U.S. Salary + Chinese Prices = Yum

Just off of Nanjing Road: two orders of (good) soup dumplings, one pork-chop noodle soup, one tomato and egg over rice, one big bowl of wonton soup. Thirty-one yuan, or four U.S. dollars. I'd show you the picture but my cellphone situation is all weird and I can't download the photo.

Still haven't made the trip to Din Tai Fung -- the mecca for soup dumplingers, I'm told.

No Price Too Low

I woke up at 7 today and hoped to get some serious one-on-one time with my elusive friend The Internet, but the connection in my dad's office is so darned finnicky that in one hour, I was able to respond to four e-mails and correct one blog typo before it was time to head out for a day of sight-seeing, courtesy of the Shanghai Cancer Institute.

The first stop, on the outskirts of Shanghai, was Zhujiajiao, an ancient canal town (think Venice) in which tourists are supposed to wander around admiring its ancientness. Mainly what we did was wander around looking for the best prices on cheap souvenirs while trying to avoid eye contact with the old women who hover from tourist to tourist asking for money, hands extended.

Probably the most interesting thing that happened while there, besides having an eel head plopped down on my plate at lunch, was watching our guide, endearingly referred to as Xiao Li, turn haggling into an art form. He was tall and skinny, but the drab orange blazer that hung from his body and the way he was constantly taking a casual drag of his cigarette made him seem older than his 30 years.

Anyway, after letting Xiao Li know that we were interested in, say, a certain pashmina for my 82-year-old grandmother, he'd walk over to the merchant -- cigarette at his side -- lean in, and start muttering under his breath in Shanghainese. He'd smile the whole time, eyes darting back and forth from the pash to the vendor. Usually in these situations, when the vendors look offended, that's when a counter-offer is made and you eventually end up with some kind of compromise. Not with the mighty Xiao Li. I don't know what he would say, but things usually ended with us holding the goods and the merchant pouting badly. (I think the upside for them was that he could bring them customers in the future.)

Wisdom of Cabbies

Biggest compliment of the week: on the taxi ride home from Pudong to Xie Tu Road last night, the cabbie actually thought I was a local when I asked him how one finds the numbered alleys that turn off Xie Tu Road. (Unfortunately, that also meant he must have thought I was an idiot since the numbers are clearly posted on the street corners.)

Gid & Zhe

On Thursday evening after our subway debacle I finally met Gideon's girlfriend, Zhe. This was weird, mainly because I never thought he would ever have a girlfriend (kidding, sort of). I realized that he spent all those years being a third wheel, and now it's my turn.

We had a long dinner in Pudong, and we had puo4 la4 yu, in which fish slices, bean sprouts, and other goodies are bathed in a giant bowl of broth and completely covered in a layer of hot peppers. They carefully move the bowl five feet from your table and pour a giant ladleful of scalding oil into the mixture. Remove the millions of peppers (or don't) and you've got yourself one spicy dish.

It's comforting to have finally met Zhe and to know that Gideon is in good hands. I think I'm entering that stage in which your buddies' significant others are potential lifelong friends. She's sweet and attentive, which he needs. She doesn't seem to let him get away with too much, which is probably a good thing. And I think she has an affinity for things not her: She spent her whole life, from elementary school to high school to college to teaching -- until last January when they went to Shanghai -- on the same street in Harbin. I'm pretty sure that Gideon provides an abundance of otherness.

I guess we'll see if the embarassing college pictures don't scare her.

Chinese Sardines

Today I had my first hardcore encounter with the Shanghai subway: rush hour. In general, as a New Yorker it's hard to be fazed by much -- but nothing in New York compares to the cooperative insanity you find in some Asian cities.

Gideon and I were on our way to meet Zhe (me for the first time) for dinner somewhere in Pudong, which is the section of the city east of the river. (It's the new development district, where you see crazy buildings like this and this.) The No. 1 train pulled into Xu Jia Hui station, and it was pretty full. In New York, I've been packed onto 6 trains so tightly that I haven't had to hold onto a single thing, but this took train-stuffing to a whole new level. I was crushed as I had never been crushed before. Between stations, commuters jockeying for position pushed and pulled and elbowed to get where they wanted to go. In a couple of instances, some guys were protecting their girlfriends from the 360-degree assault. There was no pretense about manners here. It reminded me of wrestling (which I had a brush with in 8th grade gym class). It was a violent, almost barbaric event, conducted in an oddly agreeable way -- a sport! (This photo is the best I could muster of Gideon whilst in the crush.)

At one point, before pulling into a major station, the surge toward the door was the most vivid demonstration of physics I've ever seen (aside from when Mr. Appel fired his potato gun out the window senior year of high school). I was near the door, and about a dozen other people around me were getting off. I wasn't. They began to push, push, push toward the door, and those not working against that force to stay by the door (me, for example, since it wasn't my stop) were, by no effort of their own, swiftly relocated to the other side of the car. I was literally, in one moment, standing on one side of the subway car; moments later, I had been squeezed to the other side by the wave of riders exiting. Gideon looked at me and said, "Fluid dynamics."

Needless to say (so I'm saying it), I think I might have been the only one getting a kick out of all this.

Chinese Sign of the Day

Outside of the Xu Jia Hui subway station: "When you are getting off with your lover, pay attention to your bag!"

The Sights of Zhong Shan Gong Yuan

Wandering through Zhong Shan Gong Yuan to a nice restaurant with my parents and some friends of theirs from the U.S. (now Shanghai residents), we saw a few interesting things.



Can you trust Communist Party-run Viking Ships?



Old-school canvas Converse: Popular with residents of Williamsburg, Brooklyn ... and trendy old Chinese men.



Here, you don't walk dogs. You walk your bird, hang it from a tree branch, and let it chirp in harmony.

Shanghai Bound

Tuesday, March 27
3 PM, Minneapolis -- An all-nighter, a greasy BK sausage egg and cheese, and a 45-minute wait on the runway at Laguardia have taken their toll on my system, but so far I'm holding up okay. (Here, Mel and I celebrate my departure with funny faces.)

I'm at Minneapolis/St. Paul International, a sprawling, shiny, Wi-Fi enabled mall of an airport. We boarded the plane a few minutes ago, and I've progressed to Cheez-Its for nourishment. We're taking off for Tokyo/Narita any minute. I've phoned, texted, and IMed constantly before and during boarding. It feels like I'm leaving for good to go somewhere.

On the plane, the giant screen before me shows the world map, and a graceful blue arc connecting Minneapolis to Tokyo. Our flight path. Just a little hop across the ocean. Take off, cruise, and land.

9:30 PM EDT, Somewhere Over the Aleutians -- Amazing views out the side window. It's dark in the plane but a few windows are open, like floodlights trained inward on small sections of the plane's interior. We're flying over Alaska, then south of Russia, before we travel southwest along the islands of Japan.

Over 300 people have been neatly sorted in this giant flying metal bird, and it's crowded, stuffy, and noisy. Outside, six miles below, it's a snowy landscape of mountains, untouched and endless.

Wednesday, March 28
4 AM EDT (5 PM in Tokyo), Arriving in Tokyo -- Ears pop as we descend into Narita airport. It's been a long, uneventful flight, except for those few minutes when that kid locked himself in the lavatory and freaked out. (I think some passengers were looking for terrorists.) I'm tired and my body is confused. Is it dinner or breakfast? Is it light out or not? Ugh. One thing I'm not confused about: Never eat airline fruit salad again.

Thursday, March 29
2:30 AM in Shanghai, off of Xie Tu Road -- I'm on my bed. In the living room of my parents' small one-bedroom dorm/apartment at the Shanghai Cancer Institute, where my father is visiting for a month. Gideon met me at Pudong Airport four hours ago. He seemed disappointed in himself when I called out his name.

"I was supposed to see you first," he said when I plopped down my bags. Before we hopped the No. 3 bus for the 45-minute bus ride to Xu Jia Hui, the stop closest to my parents' apartment, we snapped the obligatory photograph -- and he presented me with a 50-yuan China Mobile SIM card! On the ride we did some catching up since we hadn't seen each other since last April. I still can't get over the fact that not only does he live with a girl (her name is Zhe, and two months ago they ran away together from Harbin to Shanghai), but she cooks for him all the time, too. He's officially been domesticated. More on those two later.

USPS Jedimaster

MARCH 21, 2007  |  Dan and Chris visit the Jedimaster located at the corner of Bayard and Mott Streets, in Chinatown. Despite their enthusiasm, passers-by were generally apathetic (click to enlarge).

I mean, how fun and silly is this? In celebration of the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, not only is the Postal Service releasing SW-themed postage stamps, but they're scattering R2D2-decaled mailboxes on various corners in 200 cities throughout the country!

Dan learned about it from Gothamist a few days ago, and sure enough we had to make a pilgrimage. (Or, at least Dan did. I got a kick out of it though.)

Hard at Work

MARCH 21, 2007  |  Melanie and Gary goof off during a lull in the action at the offices of TENNIS Magazine. Chris was not amused by the abuse of his office computer (click to enlarge).

:: photo by Melanie Hendel ::

One Grande Eyesore . . . To Go?

MARCH 5, 2006  |  Chris and Gideon kill time at the Forbidden Starbucks, in the Forbidden City in Beijing. The franchise "taints China's national culture," according to a Chinese lawmaker.

I guess I knew this was bound to happen: A member of the Chinese parliament, Jiang Hongbin, last week called for the removal of the infamous Starbucks branch in the Forbidden City. Guess what -- the Forbidden Starbucks is the smallest Starbucks out there, and it is in the space once used by gathered officials before seeing the emperor. (They probably could've used an apple multi-grain donut, they are scrumptious.)

"Starbucks must move out of the imperial palace immediately, and it can no longer be allowed to taint China's national culture," said Jiang, as cited by the Xinhua news agency, on the sidelines of the legislature's annual session.

The 720,000-square-meter (0.3 square mile) Forbidden City in Beijing, which attracts 7 million tourists a year, was home to 24 emperors from the Ming and Qing dynasties for a period beginning in the early 15th century and running through the 1920s.

Starbucks was invited by the management company that oversees the site to open its outlet in September 2000. The cafe, the smallest Starbucks shop, was located in a tiny lounge where Qing officials gathered before meeting the emperor.

Children of Tsunami

The 15th DC Environmental Film Fest is on right now, and I'm missing all of it (and you probably are, too). There's a smorgasbord of fascinating films, and I would tell you which ones to check out, but I haven't seen any of them except for the obligatory An Inconvenient Truth. However, I do have it on good authority that Thomas Friedman's Addicted to Oil, A Life Among Whales, and Manufactured Landscapes are top-notch. (Additional links for Addicted, Whales, and Landscapes.)

One of the more moving, personal films, Children of Tsunami, follows the lives of eight children for one year following the catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami in late 2004. The children, from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Thailand, speak about the suffering, loss, and rebuilding they've had to endure. (This is Selvam, a 13-year-old Indian boy who lost his mother and his house in the tsunami. His brother is now the head of his family.)

Fortunately for us resourceful net-goers, Children of Tsunami not only has a website, the actual film itself is available (albeit in pieces) there. Watch the film and learn about these children. And pass the link along.

:: hat-tip to Sharon Hsu ::

Do You Know Your Schism?

Can you tell a Sunni from a Shi'ite? Last week Time ran a great cover story on the schism in Islam, and what is dividing the two sects today. The conflict used to be religion, but now it's more about class and resentment and repression.

Read up; don't be as uneducated as ... the public officials we've entrusted our safety and security to. Jeff Stein, an editor at Congressional Quarterly, wrote in October in the NYT:

For the past several months, I've been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: "Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?"

...

But so far, most American officials I've interviewed don't have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

...

Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.

"Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?" I asked him a few weeks ago.

Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: ''One's in one location, another's in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don't know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.''

To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. "Now that you've explained it to me," he replied, "what occurs to me is that it makes what we're doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area."

Havoc in the Village

Madness broke out in the Village last night. Two volunteer police officers, one of them an NYU student, were killed when they followed a gunman from a pizza joint -- where he had just fatally shot a bartender -- up toward Washington Square Park. He shot them, then was himself shot and killed half a block away by officers on Bleecker Street between Sullivan and MacDougal.

Clifford used to live on MacDougal.

graphic from nytimes.com

Mayor Federer

A couple of months ago, Steve from work mentioned that Roger Federer is now so diplomatic and is in such good favor with basically the entire world that "the guy is starting to sound like the Mayor of Tennis."

You know what? Roger Federer really is the mayor of tennis. I knew that he was contacted by the ATP president about last week's Las Vegas brouhaha -- which he wasn't even at; he was playing a tournament in Dubai -- but the way he describes it, it sounds like he's the premier being briefed by a deputy on events in his dominion.

From his press conference on Friday at the Pacific Life Open:

ROGER FEDERER: No. I got a phone call from [ATP president] Etienne de Villiers, who explained me the situation. I mean, I was far away, you know, so there was the whole time difference, the whole thing was kind of happening. I just remember going on the Internet and checking out the scores of Vegas and I saw that Blake was through, but I couldn't figure it out, because I thought Korolev should have been through, even though Blake was about to win, you know, the whole thing.

So I thought, okay, well, I guess I miscalculated or whatever, and then I got a phone call on the way over to the club, you know, from de Villiers explaining the whole situation, kind of the whole back and forth, you know. I said okay. ... [It's] your problem, you know. I'm over here, you know.

But I'm happy to see that finally we had a problem in this round-robin system, because I always told you I was against it in the first place. So, you know, he apologized and the whole thing, that something like this had to happen with other players...

Picture Post: TENNIS.com, on the Ball

MARCH 7, 2007  |  During a media session at the Pacific Life Open in California, Elena Dementieva speaks with reporters -- including Kamakshi Tandon, TENNIS.com's editor extraordinaire (click to enlarge).

photo by Getty Images

Editor! Stat!

The New Yorker, March 12, 2007, Page 88:

From the Sandpoint (Idaho) Bonner County Daily Bee.

Because of a production room error with new software, Sunday's Daily Bee Page 1 was rife with mistakes. The staff of the Daily Bee sincerely apologies to our readers for the slopiness and we vow to be more diligent in the future.

We are reruning the butchered articles on Page 4 today and have made all the necessary corrections.

Phew! For a minute there, you had us worried.

Hahahaha.

Delicate Bill

A profile on the inner workings of Bill Maher and Real Time. He's probably one of the more underappreciated commentators/agitators out there. Watch his clips on YouTube!

White House on the Couch

David Brooks does a nifty job of deconstructing the White House in today's column. I like his approach because it's realistic. He's critical but also portrays the administration as an emotional, evolving, complex thing. He covers politics like a fanboy -- he shows his empathy with a given side and simultaneously administers sensible criticism.

He frames it through the Scooter Libby trial, and then discusses the White House at the time of the trial's events.

When you think back to the White House of 2003, the period the trial explores, you will discover a White House consumed by a feverish sense of mission.

Senior officials were greeted each morning by intense intelligence briefings. On June 14, 2003, for example, Libby received a briefing with 27 items and 11 pages of terrorist threats. Someone once told me that going from the president’s daily briefing to the next event on Mr. Bush’s schedule, which might be a photo-op with a sports team, was like leaving “24” and stepping into “Sesame Street.” No wonder administration officials were corporate on the outside but frantic within.

The administration, he says, has gradually become a more competent one -- on paper -- as failure after failure has bred change.

In short, this administration’s capacities have waxed as its power has waned. And you can’t help but feel that today’s White House would have been much better at handling the first stages of the war on terror. But that’s the perpetual tragedy of life: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Wisdom comes from suffering and error, and when the passions die down and observation begins.

Working Moms

Women are making some news this year.

Nancy Pelosi became the first woman Speaker of the House ("Madam Speaker") and is third in line to the presidency.

Hillary Clinton is (duh) running for president and has the best chance to win that any woman has ever had.

Drew Gilpin Faust was named the president of Harvard, and will be the first woman to hold the position when she takes over in July.

Katie Couric became the first woman to solo-anchor an evening news broadcast, in September.

Ségolène Royal is the Socialist party's nominee for France's 2007 presidential election, this spring. She would be the country's first woman president.

Anyone else?

Oh yeah, right: Ann Coulter becomes the first woman ever* to refer to a presidential candidate as a faggot on national TV, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in early March.

*speculation

graphic from Queen's University Dept. of Women's Studies

Poker Players Unite!

In a fluff piece, former N.Y. senator Al D'Amato has signed on with the 160,000-member Poker Players Alliance to lobby the federal government to overturn the law signed last year that prohibits certain aspects of Internet gambling. We learn a lot about the former senator's poker-playing habits ("He is now a stalwart of a weekly game on Long Island where a bad night might mean that a player drops $5,000 or more"), but it gets serious too:

To him the implications of prohibiting online poker are profound, touching on matters as wide ranging as the war on terrorism, national security, the rights of the elderly and the handicapped and equal protection under the law. At times, he pounded his desk to make his point.

The money being spent to outlaw poker and enforce the ban, Mr. D’Amato said, could be better spent “in the battle against money laundering, trafficking in drugs, or trafficking in terrorism.”

He takes issue with Congress’s decision to lump in poker, a game of skill as well as luck, with games of pure chance like roulette and craps. “It’s really a great sport,” Mr. D’Amato said, perhaps the country’s favorite sport. “You don’t have 70 million people participating in baseball.

As prominent a figure as the poker-loving former senator maybe, his involvement "is not expected to lead to overturning the new law anytime soon." Boooo.

You Should Have Been There, Part 2

[continued from previous post...]

Moses, the New York City public-works czar for over three decades starting in 1934, was (and still is) a notorious and controversial figure. (Click on this picture to see his plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, endearingly referred to as "Lomex".)

He bestowed upon New York City innumerable playgrounds, parks, ballfields, and swimming pools, as well as Lincoln Center -- he's the reason why I was able to play tennis today in Riverside Park -- and, simultaneously, he uprooted thousands of families to inflict plagues on the cityscape like the Cross-Bronx and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressways, guided by a vision that personal automobiles were the future. (Some say that, to the extent that that vision is true today, it's only been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Moses built it -- the bridges and eight-lane highways and tunnels -- and they came.)

Moses was massively responsible for so many things in the city, it's kind of scary. Among the things he had built: Cross Bronx Expressway; Belt Parkway; Riverside Park; Henry Hudson Parkway; Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; Verrazano-Narrows, Triborough, Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck Bridges; Lincoln, Holland, Brooklyn-Battery Tunnels.

What, you ask, was the nuttiest idea he had? (Besides the Mid-Manhattan Expressway and the Lower-Manhattan Expressway -- both of which galvanized public outcry because, well, they were nutty.) I'd have to say the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge, which was a double suspension bridge (!) strung across New York Harbor that would have taken over much above-ground space, including Battery Park and parts of the Financial District. As you may know, today it is now the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

The MCNY exhibit is part of a three-location retrospective on Moses (it's been called a "rethinking" of his demonization).

Go!

photo from Museum of the City of New York website

You Should Have Been There

Some good "culture" this weekend.

1) See The Lives of Others, critical darling and this year's Oscar winner for Foreign Language Film. The plot is clear, intense, and exciting, but it's not just an intrigue/thriller kind of movie; it's driven as much by the main character as it is by the plot. And it's as good as they say it is.

2) Robert Moses at the Museum of the City of New York, and the Museum's Timescapes exhibit.

First, the Timescapes film. It's a great 22-minute short film covering the entire history of New York, from 1609 to present. It's overwrought and simplistic at times, but you won't find a better 22-minute history of New York City that really gives you a sense that tens of millions of stories have been lived here. Think Ric Burns' 16-hour, eight-DVD New York documentary condensed into a half-hour TV show.

[post continued above]

photo from Metacritic.com

Geek Alert: Total Lunar Eclipse

Total lunar eclipse tonight!

Unfortunately, the view will be best from somewhere along the prime meridian. And in the U.S., just after 10 p.m. GMT means it'll be around from 5-6 p.m.

But thanks to the miracle of the Internet, you can bring nighttime right to your swivel chair. Just watch the webcast.

Crossword Vocab #4

Wow, things have been crazy. Hopefully I can start posting more again. Or maybe not.

GABLE:
the triangular portion of the wall, between the enclosing lines of a sloping roof

SWAIN:
a male admirer or lover