Posted 8 July, 2011
The Streets of Shanghai
I had a half-mile walk from the hotel to the conservatory that became quite a source of interest for me. It was interesting to me because it was never, ever the same twice, even though the geography was the same, it was like walking through a kaleidoscope.
The two things that surprised me most were actually things that were missing. I was expecting more noise and more pollution. While I am not about to praise the air-quality of Shanghai (or Beijing), I was expecting to breath more uncontrolled exhaust like I did in Prague back in 1994 and I was expecting most of that pollution to come from noisy motor bikes with stinking two-stroke engines. The fact was, I never saw an old car anywhere in China. I saw old trucks, motor bikes and bicycles, but cars were luxury items that cost their owners big bucks just to license them. The motor scooters were almost all electric and very quiet. Some of them were quite stylish, others were working-class models. All were driven skillfully and fearlessly. All in all, the traffic was lighter, quieter (even with the honking horns), and better smelling than I had expected.
City blocks in Shanghai were arranged differently than those I have seen in American cities. They are bigger and contain more and varied interiors than cities I have seen in the west. In Shanghai, the big streets looked more or less like streets in any city. Businesses face the sidewalks that separated the shops from the roads. The streets varied in size from 3 lanes to 6 or more. In the French Concession, London Plain Trees (or French Sycamores) line the sidewalks and there are places marked for bicycle and motor scooter parking. Within the blocks, there are small streets (or alleys) that lead to residential enclaves. Sometimes the alleys bisect the blocks, but more often they turn or dead-end, so using them as a short-cut is usually a bad idea unless you really know where you are and where you are going. The alleys can be charming, clean-scrubbed neighborhood lanes or squalid, ramshackle slums. In either situation, these places are the provinces of the people who live there. Clotheslines often crisscross the streets, people hang out in the streets together, possibly playing cards, mahjong, or even chess. There could also be mini markets where people sell anything from fruits and vegetables to pirated DVDs, socks and umbrellas to purses and T-shirts.
The front doors of the hotel faced onto an alley that led between Shanxi (Shan-shee) Road and the Campus of the Sino-British University and the Shanghai University of Science and Engineering. Every day, I would pause at the front door of the hotel and choose between the right turn to the route on the street or the left turn to the shorter, quieter way through the campus. The Shanxi Road had a string of shops. Just outside the gate was a gelato shop with all the proper Italian accouterments. A few doors down was an import shop that sold cheeses and European wines. Beyond them were several housewares shops, some with very Euro styles of glasses and plates, others with stylish oriental sensibilities and some that looked like they could furnish a Chinatown whorehouse back in the States. After the housewares stores, there were the flower shops which always offered a whiff of lilies and other natural perfumes as I walked past. Sometimes, the workers of those shops would be assembling an upright display in the street. Another time, the entire bike parking area in front of two stores was filled with racks of potted plants. Sprinkled in amongst the flower shops, there were several other business; La Vida Lounge & Coffee offered a free Mojito to Ladies on Tuesdays and advertised “Happy Hour” from 8:00 to 11:00. Whenever I went past during those times, the wait staff looked lonely and bored, but a few times, I walked by and they had a pretty good sounding band with a male lead singer who sang in a high tenor. Nearing the corner was a high end restaurant where I often walked past as the wait staff was lined up for the morning pep talk/dressing down/marching orders for the day. On my last day, I walked past earlier than usual and saw the day’s food delivery laid out on the front step. Then it was around the corner past the clothing shop that proclaimed “I am Mermaid” and on to Fuxing (Fu-shing) Road and past the gates of the University Campus.
One of the things that I found charming about the French Concession in general and Fuxing Road in particular was the quiet beauty of many of the conventional, mundane things of the street. The security gates for the fronts of the stores were made in a fish scale pattern rather than the tight grids I am accustomed to seeing in American cities. The iron gates that separated residents’ doors from the street were often ornate European (probably French) scroll work. Simple walls were usually topped with ornate cornices and the sidewalks were laid in patterns of brick.
At the next corner, I would walk past either clothing shops and fruit stands on the north side or on the south side with the fresh market (usually clogged with people and bicycle traffic) with unlicensed vendors selling vegetables, fish, eels and sometimes turtles squatting on the sidewalks, and then the short string of food shops that Professor Meng said were owned by Muslims and did not serve pork, but he recommended their beef dumplings and noodle bowls.
On the far corner of the block, was the only place I saw that made what I considered real bread, but it was of a more or less middle-eastern variety. (The Chinese make dough out of wheat flour, but instead of baking it in an oven, they steam it. Ovens are not common things in the world of Chinese food.) The one that I bought (for about 50 cents) was the size and shape of an 8 inch pizza crust, thick and chewy on the outside rim, thin and cracker-like in the middle where we would put the pizza sauce and the other ingredients. This bread was salty and sprinkled liberally with sesame seeds. Across the street, along Fuxing Road, on the adjacent corner was Modern Electronic City, a market place for all things electronic housed in a 5 story building with a late 19th century façade complete with stone guard lions. I went there one afternoon with about half of our group. There were people selling anything from circuit breakers to (seemingly) new iPads and other computers. I didn’t buy anything there, but several of the students bought some very impressive noise-cancelling, high response head phones that they said would have cost over $300 in the US and cost them (after some negotiating) around $50. Several other students bought netbooks and, I think, one person even bought a laptop.
The next block had long stretches of gardens backed by walls to some sort of compound or another. One of the compounds turned out to be nursing home which explains why I often saw old people being wheeled through the streets (as opposed to the sidewalks) along my daily journey. It seemed to be a high-class operation with a brick courtyard behind a monitored electric and woman in a nurse’s uniform visible inside the glass and marble entrance. I guess the wheel chairs in traffic were all about a lack of ramps on curbs. People seemed to drive a little more carefully when they saw them. At the last corner, where I turned right onto Huaihai Road, there was a large modern building with a gated courtyard advertising “Chinese Kung Fu Tea.” I never did investigate, but I am guessing that it was a high-end tea house. Some of the fancy tea houses were places where you could pay to spend the day, drinking and eating, of course, but also just lounging about, reading a book or the newspaper, chatting with friends and possibly having a spa or a massage.
Caddy-corner from that was the beginning of a string of music-related business on Huaihai Road between the corner and the gates of the Conservatory. First, is Julius Ferrich, selling (and possibly making) violin-family instruments, next to Parson’s Music, selling a wide variety of instruments including pianos, woodwinds, brass, as well as various traditional instruments. (I bought a pair of qinzhu (chin-jew) there which are the hammers for the yangqin that translate literally to “zither bamboo.”) Next door is Parson’s Music School where (I presume) the tiger moms of Shanghai can send their children to get a leg up on the competition for getting into the Conservatory. The next store is TT-Art, a music book store that carries books of music as well as books about music and musical chachkeys such as miniature instruments, and busts of famous (western) composers. Finally, just before the gates of the Conservatory, there is another violin shop that also has a full-size gilded classical harp in the front window. Often, right in front of this store there was a woman on the sidewalk selling cherries and lychee fruits from her yoked baskets.
Just inside the Conservatory gates is a guard house full of guards that seemed to be watching, but rarely interfered with anything going on other than to lift the gate for vehicles. It was hard for me to tell if they were really doing much and they had a gravy job or if they were actually minding who entered and left the grounds. They certainly didn’t ever give me anything more than a passing glance. Inside the grounds, I walked between a building that screamed “Mao-era construction” and a small grove of dawn redwoods and other plantings and a long row of bike and scooter parking. Then on and around the corner, past the row of posters advertising the upcoming performances at the concert hall on campus and on to the “restaurant” which we always called the cafeteria or cantina. There was a real restaurant upstairs, but the main floor and the lower level could only be described as cafeterias in English. There I would drop my instruments and backpack in or near a seat and return to the window for my next eating adventure.
That was my walk. I might see anything on a given day. Once I saw a man with a six-foot tall potted tree on the back of his motor scooter. Another day, I saw some parents holding their small child over a trash can to poop. There were street vendors with carts full of nothing but socks and pantyhose and in the mornings near the fresh market, people were selling live fish, eels and other creatures for food. Crossing the streets took careful attention. One should never assume that a green crosswalk light meant that it was safe to cross and there were plenty of times that I crossed against the light because there was no traffic. The motor scooters and bikes were the worst offenders; they seemed to consider themselves below the law and habitually ran red lights, drove on the sidewalks and beeped their horns and rang their bells at the pedestrians who were in their way. Despite all that, I felt more or less safe. My roommate witnessed one car to bike collision in which the driver stopped to help the cyclist to the side of the road. I also witnessed the aftermath of a car-to-scooter fender-bender. But despite the horns and the right turns on red without stopping for the light or the pedestrians, I never saw or experienced even so much as a close call for a pedestrian. You just needed to keep your eyes and ears open; no spacing out allowed.
2011月03号 (Riding the Fast Train from Shanghai to Beijing)
Well, I’ve just settled into my seat by a window on the fast train. It’s gliding along pretty well at something that looks like fast highway speeds, but I can hear that we are still accelerating. I’m guessing that we are already above 100 mph. We packed our little bus full of luggage and ourselves this morning and the driver took us to Hongqiao Airport with the adjacent railway station. The look of it was just like any airport, with security checkpoints, arrival and departure boards, boarding gates, vast open spaces and lots of uncomfortable seats It definitely all feels new and the train itself has a new car smell to it. The trains are sleek and shiny. We glided away from the station and were quickly going faster than any of us could run (despite Roosevelt’s claims to the contrary) and once we got onto the straightaway, we accelerated steadily. The ride is so smooth that one doesn’t have a real sense of the speed, but if I gauge it against how it looks against all my years of driving and riding in the 55 tp 70 mph zone, I can tell we are moving fast.
We just slowed down to highway speed long enough to pass through a station, but we haven’t sped up again. We seem to be going slower than the speed that the track is designed for since I am feeling the tilt of the banked turns.
Yesterday was a great day. I confess that when I saw this tour on the itinerary, I wasn’t terribly excited about it. But I was excited about the Hangzhou trip and the tour guide did everything in her power to dampen my enthusiasm (not on purpose, mind you, it was just natural ability) but our tour guide for the Shanghai trip put together a very enjoyable package for us. Despite some technical difficulties with the bus’s sound system that made her voice sound like she was talking from the bottom of a well, making her very good English unintelligible to the back half of the bus, she had a great sense of what we wanted and how much time we needed to do it enjoyably.
Our first stop was the Old Town or Old Shanghai. Despite having been there twice already, I was happy to return. It really is quite magnificent, even if the old style buildings are rebuilds and modernized versions of what was here before. My roommate, Patrick, has been turned on to tea. We have been making the tea that we bought in our room almost every day; comparing his purchases to mine. At someone’s suggestion, we decided to go have some tea at the big teahouse in the middle of the Oldtown. As we began to traverse the winding bridge with nine right angles in it to discourage ghosts, we spotted a camera crew taking pictures of a famous celebrity on the bridge right there on the bridge with the teahouse in the back ground. Who would have expected to Elmo from Sesame Street in the streets of Shanghai? Not me!
We are approaching North Hangzhou station. It took us about 2 and a half hours to take the bus each way. If we left on time (which I think was the case) we will arrive in the station in about 35 minutes. One of the best time savers for the train is that we didn’t have to deal with the in-town traffic.
We had lovely (if slightly expensive time) having tea in the teahouse. Having just had a bit of an education on tea culture in China, we ordered three kinds of green tea, Drangonwell (longjing) from Hangzhou, White tea from Souzhou, and Spring Snail Tea from Idontnou. In addition to the tea, they brought us tea snacks that included hardboiled quail eggs, some sort of candied olive, almonds, a gelatinous blob made from rice that was sweet and had the consistency of bread dough (not my favorite), some dried cherries, squares of tofu, and dried soybeans.
There are mountains to our south now. From here they remind me most of the hills and low mountains to the south of San Francisco Bay. The land continues to be quite carried. We might wiz passed a stretch of rice paddies followed by a tree plantation, followed by hills with quarries, followed by greenhouses and then a small, new village with row upon row of identical roofs.
I did my best to put into practice what I learned about drinking Chinese tea in the Chinese style. I forgot to warm the cup (probably since it was plenty warm enough already from the atmosphere), but I did remember to carefully smell the tea and admire its color. We tried our teas and the tried each other’s. Nick’s white tea was the best with a delicate flowery sweetness and very little bitterness. Mine was runner up with the more robust dragonwell flavor, but better quality than the tea we tasted in Hangzhou and Patrick’s Spring Snail tea tasted like hot water until it had steeped a lot longer than the others needed. It didn’t make any of us want to inquire about the price of a kilo of it.
After about half an hour, Professor Meng came to join us (he ordered WuLong tea) and as we talked, I noticed that there was a picture of Queen Elizabeth II taking tea in the very room where I was sitting. I commented on this fact and Meng said with a laugh that he doubted very much that George Bush II came here when he visited China. It had struck me from the moment I walked in the room that this was a place out of time. We could have been doing the same thing in a room like this one in the same location 600 years ago. We looked over the water garden below (but could see very few people) and felt a moment of respite from the crowed, jostling world below. Our rendezvous time arrived and we returned to the group.
Lunch time on the train: we walked back to the dining car to buy lunch, thus creating our own lunch rush, and saw a lighted sign that told us how fast we were going – 310 kph which is about 193 mph. Lunch was difficult. There was a picture menu for snacks, but the actual hot meals were only written in Chinese. I saw someone eating something that looked like stir-fried eggplant which looked a lot better than the other option, but it took me a while to get to the counter (the Chinese are not big on standing in line, they tend to just crowd up to a counter) and then it took longer to make them understand what I wanted and longer still to get it. In the end, what I had thought was eggplant was fatty meat of some sort and all of it was the Chinese food equivalent of a TV dinner. The other Americans had long since returned to their seats either having eaten and gone or given up trying to find something to eat. AS I ate alone, I realized that even if I had not had any Western meals since I arrived. Several times, I have eaten the Lara Bars that my son gave me for the journey, but that is only western food that I can recall eating in China. I haven’t even had a cup of coffee… which might be one of the first things I DO have when I get back to the States.
I dozed off for a bit and woke up in a mountainous area. The mountains that I saw had a look about them like the American west with rocky outcroppings and the occasional talus slope, but they seem to be on a much smaller scale than our Rockies. One moment we were in the mountains, the next moment, while I was getting the computer started again, I looked up to find us in the flats again with rice paddies everywhere and the voice on the speakers announcing West Jinan Station. Mini mountain ranges.
After having tea yesterday and rejoining the group, we went to lunch at a fancy restaurant in a huge modern, glass and steel building. The food was served to us in the traditional style with a turntable in the middle and dish after dish being presented to us and shared around. It was very good. Then we were off to the tallest building in Shanghai, the World Financial Center. The building is very distinctive: it has a hole built into the top floors and the locals call it “the bottle opener.” We had a great time looking out over the hazy cityscape and taking pictures of the cityscape and taking pictures of our friends looking out at the hazy cityscape and posing for pictures of us standing in front of the windows and then we took some more pictures and posed for a group photos or two…thousand. It really was fun and terribly oriental. I didn’t see a single bottle opener in the gift shop. Someone is missing a golden business opportunity. As we waited to take the elevator down, Patrick plugged himself into his iPod and wondered aloud what was the right kind of music to listen to at this altitude. Here is the list of the best songs that we thought of: 8 Miles High (the Birds) , Free-fallin’ (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers), Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Rainbow in the Sky (Ziggy Marley), I’m On Top of the World (the Carpenters), On Top of the World (Boys Like Girls) and Flying (the Beatles from Magical Mystery Tour).
The next stop from there was hot baked plaza looking over to the Bund from our side (the Pudong side). Most of the group stayed on the bus. It was a nice enough view, but it was bloody hot and I returned to the bus only to find that I had led the retreat.
Ooooo, we’re really moving a long now. I just looked up at the speedometer and we’re up to 311 kph. It feels fast.
Our last two stops yesterday, were another huge restaurant with even better, more exotic food and the Shanghai Circus. Patrick and I ended up sitting with Meng Laoshi and a group of the Malaysian and Singaporian students. The vibe at the meal was completely different than with the Americans we had eaten with at lunch. Don’t get me wrong, they are good kids and I enjoy their company, but dinner was calm and congenial and table manners were very different. For starters, one of the students served rice all around rather than each person serving him- or her-self. Also, I noticed someone very much deferring to Professor Meng; waiting for him to give the signal for us to eat (which I had been doing secretly all along) and serving him something first before serving herself. I’d read about this, but this was my first time experiencing it and it really made the evening special for me.
312 kph. Flat terrain, some sort of brick yard, something that looks like corn growing but probably isn’t, tree plantations, an occasional rice paddy. I have yet to see any land from the train that looks genuinely wild. The stamp of a human presence is everywhere.
After dinner, we walked across the plaza to the Circus and saw a great Cirque de Soleil meets Changhai Circus show. It had beautiful acrobatics, tumblers, traditional jar tossing/balancing, plate spinning, more acrobats, and a final act with people were dressed like the terra cotta warriors on motorcycles inside of a sphere made of metal grating, zooming around and doing tricks and not killing each other. It was impressive, but it made me wonder if any of them were instructors for the Shanghai Motorcycle Driver Training Academy. It would explain a lot if they were. The show had a live band that was made up of traditional instruments (erhu, zhudi, zheng and a vocalist) on one side of the hall and an impressive array of modern instruments (guitar, synthesizer, and a huge percussion section) on the other. They did a great job and several times, I found myself watching the musicians instead of the acrobats, but I’m guessing that Meng and I were probably the only ones.
We were in the countryside a few moments ago, looking at farm land and even spotting the occasional tractor, donkey cart and even a bull cart once. Now Patrick just pointed to the nuclear reactor we are passing and the city is moving in around us… or rather, we amongst it. Oops: Rice daddy, produce, tree plantation grapes, apartment blocks… Hmmm, might have been wrong about that last statement. According to our map, we were just near the place where the South China Sea comes closest to Beijing and now we are turning inland. I tried to look off into the distance to catch a glimpse of the ocean, but all I could see were buildings.
Well we just departed the last station before South Beijing Station. The train and the time fairly well flew along. I’d better get my things corralled. As usual, I have expanded to fill the space.
Tomorrow is our last day of classes. We have some weekend excursions with the Conservatory and then we are taking the fast train to Beijing. The time this week has just flown by. I keep trying to fit in more practice time, but other sights, excursions and experiences keep pulling me away. We have more or less given up on the Conservatory's food except for breakfast. Every time I eat there, my face is leaking oil like a teenager with a bad diet before I have even finished my meal. My roommate and I have, for the most part, taken to getting noodles or fried rice from the street vendors who are food artists when it comes to quickly and efficiently making a great-tasting, nutritious dinner before our eyes and charging just over one US dollar for the experience. For lunch today, it was looking a little rainy and I wanted to sit down at a table for a change, so we splurged on a sit-down noodle place where I watched the guy make my noodles before handing them out the window for the guy outside to cook them and add the other ingredients.
My roommate heard about a "Fake Market" in the subway station at the Museum of Science and Technology and has been itching to go buy several languages worth of the language learning software, Rosetta Stone. (I know, I know, but I am just going with it.) One of the Thea Bowman kids, Avery, went with us. We successfully negotiated the subway and found the place easily. We entered an underground (figuratively and literally) market full of souvenir items, clothing, and software all at bargain prices. It was near closing time on a weekday, so the sellers called out to us to (in English) "just come in and look" or to tell us what they had inside even though we could easily see through the glass walls of their stalls. The way to buy things in Shanghai is to almost never believe the price tag or the first price offered. It has become a game for us to see how well we can bargain. I found several items that I mentioned previously with starting prices at or below what I paid for them elsewhere (doh!) and several other gift items that i had been looking for and not seen elsewhere. The funniest thing was that since we were there near closing time and not particularly desperate for anything, lots of vendors kept on lowering and lowering their prices until we became curious to see just how low we could go. Several of them gave us "evening prices" and "special deal, just for you." I have never enjoyed bargaining much before, but this was really fun for me. It helped that Patrick and Avery were really into it, but it also helped that it was simply the culture and a game that everyone played. If I didn't play the game, then I would be an outsider, a tourist. By playing the game, I take a step toward the inside.
2011 6月 29 号 (evening)
We just returned from a little shopping excursion with Professor Meng to the Old Town. I was able to acquire several items on what my roommate and I have begun referring to as our quest list. I found simple, but lovely wooden chopsticks with no finish on them to wear off with use, I bought several lovely tea cups(the kind with lids and strainers in them) to use with the tea I bought here in the neighborhood and in Hangzhou, and an old-style reversible cotton jacket with knot buttons and a similar shirt in silk. It was great having Professor Meng along to help us assess and negotiate prices. He was in valuable and I don’t know how I will ever thank him enough.
We stayed until it closed (at 9:00 PM) and then wandered around looking for a taxi. We kept on wandering until we reached the river,(not far away) and walked up to the plaza to have a look before finally getting a taxi back to the hotel.
Patrick (my roommate) bought an abacus which he is learning how to use as I write, and a silk robe with a dragon on the back. All the way home and ever since we got back to the room, he has been chortling, giggling or just gushing over how pleased he is with his purchases. The robe is outrageously gorgeous. As a junior heading back to the dorms, he is going to cut quite a figure, especially if he carries the abacus with him in one of the pockets. He’s talking about buying a pipe to go with the outfit. I suggested a cane.
For more about the non-shopping part of my day, pop over to the music and language section.
2011 6月28号
I made it to the practice rooms this morning to try out my new flutes and practice the piece that my dizi professor assigned. After a productive hour I wandered back to the hotel and hung out with my roommate until lunch. One of the administrators of the program joined Patrick and me for lunch and we talked about this and that. At some point I put forward the theory that the Chinese language suggests that time flows in the same direction as gravity, but she didn’t think so. She complimented me on coming up with my theory and suggested that it was a great way to remember the relationships between up/down before/after, but she also kindly told me that I was wrong. So much for my foray into linguistic anthropology.
After lunch she offered to show us where the full service grocery store is in the neighborhood and walked us there, helped me find laundry soap and a peculiar fruit and herb drink that Professor Meng turned me onto and then we parted company.
As we were walking to the store, I ventured a question that I had not been able to get a straight answer on from anyone else. The question was a simple one, I thought, but I have only today gotten a candid and satisfactory answer. The question was, “What shall call you?” The woman’s name is Wu Yi Min (Wu, of course, being her family name and Yi Min being her given name). At first, she gave me the usual answer that it was okay to call her by her given name, but then I asked her what she calls her colleague, Yue Yizhen, with whom she works closely and she answered Yue Laoshi (Professor Yue) because Yue is WU’s boss and because she is older. Likewise, Yue calls Wu “Xiao Wu (Young Wu). I asked, should I call you that, since I am older than you? She smiled and said, “yes, that would be fine.” About the time that I was about to ask who she calls by their given names, but we arrived at the grocery store.
In the early afternoon, we attended a lecture on the symbolism and cultural meanings of the traditional Chinese instruments. As I think I mentioned, the previous lectures left a lot to be desired, but this lecture actually took what I already knew about Chinese music and the instruments and took it to the next level. I will try to review my notes and give you synopsis of what I learned, but suffice it to say right now, that it was a welcome relief to find the material interesting and relevant to what I am doing here. An added bonus is that Professor Meng translated for her (thought, thanks to the fact that here English was passing fair, he only needed to translate for the more technical and nuanced parts.
After the class, I returned to the hotel to meet up with Tao Yi for another tutoring session. She invited me to come to her practice room tomorrow morning to listen to her and a firend/colleague practice a yangqin duet which I can do just before my flute master class. I’m looking forward to hearing that.