Shanghai'd

Happy New Year!
The Chinese like to leave no doubt as to who invented fireworks. Starting a full week before the Chinese New Year, reaching it's peak at midnight on Jan. 29th (and lasting another week after that we're told), we have been bombarded with non-stop fireworks. For some reason, the plaza outside our apartment seems to be one of the main launching grounds for firecrackers, M80-like artillery rounds, bottle rockets, sparklers, and even those giant exploding ones usually reserved for professional shows. It's become so regular that we hardly even notice anymore ... just another level of background noise to add to the car horns, scooters, and street hawkers. The price you pay for living in a big city. Laurel and I witnessed the Xin nian kuai le celebration from two landmarks of downtown Shanghai, the Bund and Nanjing lu.

Apartment.
Here's the view of the Shanghai skyline from the balcony of our gong yu.

Happy Birthday - Chinese style!
Yesterday I turned 24, which was special for many reasons:
1. It was our first birthday celebration in China.
2. Every 12 years in China, you celebrate a special year. You know those placemats at Chinese restaurants with the Chinese zodiac? Each animal represents a Chinese lunar year and they cycle through every 12 years. Meaning, if you were born in 1982 like me you are a dog and this is a special year! Chinese often do not ask your age, but if they find out your animal they can make a good guess!
I got to celebrate with 2 surprises. On Thursday, I met Tim and his work colleagues at NI Shanghai to find them all in the lobby, prepared to take me to a local Shanghainese restaurant. These people are the best hosts. The place ended up being a KTV (karaoke) restaurant, and I was worried for a minute I would have to sing! Instead we were taken to a banquet room. Two Chinese ordered and the food started coming: lotus with sticky rice, evergreen (yum!), tofu with 1000 year old eggs, fried duck skin "tacos", sweet and sour spare ribs, and a kind of shanghainese hamburger, and more - we were stuffed! Then the KTV came loud over the speaker - sheng ri kuai le! We had cake and sang in both English and Chinese. Such wonderful hosts.
Last night Tim had another surprise for me. He came home with flowers and we got dressed to go to a mystery location. I was blindfolded in the cab and couldn't open my eyes until we were looking out over Shanghai from 57 stories up. We weren't there yet, we changed elevators - twice - until we were at the 87th floor of the 3rd tallest building in the world - the Jin Mao tower. We had drinks at the Cloud 9 bar and went to dinner at the Club Jin Mao (only on the 86th floor). The food was amazing, as was the view. What a wonderful birthday in China. ;-)

Chinese dumpling.
My work group invited Laurel and I to join them at Yaming's house to celebrate the upcoming Chinese New Year by making jiaozi, or Chinese dumplings. To make a jiaozi, you start with the filling - typically a mixture of pork or shrimp, and some combination of vegetables including cabbage, spinach, onions, etc. Next you spoon (or chopstick as the case may be in China) the filling onto a small, doughy, disc-like pasta, wet half the perimeter with water and fold one end onto the other to make a semi-circle. The next step is to skillfully make a few pinches around the open end to seal it shut, boil in water for a few minutes and serve with vinegar. Beautiful.

Big Bottle of Water.
No one drinks the tap water in Shanghai, not even the locals. We have even been brushing our teeth with bottled water to try to defer the inevitable case of the runs that is bound to strike at some point (but fortunately, has not yet). All over the city, skinny young men pedal 5 gallon water bottles on the back of their bikes for home delivery. Our goal for today was to track one of these guys down and get him to deliver to our apartment where we have an empty hot/cold water dispensor waiting. With no English (of course) and our limited Chinese, we were able to figure out that the going rate for a da ping shui is 16RMB ($2), plus 30RMB for the initial bottle deposit. We gave our address and was told the delivery boy would be by in 1 hr. 30 minutes later, he arrived and dropped it off. After 15 minutes of fiddling with the seal and a few spilled drops, we were set up with clean hot and cold water on tap. Doesn't sound teribly impressive given that in the US all you have to do is flip the faucet on, but in China, everything is an achievement.

Sensitive.
Woke up this morning to the piercing beep of the gas detector going off in the kitchen. We had been warned before by Shiyuehua (the girl from the apartment complex office who speaks a little English, and has thus become our goto contact for any apartment-related questions) to turn the gas valve off when we're not using it. Problem with that plan is that it's freezing right now in Shanghai, and turning off the gas valve means no heat and no hot water. We tried to air the kitchen out, but the detector kept blaring away, so we called Shiyuehua and the maintenance man to come up. In what I'm finding is typical Chinese fashion, the maintenance man fiddles with the detector to get it to turn off, replaces the detector with a new one, then tests his work by holding his lighter up to it! At the site of that, I grabbed Laurel and headed out of the kitchen. Nothing like striking a match to check for a possible gas leak! The explanation we got from Shiyuehua is that the old detector was "hen mingan" or "very sensitive". Hopefully it was Laurel's cheap-comforter-defunkifying Victoria's Secret body spray that set it off and not a gas leak. We confirmed several times, in very slow, simple English, that it is indeed safe to keep the gas valve on at all times.

Cell phone.
Buying a cell phone, like all other transactions in Shanghai is an adventure. You must bargain for everything, and you're never quite sure exactly what you're getting. Along with William, our dutiful translator for the afternoon, we went to the market next to the NI office (which sells everything from plasma TVs to rice) in search of shouji dianhua. Imagine walking into the Best Buy, eyeing the new Samsung slide phone and offering the pimple-faced sales guy half the sticker price for it. Along the way, you will be confronted with the choice of paying slightly more for the phone which has arrived the "normal way", presumably ligitimately from Samsung in Korea, or getting a bargain price for the "Hong Kong way" version, which from what we could gather meant it was some sort of refurbished phone via Hong Kong that comes with no guarantees. 1 hour and about 8 very beauracratic official stamps later we were connected.

Umbrella.
AUS-LAX-LIH-LAX-SFO-PVG. That's Austin to Shanghai, in a round-about way with a honeymoon detour to the island of Kauai in Hawaii. After 28 straight hours of travel, including 20 in the air, we touch down in Shanghai on Jan. 17th, 2006 at 7:30pm. The NI company driver was waiting to pick us up at the airport carrying a sign bearing my name. First impression: it is cold and rainy. It's been raining for 2 weeks straight in Shanghai. Our first purchase
in China will definitely have to be a san. The frigid temperature is made worse by the fact that: 1) we've become quite accustomed to the consistent 80 degree warmth of Austin and Hawaii, 2) the heater isn't on in our apartment and we have no idea how to get it working. Luckily the package of bedding we shipped is waiting for us, so we hastily make the bed, drape our sleeping bags over top and crash.