Thorns and Roses (or why the fu** aren't there any cabs in Shanghai tonight?!)

I've tried to add entries to this blog after thinking them through beforehand and then writing them down later, but it just doesn't work that way for me. So, in the interest of immediacy, I rant. When doing long backpacking trips we used to play a game called thorns and roses, in which you point out a rose, or something you're enjoying; and a thorn, something that's pissing you off.

A stock example of each for Shanghai would be that I love the variety of food (rose), but that babbling in Shanghainese dialect just isn't easy on the ears at 7:45 in the morning on the bus, ladies (thorn).

Why couldn't I find a taxi tonight from 9:55 to 10:35 in Xuhui District of Shanghai. The New Year's holidays are still more than a week away, so that excuse doesn't hold up. Never, in my time here, have I had this hard a time finding a cab. Even if it was New Years, all the cabbies are Shanghainese, so they aren't going to leave, and since there are 60,000 of them, why would they take time off when there is lots of money to be made.

I ended up taking two buses home (and they were stuffed, just like rush hour, except at 10:40 at night). So I am left extraordinarily pissed off, and wondering what the hell? Even on Christmas, and (Gregorian) New Year's, the longest I waited for a cab was 15 minutes. If it was something I knew about in advance, no worries, that's okay, I can make arrangements to not be 4 miles from home in sub-zero weather. But no, thanks to you, Shanghai, it all seems completely random and designed to piss me off.

Weather changing, Suzhou, and yelling on the phone

I feel I need to get something up here before I leave too much time between posts, so here's a post on a bunch of nothing. First, Shanghai's temperature has dove over the last two weeks from swampy heat and humidity to refreshingly crisp autumnal coolness. I'm liking the change, so far.

Last week, China's National Day was observed with a week-long holiday for most non-service sector workers. Unfortunately, since I'm working at an English tutoring center, I still had to work a few days. Apparently, my students' parents didn't like the idea of a whole week of relaxation, as several of them mentioned that I was just one of many tutors they had during the week for various subjects.

I did manage to make it to Suzhou for about 36 hours with Adam and Sam, which was a relaxing break from Shanghai, in ways that watching DVDs in the apartment can't compare to. Highlights included Suzhou's traditional Chinese gardens, canals, Lin Biao's car, a steampunk bar, and not being surrounded by 40-100 storey buildings on all sides. I'll link to the pictures when I get them up later. Suzhou is just a ~30 minute high-speed train ride away from Shanghai, and at ¥52 round-trip, not a bank breaker, so I'll be back to see what I missed this time around. I'll soon be checking out the nearby Jiangsu province cities of Yangzhou and Nanjing, both of which are quite close and seem interesting enough to merit a visit.

One last thing: I always chuckle to myself when I see or hear out-of-towners/country bumpkins screaming into their cellphones on the public transportation here. This past week saw a big influx of such types on sightseeing missions to Shanghai, so I was startled out of my morning commute/coma several times by a man screaming at his ostensible friends or loved ones, "HEY!!! IT'S ME!! YEAH I'M IN SHANGHAI!!! GET THIS, A LAOWAI IS SITTING ACROSS FROM ME AND LOOKING AT ME IN A SORT OF SURPRISED WAY!!! YEAH I CAN'T FIGURE THEM OUT EITHER!!"

Nighttime Street Food in Shanghai

Fried Rice, Fried Noodles, and all the Fixins

Ever since my first trip over here, one of my favorite aspects of Chinese city life is the street food. It’s usually small, quick, cheap, and really 地道 (didao, authentic). One of the best things about street food in China is the variety, especially at night, when people do their greasiest post-bar eating (and some men make the trip [or are sent] from apartment to the local grill for seared lamb and chicken testicles, two examples of the many substances that are said to make one ‘strong’, as in viagra strong). Staples of nighttime street food in most Chinese cities include: fried rice and noodles; fried dumplings; 麻辣汤 (malatang), a soup with your choice of noodles, fresh veggies, meat, and spiciness, all cooked in a communal pot; and finally chuan’r, the nearly ubiquitous kebabs of various meats and veggies grilled (most often by a Uyghur or Hui person) and then dusted in spices.

Regularly these various street foods are found at different shops and stalls, spread throughout one’s neighborhood and found by wandering around. Many of the mobile fried rice and chuan’r guys will have a usual corner on which you can find them most nights. However, if you luck out like me, you could find that you have a little night market in you neighborhood.

Notice the long Chuan'r grill in the foreground

Unfortunately these places, and many street food vendors in general, are slowly being shut down. Times were I knew three places in my neighborhood where I could have live poultry slaughtered while I watched (never have actually tried this), now I only know of one. Regardless, I still have a little night market by me, at a busy intersection in front of the Shanghai friendship store and next to a KFC, but busier.

At least once a week, I’ll go there for some green bean, mushroom, eggplant, and lamb chuan’r, or the occasional flat top grilled squid. Last week I tried a new and delicious item, grilled shellfish. A few guys from Jiangsu province grill oysters, scallops, and large, attention-grabbing blue mussels.

My local shellfish griller, from Jiangsu province

As they cook, they add chopped garlic, sauce, tiny rice noodles, chives, and for the oysters a substance best described as a Chinese salsa.

Topping them with the rice noodles

The noodles kind of soak up the juices, making it easier to eat the whole deal with chopsticks. The smell of them cooking, as the garlic mixes with the boiling juices, is fantastic. The shellfish are of unknown provenance, but look, taste, and smell very fresh. This is a new favorite of mine, which at 5 kuai (RMB) a pop are not cheap, at least for street food, but well worth it.

Almost done, we've got oysters in front, a blue mussel, then scallops in back

Who controls Shanghai's Nighttime Teddy Bear racket?

This is one of those things that seemed really weird when I first got here in 2006, but that I hardly notice now. If you are in a relatively well trafficked area of Shanghai after about 10pm most nights, mobile Teddy Bear dealers like the one shown above will come out. If you tend to over-think things, this raises a few questions: First, who's buying Teddy Bears at three in the morning? Second, is there a Teddy Bear kingpin of Shanghai (all signs point to yes), and do rival Teddy Bear outfits ever have 'rumbles' over territory? And last, are all the Teddy Bears made in some factory town in Zhejiang Provinces that specializes in just Teddy Bears, supplying 40% of the world's carnivals with over-sized stuffed animals?

Looking Down (Literally) on Shanghai

Jin Mao Tower in front and with the World Financial Center about a month ago

World Financial Center on Tuesday with the Jinmao behind

A few days ago I checked out the newly opened World Financial Center with my friend Nic, who was visiting Shanghai. I figured that having a visitor in town was just about the best time to do such a trip, as it is a little hard for me to justify spending ¥150 to go to the top of a building which I see every day on my way to and from work (I still have never made it to the Sears Tower). Despite the high price of admission to the new tower’s observation deck, the “Bottle Opener”, as it is known to some locals, is a breathtaking addition to Shanghai’s skyline.

Shanghai's Pudong area with the Huangpu river

I first saw it in 2006, when I ascended to the observation deck of the adjacent 88-story Jinmao Tower with a group from my CIEE study abroad program. At that time it was maybe two-thirds the height of the Jinmao, so it was a bit surprising to see it towering over the Jinmao when I arrived back in Shanghai this April. When I returned to the Jinmao this summer with my cousin Andrew, the “Bottle Opener” was an impressive thing to behold, rising well above the already massive and iconic Jinmao. At that time, though the exterior looked finished, much work was still being performed on the windows and interior. As we watched from the Jinmao, clouds passed through the opening in the top of the Bottle Opener and incredibly miniscule workers were lowered from cranes to complete some work on the behemoth’s mid-section.

The top of the Jinmao Tower, the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Huangpu River, and Puxi (the west bank of the river)

The observation deck finally opened this week and Nic and I decided that the WFC would be our tourist ‘activity’ for the week. We arrived via a cab that dropped us off in what appeared to be a construction site parking lot, and eventually made our way around to the shiny main entrance. There, we were first bombarded by the forced and stilted English of the tour-guides, who were seemingly selected for their jobs on purely aesthetic qualifications.

Tourists crowd the 100th floor observation deck

After about a ten minute wait in line we were able to buy our tickets in the basement staging area, and make our way to the first of about 5 lines we had to wait in to make it to the top. Thinking we were about to board an elevator to the top, we were instead treated to a psychedelic and incoherent light show involving a spinning miniature of the tower. After five wasted minutes, we took the high speed elevators up to the ninety-seventh floor. This deck was not yet at the top of the building so we made our way up to the line to get to the very top, the small deck above the space in the Bottle Opener. After a long wait for the incredibly small elevators, we finally got up to the 100th floor observation deck, which gave us an incredible view of the sprawl of Shanghai. The deck’s floors were glass, which at 474 meters, is not for the vertigo-inclined.

Walking on glass 474 meters above ground

A highlight for me was seeing workers nonchalantly taking their break on the 97th floor open deck. Altogether it was an enjoyable experience, though I look forward to returning on a less crowded day.

A couple of workers enjoy their break

Later that night, on my way home from work, I was treated to the spectacle of the Bottle Opener lit up like some type of strobe light, as seen in this video I took from the Century Avenue Metro Station.

Delicious Xinjiang Food

Last night my brother, a friend, and I went out for Xinjiang food. Xinjiang, the vast, relatively sparsely populated province in China’s northwest, is home to the Uyghur people. Xinjiang food is distinctly Central Asian, and doesn’t share much with other styles of food found in China. There is a lot of meat, in big chunks, often skewered and roasted on an long open grill. They do bread exceptionally well, and everything is liberally dusted with a ubiquitous mix of spices. Also, there is no pork, the staple meat of Chinese food, to be found here, as the Uyghurs are a Muslim people. It is a delicious, and occasionally necessary break from traditional Chinese food--in ways that lunch at McDonald’s can’t compare to.


In the picture you can see most of our meal. There’s the mutton fried rice with roasted carrots, which I think must have been cooked in lamb fat. The thinly sliced red meat is cold venison, which was delicious and sort of similar in flavor to cold brisket. Then there is roasted lamb ribs. The skewers are called 羊肉串, or chuan (r), commonly pronounced with an ‘r’ ending in Beijing. The lamb meat is skewered with bits of fat that melt into the meat during grilling. Not pictured is the lamb heart skewer, which I ate too quickly to photograph. We also had fried eggplant slices, dusted in spices; and a dish consisting of chopped up lamb meat with carrots and hot peppers that was placed into fresh tortilla-like pancakes.

A necessary accompaniment to Xinjiang food is Xinjiang Black Beer. It is possibly my favorite brand of beer in China. It has all the flavor, body, and alcohol that beers like Qingdao and Yanjing lack.

DVD Speakeasies of Shanghai

When I first arrived in Shanghai for study abroad in 2006, I was, as a movie-buff and cheapskate, impressed by the ubiquity of illicit DVD stores around the city. It seemed that wherever one went in the city, there was a bootleg DVD store at every corner, or at the very least a few 3-wheel bicycle cart vendors selling 5-kuai (yuan) discs. During my semester I amassed a rather large collection of these DVDs.

Beijing, however, was different. I was there last summer for around 7 weeks, and I may have bought 2 DVDs during that time. The lack of friendly and disreputable DVD dealers there is due, one assumes, to stricter enforcement of the law and higher police presence in the Capital.

This time around in Shanghai, I happily discovered that many DVD stores were still around, albeit with slightly higher prices. However, I noticed that first runs from the states were taking longer to arrive on the shelves, and some didn't come at all (e.g. Hancock was spotted for the first time today, and still no Indiana Jones).

A few weeks ago my entertainment world came crashing down around me as every known store in my neighborhood, and hundreds throughout the city were hit by systematic raids. The stocks of stores that were unlucky enough not to receive advance word through the grapevine were confiscated, and the operators were told not to reopen, in the words of one local owner, "for a long time". Why this brash and affronting observation of laws that have been on the books for years? According to the owner of one of my favorite local haunts, he was simply told “For the Olympics.”

But a few intrepid DVD stores that I occasionally visit are holding the torch (pun intended) for the Shanghai knockoff DVD scene, although in a slightly different format. The first store I visited, which I walk past regularly, had cleaned their shelves of all stock, but their doors were still open daily. I was a bit confused by this, so I went to ask the owner, who sits surfing the web in the front of the shop all day, what was going on. He was the first to explain the Olympic connection to me, and he directed me to the back of the shop, where after crossing between a row of shelves and a wall, I climbed the stairs to his living area. Next to the bathroom, in a small storage room, he had set up his stock, TV shows on one shelf, and movies according to genre. The newest were on a table in the center, and thousands of DVDs in sleeves were in boxes arrayed on the floor. When I left he said he’d be getting a new shipment the next day, which indicated he wasn’t just getting rid of old stock.

About a week later, I passed another shop, which had appeared previously to have shut down under the financial strain of the raid. However, as I walked past, the proprietor, who recognized me from past trips, pointed to the back of the store. There, past renovation work and concealed behind a sliding door that matches the adjacent wall, was his store. Except that his store had a better selection than before, was better organized, and even had a brand new cash register. This week the construction at that particular store was finished, and the front end has been converted to a shiny new stationary and school supplies store. On a recent visit, as I was ushered to the back, the worker calmly but intently looked out front for strolling cops as he opened the sliding door.

I should also mentioned that one of the more expensive stores that I know from my study abroad time was seemingly never raided and has gone on doing business as usual. When asked about the reason for their luck, a worker there only said that yes, the other stores had shut down because of the Olympics, though he would not divulge how they had been able to avoid a similar fate.

为奥运会。 (For the Olympics)

As the Olympics fire up this week, it is interesting to look at the steps that China’s leadership has taken to present their best face to the world. From ordering migrant junk collectors off the streets of Beijing to shutting copyright infringing DVD stores in Shanghai, all sorts of measures have been put in place to avoid any type of embarrassment during the games.