just serve yourself with chopsticks or a soup spoon. I quickly gave up on cross-contamination of food, as it’s impossible to clean your chopsticks. Just make sure that if you try to pick something up, you get it on your plate instead of dropping it and loosing it back in the dish. That’s about the best you can do. And if you only want a tiny bit of something, you can just use your chopsticks and grab one bite from the dish and eat it without having to dish it up on your plate. I could definitely get used to this. We eat a lot and there is a big variety of things. My favorite dish so far is definitely Squirrel Fish. I’m pretty sure it’s fish, though I have no idea what kind it is. It may be a different kind each time. I’m not sure. Either way, it’s a culinary work of art, sometimes served with a small flame burning from the mouth. On the tastiness scale of 1 to 10, it easily gets a 9.5. There is no fishy taste at all. It’s incredible.

Yesterday we went out to get cell phones. Wow. You would not believe the cell phone stores here. We went to one digital store and it was probably as big as Best Buy, but literally at least half the floor was devoted entirely to cell phones. Compared to the USA, where you pick your carrier, then get slim pickings as far as phones go, here you pick your phone, then you buy a SIM card to pick your phone service. And as far as phones go, you easily have hundreds you can pick from. It’s insane. Oddly enough, however, I didn’t see any desktop computers in the store. They only had laptops, and even then there weren’t nearly as many as there were cell phones. Overall, though, I would say the prices in the world of high-tech are about the same here as in the US, if not even higher. So, there will definitely be no flat panel TV in my dorm room, not that I plan on watching TV anyway. We have one, but I haven’t even turned it on to see if it works.

The dorm rooms are relatively nice, I think. I mean, they are slightly more ghetto than in the US, but we have our own balconies in each one and our own bathroom. Mine has an awesome view of the huge Shanghai World Financial Center skyscraper in downtown that they are constructing in the financial district. This thing is MASSIVE. When competed, it will have 101 stories and will be the second tallest building in the world from floor to roof. I have followed its construction for the past year because I’m an architecture buff. Most days I can see it from our room, but it’s very hazy. For some reason, our rooms have two beds, two desks, but three closets. Oh, we also have three bookshelves on the wall. I don’t have too much stuff, so I don’t take up much of this space. The bathroom is an adjustment. We do have a normal toilet, compared to the common hole in the ground. But the shower simply hangs from a bracket attached to the wall. There is no shower stall or anything, just a drain in the floor in the middle of the room. There is also a large basic affixed to the wall with one facet that provides cold water only. It’s a deep sink, but there is no counter or anything, so I’m working on getting used to it. The hot water heater has to be turned on an hour before showering so that it can heat the water. We do have air conditioning though, and that is nice. When it’s in the mid 90s outside with 100% humidity, a small room featuring cooler air can make for a nice retreat.

My Room

My Bathroom

View from Balcony

View from My Balcony

The bed could probably be more comfortable. It’s quite hard, as is the pillow. But I sleep well enough, especially after being out in the heat all day. And in the end, I think we have it pretty well here. I certainly have no cause for complaints. And the cockroach I found in my luggage as I unpacked is the only one I’ve seen in here and the only one I expect to see in this room. As long as that remains the case, I will be quite at peace.

More Pics:

Confessions of One Too Nerdy for His Own Good

2007-08-27T23:26:00.000-07:00

Here it is. I leave for China in less than 7 hours. If I were to go to bed right now, I would get 3.5 hours of sleep at best. That’s assuming I could even fall asleep. That doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest right now. I’m not tired. I’m savoring the feeling of anticipation and tying up loose ends. I installed Skype on my laptop so that I can talk with people for free (assuming I can get the microphone to work – yet another thing I shall have to test before I go to bed). The past several days have been absolutely perfect. I wouldn’t change a thing. I got to go out with a bang at a farewell/stuff yourself stupid party at Cinzzetti’s. I would much rather have an additional reason to celebrate besides my leaving. That would just seem too, well, “putting me at the center.” So it also had this second theme to it. There’s nothing quite like going out American style and just stuffing oneself stupid. If your IQ doesn’t drop by at least 10 points from being so full, then you have failed. Failed! And of course, I must not fail to mention that I was given the gift of a Hotwheels taxicab with which to take random pictures in China. The cabbie confessions will live on!

Saturday I spent virtually the entire day packing, moving things up to where they will be stored in Loveland, and driving way too much. I watched a movie with Jearime and Jessica, The Painted Veil, which was an interesting film about a British couple who moved to China and worked in a remote village stricken by Cholera. Aside from that, the highlight of my day occurred, ironically, at 3:00am when I arrived at my brother, Jake’s, condo where I would crash for the night. He wasn’t there. I called his phone. No answer. Lovely. It’s 3 am and I had little choice but to proceed to call people until I finally found someone who would be willing to let me sleep in a spare bed or sofa. Fortunately my Mom was willing to answer the phone, which quickly resolved that issue.

Sunday was another busy, run-around day. Between saying “see ya” to Zach, gaining temporary custody of his “The :::insert vulgar word here that begins with F and ends with K and modify it to serve as an adjective::: Dollar” (I much prefer this title, but apparently I’m weird), unloading yet more things, and enjoying a China-centered common interest gathering at Chiu laoshi’s house (CSU’s infamous Chinese teacher who, students would unanimously agree should they be asked, is truly “the shizzle” (in the superlative of “good” way, of course)), it was another great day. And I think I just set a new personal record for an overly complex and multi-layered run-on sentence that simultaneously demonstrates my unabashed nerdiness. Go me!

But seriously, the party was awesome. We ate an abundant amount of Chinese food, played ping pong, talked with Nathan in China via Skype, and had a great time overall.

Apparently I am such a nerd that I am actually willing and eager to go to school and attend classes even when I am not even enrolled in them, let alone expected to attend. Yes, it’s true. I am that much of a nerd. I went to three Chinese classes, all back-to-back. I got to see some familiar faces, meet some new ones, and make a vain attempt to quench my unquenchable thirst to learn as much Chinese as possible. I went to class from 11am to 2pm, and it was awesome. The whole time, aside from enjoying the fact that I could actually manage to convey a semi-moderately slaughtered attempt at responding to the unexpected questions that were being thrown my way, I was counting down the hours that remained before my departure. I also still had a list of things I needed to get or accomplish before I left. If anyone is in a similar position of anxiously awaiting an upcoming event, I highly recommend making lists. Make many lists. It offers a good distraction that also happens to be quite productive and makes you look even more organized, responsible, and prepared than you probably are in real life. Way to boost the intangibles!

Finally, after unloading the last remaining things from my car, two of my siblings, Annelise and Ben, brought me back down to Denver where my roommate, Dave, has agreed to take me to the airport at 4am.

Yes, you read that right. Someone has actually agreed to get up by 4am. I am still shocked by this. I even know this person personally! I really need to get his autograph.

If you have managed to stomach my seemingly unfocused ramblings thus far, I congratulate you. The next time you read another post by me will probably be after I have arrived in China! I now have just 6 hours and ten minutes left! And I think I’m even less tired now than before. I guess I shall direct my productivity elsewhere. Until my next post, which will hopefully include pictures!

ZOMG, I Refuse

2007-08-19T23:18:00.000-07:00

A survey was conducted recently, according to CNBC and the Wall Street Journal, that indicated that the biggest fear of 52% of Americans is not a recession, a certain individual becoming president, world war III, or anything like that. This fear, instead, is one thing: China.

I'm confused.

Or perhaps America is confused. Actually, I think this is quite possibly the case. I won't put money on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if half of these people couldn't even locate the country on a map. *sigh* I suppose not everyone enjoys such a nerdy appreciation for geography as I do.

I don't mean to be all political, but knowing what I know about China (as limited as that is) actually makes me far less afraid of the country. Of course, I will be over there in Shanghai for the next 4 months, which I incessantly repeat whenever the topic arises. But am I worried? No. Am I afraid? Certainly not.

My fear, instead, lies in something completely different. You may scratch your head at first, but it is with good reason that I announce that my biggest fear right now is of the local law enforcement and/or judicial system.

You are probably confused. Let me demonstrate. Imagine my scenario. I'm fascinated by big cities. I've always wanted to live in a big city and see the fast-paced life, people so busy going from place to place that they have no time to notice you. People watching is terribly fun. I also love architecture - especially dense urban architecture. Shanghai is probably one of the top five fastest developing cities in the world. It is absolutely incredible. If you don't believe me, check out this video:

I also love learning foreign languages, and Chinese is by far my favorite that I've studied. It would take me far too much space here to explain why I like it so much, so you'll have to take my word for it. Basically, it's the shizzle.

I also like what I study. International business and finance is fascinating to me. It just so happens that in the realm of both of these areas of study, there is probably no place more happening than Shanghai.

My fear is that something is going to arise that will keep me from being able to go. I am doing everything in my power , while trusting that everything else will work out, in order to be able to go. I have my passport, visa, luggage, schedule, plane tickets, stuff, list of stuff that I don't have, and even money. I'm set.

Almost.

More specifically, my fear is that I am going to be cited for some seemingly minor traffic violation that, as petty as it may be, would require that I make a personal appearance in a courtroom at some point between August 29th and December 22nd, thus rendering me unable to go to China.

Is this fear irrational? I think so. But given my track record, I'm trying to play it as safe as possible. I have been pulled over for quite random reasons. Fortunately, I have not received a ticket for any of these times. I'm a safe driver and I think the police understand that I am quite willing to comply to their requests.

Some of the recent reasons I have been pulled over include:

A crooked license plate
Burned-out license plate bulbs
A burned out headlight

Just today I discovered that the rear license plate on my car is MIA (missing in action). I don't know exactly when I lost it, but I have a sneaky suspicion that it was Monday. If that is true, then I have been driving around in a car without a license plate on it for the past week.

I haven't gotten a ticket yet, but I'm pretty sure that there is no way I could talk my way out of this if I got pulled over. This is why I am so relieved that I happened to be up in Loveland this weekend, where I would have to go to get a new license plate. I also just happen to have the necessary documentation to get a license plate (according to the county clerk's website, at least). I also happen to have tomorrow off from work in order to attend a big energy and oil conference in downtown Denver. But alas, I will have to get new plates instead.

Phew! I think I may be able to narrowly avoid getting slapped with a traffic violation that may require a court appearance and foil my China trip.

Maybe I'm just paranoid. Maybe I'm just excited beyond words to be able to go. It's probably both. But I can assure you that I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that nothing keeps me from going. And when I do arrive, rest assured that many, many photos will be posted. So keep your eyes peeled!

Chinese Confession I – The Countdown and a Salty Situation

2007-07-18T22:58:00.000-07:00

Does anyone remember what it was like to be a little kid on Christmas Eve? All of the excitement and anticipation for the following day – and the prospect of all of those presents, food, and fun – made it completely impossible to sleep? For hours you would just lay there in bed, knowing that the limited efforts to go to sleep were completely in vain. You couldn’t possibly sleep if you wanted to, or even if you had to. If you do, then you might have an idea of what I’m going through right now, though to a relatively minor extent – a state that is getting progressively more agonizing with each passing day.

I finally updated my myspace profile. I added a countdown. I don’t really like this particular one because it merely counts down to 12:01am on August 28^th. My plane doesn’t take off until around 6:30am. That a difference of 6 ½ hours. That’s an eternity in my book.

I updated my facebook profile. I added a countdown there. I like this one. It counts down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until 6:30am on August 28^th. Such an acute attention to a detail even as slight as the seconds on a timer should indicate how ridiculously anxious I am to leave. If you click on it, it runs in real time. I also added a map of the earth with all of the places I’ve lived (red), visited (blue), and want to visit (green). My red zones feature Colorado, France and (I practically blocked this one from my memory) Utah. Right now China is a big green mass in the middle of Asia. I can’t wait until I can turn it red.

The fact that I’m going to China in just over a month is still just a bit past the horizon. I’m already wondering what kind of ridiculous, cultural, linguistic, or even cooking mistakes I’m going to make. Will it be like when I was in France? I have several memories that I can now look back upon and laugh, especially the very first meal I ate in my very first apartment there.

When I arrived in France, everything was new, despite the fact that things were actually decades or even centuries old. Manosque, a tiny town nestled in the Alps just northwest of the Riviera, was the first place I would live. I felt like such a foreigner. The language was different, the city was different, the surroundings were different, the weather was different, even the air smelled different. But I kept my chin up; I was excited. For so long I had been dreaming of going to a far away land, some place beyond the known and even understood.

And I was hungry. Very, very hungry. I arrived at my apartment and met my colleague, Seth, with whom I would spend the next 2 ½ months – the person who would have the biggest impact on my entire two years in France as he helped me cope and adjust. He was nice enough to offer to make dinner for me, which was rather fortunate because I was only capable of making ramen and peanut butter sandwiches – two items that, incidentally, are virtually impossible to make in a country without ramen or peanut butter. Oh yeah, I also was quite good at making Jello, but that literally is impossible to find in France. Since I was incapable of making anything, he volunteered to whip up some spaghetti for me. I sat there, still in awe and slight culture shock at the prospect of twenty two more months in such a foreign place. We chatted casually as he boiled the noodles and mixed up some sauce.

Once the spaghetti was ready, I dished up and began to eat. Of course, a good plate of spaghetti is hardly complete without any parmesan cheese. Fortunately for me, there was a familiar, cylindrical container sitting there in the middle of table, which I recognized instantaneously as being parmesan cheese. I twisted the cap and pour it all over my spaghetti. I really do love parmesan cheese, so I made sure I got plenty of it. Finally satisfied, I set it down and began to eat.

I took a bite, and chewed it without paying much attention. My mind was racing with all of the things I was being exposed to. I took another bite, my mind still racing. I took a third bite, and something seemed to awake me from my state of mental surrealism.

“Wow, this spaghetti is salty!” I thought to myself. I forced myself to swallow the bite, and looked down at my plate.

“Should I take another bite? Should I say something? I just met this guy. How is he going to take it if I complain that his spaghetti is too salty?” I thought to myself. By no means do I want to get things off on a bad foot. What was I to do?

Finally, without much more thought, I casually said, “This spaghetti is a bit salty.”

As I looked up at him standing by the stove, he grinned somewhat awkwardly and responded saying, “Yeah, you put a lot of salt on that.”

“Salt?” I replied, turning to the container of parmesan cheese set before me. I turned it slightly and saw, for the first time, the image of a blue whale that would be all too familiar in the future, with the titled “Baleine” and “sel” on it.

My French was terrible. I had no idea what “Baleine” was, nor did I have any idea what “Sel” was. For all I knew, it was a brand of parmesan cheese. How wrong I was.

“Ohhhh.” I said. “I thought that was parmesan cheese!” So there I sat, in a moment of awkward silence, staring at my beyond-excessively salty spaghetti.

“You don’t have to finish eating it if you don’t want to. I don’t want you getting sick.” he said.

Fortunately, we promptly laughed about the whole strange situation. As I am a terribly unobservant person, I didn’t notice the very strange look that was on his face as he watched me dump gobs and gobs of salt all over my spaghetti. He didn’t want to say anything for fear that I might freak out and scream, “Okay! So I like salt! Is that such a big deal?!”

I can’t even remember what I ate after that. Maybe it was a bowl of cereal; maybe it was just some M& Ms. I don’t think it really matters. What does matter was that we were able to have a sense of humor about things. I learned that lesson several times, and it’s one that I am definitely going to remember when I go to China. There are things that I’m not going to understand. There will be situations where I will have absolutely no idea how to act or what to do. There will be stores out there filled with products labeled in strange characters that I will be at even more of a loss to identify than I was with “Sel.” There will be stressful moments. I will need time to adjust. It may only take a week, or it may take 3 months. But having a sense of humor, being able to laugh at myself, and not taking things too seriously will definitely make a difference. So, I am quite sure I will have plenty of Cabbage Confessions of the Chinese variety to go for a while.

Chinese Confessions

2007-07-02T22:02:00.000-07:00

Shanghai
(soon I will be able to post my own pictures, but for the time being, I'll just have to "borrow" some from other people)

For any of you who follow along with my cabbage confessions, you are probably well aware by now that I will be in Shanghai (and occasionally elsewhere) on August 28th through December 22nd. I've pretty much given up on any hope I may have superficially had at containing my enthusiasm about going. I've enjoyed writing my cabbage confessions so much that I am going to continue them while I am experiencing China. I'll try to keep them entertaining! However, rather than adopting yet another blogspot address for them, I will go ahead and post them here. I am justifying this, of course, by the fact that have cabbage in Chinese food, so that will be enough to keep the address for this blog relevant.

In the meantime, I have been thinking a lot about what am amazing opportunity this is going to be. I actually sat down and tried to put it into words, and I am going to include those here.

A strange feeling has come over me today. I feel more excited about future than I ever have. Last Friday night I had dinner at my Chinese teacher’s house with a bunch of her other Chinese students. While I was there, she gave me a photocopy of a couple chapters from a book about a westerner’s trip in China along a 3,100 mile long highway. These specific chapters were talking about his experience in Shanghai. I read some of it during my lunch break today. It was amazing! His descriptions were so vivid, and having studied Chinese history for the past semester and the language/culture for the past year, I could follow it very well. It’s simply breathtaking. If ever there was a perfect moment to go see Shanghai, this is that moment. It’s like seeing all of the following take place, in the same place, at the same time: the industrial revolution, New York city massive skyscraper development boom in the roaring 1920s and the massive influx of immigrants (with the only missing element being a statue of liberty), the silicon valley during the dot com boom of the 1990s, some of the most amazing architecture in the world being built right before your eyes right next to historical buildings, businesses from all over the world coming to one city to set up their operations in one of the most important cities of this century, and the vibrant, modern, cutting-edge, and ever-changing cosmopolitan life of the city. All of this is happening right now in Shanghai – home to 18 million people from all over the globe. Needless to say, if I didn’t have 55 – 60 hour work weeks and the last Harry Potter book to look forward to in 19 days, I would be going absolutely insane right now. This upcoming semester is going to be a truly amazing experience. The thought of having to wait is agonizing!

On another, but equally exciting note, I came across a fascinating article in the Bloomberg magazine today talking about careers for people in my position and age, those getting ready to graduate from college and enter the work force in the world of finance. I’ve spent the past 4 years in college trying to make all of the right moves, learn all of the most critical things for my future, and seize every worthy opportunity that presented itself – all this while working and paying for school by myself, doing art, and trying to maintain a social life. I won’t lie – I’m really satisfied and proud of what I have been able to accomplish up to this point. I have a well-developed (and constantly developing) knowledge about finance, investing, economics, and international business, along with knowledge of four languages. I have an unabashed passion for art, hard work, creativity in general, and math, and fairly impressive work experience to accompany it. I have worked like mad to get to this point, and I have had a lot of support from friends, family, and professors – and I have to give a large amount of credit to them for their encouragement and help. My main concern was about post-college life and trying to find a satisfying, rewarding, and intellectually stimulating career. In the Bloomberg article, entitled “The Graduates,” it said, “Wall Street and Silicon Valley are courting… graduates – kids with top grades, finance and math skills and a couple of languages – more heavily than any students since the days of the ‘90s dot-com explosion.”

When I read that sentence, everything clicked. Before, I had the feeling and the hope that I was doing all of the right things to have a good future. But now that I’ve read the news articles and actually seen what the Street is seeking most earnestly, I feel a profound satisfaction that my hopes are not in vain. And yes, even the amazing experience of studying in Shanghai for a semester is going to make that future that much brighter. Needless to say, I am thoroughly ecstatic and optimistic that the future will be bright. Not only will I get to do the things that I enjoy so much, but there is a major need for people who have that very ability.

I hope I don’t sound as if I am bragging or boasting. I just wanted to share my excitement about something that has me so excited.

Confession 15 - Irony

2007-05-02T17:04:00.000-07:00

Irony is not without a sense of humor. If I haven't alluded to it yet in the context of any of my cabbage confessions, I have been looking for a full time job for the summer. This job may or may not replace my employment as a cabbie – I haven't decided yet. But since this confession is somewhat related to that, I will go ahead and post it. If any of you are disillusioned because this confession is not actual cabbie-ing, I apologize. I just had to share it. And I want to continue to tell my crazy employment-related stories.

I had a job interview last week in downtown Denver. I had been working hard at being well prepared for this interview, and I wanted to make sure that I had all of my bases covered. I had extra copies of my resumé, a full tank of gas, good tires for my car, functional car, made prearrangements for all of my classes that I would be missing, and even left early enough to allow extra time for getting stuck in rush hour traffic.

Once I got into the downtown area, I was starting to really focus on how I would handle the interview. Being only a mile away from my interview destination, I figured I was on the home stretch and had nothing to worry about.

My car didn’t agree. It decided, instead, to lose functionality in the gas pedal. If you’ve never had this experience, I will explain. A gas pedal works by pushing on it. Genius, I know. But somehow this mechanical marvel does a whole bunch of complicated mechanics and propels the car forward. In my case, I assume that it hooks up to spark plugs which are then used to shock the hamster under the hood, which then runs in a wheel that propels my car. I’m not sure how it survives. I think it lives off of the gas that I put in the tank. Whatever the case, this little hamster gets about 40mpg on the highway.

The problem arose when my gas pedal quite suddenly became rather flaccid. It had about as much motivation as most of the seniors on campus at CSU. It pushed on it and it collapsed to the floor. It gave no resistance, and exerted no effort. To make matters worse, this was in the middle of Speer Boulevard, which happens to comprise 8 lanes of insane traffic. So, I was trying to coast as far as possible in the vain hope of finding a good place to pull over. The red light ahead of me seemed to have a different idea.

In my attempt to keep my momentum, I decided that I should turn right at the stop light and pull over in an area with less traffic. I succeeded in doing so at the cost of running a red light. I could only hope that there were no police around. My car finally stopped in the middle of the single lane entrance into a downtown park-n-ride. Preparing for the worst, I popped the hood and took a look.

It wasn’t as bad as I expected. Apparently the cable that connected the throttle to the gas pedal had come loose and lost its tension. This was much better than the alternative of it completely breaking off (which had incidentally happened to me about 2 years ago while delivering pizza). So I popped it back in place, ecstatic that I actually managed to avoid opening the hood and staring in complete confusion while I anxiously decided what to do next.

I lowered the hood and then looked up to see a local police officer stopped behind my car. As everyone knows, I am a completely honest person, so I did what any honest person would do: I waved to him, jumped in my car, and drove into the parking lot to look for an exit. As I meandered my way through to the gated entrance, the police officer stopped next to me and asked me if I was aware that I ran the red light back there.

“Oh, sorry. My car wasn’t working.” I replied. I then…well… just drove off. In hind sight that probably wasn’t such a good idea. But for some reason, he didn’t follow me. So once again I managed to avoid getting a ticket.

I even managed to arrive at the interview on time. I even managed to get the job. And, as of the time of me writing this, I have not received any ticket in the mail. Irony truly is not without its sense of humor, but the ironic thing is that the ironic situation had an even more ironic outcome. Don’t you think?

Confession 14 – A Throbbing Finger and a Filthy Dollar

2007-04-08T14:18:00.000-07:00

The Infamous Dollar

A while back I posted the count of flirtations and such that I had received. As much fun as that was, I’ve actually lost track. It’s tragic, I know. There was so much grey area that it was getting difficult to determine what would count as a flirtation. Some of them were just funny, others were a bit awkward. That’s just part of the fun of being a cabbie.

Last night I got a call to take part of a big group of people to the Hunt club. Yes, I know – the Hunt club. I always dread those because the people are generally jerks. But I figured I’d keep an open mind about it. Maybe I would get some cool people.

I pulled up at a big house party. There were people everywhere, but they weren’t the usual clientele that would be going to the Hunt club. They were all CSU students or at least that age. I guess they told the dispatch that they needed to go to the Hunt club. When I talked to them, they were apparently going to the roller skating rink.

These people had obviously been drinking and were obviously having quite a lot of fun. One guy in particular must have been having a blast because he was wearing women’s lingerie. It it was quite… well… words can’t describe it. He was a little bit hairy and was running all over the place. I just had to laugh.

After we got everyone piled into the car, we headed over to the roller skating rink. They were talking like they were going to go to the Hunt club after skating. I couldn’t quite figure it out though. The group was actually very co-ed. There were at least as many girls as guys, and all of the girls seemed like the pretty, popular types. But I figured that they just wanted to have a good time and, if they were going to drink more, the Hunt Club was right next door and was one of the few bars in the area.

I just have to point out the irony though. Believe it or not, you can actually get a ticket for biking or even rollerblading drunk, just like you can for driving a car. If you don’t believe me, just ask around. I’m pretty sure that someone within the first or second degree of your social circle has had that unpleasant realization. And here I was, taking a big group of people to the roller rink where they would attempt to skate around while tipsy.

If anyone actually attempts this, let me know how it goes. I’m now curious as to whether it makes it more fun or you just end up crashing more.

As people were climbing out of the van after we arrived at the final destination, I ran around the car to the other side to lift the middle-back seat to let the people in the very back climb out. While fidgeting with the lever, one of the girls pulled out some money and asked if she could put it down my pants.

I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, partly because that’s the first time one of my passengers has asked me that question, and also partly because my finger had gotten stuck it in the joint mechanism of the seat and was hurting quite badly. If I moved the seat forward, it pinched it even more. If I moved it backward, it pinched it even more. I’m always amazed by the little things that happen that make an ordinarily bizarre or, in hind sight, humorous situation even more random and crazy.

Another result of getting my finger caught in the seat, aside from the sheer pain of it, was that I managed to dodge the question. I actually have very good reason for not wanting her to put money down my pants. It’s the same reason that I tell people who handle a lot of cash for their job that they should wash their hands before they use the restroom. Money is dirty stuff! Who knows where that bill had been before? I could see it, as she was stretching her arm out to me, held lightly in her finger tips. Sure, her pretty smile and puppy dog eyes would have made it a very tempting offer for virtually every guy on the planet. But I knew better. That bill was obviously old and worn, wrinkled from passing hands countless times, brown, greasy, and dirty around the edges and creases. But on a more microscopic level, it was a bacteria and STD smörgåsbord of unsightliness. And the last thing I wanted to do was get an STD from some random person putting money down my pants. No thank you. Not to mention that I’m not that kind of guy :)

And so, after I finally got my throbbing finger free from the seemingly perilous trap of that was the hinge of the seat, I stepped back and let her out. She gave me the money as a tip, and smiled as she and her friends walked off to go roller skating. I wished her a good night, my finger continuing to throb, and wondered to myself if that counted as another flirtation?

Confession 13 - Conspiracy Theory

2007-04-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

Being a student at Colorado State University, I am constantly exposed to individuals and ideas that can be surprisingly irrational. Whether it is manifest through random comments made in class, the clothes people wear, or what the CSU administration insists that I do for registration, some things just naturally bring out completely screwed up look to my face and, if I were a comic, the letters WTF would be written in a size 128 font above my head.

In driving a cab job, on the other hand, I generally expect for the people I meet to be a bit crazy. After all, enough alcohol can make just about anything happen. But last night I think I met one of the craziest of all of them. She was especially crazy because she was so confident that she was not crazy but that the world was crazy. The craziness was based on “Conspiracy Theory,” which, until last night, I thought was just a fabrication used on TV for our amusement. How wrong I was.

I picked her and another guy up to take them to Tailgate Tommy’s, the bar at Drake and College. As we pulled away from their house, she started telling me that she knew the future and that anyone who knew the future was going to get f***ing killed. They always kill the people that know the future. For this specific reason, she would not tell me her name.

“How is it that ‘they’ know that you know the future?” I asked her, humoring her slightly.

“They just do!” she replied. She then asked me, “Do you know anything about the truth behind 9-11 and the New World Order?”

“Uh… I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know a whole lot about it.” I replied cautiously and dumbfoundedly with the invisible letters WTF flashing above my head.

“Well, I’ll go ahead and tell you about it in a nutshell.” She replied.

Oh great! What a way to start out a fun filled evening of cabbying.

“Do you remember Hitler?” she asked me. I tried to contain my inner laughter because I immediately recognized that as a genuinely stupid question.

“No I don’t remember Hitler because I wasn’t alive back then, but I do know about him.” I replied.

“You should read more history then.” she told me, completely oblivious to the fact that I, very subtly, was jabbing at her ridiculous question by taking it literally – the same subtle jab that I am now making again with the letters LOL flashing invisibly above my head.

She then proceeded to inform me about the “New World Order” and what that entailed. I will do my best to summarize her summary of this massive conspiracy that is going to shake the world.

She started out by saying that very soon there is going to be only one country and one religion in the world that will govern all. She didn’t specify which country this would be, but did mention that before it happened, the US, Canada, and Mexico would all join together as one country. Apparently Condoleezza Rice had just gone up to Canada to meet and discuss this very topic. As proof, or to validate her argument, the lady claimed that she had footage of the meeting.

Then she started talking about Hitler and how George W. Bush’s grandfather or great grandfather had provided him with the funding for WWII. At this point, it was getting rather difficult to contain my mocking laughter. I still didn’t know what this had to do with the point that she was trying to make, but I decided I would just humor her and be entertained for a while.

She then talked about some massive highway that was being build leading from Mexico through the middle of the US and up to Canada. I think she missed a conjunction because she never mentioned how this was supposed to weaken the US and allow us to be taken over by invading Russian forces that would poison our water supply and use submarines to destroy our country. I think it had something to do with nukes as well, but I’m not certain. Oh yeah, she also insisted that 9-11 was a fabrication of the government, though she never said why they did it.

Then she made the biggest mistake of all – she tried to enter into the topic of economics and the market. She said that the major drop of the US market that occurred “4 weeks ago” (which I happen to know actually occurred 6 weeks ago on February 27^th, 2007) was because Russia, which held all of the US’s debt decided to sell them. Apparently this was an attempt to undermine the American economy. I asked her how that related to the Shanghai Composite dropping nearly 9% on that day, but she didn’t really have a good answer to that question. She just said that that was because of Russia as well.

Then she moved back to the whole “New World Order” idea that between the nukes, the poisoned water supply (I still have no idea how Russia could possibly poison all of the US’ water supply because, well, that’s a whole lot of streams and lakes and wells and treatment facilities to deal with), and the submarines, America would be destroyed. The only way to survive, she explained, was to accept Christianity.

At about this point, we arrived at Tailgate Tommy’s, where she paid for the fare with a credit card, thus completely disclosing her identity (though I’m sure she overlooked that). Before she got out, she decided to give me a DVD that I should watch that talked about all of this. I gladly accepted the DVD, with the letters LOL and CYA flashing invisibly above my head.

I still have this DVD and if anybody wants to watch it and join me in bringing up valid and irrefutable arguments that completely undermine every single point that is made, just let me know! I’m sure it would be much more fun to have someone to join me.

Confession 12 - Just Because

2007-01-28T21:05:00.001-08:00

No description required.

Confession 11 - Crazy Little Thing Called "Life"

2007-01-27T13:59:00.000-08:00

As the title denotes, life is not lacking a sense of humor. Just take my job for example. You’ve read the confessions. I see some really crazy stuff. Granted, it’s not nearly as crazy as the stuff New York cabbies probably see, but it is for FoCo.

I also seem to have a genuine knack for picking the cabs that have “issues”. I’ve gotten used to this, actually, so I try to have a sense of humor about it. I’m sure, however, that the office personnel just roll their eyes when I come in and tell them what’s wrong with my cab this time. That thought actually makes me laugh. I’m not trying to find reasons to not have to work; I just genuinely find problems with these cars.

Anyway, enough rambling there. It’s confession time!

Last night was looking like it would be a rather dismal night. The car I picked, which was incidentally one of the only two left, was having issues. Actually, this thing had been through quite a lot. It had over 580,000 miles for starters. When I got in, the meter wasn’t working, so I figured I would just have to calculate the fares with my calculator. When I put the car in drive, it took absolutely forever to even start to accelerate. When I would punch the gas pedal, the RPMs would rev up and then slowly come back down as the car ever…. so….. slowly….. began….. to….. consider….. the….. idea…. of….. accelerating………………. maybe. But it actually did run and I really didn’t feel like missing yet another night of work, so I decided to go with it. I would just have to be careful when pulling out into traffic.

Just to give a better illustration of how much “character” this car had, after driving about 3 miles, the meter actually popped off of the dashboard and rolled onto the floor beside me. The hood had some strange bumps and awkward angles in it – a good indication of the considerable repairs that it has gone through. If this car could tell stories, I’m quite sure its confessions would blow anything I could possibly write out of the water.

Oh yeah, the car also shook quite violently if I tried to accelerate after completing a turn. I laughed and told my customers that it was the “built in massage feature.” They usually laughed and thought nothing else of it.

Well, the night was going rather uneventfully. I talked with some cool people, but I also had the misfortune of meeting a jerk from the Hunt Club. I have actually noticed that, almost without exception, the people that I drive from the Hunt Club are the most unpleasant individuals I meet as a cabbie. And this is not just a casual observation after a couple of experiences. They genuinely are completely unpleasant people. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe it’s because I’m not a hot chick and so they hate me. Maybe it’s because they realized that they just wasted hundreds of dollars and have nothing to show for it. Or maybe they have come to the realization that the only way they can get remotely close to girls without receiving a restraining order is by going to a strip club. Whatever the case, I think it’s pathetic and a waste.

The only exception to this was one guy who was there just because his girlfriend works there. He seemed like an okay guy.

As for the jerk, Mark (There, I divulged his name! Vengance is mine! Mwahahahahaha), I was supposed to pick up at the Hunt Club last night, fortunately for me, he decided that he didn’t actually need a ride. That was a good thing because I’m pretty sure he would have thrown up in my back seat. That’s something I avoid at all costs.

I got a call about an hour later from someone who incidentally happened to be at the Hunt Club, and he asked me if I want to pick a guy named Mark and his friend. I laughed lightly and said, “No. I was supposed to drive that guy earlier tonight and he was not a very nice person. So no, I won’t drive him.” It felt so good to be able to say that!

About half an hour later, I was cruising around through old town looking for someone who needed a ride home. It was about 1:45am. (Side note: isn’t it odd that the vast majority of my confessions occur around 2:00am?) I saw a guy flagging me down and he seemed okay from a distance, so I pulled around.

Closer up, he was really grubby-looking and dirty, perhaps 40 years old. His skin was thick and prematurely worn and stressed from over exposure to bitter conditions. His clothes were very dirty and he carried a tightly packed backpack. A second guy was tall and very skinny. His clothing was in about the same condition. As they were approaching the cab, I wanted nothing more than to just drive away. I probably should have, if only for my own personal safety. These guys looked extremely dodgy. The second guy’s motor skills were terrible. He struggled just to climb into the back seat of the car. I would say it was comparable to seeing a giant graham cracker try to bend and fit in. Somehow he managed to get settled in. His hair was grey and wiry, though he couldn’t possibly have been as old as he appeared. I can usually smell it when people have been drinking a lot. But from this guy I caught no odors of alcohol. His brain must have been completely fried by drugs. It was a really sad sight.

When they both were settled in, trying to warm up from the cold outside, I asked them where they needed to go. They said they needed to go toward the Charcoal Broiler. This happens to be right next to what is probably the most ghetto and dodgy trailer park in the city.

I am generally not a very judgmental person, but I was started to be extremely cautious. Everything just seemed wrong. So I asked them plenty of questions, trying to figure out what they were up to that night, where they were from. Whenever possible I would dart a glance toward them and try to pick out some identifying features that I could easily remember.

Just as I was hoping that I wouldn’t get robbed by these two guys, something crazy happened. I actually wasn’t a bit surprised by this either. My transmission went out! I tried downshifting and hitting the gas pedal but all that would happen was the RPMs would rev up. I was heading East on Mulberry, a high traffic road, and was losing speed fast. I did what I had to do – I pulled over and explained to them what was happening. I ended up parked next to Carls Jr. where the cab finally came to a stop. I apologetically told them that I couldn’t go any further because the transmission went out and then called dispatch. After several minutes of talking on the phone, they found someone who could come get me and these two guys.

As we were waiting for the other cab to arrive, they whipped out some rolling papers and something to fill it. You’ll have to excuse my ignorance because I have no idea what pot is like, never having smoked it. I’m guessing that’s probably what these guys had, but maybe it was just tobacco. I don’t know. But I told them they’d have to get out of the cab if they wanted to smoke, so they did. The other cab finally arrived and I got my things and loaded them up, as did the other two guys. We took them to their extremely dodgy trailer. I was glad I didn’t have to go there on my own, especially after the other cabbie said, as we were driving away, that it was probably the biggest crack house in Fort Collins.

And after that, I got dropped off at base and went home. I didn’t make much of any money, so in that sense it was pretty much a waste of a night. But I am glad that things worked out the way that they did. I didn’t get robbed, I officially concluded that the Hunt Club sucks, and I managed to kill a cab without being at fault. I’m pretty sure that you would probably agree that life truly is not without a sense of humor.

Confession 10 - The Night Off

2007-01-13T16:08:00.000-08:00

Today's confession picks up where we last left off. As you may or may not recall, I had just decided that it was a bad night for cars and I really am death averse. So, that being the case, I decided to opt out of working for the night.

Upon my arrival home, I began pondering what I should do. After all, it's not every night that you actually get out of work and can actually do something fun. On a purely sporadic and whimsical... umm.... whim... I decided to take a previously humourous activity to the next level.

The concept was simple, and originated with my good friend Regina. We had previously taken paper bags, drawn on faces, and used them as masks for taking rather hilarious and random pictures. For an example, the following picture was probably the best scenario we have come up with so far:

As I was saying before, on a rather spontaneous basis, I decided to take the mask fun to a higher level: a music video! Apparently I have a reputation as being a dancer. I cannot attest to this because I haven't actually really seen myself dance. But apparently I was at least entertaining enough to win $100 doing it several years back in a talent show.

So with that, I give you the very short "Masked Dancer" music video.

But before watching, please remember that upon clicking "play", you hereby waive any use of this video for the purposes of blackmail.

And with no further ado, here it is!

Confession i - A Mid Winter Night's Foreshadow

2007-01-06T16:13:00.000-08:00

Yes you read that right. It’s not a typo. This is confession i – as in the imaginary number; the square root of negative one. Given the strange nature of this particular confession, I figured that such a numeration was only appropriate.

I’ve never really been one to believe in luck, fate, astrology, curses, or even manbearpig. Life is what you make of it. I stand by that. But at the same time, I’m also not stupid. I do recognize that sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes there are indicators or warnings, sometimes there aren’t. I’m sure we all can think of times where we should have done or not done something, and we ended up regretting it bitterly. Last night, I am convinced, could easily have been such a night.

When I arrived at work, I was ecstatic that there was actually a nice selection of cabs that I could drive. Usually there are only a couple of vehicles left by the time I check in, and I end up driving the big beastly Ford Aerostar that gets approximately 2 gallons per mile. You read that right. Gallons per mile. Don’t you just love American cars?

I picked one of our Honda minivans because they carry more people and are pretty comfortable. When I was checking the vehicle out, I noticed one of the headlights was out. I honestly don’t have much trouble driving with one headlight; I’ve done it before. In fact, I had been doing it Wednesday night, completely unaware of course, when a kind police officer pulled me over and burst my blissful bubble of ignorance. So, knowing that the Fort Collins police exercise no reserve in pulling over someone with only one headlight, I decided to pass on that cab.

Next, I opted for a Camry. We have a bunch of those cars and I like how they drive as well, particularly since they are virtually identical to my Corolla. So, as I was checking out this vehicle, I opened up the hood and immediately noticed a sweet smelling steam rising steadily from the radiator.

“No way. No way am I driving this one.” I thought to myself. I also had learned just one week ago the travails of driving a car that leaks engine coolant. That particular reality check hit me down in Denver in Cherry Hills. An overheated cab in Fort Collins on a Friday night, probably at 2:00am just like the rest of my confessions, is not my idea of a good time. So, I passed on this car.

I tried a third car. It started up fine and everything checked out alright. Well, all but the horn. Technically we aren’t supposed to drive without a working horn. But I figured I would just conveniently forget that little detail. I checked out and hit the roads of FoCo.

I got about 3 miles up the road when I started to notice that the car just happened to be teetering on the edge of losing control. Whenever I would get above 30 mph, the car would start to swerve back and forth, rhythmically. It wasn’t just a casual swaying. This was the kind where your hands leave imprints in the steering wheel because it’s impossible to maintain control. I have never experienced anything like it. All the traffic was flying past me at normal speed and I couldn’t even keep the vehicle going straight at 30. I was lucky there were no cops around because they probably would have pulled me over thinking I was drunk.

So, I called dispatch and explained my predicament. They said I could bring the car back and get another one. Whoever said “third time’s a charm” must have only tried twice. There’s another thing I don’t believe in: stupid cliché expressions like that one. So, I carefully drove back to the base. They gave me yet another car. I was sincerely apologetic. I didn’t want to be a pain, and I’m really not that picky. Apparently it just wasn’t my night for cars. Actually, I was surprised the each vehicle kept getting worse and worse. Finally, I was walking out to the fourth cab of the night, when I noticed it was totally covered in snow. Apparently it hadn’t been driven in a while.

“That’s odd.” I thought to myself. As I started wiping it off, I noticed that the driver side of the vehicle was dented. Okay, it was actually totally bashed in. In fact, neither of the two doors were able to open.

“Yeah, that one had a slight fender bender, but it should still be drivable.” they told me.

Okay, go ahead and put yourself in my shoes at this point. The first cab I picked had a burned out headlight. I probably would have gotten pulled over. The second vehicle had a leak in the radiator, so it probably would have overheated and left me stranded. The third vehicle couldn’t even drive straight when it got about 30 mph (I’m still puzzled about that one), and I would have almost been guaranteed to get in a wreck if I drove it. The fourth vehicle had actually been in a wreck and only the two passenger side doors could be opened.

As I said, I don’t really believe in luck, fate, or anything like that. But I do have common sense. And common sense was telling me that it was not going to be a good night. I would be lucky to get out of it without getting killed.

So I did what any person with common sense would do. I went home. I would rather have a lack of a confession than see how things could have gotten worse. And thus explains why this is confession i. It’s the confession that doesn’t exist, because hopefully I managed to avoid something I would have bitterly regretted.

Confession 9 - The Cling On

2006-12-31T14:41:00.000-08:00

We all know one. Or have known one. Or, as much as we may not want to admit, have actually been one. I am referring, of course, to the infamous cling on – and no, not the Star Trek variety. Well, perhaps the cling on may have been a die hard trekky, which may have contributed somewhat to a limited development of social skills. Or maybe the person is as unobservant as I am. Either way, the cling ons are out there, enjoying the bliss of ignorance because they probably don’t recognize that they actually are cling ons.

You may be wondering why I am going on about cling ons. Well, I happened to have a run-in with one while doing some cabbage a few weeks back. But before I go into the actual story, I must at least try to pre-“save face” by saying that I really do think that I am a nice person. I try to be respectful of people and, for the most part, treat them as I would want to be treated. With that being said, and with no further ado, confession time!

It was an unusually warm night for mid December. The bars had just closed and it was a bit past 2:00am. I found myself up in old town looking to pick some people up near Old Town Square. I pulled up to the corner, in my giant, boxy, ghettolicious Ford Windstar cab/van that I was cursed… I mean “blessed” to be able to drive for the evening. The group I was picking up came to the van and piled in the middle seat. A fourth guy, in his late 20s and fairly chubby (okay, I admit, he was fat) climbed in the front seat. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and a pair of plain blue jeans that were anything but flattering. Sorry ladies, if you are swooning for him already, I can’t help you out. I don’t have his name or number.

Before I even had the chance to pull out, this guy next to me in a drunken haze exclaimed, “You should drive this thing like it’s stolen!”

“Ooooookay… you’re weird/annoying. I will just politely chuckle and pretend you are a fungus so I don’t have to say anything back” I thought to myself. And that’s what I did. Well, minus the whole “pretending he’s a fungus part”. Well, who knows? He may have had some fungus growing on him somewhere, but I’d rather not know. So, I asked the group how their night was going.

“Good” was the overall reply. And of course, the guy next to me again said, “You should drive this thing like it’s stolen!”

We made it no further than 2 blocks before a girl sitting in the middle of the middle seat behind me leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Could you pull over so we can let this guy out?”

Usually I would say “what?” just to make sure I understood her correctly, but there was communication taking place that didn’t need words. This guy must have been driving them crazy and I could tell. So, I immediately whispered back “Where?”

She sat back and then said out loud, in a not-very-convincing-unless-you-are-so-drunk-that-you-can’t-tell-the-difference-between-cornstarch-and-a-car kind of way, “You can just drop us off at the light up there. That’s our stop.” The guy, who was quite drunk (in case you haven’t figured out yet) said “But that’s not Shields [street]…”

“Oh, you’re right. It’s the next light.” she said in reply. I confirmed that and before we even got to the next stop light the guy said in a rather anxious tone of voice, “Hey man, can you pull over?” He was making sounds that I dreaded more than any: those of one about to vomit.

Everything happened so fast, and with such acute coordination that you would have thought I had been preparing for this moment for hours. I brought the van to a near immediate stop (barely having time to pull it over to the side of the road. In about 3 seconds I had put the van in park, undone my seat belt, undone his, and even leaned across him and opened the door to help him get out. The last thing I wanted was for a guy of this volume to let loose of all he had drunk that night in my front seat. Oddly enough, he was actually saying “thank you, thank you” as I my arms were flying every which way but with precision. Apparently he thought I was being polite and helping him. I suppose I was, but my motives were not quite as good-natured as he thought. I still laugh at that thought.

He stepped out of the van, which rides about as high as any big SUV. Because the edge of the road sloped down toward the curve, and more so because he was absolutely wasted, when he stepped onto the pavement, he lost his balance, tripped on the curve, and came tumbling down. It almost seemed to happen in slow motion, like it would in a movie or instant replay. He crashed down on his side and began to roll. He ended up lying flat on his back, arms and legs completely sprawled, looking straight up at the night sky, eyes and mouth wide open, about 10 feet away from the van in the middle of a parking lot. All of us in the car, of course, were staring at him in complete silence and utter shock (well, slight shock at least. In hindsight, such an outcome would be anything but surprising). After a couple of seconds of us just staring at him, in his wrecked and fallen state, the van door hanging open, I again leaned over and pulled the door shut.

And then we drove away. It took about 3 more seconds before everyone busted out in laughter. The three seated behind me explained that they didn’t even know who the guy was. He had just been following them around all night in Old Town and they had been trying time and time again to ditch him. And when the cab came, he just jumped in with them. They thanked me profusely for helping them finally get rid of him and even tipped me well!

And thus is the story of the cling on. It’s a tragic tale, but one that has nevertheless probably made you laugh, even if just a little.