eat drink seth liz

Here is a short video from our Sunday morning trip to Fuxing park.  Fuxing park is located in the former French Concession, just a few subway stops away from our apartment.  Parks are the place to be on early mornings and late evenings.  As you can see from our videos, the parks fill with free entertainment.  Dancers, jugglers, singers, guys playing cards (a strangely popular spectator sport), groups of mahjong players, you name it.  

There is an outdoor tea house in the middle of fuxing park.  I used the point and pick method and wound up with a cup of nearly undrinkably strong green tea.   Instead of fighting the crowd to find a free table, you only need to find a free patch of patio and wait for a burly man to bring you a set of chairs, your own glass table, and a hot water thermos the size of a fire hydrant for tea refills.  I gulped and watered my leaves trying to dilute the tea, but it remained strong and bitter throughout each refill.

We have loads of pictures and vidoes from the park.  Here is one teaser to start your Tuesday morning with a bang.

For your foodies, here are two videos of Shanghai experts.

We are settling in to our new apartment.  We found a local grocery store complete with products that resemble peanut butter, yogurt, bread, and milk. We wake up at 5:30 so Seth can catch the bus to campus before rush hour and I can get in my morning run before the heat swelters.  Despite mild exhaustion, we've managed to get out and explore the city.  There are plenty of night clubs and bars, but we are opting for more extraordinary fare.  Last week we saw an acrobatics extravaganza, which felt like watching a game of russian roulette. The evening ended with 8 motercyclists turning circles inside a 25 ft. diameter globe shaped cage.

By popular demand, here is a week's worth of food pictures and some videos. Remember! All these look much better in "full screen" mode. Click the button in the bottom right corner of the slideshow/video.

The Univ. of Michigan—Shanghai Jiao Tong Univ. Joint Institute took all the visiting faculty out for a banquet overlooking the river. Some of our favorite dishes were the pomelo-covered fried fish, the not-as-weird-as-you-might-think steamed chicken feet, the as-weird-as-you-do-think sea slugs, and something that looked like pig knuckles.

In this slide show: a 50 cent lunch. These dumplings are like the Chicken McNuggets of Shanghai (that's for you Poynters). The guy who owned the restaurant let us take pictures under the condition that we included a picture of his sign.

We just got back from a fun cooking class where we learned to make pork dumplings from scratch (starting with flour and water) and fold them into funny shapes. We also learned an unbelievably simple cucumber salad that involved bludgeoning the cucumbers with the side of a cleaver.

Here are some cooking videos, especially for Elana Rose Harr and Shoshanna Elise Harr.

Making a fish-shaped dumpling:

Stuffing the Tofu:

Some random shots around the neighborhood food joints. Our local melon guy convinced us to buy the 1.58Yuan/kilo melon rather than the 1.38Yuan/kilo one. What a salesman! The baked goods under the glass look intriguing but are essentially inedible.

The Great Fire Wall of China has won the day. In our new digs we are unable to see any of the blocked sites, including Blogger. Luckily we found a blogging website that still works in China.

Here's a slideshow of our new apartment in the city. The upside is that it has TWO bedrooms and TWO bathrooms -- the downside is that the second bedroom has no electrical outlets. The upside is that we have a weekly cleaning lady (courtesy the university) -- the downside is that she doesn't touch floors, toilets, showers, or windows.

We're close to our hotel but in a much shi-shier part of town. As far as we can tell, every business on our block is a hair salon, a massage parlor (as opposed to a "massage" parlor), or a fruit market. Liz and I got deluxe haircuts together. For five dollars you get the cut, a 15 minute head massage slash shampoo (in your chair), and a 20 minute shoulder and neck massage.


In the slideshow below you'll see our place, Seth practicing spatula martial arts and practicing for the inevitable day when western toilets are not available. You'll see our neat remote-controlled air conditioner system, our 4 star swimming pool (it would be 5 star were it filled with water) and some shots around the neighborhood. The scaffolding you see there is made solely out of bamboo and stands 6 stories high. The last series of shots are from a neat public park near our new place. Be sure to read the park rules. Among the highlights: no teasing crickets, shrimp, or cicadas (except for commercial purposes) and no feudalistic activities. Public nookie seems to be OK though.

As promised (see last post), here are some videos from our local park. We still don't know what the organizing principle is here. How do the dance troupes get together? Where do they buy the tennis rackets? Who selects the musical score? Are there any bitter turf wars for the shadiest parts of the park?


The Shanghai Britney dancers: hit me baby one more time.




Solo tai chi:




No! no! no! You do the tai chi like this:




The amazing racket and ball dance:



Ministry of Silly Walks



Square Dancing:



Guys playing basketball. (Andy: do these guys got game? Any future in the Houston Rockets?)

Yesterday we had a day in the park near our hotel. After Liz ruled out doing any swimming in China (see last post) we've turned to pumping iron in our chic urban gym and running around the park (about 1 mile per lap.)

This park is fantastic! Before the heat of the day it is filled with older people practicing tai chi, women's dance troups moving to Britney Spears, old guys doing caligraphy with water on the stones, badminton, basketball, and strange exercises involving walking backwards and slapping the backs of hands.

Below are a bunch of pictures from the park. (Be sure to look at them in full screen mode! It's the button in the bottom right corner of the slideshow.) We'll put up some great videos in the next post.





Here's some guys playing basketball. I don't know how good they are but they're definitely respectable.





Tai chi! Everyone seems to be doing it.





Here are a bunch of miscellaneous shots from the park. In the vending machine picture the first three items are condoms, the rest are candy.






Some ladies practicing a dancing scarf routing and some other ladies doing a tennis racket and tennis ball dance routine. What fun! It sure beats TV.

We are conquering jet lag and quickly adapting to big city life. Shockingly, Shanghai is nothing like Ann Arbor. For starters, Shanghai women carry parasols, a custom that I hope arrives in Ann Arbor shortly. With my purchase of a frilly pink umbrella, I am now a near doppelganger of the modern Shanghai woman. Someone asked me for directions yesterday. Now I am working on getting non-tourist price quotes.

In the spirit of soaking up local culture, Seth and I switched from coffee to tea. We are after all in the motherland of tea. Yesterday, I bought some fantastic loose teas at a large shopping center. As I was making my selections, an old man approached and pointed with vigor at the 2 dollar porcelain teapot in my shopping basket. I don't speak Chinese, but I understood his message: Lady! It would be a shame to steep such nice tea in such an awful pot. Soon a group circled around my basket, campaigning for a switch to a terracotta pot. Unfortunately, the terracotta pots are cost prohibitive, but I am keeping my eye out for a good deal.

In our quest to adjust and ignore jet lag, Seth and I are quickly ticking items of our to do list.

1. Eating our first soup dumplings (delicious fresh dumplings with soup and balls of meat wrapped in soft dough) = CHECK

2. Joining a gym (sauna, steam room, and crazy Chinese drill sergeant style yoga classes included) = CHECK

3. Eating our first hot pot soup (boiling soup with raw meat and veggies for dunking) = CHECK

4. Seth learns how to travel to work = CHECK

5. Liz signs up for language classes (I start Monday) = CHECK

6. Liz finds a running track and swimming pool (I am never returning to that swimming pool for many reasons, but mainly because swimmers here hurl huge throat clearing gobs of spit over the side of the pool after every lap.) = CHECK

We miss everyone and our cats dearly.

We know our comment section was down for a while. It is now up and running. We love comments!


Some of the pictures below are rather detailed. Be sure to click the "Full Screen" button (typically a box in the lower right corner of the slideshow) to make them big.


Shanghai Cuisine



Tea, Teapots, and Parasols



Around Town



Seth's Campus, our Gym, and the Giant Glowing Ball which Houses our Gym.

After over 16 hours of travel and a partial day of sight seeing, we are finally ready to collapse into our Shanghai hotel beds for a coma-like sleep. Our travels started off with a bang. The cab we took to the airport came equipped with a pug passenger, the royal dog of China. Who knew?!!

We had a 2001 moment when, just prior to deplaning in Shanghai, a group of masked men in full astronaut-like white bunny suits boarded the plane to take our temperatures. Luckily no one was suspected of carrying the H1N1 flu and we were only held up for a few minutes. For those who wonder how long it takes 4 people to take the temperatures of 300 passengers, the answer is roughly 10 minutes. They do not use mercury thermometers. Their device looks like a giant laser pointer that shines 4 red dots on the passenger's forehead. It also reads thoughts.



We did not have much time to explore the city today, but we did learn a few things. 1) No matter what type of vehicle the Chinese drive, they are aggressive roadsters. 2) Tourist districts are uncannily similar no matter where in the world they are located 3) When you are sufficiently tired and hungry, the Denny's of China looks pretty good.

In four days we ship off for our two month adventure in China. Seth will be teaching some mind blowingly difficult computer science course at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, while I wander around the city, learn Chinese, shmooze with locals, and of course, catch up on my lesiure reading. Great fire wall permitting, we will post pictures, and stories on our travels. So log on, log in, and drop a comment.