Sweet-Smelling Mystery Solved

I had never thought of West Oakland as a nice-smelling place until recently. My main experience with the neighborhood until now was driving past the sewage treatment plant next to highway 580 on my way home from San Francisco. You can imagine what that smells like.

In the past few weeks, though, I’ve been discovering some pockets of the neighborhood that smell great. There are a couple of bakeries near the Emeryville border that constantly smell like cake, greatly improving a blighted and even hostile part of town. (Somebody threw something at my car as I was driving home from my borderlands walk. I think it was just a crumpled-up drink cup, but still, it’s the least welcome I’ve felt yet.)

Around 14th Street and Market Street, the air also smells nice. It’s not quite as sweet as the cake neighborhood; it smells more like baking bread, and I’ve never known why.

A few weeks ago, when I stopped to take a picture of this building, a man struck up a conversation with me that cleared up a lot. He told me that this forbidding edifice is a breakfast cereal factory. They make supermarket-brand versions of several different kinds of cereals. I eat Albertson’s shredded wheat knock-off all the time. I really like it, and I’d probably eat it even if it came from Libya, but it’s nice to know I’m buying locally. And contributing to neighborhood improvement at the same time.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Lately I’ve been walking west Oakland, which is not a good neighborhood. It does have some nice houses, a few new condo developments, and a few prominent businesses, like Esther’s Orbit room and The Crucible metal workshop.

But much of it is bland at best, blighted at worst. In the northern area, near the Emeryville border, you see a lot of derelict men pushing shopping carts and drinking out of paper bags. Closer to the West Oakland BART station, you get strips of public housing, and run-down little houses with chain-link fences around their yards.

To summarize: It’s not a great place, and last week, I managed to make it worse.

I was walking around listening to music and wearing a t-shirt that in retrospect I wish I’d left in the drawer. I bought it at the Hooters restaurant in Hangzhou, China where Pipi and I went to watch a soccer game on TV. (Honest.) At the time it struck me as ironic and fun. It has Chinese characters on it, so it seemed like it had more cultural value than it really does.

So I was walking around West Oakland wearing this hip, edgy, ironic shirt that’s going to wow all my friends at the next party when I found myself walking past a school—a junior high school, I think. It was recess time, and several girls were sitting by the fence braiding each other’s hair. I could see that one of them had stopped braiding and was saying something excitedly to me. I took off my earphones and asked her to repeat it. “I like your shirt!” she beamed.

This was exactly what I had been afraid she’d said. I certainly hadn’t meant to bring the word of Hooters to the youth of our nation. That was dumb. From now on, it’s plain white Ts, women’s sports jerseys, or shirts I’ve gotten from charity events, I promise.

Monterey Photos

They’re up—you can click here to see photos of my whirlwind trip to Monterey.

Mad Dash to Monterey

I just got back and am madly trying to finish the Monterey article. I took lots of photos, many of which were experimental, but some of which came out better than I expected. I’ll have them up as soon as I can. Probably not today, though!

Monterey

Philippine Airlines also wants me to write an article about Monterey and Carmel Valley, so I’ll be making a lightning trip down there this week, probably tomorrow. I have been there before, but I want to refresh my memory and take some photos. Philippine Airlines is a rare magazine that will accept photos and writing from the same person. Most magazines don’t have an actual rule against this; they just don’t believe one person can do a good job with both at the same time. It is a little difficult to concentrate on two things, but I’m looking forward to the challenge--and also looking forward to trying out my new camera, a Canon 8MP that I got to replace the one that went for a swim in China.

Shanghai Now and Zen

Good news from Philippine Airlines: They want me to do a short article on Shanghai, to be published in the December issue of their in-flight magazine. I think it’s going to appear alongside an article on Beijing by my friend John. They want something on the transformation of Shanghai from its romantic 1930s incarnation to modern Shanghai 2.0. That evolution is one of the things I find fascinating about Shanghai, so this is right up my alley.

Thanks, Readers!

I finally took the step of installing a counter on my blog. To my surprise, I’ve logged 508 visitors in the past month. That’s about 500 more visitors than I expected. Clearly my family can’t account for all of this. I don’t get that many junk postings, so I don’t think it’s spam crawlers, either. I don’t know who you all are, but thanks for stopping by!

Loyal readers will be relieved to know that as happy as I am with the total, it’s not nearly enough to start justifying advertising. So this content continues to come to you harassment-free.

Top-Five Worst Songs of the 1980s

True, by Spandau Ballet
Over-emoted, over-produced, and just plain overwrought, this slick piece of pop also features one of the yuckiest videos of the 1980s. I don’t know why over-gelled hair, a business suit, and lipstick look so good on Annie Lenox and so creepy on this band. They just do.

The Greatest Love of All, by Whitney Houston
Really? The greatest? How come it didn’t inspire a better song?

Endless Love, by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie
My father used to call this “Mindless Love,” and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do), By Christopher Cross
Any song that romanticizes New York City in the 1980s is automatically suspect. Play this alongside literally any cut from Lou Reed’s “New York,” and it’s obvious that someone is not being emotionally honest.

Hello, by Lionel Richie
(It’s fair to conclude I’m not a Lionel Richie fan.) I think Split Enz said it best: “I don’t want to say I love you/That would give away too much.” (Message to My Girl.) All the above 80s ballads, but especially this last one, could have used a lesson in subtlety from our oddly-dressed down-under friends.

I mention this because I heard all of these songs (well, not the Spit Enz one) in Hangzhou. The Chinese definitely like their light, treacly vocal music, but there is no escaping it here. Light pop is not just for elevators anymore. It’s also in train stations, in taxicabs, in restaurants, and coming out of every car and shop window in the city. It would seem that on top of all its other claims to fame, Hangzhou is also the city where the 80s came to die.

Moller Mansion Mystery

From our 9th floor hotel window, Pipi and I could look right into the grounds of a building that our guidebook told us was called the Moller Mansion. It is not exactly a beautiful building, but it is impressive. (A lot of Shanghai architecture is like that.)

The book said the building had been constructed by a Swedish man in the colonial days, and that it had later been a communist youth league headquarters. After that, it became a hotel.

The book implied that it’s still a hotel, but if it is, it’s got the worst doormen in the world. I crossed the street to peek in the lobby one afternoon, and was chased away by a woman who kept repeating, “Closed, closed” in English. When I asked her in Mandarin what time I should come back, she ignored me with an intensity that only a Chinese security guard can muster.

The mansion’s web site says it’s accepting reservations for December. But it didn’t look like anyone was staying there during our time across the street. Almost all the lights were off at night, and I only rarely saw anyone on the grounds. It didn’t seem to be undergoing renovations, either. So the Moller Mansion’s purpose is a mystery for now.

One other mystery: Who does their landscaping? This monster topiary disturbs me a little bit.

Lost in Translation

Part of the reason the cab driver had such a hard time finding a large, neon-lit restaurant is that we couldn’t remember the Chinese name for the place.

“Hooters” doesn’t transliterate phonetically in any easy way to Mandarin, so marketers gave the place an entirely new name. Sidestepping double-entendre issues, they concentrated on the less troublesome kind of hooter. So in China, the restaurant is known as “The American Owl Restaurant.”

Putting My College Education to Good Use

Speaking a foreign language is difficult under the best of circumstances. I’d like to think it’s especially difficult in Chinese, a language where changing the inflection a tiny bit—raising your voice at the end of a sentence to indicate a question, for example?—can make a thought unintelligible. And speaking on the phone is harder still, because you don’t have body language or facial expressions to help you.

I say all this in an attempt to convey the level of motivation it took to track down the Hooters in Hangzhou.

During our time in Hangzhou, Pipi and really wanted to see a quarterfinal game being played in another city. In Shanghai, we’d seen a few televised games on ESPN in our hotel room. But our hotel in Hangzhou didn’t get ESPN. The television set had a poor picture anyway. We needed a sports bar.

Hangzhou is a city with an estimated expatriate population of about 6,000, but only 1,000 of those are from North America or Europe, which suggests that it’s not the best place to find a bar with burgers and big-screen TVs. We were going to have to do some sleuthing.

I first called the Shangri-La Hotel, the nicest joint in town. It had two things going for it: We’d been there, and had noticed that it definitely catered to Western travelers. More importantly, we realized it was also the place the U.S. soccer team was staying. (And I promise you, we only went there once to stalk them.)

But there was no luck there. Hard as it was to believe, they said they weren’t planning on showing the game in any public areas.

So Pipi hit the Internet, but had trouble finding listings for sports bars in Hangzhou. The only thing that kept coming up was a blurb for Hooters, which improbably has one of its three Chinese branches in Hangzhou.

I had never realized that Hooters thought of itself as a sports bar, having never been to one. (Pipi remembers that we once almost went to one in Memphis, because it was one of only two restaurants near our hotel, but oddly enough we ended up getting bad Chinese food instead.)

So I called the Hangzhou Hooters, and using the full extent of my three years of college Mandarin, was able to determine that they would, in fact, be showing the game. I got the address, too, and found it was well across town. I forgot to ask the cross street, though, which made the cab ride interesting.

The street that Hooters Hangzhou is located on is long, and the numbers seem to be particularly poorly marked. Our driver stopped once to ask another driver if he knew what block we were on, and twice pulled the taxi over, with the engine still running, and sprinted up and down the sidewalk looking for street numbers. Pipi asked me to remind her what that word was that the Shanghai doorman had used to describe us when we came home soaked from the Nigeria game. She thought this guy was pretty lihai, too.

Finally, we found it. It looked like I imagine an American Hooters looks, with pool tables, several bars, and lots of tacky signs on the wall. The waitresses looked surprisingly like I imagine American Hooters waitresses look like. Ours was named Kiki, which I know because she wrote it on a napkin for us. In my memory of it, she dotted the “i”s with a heart, but this can’t really be true. (I am sure, though that she did write, “thank you” on the bill accompanied by a smiley face inside a daisy.)

Hardly anyone was there, so we got a lot of attention from Kiki as well as the manager, who must not have drawn actual work duty that evening. I thought they might pull up chairs and eat with us until a gong sounded the signal that it was the time at Hooters when they dance. All the waitresses jumped up on one of the bars and began lip-synching to “YMCA,” complete with the ritual arm waving. It was weird. Not as weird as fish falling out of the sky, but almost as unexpected. Hangzhou had delivered us a surreal experience after all.

Everybody Gets a Job

We knew the boy was trouble the moment we entered the breakfast room. Our hotel had a breakfast buffet. The apparently teen-aged boy who worked there was either the son of the hotel owner, or at his first day of work ever. Maybe both.

He led us to our table and asked if we wanted coffee. I said I did, and Pipi said—in Chinese—that she didn’t. He looked at us blankly. Finally he poured me a cup—and then turned Pipi’s cup over to fill it. She repeated that she didn’t want any. Blank stare. Then he made a move to start pouring. Pipi turned her cup upside down. He froze, then walked away, shaking his head at those wacky Americans who can’t agree on anything.

During breakfast, I realized that the boy’s primary duty was not even seating people. It seemed to be to walk around with a tray of sterno containers for the buffet trays. His job description probably read: 1) Look pretty in uniform. 2) Try not to break anything.

Towards the end of breakfast, after passing through the room several times but not doing anything with the burners, he managed to drop the whole tray, spilling the gelatinous fuel all over the carpet. The boy disappeared immediately, leaving the woman he worked with to clean up the toxic mess. Just as she was finishing up, he reappeared with a new tray of sterno, which he promptly perched on the very edge of a table. This finally elicited a scolding from the woman, which he didn’t seem to notice.

The next day I went to breakfast myself—Pipi said the chicken feet, kimchee, and other unorthodox breakfast items make her loose her appetite.

As I was helping myself to the food—I love a buffet, no matter what’s served—a swathe of bunting that had been attached with Velcro to the front of the 20-foot long table suddenly detached itself and fell at my feet. I looked around for a possible cause and discovered our hapless boy standing a few feet to my right, with one end of the cloth in his hands and that same blank look on his face.

I shrugged, assuming that everyone would know it was the waiter’s fault, not mine. But just then, a little Australian boy, about four years old, shrieked, “Mum, the lady broke it!” (Mum looked pained, like she was hoping fervently I wasn’t an English-speaker. I don’t blame the kid, though; he probably thought he was going to take the blame.)

It reminded me of something that was sort of a mantra in my China backpacking days: Whenever we’d see four people on the scene of a one-man task, we’d say, “Well, I guess everyone gets a job.” It was never clear how the division of labor was worked out—who decided which one had to work and which ones got to sit around observing? But somehow every job site had its own arrangement, and 15 years later, even though I’m not sure full employment is a promise the Chinese government makes anymore, the Everyone Gets a Job policy still seems to be in practice at the Mason Hotel.

Where in the World is the Cup?

Speaking of the next world cup, it’s not yet clear where that will be held. There are four countries in the running, and a vote will be held in November to determine which one gets the tournament. The candidates are Peru, Canada, Germany, and Australia.

Peru would be an interesting choice because its team did not even qualify for the 2007 tournament. Canada might also find itself in the troubling position of being a host country that doesn’t make it out of the first round. Germany almost has the opposite problem—its women’s team won in 2003 and 2007, and the men hosted the 2006 men’s world cup. Enough already!

I’m personally pulling for Australia, a country I’ve never visited but have wanted to go to since the first time I heard the song “Land Down Under.” Aussie Aussie Aussie, oi oi oi!

Losing Hope, Gaining Perspective

You’re probably wondering what Pipi and I were doing in a place that we don’t seem to like very much. We asked ourselves the very same thing in Hangzhou, a city that thwarted our every attempt to find anything charming about it.

Hangzhou had one last disappointment in store for us. And no, I don't mean the hostile Buddha above. He doesn't mean it; he's just sporting a Sanskrit character that predates the Third Reich by centuries.

I'm talking about the United States’ defeat in the game they played there. It was an unpleasant match, played in stifling heat, with a hostile crowd that really had it in for the United States. The opponent was Brazil, and we got to know the Chinese word for that country, Ba-Shi, very well because the crowd chanted it non-stop. They cheered when Brazil got the ball, exploded when they scored, and roared with approval when the Brazilian players literally danced circles around the Americans with needlessly ostentatious and taunting footwork. I’m not sure where this antipathy comes from. My guess is that it stems from the 1999 World Cup, which came down to a final game between China and the United States. It was tied 0-0 through overtime, and was settled with a shoot-out, which the United States won by one shot. The goalie in that game was Brianna Scurry, the same goalie who played in this Brazil-U.S. game, and I think the Chinese fans were happy to see her shellacked.

So the game wasn’t that much fun to watch, but it did at least remind us of why we’d come to China in the first place, and to Hangzhou in particular. And we had a giddy moment at a lunch buffet at the fanciest hotel in town when former U.S. star Julie Foudy walked right past our table. (We were too shy to say anything, but we did revel in our proximity to soccer greatness.)

The next day we took the train back to Hangzhou, and things improved immediately. We both really like Shanghai, and instantly felt like we were on vacation again. The soccer became more interesting as well, with a dishy controversy erupting over comments made by the starting U.S. goalkeeper. Hope Solo, who had been the starter for about two years, was suddenly benched by the coach right before the Brazil game. When the U.S. lost that game, Hope responded with a juvenile tirade mocking the coach’s moves and implying that the keeper who did play is past her prime.

The team responded by basically saying they couldn’t be her friend anymore. She was banished from the team to the point where she not only wasn’t allowed to sit on the team bench for the next game, she apparently wasn’t allowed to eat with them or even go to the stadium to watch the match. I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to sign her yearbook, either. Newspaper reports said she still would probably fly home with the team but I don’t think she did and I actually would know because THEENTIRETEAMWASONMYFLIGHTHOME.

Sorry, being starstruck has made me lapse into capitals again. What I meant was, the entire U.S. women’s soccer team, except for Hope Solo, was on the same flight that Pipi and I took home.

After spotting players all over Eastern China, and the Shanghai airport, I finally decided to overcome my shyness. The team boarded before us and were scattered all over the coach cabin as Pipi and I got on the plane. When I found myself momentarily stalled in the aisle next to the row where Abby Wambach and Kristine Lilly were sitting, I made my move. I leaned over and told them I’d really enjoyed watching them play. Abby Wambach thanked me very sincerely for coming all that way to watch. She also apologized for not bringing home the trophy, which kind of flustered me. I stammered that they’d done well, the line started moving again, and the awkward moment was over.

What I wish I had said of course, is that there was no need to apologize; that we were disappointed after the Brazil game, but that the consolation match against Norway was so good that it redeemed all the drama that came before. So Abby, if you’re reading this (it’s okay; we all Google ourselves sometimes), please don’t feel like the team’s performance was anything to be sorry about. We loved watching the matches and were honored to be in the team’s company flying home. And I’m sorry about talking in run-on capital letters when we met. It’s a problem I promise to work on before the next world cup.

More Technical Difficulties

The foreign tourist screaming obscenities at the tranquil lake would almost have been comical if she were not me. But she was. I was giving the locals an impromptu vocabulary lesson because I’d just made one of the dumbest mistakes of my traveling career.

The day started out well. Pipi and I found the lake, and were starting to see what it was the guidebooks saw in Hangzhou. It’s a lovely lake. It’s very big, and on the day we visited, the atmosphere was very heavy and hazy, so much that you could barely see modern buildings on the far side. The view mostly consisted of the willow trees lining the shore, and the little wooden boats cruising the water. Even though the boats are all for tourists, it still looked like a Chinese landscape painting. It was very picturesque, but unfortunately, there will be no pictures because I dropped my camera right into the depths of this lovely body of water.

Pipi says it seemed to happen in an instant, but from my perspective, it seemed like slow-motion. I sat down in one of the tourist boats with my camera in a soft case slung over my shoulder. The case closes with Velcro, but I hadn’t really fastened it. As I sat down, the case bumped up against my leg, the top popped open like a Pez dispenser, and my camera slid out, right over a low railing. It seemed to teeter on an exterior ledge a few inches above the water for about half an hour, but I still couldn’t move fast enough to grab it. It tottered in and disappeared immediately without a single bubble. I always wondered if it floated; now I know.

So there will be no further photos until I calm down and figure out what to do about this situation.

The “Real” China

Hangzhou is famous in China for having hosted Marco Polo, who pronounced the city the most beautiful place in the world. So Pipi and I arranged to spend several days here, somehow overlooking the fact that we were going on 800-year-old information.

Hangzhou is only about two hours from Shanghai by train, but it’s a very different place. We left from Shanghai’s brand-new South Station, a sparkling modernistic glass-and-chrome dome of a building that looks like something out of the Jetsons. You expect to leave it by hovercraft, not by train. We arrived in a grimy, crumbling Hangzhou station full of dark corridors clogged with touts trying to hustle people into taking their over-priced minivans into the city center. Hangzhou is a city of about five million people, but it still doesn’t have the cosmopolitan feeling that Shanghai does. English is not widely spoken, and hotels and restaurants don’t have the polish that you’ll find in bigger cities. Wai guo ren--foreigners—are still a little bit of a novelty. It’s not like we’re the first white people anyone has seen, but teenagers still bark, “Hello” when they see us, something that hasn’t happened to me since 1992. It’s kind of cute, but it reminds me of the way I’m often moved to moo when I drive past a dairy farm, and I don’t really like the attention.

It’s a hard place to get around, too. I’m reminded of how much infrastructure and order we take for granted in the United States. I went for a 45-minute walk in town two days ago while Pipi was at a meeting (her company has an office here), and never did find what I was looking for: the large urban lake that is Hangzhou’s claim to fame. This is sort of like being dropped off in mid-town Manhattan and failing to find Central Park, but in my defense, it was very hot, the blocks were very long and torn up by construction, and the street I started on wasn’t on the map I consulted before heading out. I know I was quite close when I gave up, but I was too tired and dehydrated to be enthusiastic about walking more, so I took a cab back to the hotel. As it turns out, I fared better than Pipi, who was not able to flag down a cab at all, and had to hike several miles home in business attire.

(Actually, she says several cabs stopped for her, nicely explained something she didn’t understand a word of, and then drove off empty without her. This also seemed to be happening to a lot of businessmen around her, so we really don’t know what the story was there.)

A lot of people dislike Shanghai. They find it too maniacally entrepreneurial and Western-influenced, and don’t consider it the “real” China. I think these things make it an incredibly exciting place, and even detractors concede that it’s what my friend John calls gaijin-friendly—easy to navigate. I miss it!

Awful Waffles

The English-language menu at C-Straits, a restaurant just down the street from our Hangzhou hotel, started out promisingly enough:

Honey Waffles.

That’s a little unconventional, but honey’s not so different from maple syrup. I’m okay with that.

It goes downhill from there:

Pork-Floss Waffles.

I’m still trying to stay with them. Pork floss—dried, shredded meat--is kind of gross. But is it really so different in spirit from sausage or bacon? I guess not. Okay. I’ll read on.

Tuna Waffles.

Okay, they’ve officially lost me. I like tuna and all, but with a waffle? No way. That has to be the strangest waffle accompaniment ever.

Or is it? No, it gets worse. Much worse. It goes to a place no waffle-lover should ever find herself:

Roasted Eel Waffles.

The truly disturbing thing is that all this was on the restaurant’s beverage menu. We will not be returning to the C-Straits cafe.

A Plague of Fishes

Have you ever literally not been able to believe your eyes? This happened to Pipi yesterday in Shanghai. We were waiting for a cab at our hotel when Pipi saw what she wanted to believe was a falling leaf. But something about the color, the speed at which it fell, and most of all the way it seemed to be flopping around in the driveway all suggested something else. So Pipi went over and took a look and discovered that, sure enough, a fish had just fallen from the sky.

It was a small fish, about five inches long. It was flailing helplessly as people walked dangerously close, most of them not even noticing. We stood there watching it for a moment, a little warily, in case the one drop was followed by a full fish squall. Finally we realized that it had come from an outdoor tank on the second-story patio of an apartment building next to the hotel. (The photo above, advertizing the upcoming Shanghai Special Olympics, happens to show the row of tanks.) That solved the mystery, but how to solve the problem?

We pointed out the flopping fish to the head doorman. I didn’t expect him to be too sympathetic to two foreign ladies babbling about suicidal carp, but to my surprise, he was quite concerned. He picked up the slimy fish with his bare hand, gave a few practice pumps, and heaved it up over the balcony. Frankly, his form was not great—a little elbowy. I pictured the fish either slapping back down to the ground, or else flopping around unseen for hours on the patio, but miraculously, we all heard a splash as the little fish landed back in the tank. Pipi and I and all the other doormen cheered. “Hao qiu,” I told him, using a phrase I’ve heard Chinese sportscasters use to describe an especially skillful play. “Well,” he said bashfully in English, “I am really good at basketball.”

We’ve just arrived in Hangzhou, and so far it’s okay, but nothing that Felliniesque has happened to us yet. Something tells me we’re not going to top that random moment on this trip.

Technical Difficulties

I am having a few technical issues. I can access the tool to post this blog, for instance, but I can’t view it, or post photos to it. I also can’t delete comments. Some guy has been posting spam , but I can’t get rid of it until I’m home. So I’m sorry about the time-share junk messages that have been appearing in the comments section. Finally, I can’t view my photos on Flickr, either, so I’m labeling them blind. I know I’ve made a few mistakes. Not too many, I hope.

Technical issues aside, today was a good sightseeing day, and an even greater eating day. First, we went to my favorite street corner for breakfast. Chinese street food is some of the best food you’re going to find here, especially at breakfast time. There is a corner two blocks from our hotel that has about a dozen vendors out in the morning. Most of them sell variations on two things: Egg pancakes, and what the Chinese call youtiao, or “oil twists.” They’re essentially doughnuts, or crullers, really, but not that sweet. (I confess to swiping a sugar packet from Starbucks and sprinkling a little on mine this morning.)

The egg pancakes are either a crepe or a piece of bread like nan that is cooked on a large griddle. The batter usually has a lot of green onion in it. As the bread cooks, an egg is cracked on top and the whole thing is brushed with lots of oil, flipped over, and fried. Then it’s rolled up with a little salty sauce and some optional hot pepper. It’s a salty, oily, eggy, starchy treat and hot off the grill it’s one of the best things ever.

After breakfast, we went to the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. This is one of the only big tourist sights we hadn’t seen yet. It’s an enormous space needle-like tower, but more garish than those you see in places like Toronto or Seattle. It looks a little like a neon hypodermic needle sticking up into the sky. Subtle is isn’t, but it’s on the east side of the Huangpu River in an area known as Pudong, where it somehow fits. Pudong is a region that has been declared Shanghai’s new financial and business district. This was farmland when I visited in 1992, but since then skyscrapers have popped up like mushrooms with almost no restraint or aesthetic consideration. It’s sort of like an urban planning theme park. A lot of the buildings are actually very creative and attractive. It’s not an ugly area. It’s just that like a lot of new-money situations, no one ever stopped to ask, “Is this too much?”

We took the elevator 263 meters up to get a look at Shanghai from above. It was a good day for this. It finally stopped raining, and got about as clear as a polluted city ever gets. The view was stupendous. I knew Shanghai was big and built-up, but the sight of a skyscraper forest poking up to the horizon was shocking.

For lunch we went to a restaurant specializing dumplings in a posh new mall called Xin Tian Di (New Heaven and Earth). We had soup dumplings, which are a Shanghai specialty and are almost my favorite thing in the world to eat. We decided to quit while we were ahead and came back to the hotel to nap. (I actually tried to see one other sight, a mansion-turned-hotel we can see from our room, but I got rudely shoed away from it. Whatever it is, it clearly isn’t a hotel anymore.)

Tonight, we’re seeing a dance performance. I don’t know what we’re doing for dinner; it can’t top the first two meals of the day. Tomorrow morning we catch a train to Hangzhou. I will try to blog from there.

Food photos and more here.

Adventurous Eating

I hope I didn’t make anyone nervous talking about dogs and China in the same breath yesterday. I know everyone makes uneasy associations about the two. And there’s some truth to it—I think dogs really are eaten here. But in three trips to the mainland, I’ve never been offered dog or seen it on a menu. And as an obvious foreigner, I doubt I ever will. Eating someone’s pet is just not something an American has to worry about.

On this trip, however, I’ve realized that many other alarming things are eaten here. The fanciest restaurant in our hotel, for example, has several dishes containing bullfrog. And last night, we ate at a dumpling restaurant that served conventional pork-and-cabbage jiaozi, but which also offered donkey as a dumpling filling. One other weird menu item was a picture of what looked like stewed grubs—Pipi asked for an English version of the menu and was able to determine that they were silkworms. So I’m not saying that you don’t have to watch what you eat here. The pitfalls are just different from what you might expect.

Today, I went to a place called the Duolun Lu Culture Street. It's a pedestrian street in what used to be the International Concession in North Shanghai. It was famous for being the home of a lot of revolutionary intellectuals in the 1930s, including Lu Xun, a pretty famous social commentator whom I remember reading in college. These and other photos here.

Hey Big Spender

Not everyone will admit this about traveling in China, but everyone secretly likes being a little bit more of a big shot than they are at home. Take me. In the United States, I’m a 5’-3” person who is basically unemployed. Here, though, I’m a solidly average (emphasis on solid) size, and have almost unimaginable buying power.

That’s because once you get here, everything is remarkably inexpensive by American standards. There’s a massage parlor in our neighborhood, for example, where you can get an hour-long massage for about $15. So far I’ve had two, which is about what I have in a good decade at home.

Just like anywhere, you have to be careful about choosing massage places, but this one is beyond legitimate. It’s decorated in a Japanese tatami-mat and shoji-screen style, just like an upscale American spa. It’s patronized mostly by ex-pats, but I have seen some Chinese yuppies there, too.

The first time I went, I had a neck and shoulder massage which was great. The second time, I picked a full-body treatment called simply “Chinese massage.” The English menu said that I would appreciate the “gentle Eastern touch.” I envisioned a tiny waif of a woman administering this massage with little butterfly fingers.

Clearly something got lost in translation. The masseur assigned to me was the sturdiest, most muscular guy in China. He looked exactly like the buzz-cut, ruddy-cheeked youths you see in Chinese propaganda posters. (I always wondered where they found these people; now I know.) He squeezed, pushed, pulled, kneaded, bent, folded, spindled, and stretched me to within an inch of yelping. I’d never had a massage that firm before, but it was great. I was so relaxed. How relaxed? Relaxed enough that I had a minor wardrobe malfunction with the pajamas I was given to wear and I didn’t even care. I was that Zen.

In other news, Pipi and I, feeling a little homesick, I guess, went to a pet show today. The conclusion we drew is that the Chinese have raised small pet dogs to an art form. Tonight we’re going to another sports bar so we can watch two soccer games happening in different cities. I hope we can stay awake. We’re having some jet-lag issues. We bounce out of bed at 7am but we can’t stay awake after dinner to save our lives.

Here are some photos. I've added a few.

Typhoon soccer

I was joking when I said we would be the only people in the stands, but it was practically true. The stadium seats something like 30,000, and the announced attendance was 6000—and that seemed inflated. I could see almost as many security personnel as spectators. There were at least as many Nigeria fans as US boosters, which was a little strange. I snapped a picture of the U.S. team trudging towards the locker room at the end of the game, and they don’t look like a team that has just won a big game and advanced to the next round of the World Cup. They look angry and wet. I think we’re all ready for the rain to stop. I know I’m tired of being wet and I don’t need to see my bright red poncho ever again. When Pipi and I got back to our hotel after the game, the doorman observed that the two of us were “hen lihai”—very hard-core. We definitely felt like two of the most dedicated fans right then.

We didn’t do a whole lot today, partly because it is so wet. We did walk around quite a bit this morning during a break in the weather. I’m really starting to like the neighborhood we’re in. It’s called Lu Wan, and in English is usually referred to as the French Concession. It’s the neighborhood that in the heyday of Western colonialism in Shanghai was home to a huge French expatriate population. I remember visiting this neighborhood in 1992 and being disappointed. I think I expected people in berets eating croissants on every corner. I wanted to eat buttery pastry and speak a language that I’m comfortable with. The French influence is a lot more subtle than that, but it’s there. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the buildings are made of brick, not the ubiquitous Chinese white tile, and the streets are laid out in an orderly manner, and lined with more trees than you usually see in a Chinese city. I will try to post a few photos, but it’s been so wet I haven’t taken many yet.

The biggest excitement of the day was at dinner. We went to a pseudo Irish pub because we thought they might be showing the China/New Zealand game on TV. As it turns out, that game got rained out, so no televised soccer for us. But that was okay because THEUSWOMENSTEAMWASRIGHTTHEREINTHEBARWITHUS!!!

Sorry; I get excited just thinking about it. What I meant was, the U.S. women’s team was there at the bar, too! Not all of the women, but about half of them, including the big stars, Abby Wambach and Kristine Lilly. It was so exciting we literally didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We wanted to be gushing fans, of course, but they also seemed to be trying to have a normal dinner with friends and family—it looked like both Lilly and Wambach had their parents in tow—and we didn’t want to be rude. So we didn’t get autographs, but we did gain the story of how we watched a soccer game in a typhoon and then the next day got to eat hamburgers in Shanghai with the stars of the game.
Here are some photos.

Shanghai Surprise(s)

We got here fine. Well, we’re fine now. We weren’t doing too great after a 12-hour flight, but we slept very well and managed to wake up at a normal time, and now we feel fine. Our hotel is much nicer than I expected. Shanghai is an exciting and constantly surprising city.

A pleasant surprise: I only made one real packing mistake, but it was a doozy: I forgot the power cord for my computer. Remarkably, there is an authorized Apple reseller one subway stop away from our hotel at a huge electronics emporium called Cybermart. It was very easy to buy a new cord. So now I’m up and running, and obviously even able to access my blogging site. It’s amazing how much things have changed in China in 15 years. In 1992, it was an afternoon project to call home. This morning I spoke to my parents using Skype and my computer. It was easy and cost about 20 cents.

After breakfast, Pipi and I went to a Carrefour store, which was an interesting experience. Carrefour is a French chain, sort of like Wal-Mart, but more upscale. A grocery store is a major component, and it’s full of Western treats. There are lots of Asian things there, too—in fact, almost all of the patrons there were Asian. But it occurs to me that it might be like the Shanghai equivalent of Ranch99. I imagine the locals wander the aisles and think to themselves, “Ugh, fried potato slices? Pureed tomato gunk for pasta? People really eat these things?”

One quintessentially Chinese treat they have at Carrefour is White Rabbit candy. I think I’ve already documented my love of these candies. Pipi likes them too, and the last time we were here, we made a pilgrimage to the factory. To my surprise, we discovered a new flavor this morning: corn. No, really. How well you like corn White Rabbit candy depends not just on your feelings about creamed corn, but also on how far outside of the candy box you’re willing to think. I kind of like creamed corn, but I haven’t yet decided if I can accept it as a candy flavor. I understand that a lot of conventional western candy flavorings like cocoa, mint, and vanilla are really vegetable and plant products, but this may be too big of a leap for me.

Shanghai did welcome us with one other surprise: a typhoon. It’s been alternating between pouring and torrential rain all day. They’re forcasting 200 milimeters, which is, uh, a lot of rain. (China is a nice place, but it’s no Liberia; they use the metric system here.) We’re supposed to go to a soccer game tonight. We’ve come so far that we can’t possibly skip it, so we’ll go and get soaked supporting the US women. The game is on ESPN. Look for us—we’ll be the slightly dazed, very wet, poncho clad Americans. Also, we’ll be the only people in the stands. We shouldn’t be hard to spot.
Here are some photos.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Pipi and I leave for China this weekend. I’m bringing my computer and I will try to blog, but I won’t promise. I’ve been told that it’s not possible to read my blog in China, which would almost be a point of pride but it’s just that the Blogger site is blocked to Chinese readers. Nothing to do with my hard-hitting exposes. I think I remember being able to post, though, when I was there before. I will try my best.

Things Better Left Unsaid

Granted, Germany was beating Argentina badly. The final score was 11-0, which is a soccer World Cup record. And the German women did seem to be bigger and faster and more fit than the waif-like South Americans.

But still, there are certain sentences that just should never be said aloud, even if everyone is thinking them. One of these came out of the mouth of an announcer on ESPN, who found himself observing that, “The Germans are superior physically.”

Well, at least they weren’t playing Poland.

In just four days of soccer, we’ve also heard the Chinese team described as “sneaky,” and endured one talking head earnestly explaining that the Norwegians play an attacking style because they’re all Vikings. People, can we please think before we talk? Thank you.

Formerly Burma; Still Using the English System

I know, of course, that the metric system is better than the English system. I understand that it’s decimal-based, making math easy. And I know it’s a pain to learn how many tablespoons in a cup, how many ounces in a pound, and how many feet in a mile.

But I did. I learned all those things. I know how long it takes me to walk a mile, and what to wear when it’s 70 degrees Fahrenheit. And so it’s fairly grudgingly that I’ve been educating myself about the metric system.

I used to tell myself that I needed to do this because the rest of the world does. But I just discovered that’s not quite true. Liberia and Myanmar (what you call Burma) also persist in using pounds and inches. And the E.U. recently granted England special permission to use their own system in certain circumstances. (Which seems a little condescending; no wonder they don’t like to think of themselves as part of Europe.) So for now, if you’re going to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, do it in Burma, Liberia, or an English pub.

In Praise of Armchair Travel

Next week at this time Pipi and I will be in Shanghai. In contrast to last year’s trip to Asia, where the week before departure saw me in a frenzy of emailing, gift buying, and dog-earing four separate guidebooks, this week I’m going to mostly be sitting on the couch watching soccer. Lots of soccer.

Our trip revolves around the women’s World Cup soccer tournament, so our homework is to watch as many games as possible. Remarkably, the entire tournament is going to be on ESPN.

Last night Pipi did something I’ve never known her to do before: She set an alarm to watch television. I got up, too, and I'm glad I did. The games are on in the evening in China, which is early morning here. We do have a DVR, but it has a somewhat limited capacity and more importantly, we have a deadline. There are several games on each day, so we have to get creative about watching them or we won’t see all the important first-round matches before we leave. Also, I’m hopeless about avoiding spoilers. Last night we watched a recording of Germany steamrollering Argentina. In the middle I tried to look up some information online about the German team, and managed to spoil the final score for myself. (I know it sounds dumb to take risks like that, but if you’d been watching you’d want to know how tall Kerstin Garefrekes is, too. [Answer: 6”1’.]) So I need to watch games in as close to real time as possible.

This morning there was a real nail-biter between the United States and North Korea, which we watched almost live. I’m endlessly fascinated by the DPRK. It’s such a weird country and I wonder what the women’s lives are like. I wonder what they think when they travel. In the case of this year’s world cup in China, they’re probably thinking something along the lines of, “Great, the one place they might let us go on our own. Why couldn’t Canada have hosted?” But still, Shanghai must be pretty mind-blowing after Pyongyang.

Oh, the game was good, too. It ended in a 2-2 tie. North Korea played ferociously. There’s no other word for it. They played like it was their last game ever; like they didn’t need to worry about having energy for more matches. They played like there was nothing else in their lives, which may be the case. Or maybe I’m being ignorant. For all I know, the North Korean women spend their weekends shopping for Gucci knockoffs and planning vacations in Thailand with their boyfriends. But I don’t think so. I got the impression I was getting a rare, if very controlled glimpse at a culture with a really different outlook on life.

It’s the next best thing to travel.

Isn’t it Ironic?

I just realized that Pipi and I are going to miss the premier of Survivor: China because we’re leaving on Sunday…for China.

Yes, we are huge Survivor fans, but I swear we didn’t plan this. Anyway, filming is long since over. So I promise you, we’re not really stalking the cast. (Or angling for a spot on the show. I’ve said it before; I wouldn’t last three days out there.)

More Fun Facts

Most lakes, even big ones, turn over their water fairly quickly. A drop of water landing in Lake Erie, for example, usually spends about two years there before finding its way out. (Don’t ask me how they know this.)

Lake Tahoe is different, though. For one thing, it’s extremely deep. Also, about 60 rivers feed into it, but only one leads out. For these reasons, water takes about 700 years to escape the lake.

Fun Fact

The water at the bottom of Lake Tahoe is a constant 39 degrees Fahrenheit. The lake never freezes, though, because convection keeps this cold but still not-quite-freezing water moving toward the surface all winter.

This fun fact comes courtesy of my procrastination instinct. I have an article due to Philippine Airlines in a few days, and I’m still at the fact-finding stage. Wish me luck.

Short Break

There’s no real news today, and Pipi’s getting off work early, so in that spirit, I’m taking the rest of the long weekend off. Have a great weekend, everybody!

And it Was Uphill Both Ways

Maybe you’re wondering what I did the first time I went to China, before the World Wide Web. The answer is I winged it, making reservations in person the day I arrived in a new city. This actually worked pretty well, and I never had to spend the night in a park or anything. (There were a few nights where I might have been warmer and more comfortable if I had). As well as it worked for me, however, I don’t wish this lifestyle on anyone I love, so I recommend it only for solo travelers.

I Knew I Was Forgetting Something

When I said yesterday that the China trip was just about set, I was leaving out one detail: We didn’t yet have hotel reservations.

We do now. I don’t know exactly why I procrastinated so badly on this. I think it was because I knew that making the reservations would be an adventure. I don’t feel confident enough with my Chinese to try making a reservation over the phone. (And at the price I’m willing to pay, you can forget about English.)

Not every Chinese hotel has online booking yet. Many have web sites, but few let you book directly. At best you can email a reservation request and wait for a reply in creative English.

That leaves Western chains and online travel sites as the best option. I ended up using both. In Shanghai, we’re staying at a Chinese hotel that is bookable through Hotels.com. In Hangzhou, we’re staying at a Best Western that was bookable through the Best Western site. It was fairly exhausting narrowing down all the options to get to this solution, but I’m happy with our rooms. And happier still to have this over with.

Special Delivery

Alert readers will remember that about two months ago, I attempted to buy World Cup soccer tickets over the Internet. It took five or six tries spread out over two days and two computers, a couple of trans-Pacific phone calls, a fax to Beijing, and a call from my bank’s fraud prevention department (right; they contacted me), but I’m happy to report that on Friday a DHL envelope arrived from China containing all the soccer tickets I was expecting.

In other news, I picked up our visas today at the Chinese consulate. The trip is just about all in place now. We have tickets to China, permission to enter the country, and tickets to all our matches.

I suppose I could have let a travel agent or a tour group operator take care of all this, but that wouldn’t have been sporting. Me with my limited Mandarin skills against a communist bureaucracy…now that’s an exciting matchup. Let’s hear it for independent travel!

Road Work

I’m a member of a writers’ group called Left Coast Writers. One of the perks of membership is that you can submit your writing to the group’s web site and if you’re lucky, they’ll post it online.

This week, I got lucky. A piece that has previously appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle just went up in the Road Work section of the Left Coast Writers site.

Actually, LCW accepted the essay first, but there were delays (circumstances beyond my control) getting it up online. But the piece is there now, and I’m grateful to LCW for believing in it before the Chronicle even did.

Do You Copy?

Sometimes my parents are big copycats. I moved to California, they moved to California. (It took them seven years, but I think that was just to make it look less obvious.) Then I started a blog, and look who’s blogging now: My father.

He’s using it to post articles about aviation. Some of the articles that will appear have been published already and some will be original. He’s hoping to compile them into a book one day.

When I was in college, my father suggested to me that I should pick elective courses based on the professor’s reputation, not the subject matter. He believed, and I think he’s right (he’s got some pretty good advice for a copycat), that a good teacher can make any subject interesting.

For an example of what I mean, I don’t need to go any further than my father’s latest blog entry. It’s on a navigation system that’s on the brink of extinction. Maybe that doesn’t sound like something that would grab you, but he called it “Breathing Life Back into Dead Reckoning.” Good, no? That made me want to read further, and I’m glad I did. You will be too. Please check it out!

Oh, I guess I ought to mention, since you’ve probably noticed, that yes, my father and I are both writers. He kind of thought of that one first, though. Like I said, he does have some really good ideas.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

Tahoe can be expensive, but I’ve found a way around that: Sleep somewhere cheap and spend your days in places that look like a million bucks.

I spent both nights of my trip in motels. They were definitely bare-bones, especially the one in South Lake Tahoe, a family-owned, cash-only operation where not even shampoo was provided. But both were clean and quiet and provided a place to sleep for less than $100, which was all I wanted out of a solo trip. (The place in Tahoe City had free wi-fi and included continental breakfast--not bad.)

Both days I was in Tahoe I visited grand old houses that are open to the public. True, nobody let me take the boat out for a spin, but it was fun to pretend that I knew the kind of swells who had vacation homes like this. Pictured is the Thunderbird Lodge, near Incline Village, Nevada. This place was owned by a guy named George Whittell, Jr., who was basically useless while he was alive, having inherited so much money that he never had to work a day in his life. He spent his days collecting knickknacks, building a menagerie, and investigating mysteries such as the age-old question, “Can an elephant survive at an elevation of 6,200 feet?” (Sadly, the answer is no, but there was a lion named Bill who fared a lot better.)

After Whittell’s death, his land, which included virtually the whole Nevada shore, ended up in the hands of the state. Most of it is protected, and the eastern side of the lake is still undeveloped and beautiful. So by ostentatiously buying up more land than any one person needs, Whittell was actually doing more good than anyone could have envisioned.

And today you can hang out at his house and pretend you’ve been invited to a weekend at Jay Gatsby’s.

Toeing the Line

One other thing that’s interesting about the Cal-Neva Resort is that the California/Nevada state line runs right through the lodge. (Hence the name.) How often do you get to stand with one foot in the Silver State and one in the Golden State? Okay, it’s not exactly straddling the equator, but it’s still worth a photograph.

And I’m guessing the equator isn’t highlighted in gold and silver paint. (I’ll have to ask Pipi; she really did straddle the equator once, in Kenya.)

But Don’t Take Any Wooden Nickels

I didn’t do much after arriving at the lake the first evening. Just a disappointing dinner at a family restaurant where the surly teen-aged hostess (sometimes I hate summer) acted like one single grown-up can be safely ignored.

After breakfast the next morning I started driving around the lake. One of my first stops was at the Cal-Neva resort, in Crystal Bay, Nevada. This casino/hotel used to be owned by Frank Sinatra, and it still has a retro coolness to it without actually being stuck in the past. It looks sort of like the Ahwahnee Lodge would if the Jetsons did the decorating. There are all the usual casino favorites, like blackjack and craps, and of course, lots of slot machines.

Now, I know there’s no such thing as a professional slot player, and I know why: Because the house always wins. But I like slots. I can’t help it. I like pulling the lever. I like handling the coins. I like it when the one-armed bandit flashes and chirps at me like a pinball machine. I just like the whole sensory experience.

The Cal-Neva didn’t disappoint. I bought two rolls of nickels (that’s four dollars, folks) and made them last almost an hour at a particularly shiny machine.

At the end of the hour, I had exactly five cents out of my original $4 left. But the one nickel left was a buffalo nickel. I can only remember one other time that I’ve gotten a buffalo nickel in change, so this was quite an event for me.

If you can get yourself into this frame of mind, where you can lose 79 out of 80 coins and still feel like a winner, then you too can be a slot machine champion.

Later, when I visited some of the casinos at the more developed south end of the lake, I realized that I’d had a very unusual experience at the Cal-Neva. The slots in the south all seem to be virtual. You give the machine a bill or a credit card, and when you’re ready to cash out, it prints a ticket for you that you take to the cashier. You’ll never see a real coin. I understand that cashless machines are cleaner, safer, and more convenient, but they make me sad. Sad enough that the next time I’m in Stateline, I probably won’t even bother stopping.

In fact, you can bet on it.

Lake Tahoe

I’ve been neglecting my Lake Tahoe trip. Lake Tahoe is a place I have been to before, but it had been a while, and I wanted to refresh my memory. Plus it was fun to take a little trip in the middle of the week, even though I had to go by myself.

I spent two nights in the area, one in Tahoe City, and one in South Lake Tahoe. While I was there, I drove around the lake. The route around the lake is about 75 miles and can be driven in as little as two hours. But I managed to make it last two days, stopping several places and keeping the top down as much as possible. The drive around Lake Tahoe has been described as the most beautiful drive in America, and it just might be. While I was there, the weather was perfect and the crowds were thin. I’m not sure I’d recommend winging a trip to the lake to the extent I did (I didn’t know for sure each morning where I’d be staying that night) but it certainly worked for me. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed myself so much in Tahoe.

Photos here.

Flirting or Mourning?

I mean, I know where the flowers came from, or at least I think I do: There is a tangle of rose bushes hanging over a wall just a few doors down from where I took the picture.

What I’m wondering is, what inspired someone to clip a few roses and leave them here? Right here, on a block that, thanks to an industrial bakery, smells like 20 cakes cooling at once. Here, a block away from a convenience store where a man is speaking to six cruisers’ worth of police officers. Here, a quarter of a mile east of a hovering helicopter. Here, where rolling carts filled with scrap metal of dubious provenance trundle by. Here, where I’ve found myself standing on a corner that smells like a birthday party but looks like a highway fatality shrine.

What Happened Here?

I found this still life at the corner of 32nd and Adeline, which is not the most uplifting corner of Oakland. (Although it’s not far from the robot I found the other day.)

C3PO

I like to listen to music while I walk. Lately, I’ve been going through all of our CDs systematically listening to each one.

Yesterday I found myself listening to an album of children’s music (I have no idea where we got it) while walking through a part of town that was more blighted than I expected. At first this seemed incongruous, listening to silly songs while muttering men with shopping carts full of cans rattled by.

Then I came upon this guy, a relic of my own childhood. He was standing outside a scrap metal yard on Peralta Street. (Which was where all the carts were headed.) Suddenly it all made a little more sense.

A Statistical Improbability

At the bookstore reading, someone told me that Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007 is doing quite well. This could just be a rumor, but I hear it has sold in the neighborhood of 50,000 copies, which is a lot for Travelers’ Tales.

I went to the Amazon site to try to confirm this. I was not successful, but I did discover one other interesting tidbit: Amazon, for some reason, always has a section on a book’s information page that lists “Statistically Improbable Phrases” contained within the book. For BWTW 2007, it lists exactly one:

Fire Chicken.

I’m not kidding. The only phrase used in the whole anthology so unusual as to have the word “Improbable” attached to it comes from my story. (It’s the literal translation of the Mandarin Chinese word for turkey.) This somehow strikes me as something to be proud of. Maybe it isn’t; I don’t really understand what it means, even after having read the explanation, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Better Reading Though Chemistry

I had my first bookstore reading last night and it went surprisingly well. I say I’m surprised because I am, as I have mentioned, a nervous performer. But I kept it together last night. Someone once told me that it’s physically impossible to have a panic reaction if you’re breathing regularly, so I spent all of yesterday trying to remain calm and breathe. That seemed to keep the nerves at bay.

Oh, and I was also on drugs. I popped a beta blocker late in the afternoon, and I think it helped. I didn’t do that embarrassing blushing thing I usually do when I realize a roomful of people is looking at me, and my heart didn’t pound like it usually does.

There were probably sixty people at the reading. I went first, and everyone agreed that my piece was a fun way to kick off the event. I know I had fun, anyway, and I never have enjoyed myself speaking before a crowd before. The audience seemed to enjoy it, too. They laughed at all the right things.

Oh, and people wanted me to sign their books! I’d never been asked for an autograph before. Very exciting!

Friday Fillip

Perhaps I’ve mentioned that I’m writing an article for an airline magazine right now. Perhaps not. In any case, I began my research by going to this airline’s office in San Francisco to pick up a copy of the magazine, since I’d never seen one.

I think they’re in the process of moving. At least I hope so. The place was a study in chaos, with boxes everywhere and people milling around as if, like me, they weren’t sure where to go. There were no labels or signs on any doors—it was impossible to tell where I even should start asking for a magazine. (It makes me wonder what it’s like to fly this airline, but I’m trying to push that idea out of my head.)

The funny thing was that the people who worked there seemed completely unfazed by the discord. They were friendly and untroubled. Surprisingly, there seemed to be some kind of event going on in the office, a big presentation or meeting. The fact that it looked like they were squatting in the building wasn’t going to stop them from having friends over. Dozens of chairs were set up in an otherwise completely bare room with papers all over the floor. No one seemed to mind.

Eventually someone found me and was very happy to let me have as many magazines as I wanted. I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the issues available had as its cover story a piece by my friend John about Tokyo. I knew he’d had this assignment, but I hadn’t expected to see it with my own eyes. It’s a small travel-writing world.

Missed Post

Sorry I missed yesterday. I spent a lot of the day driving back from Lake Tahoe and didn’t get to it. I’m happy to be back at sea level. I’ll post more pictures soon.

Attempting to Be Cool

I am, of course, making a bigger deal out of this reading event than I need to. It’s hardly a book tour. All I have to do is read this one story. There are four other authors reading that evening, so it’s not like I have to carry the event.

I am, however, reading first. At least for now. So far the process of organizing this event has involved more e-mail than a congressional scandal. But for now we’ve sort of decided on alphabetical order, and that puts me first.

It also means that the middle three stories will all be about Italy, which seems to alarm at least one reader, and may cause another lineup change. I’m not too worried about that, though. If someone thought all the Italy stories could co-exist in one anthology, they ought to be able to stand side by side at a reading event. And I think I’d rather go first—I’ll only get more nervous sitting there listening to the others, and I like to be the one who sets the bar, not the one who lands with it in an ungainly heap on the crash mat.

Mongolia

The Dallas Morning News published my Mongolia overview article over the weekend. I’m very happy with it. I can tell parts were edited down, but it was a gentle trim with almost no re-writing. They kept my opening intact, which I’m particularly happy about.

They also made an online slideshow of some of John’s photographs. His Mongolia shots are among my favorites, so this pleases me, too. Here’s a link. Please be sure to check out the photos--there is a link inside a small box labeled “Also Online.”

Such a Lovely Audience

Do you ever talk to yourself when you’re home alone? Of course you do; everyone does. But is it a monologue? Does it ever go on for more than five minutes?

If so, then you know what my afternoon has been like. I’ve been practicing for a reading I’m doing at Book Passage in Corte Madera next Sunday. Practicing consists of standing in the middle of my living room and reading my story out loud to nobody. I’m not normally especially chatty, so hearing my own voice for eight minutes straight (which is an improvement over my initial speed-talking 7:30) takes some getting used to.

Which is exactly the idea, of course.

About the Carved Animals

I don’t actually know anything about the animals. There are a lot of them, but they don’t seem to be for sale. This may be a labor of love situation. I will try to find out more.

Never Smile at a Crocodile…

…Unless you’re walking along Grand Avenue in extreme West Oakland and you see this one. Then go ahead. It’s pretty charming.

Yesterday’s walk took me to a place where the sidewalk literally ends. It was an interesting part of the city, gritty and industrial, and not very residential. West of the Mandela Parkway, the streets are roughly paved, with no real curbs or sidewalks. The only vehicles were trucks delivering to and from the various warehouses in the area. Even on well-traveled (and well sealed) Grand Avenue, I was treated to the sight of a man in a suit vomiting on a street tree.

That sounds horrible, and it was, but it wasn’t all third-world squalor. Actually, this part of town doesn’t seem all that blighted. Just a little overlooked. There were surprising signs of life, such as cafes and taco trucks seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There were some new condo clusters stuccoed up in trendy Santa Fe burnt umber and ochre hues. People walked dogs. Pit bulls, mostly, but it was practically Mayberry compared to the images most people, myself included, usually think of when someone says “West Oakland.”

Fun Fact

The longest commercial flight you can take is the 18-and-one-half-hour Singapore Airlines flight between Los Angeles and Singapore.

The longest commercial jet flight ever was a test flight of an Airbus A340-500 aircraft. This flight took off from Hong Kong and landed in London—23 hours later. The flight could have been accomplished more quickly, but the pilots purposely took a longer route than necessary because the point of the flight was to prove that the plane could stay airborne that long.

I would not want to have had the middle seat.

International Woman of Mystery

I’m feeling very mysterious again. On Friday I wired money to China for the second time in my life. (The first time was to pay for trans-Siberian railroad tickets.) This second missive was a payment requested by the company from which I bought world cup soccer tickets. Apparently they mistakenly charged me a domestic delivery fee and needed me to send them a few extra RMB. That’s kind of annoying, especially since the wire transfer fee was almost as much as I owed them, but at least I know I’m not being ignored. I remain cautiously optimistic about getting my tickets before we leave for China.

(We’d better get them before departure, because the will call office is in Beijing, a city I don’t expect to visit.)

Where the Sidewalk Really Begins

This morning I finished my walking tour of the Adams Point neighborhood. I’ll miss that one, because it’s really nice. There are lots of magnificent old houses, and streets shaded by leafy trees that have been around long enough to grow impressive canopies.

I discovered one other thing about the area that’s old: the oldest piece of sidewalk I’ve seen yet. This one was dated 1907. I’m curious to see whether or not I ever find sidewalk that survived the 1906 earthquake.

Blog Now Appearing on the Olivia Web Site

Olivia is a company specializing in lesbian travel. They’ve been around a while. I think they’re celebrating their 35th year soon. In observance of this, they have recently redesigned their web site to include (among other things) blogs by various writers. They call them “Voices.” And guess who has voice number 13? Yes, me. The screening process wasn’t exactly grueling, but I’m proud of this nonetheless.

Nippon Currency Exchange

Traveling to exotic places is well and good, but sometimes the exotic comes to you.

Last night I had sushi in the Castro with my sister. We went to the so-called No-Name Sushi restaurant on Church Street, which turns out to have a name after all. Nippon something. I forget. It will always be No-Name Sushi to me.

It was great--probably the best sushi in the city for the price. Hilary, who knows her sushi better than I do, thought it was better than Blowfish, which is considerably more expensive.

Almost as exciting as the food for me was finding what I thought at first was a euro coin sitting on a windowsill. It wasn’t a euro, though; it was a Paraguayan 100 guarani piece dated 1990.

I wasn’t even sure I dared take it. (Did I expect an angry South American to come back looking for it? I’m not sure.) I felt like I ought to leave something in return, so I put a dime on the sill. I wanted to leave a quarter, but I didn’t have one on me and Hilary thought even the dime was probably overpaying. She’s right. I looked it up this morning and 100 Paraguayan guarinies is worth the tiniest bit less than two cents. With currency-exchange fees, I’d be lucky to get a penny for it. No matter. I left the restaurant feeling like I was the one who had gotten a tip.

Truckin’ to Truckee

There is some good news, though: My friend John, the photographer, had a commission to write an article on Lake Tahoe for Mabuhay magazine, which is the in-flight magazine of Philippine Airlines. He is swamped right now, and is trying to concentrate on photography rather that writing anyway, so he talked the editor into asking me to write the article.

This gig pays very little--almost not enough to justify the trip up there, but it’s a foot in the door with a brand-new editor, so I enthusiastically accepted. I’m planning on spending a couple of days at Lake Tahoe next week, driving around the lake until I find an exact angle to go with. Ideally I’ll come up with more than one, and I can sell the other article to another publication if it’s different enough.

If not, I think I can still make the article break even, and what more can you ask for?

An Eccentric Orbit

The moon takes 28 days to go around the earth. The earth revolves around the sun in 365 days. These things are comfortingly predictable. But other orbits are harder to plot. Comets, for example, take wildly different paths. Some zing around the sun every few years; some take eons to make their return. My understanding, though, is that all these trajectories still can be predicted, if you do the math. That’s because they rotate around bodies of known mass and substance.

No so objects that have been trapped by the black hole of editorial indifference. Most items that get sucked into this ominous void are never heard from again.

Every once in a while, stories thought lost do return. Whether they’re managing to break free of their orbits or getting sucked in and spat back out through a hole in the space/time continuum I can never tell, but every once in a while it does happen.

The previous record for re-entry was nine months. Today that record was shattered by a piece that had been in radio silence for over two years. A story about Milan that I sent to a newspaper on April 20, 2005 recently found its way back to my mailbox, a round-trip journey of nearly 3,500 miles.

There was no note attached, but I think it’s safe to assume that this is a rejection.

Flight Times

People keep asking me how long the flight is from here to China. From SFO to Shanghai it’s 12 hours and 35 minutes. The return trip is only (only!) 11 hours and seven minutes long.

I imagine they’ll show a movie or two.

The Ultimate Cheap Ticket

I’ve never been to Shanghai mid-summer. I have been in the late spring, and it was already very hot. By mid-July, it must be so hot that you can’t believe it’s cold anywhere on earth. I bet if you told the average person in Shanghai right now that there’s a place just six miles away where it’s 40 degrees below zero, they’d laugh.

That’s the only explanation I can think of for this guy.

I’m always surprised, too, when I’m on a flight that has screens displaying the airspeed and outside temperature. It’s amazing to me that you can fly through the tropics and at 35,000 feet, it’s way below zero. What’s even harder to believe, though, is that the word hasn’t gotten out in the stowaway community that wheel wells are cold and unpressurized. You’d think this would be common knowledge among people who need to know these things.

What makes this a little more sad and horrifying for me is the fact that the flight this guy stowed away on is exactly the one Pipi and I will be taking home from Shanghai. It’s sobering to know that this trip is one that people will literally die for.

Fun Fact

There are only 11 flights per week between the United States and China. That’s all of United Sates, and all of China. Doesn’t that seem like a small number? It does to me. I feel particularly lucky to have found non-stop flights on exactly the days we wanted them.

Done Deal

I just got our plane tickets to China, so we’re definitely doing this.

Here’s an interesting thing I noticed while shopping: I found that on the days I wanted to travel, I had a choice of two non-stop flights. One was on United, and the other on Air China. Two round-trip tickets on the United flight cost about $150 more than they would on Air China--strange, since they seemed like very similar itineraries.

When I looked more closely at the flight times, I realized that they were exactly the same. And the flight numbers were suspiciously similar. The outbound leg was United flight 857, for example; the Air China outbound flight was #8857. Finally I found a notation that explained that the Air China flight was operated by United. Tickets on the same plane were being sold at different prices, depending on how you wanted your ticket branded.

As I was making the Air China purchase, I did discover that the extra money might buy more than just a brand name, though. Travelocity wasn’t able to issue an e-ticket for the Air China flights, so we’re getting the old-fashioned paper kind. That’s a little bit embarrassing, like wearing a Walkman in an iPod world, but I can live with it.

The only real downside--and I didn’t realize this until I’d completed my purchase--is that they won’t assign us seats until we check in on the day of our flight. So I’m afraid we’ll get to the airport and find that all the United passengers have reserved the best seats.

But, having missed the last flight we tried to take, we’ve resolved to get to the airport as early as possible this time--days early, if necessary. So we’ll at least get the best of the worst.

And even if I do end up in a middle seat, I’ll be smug in the knowledge that that guy on the aisle next to me paid dearly for his legroom.

On Second Thought

Having looked at an atlas, I think I’m going to be strong and not submit to the temptation to make a 1,500-mile side trip. Guilin is just a bit too far--further than Beijing, in fact, and probably harder to get to.

We do have a week between our first soccer game and the next one, with nothing else set in stone on the agenda, so we could take some side trips. Just not that one. I’ll see what I can come up with to keep us out of trouble between games.

Well, Somebody’s Got to Not Do It

Who hasn’t been to Guilin? Can you all raise your hands if you haven’t been? Allrighty, then. It is just me.

My grandfather informs me that he and my grandmother went there once, and it really did look like the paintings, and the fishermen really do use cormorants for fishing.

Seriously reconsidering my multiple-city stance….

Women’s World Cup Soccer

Our excuse for going to China is that the Women’s World Cup soccer tournament is—finally—going to be there this year. China was supposed to host in 2003, but at the last minute SARS caused the World Cup to be moved to the United States. Ironically, Pipi and I didn’t see any of those games because the nearest ones were in Los Angeles, and at the time that seemed like a long way to go for soccer.

There are still parts of China I haven’t seen (I never did get to Guilin, for example), but we’ve discovered that multi-city trips are pretty exhausting, so we’re trying to stay in and around Shanghai. There is a first-round game there featuring the United States, so we’re sure to see our women at least once.

We’re also going to Guangzhou for a semi-final match. It’s not a long trip—about three hours by train—so I don’t think it’s too much. We’ll spend a night there. Guangzhou is another city I’ve never been to, so I’m looking forward to it in any case. In addition, there is a strong possibility that this semi-final game will be a match between China and the United States. Those are my two favorite teams. I hate to see one go home early, but at least I will have seen them both play.

The final game is being played in Shanghai. It’s a double-header, with the first game being a consolation match determining who gets third place. This means we get to see the top four teams that day, so there should be lots of good soccer. (I’m predicting a USA/Norway final; China/Germany consolation. You heard it here first.)

Train in Vain

No, seriously, buying a train ticket in China is harder than you might think. I know because I once spent three months there traveling by train. Well, more like two and a half months. Just before Thanksgiving, I was in Chongqing, a strange little city at the navigable end of the Yangtze River, and spent most of a day at the train station trying to buy a ticket to Guilin. Guilin is in southern China and is famous for its misty cliffs—if you’ve ever seen a Chinese landscape painting, you’ve seen Guilin.

I waited in several lines. A couple of times I got to the front of one, only to be told “mei you”—there aren’t any. I remember it taking about five hours to get someone to sell me a ticket to Guilin.

When I got on my train, the conductress in my car struck up a conversation with me. She was very sweet, and seemed to be charmed by my imperfect Mandarin. We made small talk for a while, and I felt the conversation was really flowing for a change—my Chinese must have been improving. “Where are you from?” she asked; “How long have you been here? Where are you going now?”

I told her Guilin and her face fell. She shook her head and turned my ticket over to show me. “No, you’re not,” she said sadly. Sure enough, the ticket said “Xian” on it.

To put this in geographic perspective, this is like getting on a train in Denver, thinking you’re going to New Orleans, but finding out hours later that you’re actually on your way to Chicago. I don’t know exactly how this happened. Probably the ticket salesperson panicked when she saw a foreigner, didn’t understand what I said, and was too embarrassed to ask me to clarify. Possibly Xian was the only destination sold at that window, so when I said I wanted a ticket, by golly, I got a ticket. At any rate, it was at that moment that I knew my adventure was more or less over. I knew I wouldn’t be extending my visa. It was time to go home. At the next major rail junction, I got off, bought (correctly) a ticket to Beijing, a city I’d gotten to know pretty well, and stayed in that area until it was time to fly home.

It doesn’t have to be that hard, of course, and didn’t even then. If I’d just stayed at a decent hotel instead of a bare-bones youth hostel, I could have had a concierge handle it. But decent hotels cost upwards of $20 per night then, and what backpacker has that kind of money? (Answer: Lots of them, including myself. But it’s easy to get caught up in the backpacking mania of doing everything on the cheap.)

Nowadays, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were possible to buy tickets over the Internet. But you can see why I might have some issues surrounding the situation. Please wish me luck as I attempt to climb back on that iron horse.

It’s said that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. More and more, though, that first step takes me to my computer.

Pipi and I are in the process of planning our next big adventure, which is a trip to China in late September for the Women’s World Cup soccer tournament. Since soccer is the focus of the trip, I started by going to the Chinese version of Ticketmaster to buy tickets to the games we want to see in Shanghai and Hangzhou.

In summarizing the experience, let me just say that there aren’t many things scarier than making a purchase through a shaky Chinese web site. The transaction failed a couple of times, and every time I started over, the purchase page was subtly different, like one of those puzzles where you have to find the four things different between two very similar drawings. One time the navigation text would ask me what country I was from; the next time it didn’t care. Or the price to ship the tickets would have changed by a few yuan. (The Chinese really do like to bargain, I guess.) The whole process bogged down for quite a while because every time I tried to enter my name, I got an error message suggesting that I might have used "special characters"-- an odd complaint coming from a land with no alphabet. I had to call China twice (thank you, Skype), once to pre-order and once to vent about the special character problem, which turned out to be an Apple incompatibility issue.

I did discover one thing scarier than using a Chinese Web site, though, and that’s using a Chinese web site and getting a call from your bank’s fraud services department in the middle of the transaction.

It all turned out fine, though. It was more or less a coincidence. I apparently had made an unusual number (for me) of purchases for which you don’t need to sign your name or provide a PIN; minor purchases like concert tickets ordered over the phone, and songs from the itunes store. I hadn’t even realized I was establishing a pattern. But after that, multiple attempts to access the Chinese site was just too much weirdness for one week.

I think the story has a happy ending. I don’t have the soccer tickets in my hand yet, but I got a charmingly ungrammatical email from “Alice” saying my transaction went through and the tickets are on their way. I checked my bank account—no one has bought airline tickets to Hong Kong with my credit card. So far, so good.

Tune in next week when we attempt to use the information superhighway to purchase train tickets from Shanghai to Hangzhou.

Book Passage Reading August 12

During the spring, it looked like I might be participating in several bookstore readings. As it turns out, I’m only participating in one, but it’s a pretty big one. It’s at the Corte Madera Book Passage, my favorite Bay-Area bookstore. They’re having a reading event to help promote their annual travel writing conference. I have been to this conference twice and loved it, so I’m pleased to be a part of the event.

Five of us who contributed to Best Women’s Travel Writing 2007 are going to read our pieces. The essay I’m reading was originally written for the 2005 travel conference, so there’s a pleasing circularity there.

The reading starts at 7. Book Passage isn’t hard to find. Anyone interested in stopping by is encouraged to follow that whim!

Stockholm By the Bay?

No, it’s not Northern Europe. It’s downtown Oakland, as seen from a tiny street at the top of a hill in the Adam’s Point neighborhood. Something about the spire reminds me of Stockholm a little bit, though. I like this perspective.

Fear of Not Flying

I mentioned that there was a story to our having missed our flight out of Boston coming home from my reunion. I’m afraid that was a little bit of an empty promise. It’s not much of a story. Just a cautionary tale.

I remembered the flight as being at 5:30 pm. I realized around noon that I was off by 15 minutes—it was really at 5:15—but I didn’t worry. It seemed like it would be easy to make up the time, and how much difference could 15 minutes make anyway?

What followed was one of those anxiety-dream situations where nothing goes horribly wrong, but nothing goes really well, either. I just couldn’t get ahead of anything no matter how fast I worked. There was always one more thing to check online, one more lost belonging to track down, and one more errand to run before we could get out the door. I never did catch up, and ended up leaving the house about 15 minutes later than I wanted to, without having managed to check us in for our flight.

None of this should have been a big deal, because I can still get to get to the Mass Pike from Northampton in my sleep, and the airport is now very easy to find from I90. Traffic wasn’t bad. We lost a little time waiting for a shuttle at the car-rental drop-off point, but because neither of us had to check anything, I remained hopeful right until I tried to check in. By my watch I had a half hour before the flight departed, which I knew to be close, but the security line was short so it all ought to have worked.

Except that when United says they want you checked in 90 minutes early, they mean it. The kiosk told me it was too late to issue boarding passes.

It’s a very frustrating thing to be told you’ve missed a flight that you know is still sitting there at the gate. It’s depressing to know that a machine doesn’t believe that you are capable of hustling down an airport corridor. But that’s the way it works. And now I know.

The story has a mostly happy ending. After a few false starts, including a United customer service telephone agent who tried to charge us $900 to change our tickets, we talked to a real person at Logan. She got Pipi the last seat on a direct flight that got home earlier than our original itinerary at no extra charge. I ended up on a later flight to Chicago. Due to bad weather in the Mid-West, I caught up with our original ORD-SFO flight, which was very delayed. Someone who looked a lot like the actor Alan Cumming was in the boarding area, so I was able to while away the waiting time stalking him to determine if it were he. (It was.)

The only bad part was that I got home after 3am. But I learned a lesson about time management on the road, which, now that I’ve caught up on my sleep, I appreciate. (I’m also hoping this episode will put an end to a recurring dream I have about missing planes. Now that I know it’s not the end of the world, maybe my subconscious will stop tormenting me.)

Happy Fourth of July

Have a very happy Fourth, everybody! We don’t have any big plans, just eating hot dogs, watching fireworks from our kitchen window (we can see the Berkeley show pretty well) and enjoying the day off.