Day 5: Shanghai

Today was a pretty dreary day. It's been raining pretty much the whole day, and it's a good thing we left Suzhou for Shanghai because apparently it started snowing in Suzhou today. Our guide Mr. Huang was saying how the forecast of snow drove up the price of vegetables in one day because all the wives in the area were in a hurry to stock up on food before it was too late.

The way we've been eating it's like we've been stocking up on food ourselves. The funny thing about this trip is that although we've been eating Chinese food for 5 days straight, each place we eat is almost completely different than the last. Most of the places survive almost 100% on tourist groups meaning their food and attractions can be sometimes be a bit like a sideshow. I think it was the first night that they sang and danced, and today it was chinese food on roller skates. It's like taking your out of town friends to Ed Dibevick's(sp?) and to Sonic(?) and saying this is American food. The food has it's ups and downs but today was the first day we ate at a non-tour group location.

We were at a section of Shanghai that was modeled after a French european area and featured outdoor patios areas and expensive fancy coffee. Too bad Chinese people are cheap and don't like coffee. The place was a bit surreal and was a bit Disneyland-esque. It even had these holiday elf statues that resembled Snap, Crackle, and Pop but sang like Alvin and the Chipmunks. According to Mr. Huang, this place is popular among the european tourists and the Chinese youth. I guess it's their equivalent of Boba shops. The rain and prices kept us from stopping at any of the cafes and ended up at an indoor shopping area at the far end of the promenade. At this point we were just killing time and as we wandered through the mall enjoying being dry, I saw a Ding Tai Fung listing on the directory. I told them about the one in Arcadia and how it was pretty good and people raved about the ones in Taiwan, so my parents wanted to try it. It was fantastic to finally break away from the usual tourist places and finally have food that I was expecting from China. I know this place is a chain and that there's probably a billion better places for Chinese food, but this stuff was like heaven in my mouth after a couple of the places we've visited. The place we ate at the water village actually made me a little nauseous while I was eating it.

Since the Coffee Road stop was kind of a bust because of the rain, Mr. Huang actually took us to a Tea House for a tea ceremony demonstration and for tasting some of the different teas. Out of all the cultural stops we've made, I think this is the one I enjoyed most so far despite the obvious gift store that would follow the ceremony. The explanations of the different teas and the smelling and tasting of hot tea on a cold day was exactly what we needed.

On the way to the Tea House though, the driver actually got lost briefly while trying to make a shortcut through a part of the city which ended up being a part of the slums of Shanghai. This was probably the most interesting part of the day since this was more of the stereotyped view I had of China before I came here. The road was pretty much a single lane that was cramped with shops and stalls that lined the sides. People were walking in the middle of the road blocking the way and at one point there was a bicycle laden with vegetables blocking the road while the owner was haggling with customers. I was watching all of this from behind fogged up windows and was surprised by all the delapidated buildings falling apart while people were still living inside of them. The shops were all selling either food, fresh produce or raw bolts of cloth, since making your clothes is a lot cheaper. The most amazing thing was that in a city full of flashing lights and webs of raised freeways and enough glitz to rival NYC or Las Vegas, there are these small areas of old Shanghai that are still thriving and will not go away.

For every new building that gets put up here, I've realized that there is always something that will always end up showing China's real age, whether it's the crows feet on the walls of the hotel we stayed at in Suzhou or the push carts that the workers are using to prepare for the coming World's Fair. We actually went to go see a Chinese Acrobatic show tonight and my mom asked how long the theater has been around. Mr. Huang responded "Not very long, maybe 10 years?" For a country that's been around for thousands of years and still considers the 700 year history of Shanghai to be pretty young, 10 years is like a drop in a bucket. The show was fantastic but I couldn't help but compare it to Cirque Du Soleil. It's a bit unfair to compare them considering Cirque charges more than double for their tickets and probably hires away a lot of their most talented performers, but even the show was showing its age. The acts have been poached long ago by other circuses and even the costumes look like they've been in use for ages. At one point in the show, some contortionist tumbler girls appear out of some tiny holes in the ground right in front of us. I couldn't help but see the frayed edges of her costume and the worn patches on the knees and arms. Some of the costumes looked ill fitting as though they had multiple performers but only one costume to share between them. Even the styling of some of the costumes were showing its age. For one scene, the guys looked as though they were Super Sayan David Bowies with their super spiked hair, makeup and pointed shoulder armor. Despite all of this, the show was fantastic and I don't want to take anything away from the death defying acts which still made my heart race or the amount of effort these people put into making this show what it is.

I leave Shanghai in the morning and I have to say that this city is amazing and I only wish I had more time and more ability to really explore it. I feel like I've only gone to Disneyland and Citywalk and saying I've been to LA. Maybe I'll get to come back here one day and see the city again, but this time not from behind a fogged window.

Day 4 pictures

Outside some temple

"I farted."

"I'm a lion!" - Lion Grove Garden

"I'm a crab!"- Lion Grove Garden

"We're crabs!"

Kaboom!

Day 4

We went to a couple gardens and temples today and honestly the names are starting to blur together. Lion this, dragon that; it's hard to remember and differentiate all the names. Suzhou is a pretty cool area but is a lot colder than Shanghai.

We also hit up the silk factory today since it's a famous place for silk production in china, and silk embroidery museum as well. Not surprisingly, the factory and museum tour were just another sales pitch to get us to buy stuff while we were there. The artwork at the museum was pretty fantastic though. I don't know how many people have tried embroidery or ever looked at the back of an embroidered piece, but it usually looks like a huge mess of loose threads and knots. Some of the pieces at the museum were double sided where each side had a different image and it required the artisan to use two needles at once and work using mirrors so she could see both sides at once. For the layman artist, it's a pain in the ass.

The styles ranged heavily though from stereotypical chinese fish and bamboo to photorealism and even abstract. It was amazing what they were able to recreate using a needle, a thread and about a billion hours of cheap labor. When you first look at some of them, they look like they were real photos and some others they even imitate the brush strokes of paintings like the Mona Lisa.

The tour guide that was leading us through the exhibits and even showing us the ladies embroidering on the spot explained all of this to us in perfect english. If I hadn't met him in the middle of china, I probably would have guessed his accent to be somewhere between the uk to australia. It was a bit off from those exactly, but I never would have guessed China. His name was Billy, although I'm sure that was just a name he chose to keep foreigners like me from saying 'hwat was that again?'. He looks pretty young and apparently is the same age as me, but after talking with him for a bit, I realized how we're worlds apart. He's married and has a 2 year old daughter at home. He went to a University here in China to study English like our tour guide for Shanghai. Although our tour guide only moonlights as a tour guide and his real job is a english translator professor at a University in his home town, thinking of going to a University to lead tourists through an embroidery factory would make any college kid back in the states to say 'fuck that'. While English majors in the states use it to be aspiring actors, what I get from both the of our guides is that they really enjoy using their degree in english to meet new and different people from a land of homogeneity.

Beyond the homogeneity of the people, it is rare to find something truly unique in a land that prides itself on being able to mass produce everything from happy meals to the shoes on your feet. One thing I've come to understand is that if you see something being sold here, there's one being sold just like it in a booth down the street. So when people tell you it's hand made and one of a kind, I'm more inclined to call bullshit. In the embroidery factory, the pieces of art are truly spectacular works of craftsmanship, which is why I call them artisans rather than artists, but when you walk past a hundred embroidered artworks, you begin to see there are far fewer designs that they have to pull from. I loved the 'kitten stalking a mantis' piece, but I saw at least 5 of them and each completely identical. I commented on this to Billy and asked him "Do the seamstresses ever get to choose what designs they get to make?" and he replied "Sometimes". While embroidery is creative art along with painting, sculpting and performance art, it seems to lose the creative side of it just like any other 'art' that becomes a job.

After talking to Billy some more, apparently only one person gets to decide which designs get created at the embroidery factory. He/she basically just compiles a bunch of images they think would be cool/sell well and sends them to the factory to get them made. From a creative bias, I don't think that's a great idea to limit any creative input to one person with an internet connection. Although the artworks made aren't embroidered stock photography, they're not far from it. I don't think anyone's gonna want to drop a grand on an embroidered reproduction of Starry Night or Monet's Waterlilies. It's like buying Kidz Bop instead of the real album. But maybe that's part of the genius of China. Not only being able to copy Kidz Bop albums and sell them on the streets for the price they're worth but being able to emulate everything there is with such a precision that everyone else says 'fuck it'.

Day 3: Traveled from Shanghai to Suzhou

SWFC Building's 94th floor

Drawings in Watervillage

Watervillage

Day 2

So I got my first foot massage today. Since my parents purchased a private tour package for the four of us, most of our itinerary is planned by the tour company. They provide the translator/guide, choose the restaurants and recommend destinations for us to go to, set up our hotel and transportation. It's a pretty sweet deal when you can't speak the language and don't know the area. For the tour company, they get to guarantee restaurants and destination sites some business from their clientelle and in return, get some pretty awesome discounts. I totally understand the 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch your's mentality. We had a pretty excellent lunch at this herbal restaurant which also happened to be right next door to a medicinal herbal center where we were scheduled to have our foot massage.

When we walked into the place, they had pictures posted on the wall of all these famous/important people that had frequented the place including the last 8 emperors of China and chairman Mao. They lead us upstairs into a side room and sit us down on some chinese grandma furniture. Some people walk in and set down some tubs full of what looks like steaming soy sauce in front of each of us. They tell us to take our shoes and socks off and to soak our feet in it as a guy in a white medical coat walks in. He begins to tell us about the benefits of holistic medicine as the room empties, but completely in cantonese. So I'm kind of throwing looks over to my grandma and my mom while this guy is talking and I'm trying to guess what this guy is saying through an intense game of charades. Half way through the lecture, I look at my grandma and she leans over to me and says to me 'I don't understand what he's saying'.

When he finishes his spiel, the soy water marinade is starting to get cold and he walks outside. Our masseuses walk in. They're all in matching track suit uniforms with official looking badges. One of the girls was almost as big as I was and I kind of breathed a little sigh of relief when she went to work on my dad. My grandma and I got the two smaller girls. As they dry off one foot and begin the massage, that's when a translator and a man they referred to as 'the professor' walk in and they really go to work on my dad. They begin talking about how if you have any health problems that the 'professor' can help solve them. He looks at my dad and is saying how he needs medicine for high blood pressure and things to cleanse his kidneys and liver, and this is all from less than five minutes of just looking at him.

Meanwhile my masseuse has been working on my foot and whispering to my grandma's masseuse. I can only assume they were talking about me cus they begin to try to talk to me and quickly figure out that I have no idea what they're saying. Eventually I work out they asking me how old I am, and I'm trying to remember my numbers in mandarin, but just resort to counting on my fingers instead to say 'two nine'. They respond with a 'So old!' which I guess is one of the few things they know how to say. They hold up their fingers 'one eight' and I'm just like 'holy crap their young'. I just wish I knew how to say that in Chinese.

The professor and the translator, who really seemed more like a saleswoman at this point, are still trying to sell my dad on some herbal medicine which eventually comes out to being over a thousand bucks $US. I'm just thinking holy shit that's expensive. My dad's not really the best at resisting sales pitches and he asks my mom and me for advice. I'm just like 'It's up to you dad' and my mom says 'I'm telling you, anyone can sell you anything'. I think my dad was a little peeved by that and eventually tells them no and that's just about when our massage stops. He still manages to make some balloons for the masseuses before they leave with all smiles, and you can even see a group of girls outside the room's door looking in on the balloons.

This wasn't the first time anyone's really pushed a sale on us before. There're tons of dudes outside that are trying to entice tourists with promises of expensive bags and purses. And I don't really blame our guide for taking us to what really came down to a sales pitch, since after we leave, he'll still have to deal with these restaurants and massage parlors. I just kind of find it funny that we ended up in a place with a snake oil salesman who literally was trying to sell us snake oil.

I'm in China, man.

So I've arrived in Shanghai safely after a 2 hour layover in Hong Kong. For those who neglected to tell, I'm basically traveling through China before attending my brother's second wedding reception in Taipei on Xmas.

The trip over here really wasn't so terrible. Fourteen hours on a plane doesn't really compare with a 61 hr bus ride from NYC to LA, especially when you have free movies to kill the time, altho the crazies on the bus were occasionally fun to talk to. I haven't really flown much and don't know if this is really super common, but they actually had this feature on the headrest displays where you can watch a video feed from a camera that's attached to the bottom of the plane that's just behind the front wheel. I found it super interesting to watch during take off because the underbody of the plane would mirror the ground beneath it, and as the plane was taking off, it had this surreal tunneling effect that was mesmerizing to me. Unfortunately as we were flying to HK, we were basically chasing the shadow of the earth and the screen was black the rest of the time, but the take off and landings were sweet.

After arriving in Shanghai, we've pretty much been doing the touristy thing and been to the Shanghai museum and then walked down Nanjing Road(i think) that had (overpriced) shops all over the place. The things that have really been interesting me more is the driving around the city. It amazes me how people around here have so little regard for the road and how people still get around. Our tour guide basically said that the lights and road signs are mainly up for decoration. There's a ton of cars, trucks and buses zipping around everywhere disregarding the lights, signs and lines in the road and all the spaces inbetween are filled with bikes and mopeds. In a place like LA, the bikers and mopeds would die if they drive like they do here, but for some reason it just works, although I did see a moped totally nail a pedastrian while we were at Nanjing Road.

The food so far has been so-so. My parents got us a private tour package which includes food at select restaurants around the city. It's good to finally have some real chinese food, but I feel that I've had better food in the states. I'm not sure if that's because it actually is better or if it's because I'm just used to eating our food. I am pretty sure that the xiao long bao(the soup dumplings) that I had was pretty crap tho. The dumpling wrappings were pretty thick and weren't completely sealed. They also stuck to one another so that they'd tear open when you'd try to pick them up. The single dumpling that I got that didn't tear from sticking to another dumpling, simply because it was the last dumpling, didn't even have any noticeable soup inside of it. I'm really looking forward to going to the real ding tai fung(sp?) when I get to Taipei.

At the restaurant we went to tonight, my parents actually went there 3 years ago. It's some culturally obscure restaurant that I want to say was a thai place that served chinese food, because they had some stage show where they'd dance and play the flute or recorder and during the dances the girls wore the golden pointy finger things(wow i'm eloquent) that I've only seen during the traditional thai dances(i think). They also have these greeters that welcome you into the restaurant with cymbols, gong and drums. The funny thing was that some of these workers actually recognized my dad. If you guys know me at all, my dad is notorious for his balloon animal twisting. He has this balloon bag that he carries around with him EVERYWHERE, i shit you not. Apparently the last time he was there, all the workers came to the table wanting animal balloons and were neglecting the rest of the tables, and while they were dancing on stage, the dancer's eyes were glued to my dad.

For being a pseudo-professional photographer, meaning I've fooled people into paying me for taking pictures, I feel like my photos are pretty crap so far, but I've been a lot more proficient at my sketching while I've been here. I'm hoping to get some really good stuff while I'm here so I'll try to post those as they come too. I'm not sure how long I've been up but I feel like it's been forever so I'm going to crash soon. Hello China, here I come!

So Long LA!

So I'm all packed and ready to go. I tried to keep it light and be as minimal as possible. The flight's at 10pm and between then and now I'm totally gonna go hit up In'n'out.

If any of you are interested in keeping up with my trip, I'll hopefully be able to update this thing pretty frequently as I make my way through what is to be my first trip to the motherland and my first time setting foot on another continent.

The next time I update, I'll be in China!

So long, farewell, and peace out!