shanghai surprise

After a couple of days of meetings and walking around at the Hong Kong Consumer Electronics Show, I flew to Shanghai on Friday night. The flight was an interesting affair. I flew on Dragonair, which is a Cathay Pacific subsidiary. This meant that there were a lot of carryovers from Cathay: 90% of the stewardesses were very pretty, the service was impeccable, and the meal was far better than decent. It's worth mentioning that this flight was just over two hours, and that I sat in coach...Yet I was still given a full meal with Haagen-Dazs ice cream at the end. It would be nice if American airlines could find a way to not take things like meals for coach class away and still make money. Clearly Asian airlines can do it. Anyway, I was given an awesome exit row seat when I checked in. It seemed like it was going to be the best coach seat I'd ever had when I saw that there was no seat in front of me. That all changed, of course, when I was kicked awake after falling asleep. You see, there was a plastic panel where the seat in front of me should have been, and it turned out that this panel was a fold-down seat. For reasons I cannot understand, Dragonair has a stewardess sit in one of these seats on either side of the plane during takeoff and landing, which resulted in 30 minutes or so of the flight being very uncomfortable as the stewardess and I tried not to look at each other. Not being able to put headphones on and fall back asleep, I finally tried to strike up a conversation at the end. It didn't get anywhere until I switched to Cantonese, but even then, it was still weird. Oh well--I'd still give the flight an A- overall.

Getting through Shanghai's Pudong airport was fairly easy, and pretty uneventful. The health checks and precautions for H1N1 are pretty entertaining. Almost all the workers and officials in the airport wear surgical masks, and all arriving passengers are required to fill out declaration forms regarding where they've been, any symptoms they've experienced and the symptoms of any people with whom they've been in close contact. Chinese immigration officials have the right to make people submit to random temperature tests and will quarantine anyone they think looks sick, so I'm glad I was feeling and looking OK. A guy in our Shanghai office was once quarantined for five days due to one of these inspections, and it was not a pleasant experience.

I'm currently staying at a Radisson hotel. It's in a decent, if fairly quiet part of town. I went for a walk before hitting the town yesterday, and here's what the area around the hotel looks like:







Yes, as modern as Shanghai is, there are still some things here that are throwbacks to another era.

My first stop of the day was the first Best Buy store in China, located in the ultra-busy Xujiahui district. I believe this is the largest Best Buy store in the world. It occupies 5-6 floors of a high rise building, and is definitely larger than anything in the US. I've always heard this was super-expensive real estate, and it didn't take long to see why. Here's the store and surrounding area:









The last photo, with the little kids surrounding the man, is to show you what happened to me. I was standing on the bridge waiting for my colleague to show up when these kids and a couple moms walked over to me. After some coaxing, they got up the nerve to say "hello" in English, and since the moms were telling them to ask me if I understood Chinese, I told them that I understood a bit, so they went into their fundraising spiel. I gave them like $.75, which apparently was a lot because they gave me not one, but two fake roses and a sticker for my contribution.

After visiting Best Buy, we hit two of our competitors' stores. Both of these competitors are far bigger than Best Buy and its Chinese subsidiaries, but hopefully that will change. Both stores reminded me of the now defunct Circuit City: poor lighting, less clean/inviting environment, unfriendly/unhelpful staff. Their prices are, however, more competitive than Best Buy's in many cases. One interesting thing I noticed in all three stores is that even though most consumer electronics are manufactured in China, they're all more expensive here than in the US, at least, the name brand ones are.

After we were done with the store visits, we went to Cheng Huang Miao, which can best be described as an insanely crowded "temple" in which many little shops and restaurants are located. Shanghai's most famous culinary development, the xiaolongbao dumpling, is served in the most famous xiaolongbao restaurant in the city here. The lines for this restaurant were super long, but we were finally seated after ~45 minutes of waiting. We ordered three types of xiaolongbao (pork, crab and spicy pork), as well as crab spring rolls and giant xiaolongbao that had crab soup in them. The soup was sucked out of the xiaolongbao with a straw. Kind of weird, but very tasty. In fact, everything was very tasty. It was a nice trip down memory lane. My only other visit to Shanghai was nine years ago, when I was a student, and my friend that showed us around also took us to this very same restaurant.















After more walking around, we left and went to another part of town, near Jing An temple. We were kind of beat, so we went to a donut shop to hang out. Like Haagen Dazs and some other American eateries in China, what is essentially a fast food affair had been turned into a sit-down experience at this place. We ordered some beverages and hung out for a few hours, discussing various work topics. The weather was really nice and we had seats outside in the shade, so it was a good experience overall. Here's the area near the donut shop:





My colleague had gotten excited that I had mentioned that I liked hot pot (you cook your food in flavored, boiling water), so she insisted that we go to a popular hot pot restaurant for dinner. Now, if you know me, then you know that my digestion sucks and that I can't really eat more than once a day without feeling like I'm going to explode, so I wasn't really looking forward to this. The lack of air conditioning in the mall and people smoking where we were waiting (for over an hour, I might add) only made matters worse. Still, I'm glad we went. The restaurant's decor and ingredients were of higher quality than any hot pot establishment I'd ever been to, and my colleague explained that this was the reason why the place was so popular, and that it had been widely copied since it opened a few years ago. Anyway, I got curry-flavored water, and we ordered beef, pork, lamb, winter melon (a slightly bitter melon I've never seen in the US) and white mushrooms (the only kind I will eat) to cook in the water. It was the best hot pot I'd ever had.

By the end of dinner, I was hot and exhausted. I fell asleep about 30 seconds after getting into the taxi to get back to my hotel. Since it was 45 minutes away, I got a nice nap. All in all, a very good day.