Shanghai'd

Shanghai International Marathon.


The 2006 Shanghai Guoji Malasong has been my motivation the last few months to try to stay somewhat fit. Not an easy task in this city. 2 mornings each week I've been running the monotonous 600 m driveway around our apartment complex and doing long runs through the bustling Hongkou streets on Saturday morning. Laurel often accompanies me on her bike. Needless to say we draw a lot of attention - two lao wai running/biking past incredulous stares and endless "hallos".

Not nearly enough training to think I could enter the full marathon, but the half (13.1 miles or 21.1 km) turned out to be a good fit. The pancake-flat course took runners East to West across the city, past thousands of 加油 ("jia you" or literally "add oil") cheering fans. Laurel dutifully rode the side streets on her bike to meet me at the finish, but because of the closed streets and traffic, I beat her by a good half hour.

For those of you interested, my finish time:

1/2 Marathon - 1:35:09

That's a good 5+ minutes off my PR, but given the lack of training, pollution, and very slow early miles as the mass of runners thinned out along Nanjing Rd, I'll take it.

Here's a picture with me at the finish with the full Marathon winner, probably one of the Kenyans Kenyan Paul Korir, who finished in 2:15.

Math.

I just read this NY Times article about the sorry state of shu xue education in US schools, and particularly the increasing backlash against the ludicrous "fuzzy math" curriculum. The fact that US kids lag Asians in math and science education should come as no surprise (especially to those who, like me, have had the opportunity to volunteer as a math tutor recently).

In a round-about way, shu xue is the reason why I'm in China in the first place. Poor primary school math education means US colleges are graduating fewer and fewer engineering students. Fewer US engineering graduates means companies like mine are forced to go where the talent is - primarily China and India - to hire the engineers they need. Obviously there are other reasons for outsourcing, economic advantages being the most visible, but for companies that are in the globalization game for the long haul, supply of engineering talent is at the top of the list.

For all of it's deficiencies, the Chinese educational system of learning math by rote is nothing if not effective. There are some skills that are just most conducive to memorization and repetition - multiplication tables and long division among them. I've seen the result of this first hand with my Chinese colleagues at work. While they trail US engineering graduates in some areas, their math skills are superior by leaps and bounds. We've got a team of Chinese engineers here doing crazy digital signal processing algorithms that I could only dream of understanding.

I can only hope US educators wake up soon. Mom, I know, you've been telling me all this for years!

Concert.

It's not often that a Grammy-award winning artist NOT named Robin Gibb plays a yin yue hui in Shanghai. So when I heard Bela Fleck was playing at the JZ Club with Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet, I figured it would be worth 80 RMB and a Monday night.

I'm certainly no Bluegrass aficionado. In fact, before Monday I didn't know anything about any of these artists except the fact that Bela Fleck has a funny name and plays the banjo. Now I know he plays the banjo damn well (and still has a funny name). Fleck's banjo and lao wai Washburn's completely out-of-nowhere-near-fluent Mandarin were worth the price of admission, but for me Casey Driessen stole the show with his funky scratch-fiddle licks.

Okay, enough name dropping. Time to leave the music reviews to the real writers.

Hong Kou Neighborhood.

On a run through our rapidly-gentrifying Hong Kou qu this morning, Laurel and I stumbled upon a new upscale shopping/dining complex. Most interesting to me was the "Diaz" coffee shop, which looked remarkably similar to another well known coffee chain, which also happened to have a shop less than 100 ft away.


Who says capitalism isn't thriving in China?

Flood.


You know that feeling when you get home after a long day at work and all you want to do is plop down on the couch and crack open a frosty cold can of Lone Star? Ever had to swim over to the couch to do so?

Laurel and I knew something was wrong when we put the key in the door and could hear a gushing sound coming from inside the apartment. Clue number two came when we opened the door and saw our shoes floating around peacefully like little boats in the newly-formed 4-inch deep freshwater lake that was our living room. It didn't take long to find the culprit of the hong shui, a busted pipe in the toilet that was spraying super pressurized water up into the ceiling of the bathroom and flooding the entire apartment. Only the kitchen was spared.

This was already the second time the pipe had been replaced by the management office, and of course, instead of trying to find out what is causing the problem, they just came and put another one on. The new pipe does appear to be constructed better, but I'm sure it will just be a matter of time until it bursts again.


Amazingly, with the help of a small team of cleaners, we were able to push/suck all the water down the drain or into the wet vac in the course of about 3 hours. Perhaps even more amazingly, we didn't lose anything. Luckily all of our stuff was off the floor. The only victim is the faux-wood flooring, which is now noticeably bowed around the joints. The landlord doesn't seem to concerned about getting it replaced (though she did offer us tickets to the upcoming ATP tennis tournament in Shanghai next week). We'll likely move apartments in January anyway, so I don't really care either.