Shanghai'd

Culture.

I know, wenming, wenhua... I am certainly becoming cultured and civilized. :) Anyway, the last week has been been filled with wenhua for me.

Starting Saturday night, we headed off to our local MOMA (2 blocks from our house, that should have been the first clue to what we had in store). There was an art exhibition planned featuring live contemporary jazz. As we just had a massive storm, the weather was perfect for what I had in mind - dim lighting, sipping red wine, chatting and meeting new likewise cultured folk to some relaxing music. However, the evening consisted of luke warm Tsingtao, high school-esque abstract art exhibit and music that was a bit too contemporary for our taste. Picture one guy wailing on the drums with a saxophonist doing his best to keep up by taking huge breaths and blowing through the instrument while hitting random notes - for 30 minutes (before we left with splitting headaches). Probably the most entertaining bit of the evening was a Chinese girl dancing that made us feel like we were in a David Lynch movie.

Sunday night was the close of the 10th annual international film festival. We caught the last picture - To Return "Volver" with Penelope Cruz. Love that dishwashing scene camera angle. Great movie. We moved back to "normal" on the culture scale.

Finally last night I completely rounded out all the culture I will need for a while - I saw Christina Aguilera in concert! First of all Christina has a great voice and is obviously very passionate about her music. More impressive was the choreographed dance and costume change! Very entertaining and fun. What a good time. No opening band, no drawn out en chore. If you have never been to a pop concert before, I highly recommend it.

Olympic Games.

Laurel and I just finished buying our tickets for the Beijing Ao yun hui set to open on 8/8/2008 at 8:08pm. Can you guess which number is most auspicious in Chinese culture?

One of the benefits of having established domicile in China is the opportunity to apply for Olympic tickets through the advance lottery system. So technically we have just entered the lottery - next month we find out if we get our top choices. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for BMX cycling, rhythmic gymnastics and modern pentathlon, like much of the rest of the world, I'm sure.

Interesting to note is that the application process actually had one of the only slick, usable web interfaces I have come across in China. They are usually laughably frustrating. On closer inspection I noticed this logo in the corner of the page:


You know you've been in China too long when TicketMaster has become the model of customer service.

And for those astute readers who notice that the games are still more than 1 year away ... no we haven't tipped our hand that we will definitely be in China that long, but yes there is a chance. We can always sell the tickets, so if you haven't made your travel plans to come out and visit yet, start planning your route.

Plum rain season.

This week marked the official start of the mei yu here in Shanghai. Don't let the innocent name fool you - a more appropriate moniker should be the "we all laugh as hairy foreigners try to swim through the air" season. In fact, the Chinese have an expression that goes something like "把空气扭到水" (I think?) "空气里拧水" which literally means to ring water out of the air.

Coming from semi-arid Colorado, even Austin seemed tropical to me. Shanghai is like walking around Austin wearing a plastic garbage bag around your body. And I swear the air tastes like the inside of a stale balloon. Ponder that for a minute while I scoop out a watermelon and plop it on my head to cool off.

Hong Kou District.

Here are some old and some new pictures from our previous neighborhood, Hong Kou Qu. I feel really lucky to have lived here for a year, because these neighborhoods are quickly disappearing from ever-gentrifying Shanghai.



Here is the full Hong Kou Qu Flickr set.

Lao wai are cheated, conned, scammed, swindled and robbed blind with pathetic frequency in China. It's not often we're able to even the score. Last night, I got that chance.

Tuesday night Laurel and I fell victim to one of the oldest scams in the book. Perhaps "fell victim" is not the correct term since we knew perfectly well at the time we were being taken, but obliged anyway. After finishing Chinese class we set off on foot from our apartment to the nearby grocery store. After leaving the gate, we were immediately stopped by an obviously flustered Chinese man who set in on his version of the classic "stolen wallet" story. For those who don't get out much, this is the one where the con artist launches into a particularly heart wrenching tale of how he is just visiting and has just had his wallet stolen by a . He has no way to get back to and just needs to buy a train ticket home and put this whole nightmarish big-city ordeal behind him.

Our particular guy was requesting 100 yuan to buy a train ticket back to Nanjing after a unruly gang of kids had stolen his wallet. 100 yuan is a pretty steep starting point (well more than a ticket to Nanjing should cost), so we must have looked especially gullible/sympathetic. This guy pulled out all the stops, including showing us his business card - apparently to validate his upstanding character - and of course promising to pay us back by taking us out to dinner his next trip to Shanghai. I've got to give him credit, because he sold the hell out of the whole routine - most importantly appealing to our sense that this could even happen to us, and wouldn't we want to be able to rely on the kindness of a stranger ourselves in that same situation?

Of course I was 99% sure that this guy was full of crap, but that 1% of uncertainty (a very profitable 1% no doubt), along with what must have been a very generous mood on my part, and frankly an appreciation of his performance convinced me to part with 20 yuan to help out a fellow human being in need.

Usually this is where the story ends. Lao wai feels ridiculously naive, yet naively good at the same time. And I was no different. At least until last night, when, while waiting to meet a friend outside the Jing An temple subway station, I was tapped on the shoulder and spun around to a familiar face and familiar voice telling and amazingly familiar story about trying to get back to Nanjing after having his wallet stolen. I don't think the guy recognized me as the same sap from 4 nights earlier at first. After all, Shanghai is a city of 20 million people, and this was in a completely different part of town then before. Besides, he must tell this same story to 100 people a day, so I can forgive him for not making the connection immediately.

At this point, I figured I was more than justified in having a little fun at his expense, so I lamented with him the incredible bad luck of having his wallet stolen AGAIN just 4 days later. Beginning to realize I was mocking him, he swore up and down we had never met before and I must be mistaken. At this point, Laurel walked up and made him out too and he was obviously busted. We both laid into him for a few minutes, chastising him for taking advantage of human kindness and ruining it for the overwhelming majority of honest people out there. Pretentious, yes, but also quite cathartic. Finally, I reminded him that he still owed me 20 kuai from the night before, which he sheepishly fished out of his pocket and handed over. A meager, yet karmic-ly satisfying victory.

# posted by tim @ 8:15 PM 1 comments