In about twenty five years, China has gone from this great product of the people's revolution
to this
and this
and this,
or this
Category Archives: China
It’s a small world
At the Auto Show, everybody had huge video displays with overwhelmingly loud soundtracks. Almost all of them based on African music (or, more accurately, African music as developed by African slaves brought to the United States and then perfected by African-Americans as freed men and women. Rock. Jazz. Rap.) African music is now World Music – the music played at a Auto Show in China or a concert in England.
All business transactions, in China, in the US, everywhere, involve the numbering system based on the Hindu positional, numeral system developed in India about a thousand years ago.
Why?
Because, in the world today, the most powerful answers become the most dominant answers. It really is becoming a small world.
I write this after watching Jenson Button winning his third F1 victory in the Bahrain Grand Prix. Michele and I watched the race in a sports bar, The Big Bamboo, in the West Nanjing Road area of Shanghai broadcast on a English language feed from Malaysia. Michele drank a couple of Scotches (neat) and I drank a couple of glasses of red wine from Chile – Michele had a hamburger and I had a Ruben sandwich. The world is small and life can be very sweet.
Buying a genuine fake watch
One of the things I have wanted to do while in China is buy a good fake watch. Not a piece of junk that only looks like the real thing from 30 paces and weighs nothing: but a watch with a real automatic movement (not battery operated quartz) and the heft to feel like the real thing. While still back home, I had read that the best automatic movements for fake watches were made in Japan. But there is a certain paradox in trusting the person selling you the watch – that is fake, after all – is selling you a real Japanese movement that will last much longer than the time it takes to get out of Shanghai.
To make matters even worse, the best watches are supposed to be found only in little shops off back alleys – the kind of place where they run a white slave trade. Walking down the street, about every 15 feet, somebody is trying to sell us a watch and we would walk straight ahead and keep on talking to ignore them. At some point, at about tout 42, I thought, Hey, I want to but a fake watch, I'll say Yes to the next person. And it worked out great! We were lead down a back alley to a little shop.
They had all kinds of cheap watches, but, when I told them I wanted a genuine fake watch with a real Japanese movement, they started bringing out suitcases with all kinds of watches. What do you want, Rolex? Britling? Tag Huer? Patak Philippe? Each suitcase was full of one brand of phony watches. I finally settled on a Patak Philippe that looks and feels real including a glass back so I can see the real, fake movement.
Mission accomplished.
Shanghai Auto Show
When we got up Friday morning, it was raining so we changed our plans and went to the Shanghai Auto Show . After all, that was the raison d'être for being here in the first place. I think that China is now the biggest automobile market in the world (I know more Audi's and Buick's are sold here than in the US). It was a madhouse and great fun: thousand of Chinese auto fans, each with a camera and many with SLRs with huge lenses. After wandering through the West Hall with numerous cars I've never seen or heard of before
and some I am pretty sure I will never see again,
we came to a huge General Motors display.
including Chinese auto girls
It was very impressive and made us hopeful for the poor beleaguered General. We moved on to the East Hall which was full of other Chinese cars we had never heard of and a meager sprinkling of European cars. It was very disappointing and we kept saying There must be another hall. Finally, we figured it out, we had been in West 1 and East 1 and we had, not one, not two, but seven more halls to go to. This show is huge! Maybe five times the size of the San Fransisco show. And they closed early (5PM). We had expected it to stay open to at least nine but we began to expect they were closing when they started covering the cars,
and reviewing the troops.
now we will have to come back to see all the halls we missed. Maybe on Saturday.
Comments on Comments
We have been getting comments from several people, most consistently from Richard and Ophelia, and we want to say how much we appreciate them. I haven't figured out a quick way to answer them yet (or post them where they can be easily seen) but, if I did, I would say that, for me, the comments are the best part.
Winging it like this, we sometimes feel pretty isolated. Everytime we walk down the street, any street, every street; we are being hustled. For trinkets, for tours, by guides (or pseudo guide), for watches, for the the best Chinese restaurant, by "students" who want to learn English and will show us a good place to shop. Yesterday we got hustled by a couple of real pros. They were a young couple on vacation who asked us to take their picture (the problem is that this happens alot and is usually legit). They were here to see a Chinese Tea Festival which sounded like a good place to get some pics, so we went along. Two wasted hours and some very expensive, but delicious, tea later, we got out. It definitely put a damper on our first afternoon in Shanghai. So coming back to the room and seeing comments from a friend is a real spirit lifter.
Richard commented that China is like the 19th century industrialists/western expansion zealots but with 20th century technology and that is exactly what I keep thinking. Without the robber barons of the 1880's trying to make money off of hotels and railroads, we wouldn't have Yellowstone or Yosemite. A huge amount of damage was done by the exploitation of the west but much of the result was good. There is an audacity of taking on the future in China that is exciting and admirable. We look down on the railway station from our room (on the 22nd floor, the highest I have ever stayed in a hotel – and it is a Holiday Inn Express!) and see gleaming white electric high-speed trains. Why can't we do that in the good ol' US? We see new buildings everywhere with huge Bladerunner jumbotrons (gigatrons?) on the sides.
Hong Kong and Shanghai have great subways that go within a few blocks of every where. There is an adventurousness and boldness, an old-west no rules rashness that is very exciting.
-Steve
In response to Richard's question: "What is about the food you've had elsewhere that separates it form true local cuisine?" there are several things.
- Many of the places where we have eaten have large menus that include items from various regions. This is especially true of the restaurants with English language menus, which are obviously geared toward tourists, but also the restaurant where we ate last night here in Shanghai had a section on it's menu for Cantonese barbecue, in addition to a number of Sushi items.
- It frequently seems like the English menu is not always the same as the local menu. In an extreme case of this, when we had dinner at the hotel in Zhangjiajie, they brought us an English menu that did not include any of the items we saw others eating around us. And when we tried to order off this menu, the only thing that they had was the bottle of wine, the one thing we expected them to tell us they didn't have. All the food dishes we ordered were not available. After the first two waitresses got tired of running back and forth to the kitchen, finally a boy from the kitchen staff came out and we would point to things and he would shake his head, until we finally found something he could make. This obviously was not their regular menu.
- When we don't have an English menu available, we have been getting by with a mixture someone with limited English helping out and pointing to items on the menus I brought with me from home. I didn't think to bring a menu from each region, so when all else fails, we eat Kung Pao Chicken and green vegetables with mushrooms. Everyone seems to be able to make that.
- This menu was very limited. He only had the local ingredients like smoked ham and cabbage, and the chicken he may have just killed out back for us, to work with. And we had someone to explain to us what these options were so we could work out a menu that really worked for us (which really means we avoided the "chicken stomach."
-Michele