On Sunday, one of our hosts took us to a couple of museums and to a Korean lunch. All good. Museums mostly bore me, all that OLD stuff. But I like beauty and there were some cool porcelain. Much of the art seems very similar to Japanese and Chinese art. My favorite in the museum turned out to be Japanese painting on a bamboo screen.

Why doesn't my company ever send me to Japan? (sigh)

Now I'm sitting in a Technical Presentations Skills course that I'm supporting. Still somewhat jet-lagged, but at least the consultant is smart and interesting. The first time round. We will do this again Thursday and Friday in Taiwan, then Sunday and Monday in China, then Thursday, Friday, and Monday in Singapore.

I think I'll find some other things to do on the reiterations. I may end up delivering a different Presentation Skills training for execs in Singapore. We'll see.

Ain't my life interesting? And you wonder why I don't write more personal stuff more often.

Maybe I should tell some more of my past lives.

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March 4, 2005

Haggling for 10 RMB

So I say, Great! I know how to get us to where he wants to go. His wife told him the previous evening to get her one of these Prada knock-offs, but one in yellow. We'd seen one over the weekend in a backstreet "warehouse" that was hidden from the police because, apparently, there are legitimate knock-offs and illegitimate knock-offs. (Not to be confused, of course, with legitimate and illegitimate knock-ups.)

So we head back to the Renaissance in Pudong, write up the report, and head out to Yu Gardens again. We dodge males and females, most of them seemingly half my size (I'm just over six foot and my boss is as well, and he really stands out because of his curly gray-white hair... all around us is a sea of black hair) and they're surging up to us every five feet crying, "Rolex? You need watch?" and I think, Gee it's like they don't realize I've been asked that same question by 20 different people in the last block. And besides I already got my wife a geniune Franck Muller the previous day nearby, which normally costs $11,000 anywhere else and I got it for 350 RMB, about $43 US ($1 US equals 8.25 RMB).

I get us to the right street stall, but no one's there and I motion to some of the guys standing around, since my Mandarin is, uh, nil, and they point to a guy who happily leads us back to the alleyway behind the storefronts.

There's always a bunch of tiny apartment shanties everywhere, and he takes us past the place we visited over the weekend, and I stop and point to it and say, "Hey! This is it!" and he smiles and nods and motions us to follow him, saying "Same, same."

So we follow him through the narrow walkways into even more shanty-like conditions, with clothes hanging on lines, and people of all sorts milling about. It's all relatively clean compared to other places we'd seen and there's no danger signals going off on my inner radar, so we follow him through an open doorway and into a small 9' by 9' low-ceiling room with curtains on three sides and cheap flourescents washing out the colors.

He locks the door behind us (No police!) and draws back the pale green cotton curtains, revealing all kinds of purses, Prada, Gucci, Coach, Louis Vuittan, and we know they are real leather because he whips out a lighter and waves the open flame under a purse to prove they're not plastic and says, "See? Geniune, rea' reather!" and we smile and nod with him, but he doesn't have the yellow real-leather Prada, just a black one, and that's no good, so we point to it and say, "Yellow, yellow Prada."

And we make ready to leave, and he stops us nodding, "No, no, yellow, okay" and pulls out his cell phone (everyone in Shanghai, no matter their economic condition, seems to have a cell phone) and makes a call, and he talks rapidly, forcefully, finally getting the message across to whomever he needs to get the message across to, and he says, "Okay, okay, wait" and he pulls out several little suitcases of watches to keep us occupied, which we aren't all that interested in, we came for a very specific purse.

And then he pulls out the Mont Blanc pens, excuse me, a Mont Blanc collection of fine writing instruments, but instead of hundreds of dollars, we can get rea' ones for 80 RMB, about 10 bucks US, but that's not good enough for us so we do the haggle and get him down to 70 RMB, and we each get a pen, because they actually seem to write well, and they look and feel good.

And we're still waiting for the yellow Prada, but we figure that we should settle on a price, so we pull out the black Prada and he pulls out his calculator (there must be thousands of these being used in street stalls every day in Shanghai) and he punches in 480 RMB, which is $60, an outrageious amount (I got a nice Coach two days earlier for 160 RMB, down from 350, and I know if I had walked away a few times, I could have saved at least another 20 or 30 RMD, that is $2 to $4 US) and so we get him down finally to $320, because there is a matching wallet inside and a colleague got one just like it for nearly that amount the previous day, and we're just considering haggling for 10 RMB more, when the ceiling creaks.

We look up and our smiling salesman says, "No worry, no worry, it's just my wife" and for the first time we notice that in one part of this low ceiling is a 2-foot square cutout hole and a small ladder. And a small smiling woman comes down the ladder with their son, who's less than 2 years old.

And everything slows down.

I notice that there's a small refrigerator in this little warehouse. Some cosmetics sit on a small shelf above the refrigerator.

There's a mirror on the wall, placed in such a way that by easing over to it, I can look up into it, through the hole in the ceiling and get a reverse image of the corner of a mattress, a tiny dresser and a chair.

I look at my boss. It dawns on both of us that, Oh My God, this tiny little split level 9 by 9 warehouse is a family home.

And they're all smiling, including the boy. Just then all desire goes out of us to haggle over 10 RMB.

The yellow purse arrives, we pay more than we had agreed, and all three of them are very happy having done business with these Americans. He presses his business card into our hands, even though it's completely in Chinese. We're his new friends.

We leave them with their smiles, which we know include a glowing satisfaction at our thinking we're leaving with such incredible bargains...

...and thinking back on their smiles, the smile of that child, I'm sure we did.

--------

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February 27, 2005

Shanghai Nights

We arrived, checked in, and went right to Yu Gardens to shop. Bought a bunch of cashmere scarves for gifts, and a travel case to schlep them back in. We had the usual fun haggling prices down t 1/3 the original offered.

Oh, and I bought my wife a couple of watches. Hope they last more than a month.

Then we went to the Grand Hyatt for dinner. This is the tallest building in Shanghai offering spectaculat views of the Oriental Pearl Radio Tower, the Bund, and all the buildings in the new area of Pudong. (You can see some of the pictures if you go here.)

We ate sushi in a Japanese restaurant on the 56th floor, which also has an interior gallery where you can look up a 100-foot diameter central core that goes up another 40-50 stories with views of room halls that reminds me of the circular Galactic Senate in Star Wars. Awe-inspiring and a little dizzying.

My compatriots put away champaigne, beer, wine, scotch, and three bottles of cold saki. I don't drink, so I kept up with my San Pellegrino. We laughed for over 2 hours and probably upset the neighbors. But only two of us were Americans (one Korean, one Japanese, and one Taiwanese), so we may have dodge a cultural bullet.

Sunday we went to the first half of the Peking Opera doing Mu Guiying Takes Command. Here's a synopses: She Taijun, widow of a famous general of the Song Dynasty can not sit idle when she learns that the Western Xia regime has invaded the Song Empire. She sends her great-grandchildren Yang Wenguang and Yang Jinhua to the capital city for information. There they break into the martial arts competition arena and kill Wang Kun, the son of the defense minister who wants to take command of the Song troops in order that his family may usurp the power of the empire. The emperor then learns that they are descendants of the Yang family and agrees to put their mother, Mu Guiying, in command of the troops. She is reluctant to take command because she knows that the emperor is a capricious person. Widow She, however, persuades her daughter-in-law to take command, putting aside her private resentment in order to save the country.

It was everything we thought Chinese Opera would be. But 90 minutes of a 3-hour opera was enough. Some of the vocals were remarkably piercing and sinus cleansing. The lead actor (all the female parts are male actors, trained from the age of 5 to be women; I know, interesting...) won many applause lines for his/her ability to do a kind of chrysanthemum unflowing of the hands. I only heard about this after, so I missed out on the reason for the applause.

Today and the next two days is work work work. I'll check back in if I can. Got an org assessment to do.

Cheers

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February 24, 2005

The Lonely Traveller

...and all I can think about is missing my wife of 7 years. Why is traveling always so lonely without her?

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February 23, 2005

Blogging from Taiwan

So I recommend that, until I have time to work up another post, you read the archives for January.

I mean, really, you haven't read all those long posts yet, have you? Why not catch up now?

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January 11, 2005

Shanghaied - China, Part 1

Shanghai is a city of 20 million people. Think about that. Over twice as many people as in New York City. There are skyscrapers as far as the eye can see in all directions!

At night, the structures look like The Jetsons meet Godzilla.

It's as if the Chinese brought in every French avant garde architect to create buildings topped by spheres and rings and points and neon lights. The Chinese definitely love color. The skyline looks like neon fireworks. Everywhere you go at night, the buildings are lit up. I was walking the Bund area when I saw a huge building lit up in gold light. It was grand in architecture and presence. Was it a museum? Was it the opera house? No! It was the Shanghai Customs House!

We had dinner in the second sphere of the Oriental Pearl Radio and Television Tower. The restuarant revolves 360 degrees in exactly one hour.

Everywhere you go in Shanghai, and especially in Beijing, you see high-rise cranes. The steel consumption is incredible. (In Beijing they are building over 600 hotels to accommodate the 2008 Olympics. They work 24 hours. All night you can see welding torches in the distance.

Here is a picture of Shanghai taken from the Oriental Pearl restaurant.

When we went shopping in Shanghai, whatever price you're quoted, you know you can haggle down to one-third. The merchandise is very cheap, and truth in labeling is not enforced. Silk and cashmere are not silk and cashmere.

After a couple of days I noticed that all of the shops contained pretty much the same merchandise in the same packaging. I suddenly got visions of factories churning out tourist trinkets and began to see that it all was kind of a front for the Communist Party. It had all the appearance of capitalism, but it wasn't.

Here's a picture of me with friends in a famous restaurant in Yu Gardens (they have a big picture of Bill and Hillary Clinton on the wall).

More later.

*** All I want is a warm bed, a kind word, and ultimate power. Ashleigh Brilliant

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