tbaroundtheworld

As is turned out, I was seated next to a young Chinese woman on my flight from San Francisco to Albuquerque. She was on her first trip to the US, traveling here for training on some sort of instrument that she supports in Beijing. Seems my opportunities to practice my Chinese are becoming more constant and varied. This trip is over, and I am glad of it considering the amazing craziness of the last two days. It's nice to be back on my regular time zone and I have to say my judicious use of No Jet Lag has done its job. I always feel better when I remember to take it. I'll be staying home for a month before heading out again. My annual ranch hand gig kicks in next week and so, I'm home with the horses. In closing out this adventure I wanted to share a few photographs, not really cultural in nature, but oh so Chinese in their own way. Just a few things I encountered while roaming around. You don't see many dogs in China. Unlike Mexico, it's very unusual to encounter tho...

At least ours did, on time. There was a general feeling of geniality on the plane, we'd all been through an adventure and we were now all headed home. The story from those who opted for the free night's stay at the airport was variable, "Not bad", "I've stayed at worse", "Mirrored ceiling and round bed", "Last night's dinner was today's breakfast". I had no such interesting remarks, my stay was up to the regular Renaissance standards. So let me tell you about business class. It's really just like the regular fare except that it's bigger and there is far more of it. We started out with a drink and a little bowl of warmed nuts. The latter brought to mind a recent piece in The New Yorker by David Sedaris in which he carries on quite a bit about the nuts in Business Class. I'd like to use the cheerful chipmunk analogy that he crafted so well, but that would be stealing from my writing hero so I will instead use somethi...

After a nice evening spent drinking Kirin beer and eating some Chinese lamb chops in the Pudong Renaissance lounge, I got a good night's sleep and made preparations to head back to the airport. Our cab had one of those bogus meters you hear about, charging probably 2 times the correct rate. You read about them once in a while in the Shanghai newspaper "Black hearted cabbie steals from kind visitors." The fare was 60% higher than last night's despite the fact that he was driving like a bat out of hell, playing chicken with another cab from his company. We arrived and got into the special line for our special departure. Turns out they kept the plane here, got a new crew and decided to send us back as an intact group. Easier than re-booking 300 people I guess. Once again, it was chaos. No one at the special gates really knew what they were supposed to do. Someone had come up with the brilliant idea of pre -printing all the boarding passes, a nice idea if everyone line...

Well, I had no idea just how portentous those words were going to be. Not five minutes after the refueling announcement, a forlorn voice came on and told us the flight was cancelled, and apologized for any inconvenience that might cause. Right, 300 US bound people perhaps being inconvenienced by sitting in a hot plane for 4 hours and then being asked to leave. From that moment on, my life was forever changed. Those of us who had elected to pass the time hanging out on the plane were lucky - we got to grab our stuff and make it up the jet way in opposition to all the people whom had left and now had to go back to collect their goods. Like a few renegade salmon fighting the throng of their cousins heading upstream. At the top of the ramp, we stood queued before the tiny crew elevator until someone showed up to lead us out to immigration and that is where the true chaos began. Everyone just jammed up against the 3 lanes that were open creating a vast, unmoving jumble of people. The Global...

So we boarded the plane with the typical efficiency. After lining us up behind a clearly marked sign, they switched to another entrance at the last second, causing a mad crush. And once again they seized everyone's freshly purchased water, causing some very unpleasant racial remarks. I had chosen to forgo a center seat in the better cabin, electing instead to take a aisle seat up front. I had also requested a Business upgrade but had been told at check-in that Business was over sold. So I boarded with the first group and tucked myself into my tiny hole. Ten minutes or so passed before a woman came along and told me that I was in the wrong seat. I showed her my pass and sure enough, we had same seat. She went off and got an attendant who informed me that I had won the lottery - a seat in business. It's been more than 20 years since I worked for a company kind enough to let me fly in the better seats. And in that time, boy has it gotten better. Plenty of room, better food choices...

Writing here from the new Terminal 2 at PVG. My first time out of here, having come in to this one last Monday. But you don't really get to see too much arriving. We took the cab out to the Shanghai Maglev Museum for the ride into the airport on the train. Why they call it a "museum, I do not know since it's just a train station. It's their place though and they can call it whatever they want. The train ride is always fun, especially so when you have first-timers along with you. It roars along between 300 and 400 KPH, or 180n and 240 MPH, across the Yangtze delta. The view out the window is of small blocks of stone houses with those special Chinese roofs, embellished with the little turn-ups on the ends. We pass many small truck farms, today green with the beginnings of this year's vegetable crop. Dotting the plain are small impounded ponds, today frequented by fishermen with long bamboo poles, angling for today's midday meal. The contrast between rural life an...

We wrapped up work in the early afternoon and headed out one last bit of sightseeing. I've been to two of the three major temples in Shanghai - Longhua and Jing'an but for some reason I had never been to the Temple of the Jade Buddha. The story goes that the temple was constructed in 1882 as a home for two precious Buddha, made entirely of jade that had been brought here by a monk. The original site was destroyed during the final throes of the Qing Dynasty but rebuilt in 1928. The Buddha thankfully survived. The subway was our conveyance of choice so we hoofed it over to Louguanshan Station and grabbed the 2 line to our crossover point at Zhongshan Park. Once arrived, the walk between the stations, all stairs, turned out to be about as long as it would have been had we chosen to skip the first leg on the train. Finally we got there, waited a few minutes and the train came along. It was crowded, Andy and I got squeezed in by some high school girls who kept saying something...

I always make it a habit of tipping my maid. Sometimes I do it during the time I'm here, sometimes at the end. But I try to, because 100 RMB goes a long way for people in this country. My maid this time around, I think it the same one that once made me fill out her evaluation survey at gunpoint. At least she gives the impression she remembers me. The last two days she has come by to leave me a couple of extra bottles of water and today she saw me leaving my room to go upstairs to the penthouse. She offered to clean my room right then, and I said a little something in Chinese and she told me it was very well spoken. After hanging out up there for an hour I came back down and she was still working in my part of the corridor. My room was done and I went in and got going on some other things when there was a knock on the door. She had two more bottles of water and an apple. She told me tomorrow was her day off and that she would not see me again, I told her I would be back and that I w...

We began our Thursday with a ride on the corporate shuttle out to the other site in town, located on the far, far edge of Shanghai. You get so used to being hemmed in my multi-story buildings here that one tends to forget that the city has some bounds and that the concrete will eventually give way to the countryside. Our ride out was not the traditional corporate, rather it was one of those comfy touring buses that you see out on the interstates when they are not jamming up parking lots at national parks. This one was pretty nice and very well-appointed, the only problem being the former taxi driver at the helm. He forgot he wasn't in a Volkswagen Santana and chose to drive this thing as though he was. I'm not prone to car sickness, but this guy's style challenged even my inner ear and the rolling from lee to starboard with every maneuver came close to making me green. Here's a shot of the traffic out the front. This location is in an R and D park reclaimed for the rive...

We had our traditional team dinner last night at 海之幸, Hai Zhi Xing or "Fortune of the Sea." It's a mile down the road from the hotel, and I am sure I have walked passed it a dozen times without a thought. As always, some of the jewels in life are overlooked and right before your eyes. This one certainly was. It turned out to be great. The walk takes about 45 minutes, not so much due to the distance as the fact that it can sometimes take 10 minutes to get across the streets. This happened a couple of times when our group fractured due to picture taking opportunities, but we made it intact, even beating our local hosts. We sat and enjoyed a couple of 1 liter Qingdao beers until they arrived. It was Japanese for a change with a bit of Korean and Chinese thrown in for color. The plates and the beer and the sake kept coming and of course much was left on the table. The spirit was great and we had lots of long conversation reprising our various adventures together, my favori...