eat drink seth liz

It's inexpensive to treat yourself right in China.  Last Sunday we took a trip to the hair salon and foot massage parlor, which absorbed pretty much our whole afternoon.  At the hair salon you begin with a frothy in-chair shampoo and head massage which lasts about 15 minutes but seems much longer.  The bubbly shampoo froth continues to pile higher and higher and just when the mountain of suds are about to topple over, they walk you over to the sink for a hose down.  Then comes the 20 minute head, shoulder, arm, and lower back massage, which sounds nice, but is actually very painful. 

Like tag team wrestling pros, the massage and shampoo duo trade places with a hair cutting duo.  The hair cutting duo consists of a stylist and their personal sergeon assitant who hands the stylist various hair cutting implements such as serated and straight scissors, blow dryers, and electric shavers. 

Some of you know that Liz has been working on growing her hair out for almost a year now.  She took a major setback last Sunday, when despite repeating the words 'just a little' 'Yi dian dian',  the hair dresser clipped off most of her locks then used a hair dryer to poof up what remained into a style fit for the 60's. 

After the hair salon, we made our way over to the foot massage parlor.  Unlike tranquil upscale joints in the US, foot massages here are a blue collar affair. An old TV played period piece dramas on CCTV while the masseurs worked on our feet and gossiped away. (We won't talk about how bad CCTV is.  Use your imagination.)

We think the masseurs were shocked and saddend by the sorry state of our American feet.  Foot maintence is a huge priorty here. We have four foot massage parlors on our block alone and every joe shmoe here ducks in for their weekly foot massage fix. 

Our masseurs decided that soaking and massaging were not enough for our feet. So they brought in the big guns and took a straight edge razor to our toes and heels.   We closed our eyes and tried not to move as they deftly scraped away excess toe nails, dry skin, and bits of old lint.  We walked out without a scratch, our feet as soft as a baby's belly.

Tomorrow we head off to Huang Shan.  Legend has it, once you climb this peak you'll never want to climb another mountain in your life.  Expect some great pictures of our journey.

Thanks to Steve and Arleen for guest blogging last week! They claimed to have had a good time here and we have no reason to doubt them.

When our cousin Andrew Binkley the Photographer found out we were going to Shanghai he gave us a small errand.  He was in Shanghai at one point making photography and left some of his work at the Yuandian Art Gallery. Recently he asked them what happened to his work but they didn't respond to his calls or emails, which left open several possibilities. Among others: they could have gone out of business, they could have sold his photography and mistakenly given the proceeds to another artist, or the art may be unsold on a shelf in a back room somewhere.  It was our job to investigate!

The address Andrew gave us led to a car wash and a half demolished building. After lots of questioning and pointing and wandering we found an agglomeration of small galleries sitting in an old factory. (It apparently produced something very large and heavy and round. All the stairwells were equipped with huge concrete waterslides. See the slideshow.) Liz was chatting up all the security guards and gallery people trying to find Andrew's gallery. When we finally got there, a sign on the door said it was closed for a week! Liz called up the owner's cell phone and had a lovely conversation in Chinese, which I'll try to recreate in English:

That part about the older brother needs some explanation. Liz's family relation vocabulary is limited to "mom", "dad", and "older brother". She thought the latter was most plausible. (Chinese word of the day: ge ge means older brother. Interestingly, younger brother is a completely different word.)

After that little conversation we strolled around some other galleries. We especially liked the Mao-Nixon painting and the R-rated riff on da Vinci's Last Supper.

Here's the slideshow, with pictures of the old factory-turned-gallery, the gutted buidings and carwash, Liz in conversation, and various pieces we liked. Be sure to view it in full screen mode. The button is in the bottom right corner.

Final Guest Post By Arleen and Steve........

Man, time flies... Getting  on a plane in a few hours.  Want to give a shout out to Arlene for the great comments.  If not for her, this would seem like a one-way communication.  You FOA's that are lurking are urged to pound on your keyboards.

This visit has been a blast.  Been using taxis and striking out on our own, getting where we wanted to go and getting back.  Shanghai jumps everywhere.  24-7 crowds, traffic and construction.  Never been anyplace like this.  Took in the yuyan street market on Wed. and wound up spending the whole afternoon there.  An endless conglomeration of stalls, stores booths, food vendors and people including an exotic ancient garden residence, tea houses and restaurants.  At one vendor of dumplings there was an endless line... supposedly the best dumplings in Shanghai.  Oh yea, there are also a smattering of Starbucks, KFC's and they are building a DQ.  Even saw a Staples truck delivering office supplies.  Crazy!!!

Thurs. caught us taking a tour of the Jewish history of Shanghai... yes, Shanghai had a Jewish History.  Met up with a few other tourists and our guide at the Peace Hotel  and found the tour was one of the most enriching experiences of our trip. 

Last night we all had a farewell dinner at the "Duck" restaurant.  Now, we have to go... Thanks Seth & Liz... without you, we would never had this incredible experience.
Elana and Shoshanna, we hope you liked our pictures.

In this Slide Show:  Picture of Yu Yuan Market , followed by picture of row houses in what used to be a Jewish neighorhood in Bund area of Shanghai, the offices of the JDC (like Jewish Family Svcs), a public park in the former Jewish neighborhood, After 1941, under Japanese occupation, stateless refugees were confined to a ghetto and the last two photos were taken in the ghetto.  We actually visited one of the ghetto apartmens, a story for another time.

After we came back from Hangzhou we had a small fruit fly infestation. They were breeding in the drains and though they didn't harm us in any tangible way, they made the women of the household very upset, which caused the men to be upset. Liz and Arleen hatched a silly plan to use detergent and incense and whatnot. Seth demanded that he finally be allowed to get a rechargeable 2.3 kilovolt electric tennis racquet bug zapper. Here is a video of the zapper in action.

A Total Eclipse of the Eclipse

Did we mention that Shanghai has a stone gray perma-smog hanging over it? During what was billed as the single coolest eclipse for at least 500 years, we were unable to see the sun or moon. However, at 9:30am we did see the sky go completely dark inside of 10 minutes and for another 5 minutes it seemed as if it were midnight. The most shocking part wasn't the darkness but the sudden temperature drop. We were out on our balcony taking pictures and noticed that the summer breeze started to feel a lot like air conditioning. We can't wait to write a followup blog post in 2509 A.D. By then China will definitely have dealt with the smog situation here.

 Eclipse in Chinese is Ri Shi ('Ri' as in 'rip' and 'shi' as in 'ship')

Another guest post by Arleen and Steve.

The entire country of China is in a single time zone, Bejing time.  This time of year, dawn breaks in Shanghai at about 4:30 AM and it is night time by about 6:30 PM.  We go to bed early, awaken early and get sleepy at noon. Our body clocks are still adjusting.

Yesterday, Liz took us to a food court in one of the large malls for lunch.  We have never seen such a large food court and probably won't ever see one like this again. The progression of booths were, Asian, Asian, Asian, KFC, Asian, Asian, Burger King, Asian etc.  Later that PM we took in an acrobat show. We debated the age of one of the male performers, he looked about 12. He could stand up from a split by sliding his feet together, as if he was being pulled up by a string in the rafters.

Today, we had a half day tour of Shanghai scheduled.  We visited a very old part of the city which included a vast outdoor market and a very wonderful garden known as Shanghai Yuyan Garden, which dates back 400 years.  We also partook of a traditional Tea Ceremony. After sampling 6 types of teas, we were given a list of which teas cure certain ailments. There were teas for high blood pressure, pimples, gas, weight loss, & more.

Arleen's turn to blog.

As a child spending summers at NY beaches we were told that if you dug deep enough in the sand, you would dig to China. 50 years later, I finally got here. Shanghai is a strange city, hot, noisy, with strange smells & crazy drivers.

A few things that I find peculiar: all the purse hooks in the ladies bathrooms are very high (but the ladies are short), the beds are so hard that I thought that they were just box springs, some restaurants charge for paper napkins. 

Elana, Nana is having fun learning to eat with chopsticks, but sometimes if I am very hungry, I just use a spoon.

We stayed at the Ramada Hua Hai in Hang Zhou, a really first class western style hotel.  Breakfast, which was included, turned out to be quite a treat.  Magnificent would be an understatement.  A large room full of stations that included American, European and Asian foods and delicacies.  More like one of those weekend brunches at high end restaurants. [ELANA, we ate eggs, toast, juices, coffee, waffles, Chinese dumplings, fruit, but had no rice for breakfast.]   We then began our exploration of the Westlake area, which contains many of Hang Zhou's attractions.  Though the weather was very hot and humid, we persevered and saw many interesting sites and even took a boat ride.  Saturday evening, we attended a show entitled "Impression Westlake" and we really enjoyed it.  A cast of 600 with lights and water effects acted out an ancient Chinese Fable. 

On Sunday, we took a cab up to a tea plantation, which we believe was the driver's home and he then made and poured us tea.  We drank it and then purchased some.  Seth and Liz stayed behind to hike the hills and Arleen and I returned to the lake to continue our walk there. It was so hot we had to shower a number of times (fortunately were able to keep our room till 2:00PM) and went through all of the clothes we brought.  Caught the train back to Shanghai at 6 PM (modern and fast transportation) and, of course, capped the evening with a Chinese dinner at a nearby restaurant.

The pictures and video that follow will best describe our weekend.

(Guest post from Dad Steve.  We only have limited access to our blog.  We can post but we can not view or comment on our posts.  We can't post a reply, but we still love your comments. )

In this slideshow: On and Around West Lake, Impressions on West Lake Water Show, Museum Shots

Pictures for Elana and Shoshanna

Chopsticks

Guess we thought we would feel like strangers in a strange land here in China and, while we certainly are different both physically and culturally, it does not feel strange.  Liz has completed just about three weeks of Chinese and has developed some limited communication skills.  This has been more than helpful in improving our comfort level.  Some videos of her conversations will follow in this posting.

It is now about 6AM on Monday July 20 and the sun has been up for a few hours.  Since the entire country of China is on one timezone (Beijing Time), summer days in Shanghai start and end early.  It's dark at about 6:30 PM in this part of China.  Anyway, let's continue our trip to Hang Zhou.  I think we left you after our first meal there.

Tired from the trip, our appetites sated, we returned to our hotel.  We stayed at the Ramada Hua Hui, which is located about 2 city blocks from the lake and is a first class western style hotel.  Cost was typical of what the average motel would be in the USA.  Next AM, we met for breakfast (included with room) and were blown away with the buffet.  Food stations including an unimaginable selection of foods, American, European and Chinese breakfast dishes. We then headed out to our adventures.  The whether was exceedingly hot; but we persevered an visited many different sites.  The following videos and slides will cover our adventure.

Talk about tired...  sore feet, sweaty and very, happy.  After arising at dark-30 on Wednesday July 15th, we had an uneventful trip to Shanghai via LA, arriving about 24 clock hours after leaving, but also losing a full day as we passed over the international date line put us at Liz and Seth's apartment at about 8:30 PM on Thursday, July 15.  Of course, we ran right out to have our first meal in Shanghai and that kind of sets the tone for this blog.  Woke up the next day (Friday), met Seth and Liz at a localo park after their morning run and then walked back with them, grabbing breakfast on the fly from some street vendors.   Had lunch and later in the pm, we jumped on the train to Hang 'Zhou which is a smaller city than Shanghai (only 5 million) and is a very interesting place with a large lake and numerous hills.  Upon arriving at the hotel there, we checked in and, of course, had to run right out to dinner.  OK, this was our fourth meal here, so it is time to comment about chinese food in China. 

Here goes...  There is plenty of food for Arleen to eat.  She has been sticking mostly to vegetables; however, has become a little more adventurous as time passes.  Oh yea, she is beginning to master the art of eating with chopsticks (WOW!!!).  The most amazing thing is how inexpensive the food is here.  Our first dinner in Hang Zhou consisted of about 6 different items, 6 glasses of beer & tea for everyone, all family style, and cost us the equivalent of  $14.00 for all of us.  This took place in a very nice restaurant.

Since it is rather late here, that's it for now...  Don't want to bore y'all and we still have to work on the pictures.  More to come tomorrow.

Guest Bloggers, Arleen & DadSteve

To our niece's chagrin, we have not posted a blog in the past few days. We hope these pictures of a Mickey D's delivery man appease our favorite critic.

This video is a compilation of quiet intersections in Shanghai.
In just a few hours my parents will show up at our door. After watching this video you'll understand why we are worried about two New Yorkers, with their aggressive walking style, crossing these streets.

We've discovered that the best way to practice Chinese it to hang out with old retirees in the park. They're there every morning and evening and love to talk. They don't have any particular place to be.

In the park they do all sorts of activities, including playing with a device that resembles a diabolo (a large yo-yo controlled with two sticks and a string) and an old fashioned top. It's called Congza or "Empty Bamboo". Through a translator Seth started talking to "George Hu", one of the Embpty Bamboo players, who said they have a big Empty Bamboo festival at the SJTU Campus Track every Sunday morning at 6am, and that Seth could buy one there. Sunday comes around and the place is swarming with Empty Bamboo twirlers, none under the age of 62. One of the retirees has a few for sale and he tried to give Seth the tourist price but George Hu and Co. stepped in on his behalf and renegotiated the deal. When Liz saw how much Chinese they wanted to speak with Seth, she bought her own, purely as a tool for language acquisition.

Here are a few clips of the empty bamboo. In the first you'll see how it should be done, in the second you'll see Seth getting a lesson from George Hu and the gang, and in the third you'll see that he has learned one trick.

We booked tickets and hotel rooms for three trips:  Hangzhou water town, Huangshan Mountain featured in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Guilin where we'll travel down the rivers and hike through the rice paddies to explore minority villages.  With future adventures planned, we are spending this weekend exploring Shanghai. Today we bought a live fish from an outdoor market. The scaled and gutted fish played it cool for a few minutes until we were out of the market and then tried to flop its way to freedom. Liz dropped the bag on the sidewalk, shrieked, and started looking around for Alan Funt and the candid camera crew.

Here is the fish. 

If you are a PETA sympathizer you may wish to skip this video.

...and here is what became of him. Fried in oil and coated with a thick green onion and peanut sauce, with some bok choy and mushrooms on the side.

Here are a bunch of snapshots from around town.

We've been on the look out for two culinary delights. We've searched high and low for the Big Soup Dumpling 'Tang Bao', a large dumpling filled with hot soup, served with a straw for slurping. We've also searched high and low for Beijing Duck 'Cao Ya', crispy, roast duck.

Tonight, we hit the roast duck jack pot. We found Quanjude (786 Huai Hai Zhong Road), a restraunt that specializes in roast duck.

After some deliberation over whether we should order duck liver, duck gizzards, or duck heart, we choose none of the above and simply ordered some beer, veggies, and one roast duck. About half an hour later, a properly clad chef wheeled in a cart with a caramelized red roast duck. He sliced and diced while our waitress delivered the duck to us in pieces. First she brought a plate of sweet juicy duck skin. Then she brought a plate of rich tender dark meat. Next she brought a plate of thinly sliced white meat. Then she brought a plastic bag filled with a jumble of duck bones.

 'Why is did she bring us the garbage?', I wondered.  Then I realized that she brought us a doggie bag of bones so we could take them home to make soup. The revelation hit me with a bang and I shouted 'Soup!' in Chinese pointing my finger in the air with pride.  In a flash the waitress rushed off to bring us a giant bowl of duck soup broth.

The Accidental Soup

Delicious Flower Tea

Hot Fresh Crispy Pancakes.

The Roast Duck

In this slideshow:Delicious Street Cake, Liz in Heaven, Umbrella Repair Man, and a Common but Hard to Capture Sight.

This post is the 1st installment of our Funny Signs in China series. 

Indeed, we didn't see one frip in the whole place. It turns out frippery actually is an English word.

"LOOKOUT, KNOCK HEAD" in that order.

Ok, the story goes like this: at some point in time someone took someone else's inkslab from this room.  And at some later point they returned the very same inkslab.

Beware the angry Chinese fire hose. 

Welcome to the Buddhism Store! 

We especially like the capitalization here:  My Official Hat.

One China, one time zone, one toilet fits all.

This is a surprisingly common sign.

I LOVE THIS SIGN!!!!   DON'T BEAT AROUND THE BUSH!

At the end of a long day we went to the oldest restaurant in Suzhou (old enough, supposedly, to have served some emperor or another in some dynasty) and they sat us on the dais ordinarily reserved for weddings and bar mitzvahs. 

OK, for you math & LaTeX people out there, the price of movie tickets here are irrational numbers!  (And to get VIP tickets you need to solve for tau.)

Here's some closeups of the worms from the Suzhou Silk Museum

As most of you know, our summer in Shanghai is financed by the Univ. of Michigan—Shanghai Jiao Tong Joint Institute and, in return, I have agreed to teach the youngsters here an Introduction to Algorithms.  The Joint Institute is an exclusive degree-granting institution that recruits the best, brightest, and richest students at Jiao Tong but uses the University of Michigan curriculum, often taught by Michigan professors during the Summer semesters.  (Exclusive?  Yes, the tuition here is 5 times that of the regular university.)

Before I started teaching I heard a few things from several sources about the Chinese students here:(1)  they do a lot of cheating—on homeworks, exams, you name it, (2) they are more prepared and work harder than the Univ. of Michigan students studying here, and (3) they absolutely refuse to speak during class.  I don't know much about (1) yet but my guess is that the stories of widespread cheating are grossly exaggerated.  As for (2), the Chinese students have a bit more math under their belt but they're not a bunch of whizes.  Here's how I know.  In the first lecture I give a little quiz to see what they know about probability, which comes in very handy in an algorithms course.  Nearly every Chinese student had taken a probability course but got the following question wrong:

A couple has two children.  One of them is a boy.  What's the probability that the other one is a boy?

(Anyone want to take a stab?  Post a comment.)  As for (3), the students here absolutely refuse to speak in class, and it's not for lack of questions.  In the middle of my 90 minute lecture I take a 10 minute break and am immediately swarmed by 10-15 students with lists of questions.  The same thing happens after class.  I've tried calling on students during class who are looking confused and they react by silently and vigorously shaking their head.  It's apparently not cool to talk in class.

Our aptartment is a couple blocks from the downtown Jiao Tong campus but I teach on the massive Minhang campus in the suburbs. (Minhang is now famous for that recent building collapse.) Given how densely populated Shanghai and its surroundings are, it is truly amazing how large and green the campus is. It's not clear in the snapshots below, but the campus is crisscrossed by romantic canals shaded with weeping willows.


Be sure to view them in full screen mode. The button's in the bottom right corner.

To start your Monday, here are some pictures and videos of our trip to the Grand Canal Water Town, Suzhou. We left Shanghai at six in the morning and returned an hour before midnight.  We packed in as many tourist attractions as possible. We visited the Couples Garden, the  Garden of the Master Nets (Wangshi Yuan), the  Lion Grove Garden (Sizi Lin) ,the Twin Pagodas, the Temple Beisi Ta, and Suzhou's Silk Museum.



The Lion Grove Garden was our favorite.  We enjoyed trying to figure out why the original garden curator thought the rocks looked like lions.  We also had a great time relaxing in the garden's tea house, where we ate tough, dry corn on the cob and salty hard boiled brown eggs.

In this slide show:  Water town canal, Twin Pagodas, inside Beisi Ta, Buddha outside Beisi Ta , garden pagodas, rocks that look like lions (what do you think?), beautiful garden lattice work 

Everything in this video is actually in the Silk Museum

Suzhou Silk Museum

We traveled to Suzhou this weekend, a water town 40 minutes by train from Shanghai. We imagined a tranquil venician town. Instead we found a city almost as crowded as Shanghai. Traveling by tuck tuck, we packed in nearly a dozen tourist destinations in one day. Here's an intense video starring our chauffeurs.

Enjoy! There is more to come. Get your browsers ready, we will blog every day this week.

This video is best in full screen.  Click on the button on the lower right hand corner of the video.

Tonight we popped out to Tang Yun tea house just one subway stop from our apartment. (At the Hengshen Lu stop on Line 1.) Liz tried out her ordering skills again and unadvisedly answered "OK" to several unintelligible questions posed by the waitress. She thought she ordered 3 small dishes and some tea -- we got a feast covering Peking Pork, bok choy, soups, rice, custards, peanuts, pears, apples, watermellons, bananas, tomatoes, some very interesting aged eggs, grapes, nuts in shells, gooey dried fruit, and two pots of Pu'er tea. (Luckily most of these dishes were on the house.)

Here's Liz in front of the unexpected spread:

You think you like eggs? These eggs are OLD! The whites turned into a rubbery gelatin and the yolks became a moldy green goo a la blue cheese. 

We loved them but we can take only so much moldy yolk.

Ok, you know you're poor in Shanghai when the Buddhist monk to your left has a better cell phone than you.

The menu of the foot massage parlor next to our apartment building on Fahuazhen Lu. The "foot pinch" lasts one hour and costs about 8 bucks US.

Here's a blog dessert video for you all who slogged through those pictures of moldy eggs. This is from the arcade in Metro City in Xujiahui.

I started Chinese classes three days ago. Now, I get why no one understood me when I was trying to use the transliterations printed in my guide book. Not only did my tones stink, I was pronouncing the base words all wrong.

 Turns out that even in transliteration, letters do not correspond completely. For instance, the word 'fuxing' as in fuxing park, featured in the video below, is pronounced 'fooshing' and the word 'ren' as in people, is pronounced 'jren'.

Seth and I were sure we were saying 'tang', the word for soup, correctly. Turns out that, depending on the tone, 'tang' can mean to lie down, sugar, soup, or boiling. Yikes!

Today, I used my newly acquired Chinese to order pork dumplings, 'ji rou'. Hilariously pronounced 'jew ro'. At dinner, I took many of my new words out for a spin. I asked if they had roast duck, chinese cabbage, sweet and sour soup, rice, or, chicken, beef, or veggie dumplings. We only ordered a subset of these dishes. The waitress was getting a kick out of my tongue twisting attempt at proper pronunciation, so I decided to try my luck with my fancy new word 'xiguazhi', 'watermelon juice'. Turns out we were in luck, and the waitress brought out two delicious glasses of freshly smashed watermelons.

 

Here is your Wednesday morning video. More dancing from fuxing park.