Sidewalks are all made of tiled concrete pads of every size an style.  When a new pipe needs to be installed, or an old pipe breaks, or for any other reason people need to dig, a backhoe just comes in and ‘rips’ up the sidewalk.  The workers do their work, clean off the tiles, and in less than a single day the sidewalk can be returned to its former state.  I’ve seen multiple sidewalks go from sidewalks in the morning, to 100 yard long, two yard wide, 5 foot deep trenches to put in new waterways, and then be sidewalks again the next morning.  It’s amazing!  The labor works around the clock and stuff gets done.

The students set up FTP servers on their departments’ servers.  They have good music/games/movies delivered to their dorms at 10mb/sec.  They can’t understand why we don’t (publicly) do that in the US.  Frankly I can’t either.  From every sense except profit, it makes a lot of sense: takes strain off bandwidth, free & fast cultural content - a kind of digital library.

It’s tough to get jobs here.  The students my age are applying to positions far beneath their ability because there just are not jobs.  They are overeducated for their own market.  And there is competition even for the positions that exist.  A girl missed a phone call for an interview and was distraught because the interviewer would never call back - and the phone was always busy.  Many want to go overseas, graduate school in the US.  But that’s a daunting proposition.  And as the investment is so great, if it doesn’t work out you’re in an even worse position.

The turnover on business in the area is crazy.  There are two major restaurant/small store districts between my house and school.  Each one has maybe, 10 restaurants, 10 clothes shops, and other small little places - massage parlors, haircutting places, real estate agents, convenience stores, etc.  Anyway, I’d guess about 15% were not there when I got here.  And another 15% have closed in the past 3 months.  It seems many just do not have any idea how to run a business - and if they only get 1 customer each day they simply cannot afford to stay in business.

I’ve been taking Erhu lessons for the past three weeks.  It’s a two-stringed Chinese instrument, that sounds like a sort of ‘asian’ violin.  It is actually quite similar to a Violin in the way it is played.  The bow, however, is strung between two strings, so you either play by pushing the bow towards the outer string, or pulling it against the inner string.  Further, it sits on your lap and is played upright like a cello.  The tuning is of the D and A strings of a Violin.

During my last lesson I learned that the music is actually NOTHING like ‘western’ notation.  In fact it is mathematically its inverse.  The western notes are based on pitches which are constant - key signatures and accidentals modify the mode through the notation.  The erhu notation is based on an major (Ionian) scale that starts on any note?  The notation tells you what ‘key’ you are in, and this defines the tonic.  But from that tonic an Ionian scale sets the keys to be played.  The notation though, only references the relative place in the ‘keyed’ scale:  1-5-5-4-5-6-3-1.  Or, tonic, 5th, 5th, 4th, etc….  So with every change in ‘key’ one must change the fingers associated with each note - as a “5th” from the tonic could be a G, C, D, A or any other note, depending on that tonic!

So, I’m confused… and my natural ‘advantage’ of having studied music before vanished in an instant.  I’ve never felt that before.  Literally, I went from confidently understanding to being completely ignorant.  I can still remember my mind working about 10% capacity to sight-read a short piece, to the very next piece working 98% capacity just to get out some notes. Amazing.

Anyway, it’s interesting.  This way is much better when you don’t care about what mathematical pitch ‘A’ really is - you just want to play - tones are relative rather than absolute.  It cannot, however, be ‘complete’ in a mathematical sense.  There are some keys/notes it just cannot represent without major contortions.  Also, the ‘asian’ scale is specific to some regions and completely lacks the 4th and the 7th.  So this makes the music even stranger when overlaid onto this notation.

Anyway, I think I’m going to his sister’s wedding next week?  We’ve kind of become friends - as I am quite ‘interesting’ to them…

Hello is fast becoming the most versatile word in the English language, when compared to all but the most acrobatic of expletives.   But ‘hello’ can reach beyond simple parts-of-speech-promiscuity and convey entire phrases - nay stories - in a single word! A few new definitions for ‘hello’:

• ‘I have something to sell!’ - think of a shopkeeper saying it as he gestures to his merchandise
• ‘Do you need a (taxi/watch/prostitute/bag/drugs/stolen____)’ - usually said in a low, near-whisper tone as you walk by
• ‘Yes’ - as in “Does this bus go downtown?” - “Hello!”
• ‘No’ - as in “Does this bus go downtown?” - “Hello!”
• ‘STOP!’ - we are reminded of the kindly gentleman telling us to beware car doing a U-turn in front of us, screaming “HELLO!”
• ‘Thank you’ - you just paid for your groceries, you say “Xie-Xie”(thank you), and the lady responds with “hello.”
• ‘Das ist Vorboten!’ - a stern “Hello.” when the security guard sees you walking up those stairs…
• ‘May I take your picture?’ - a middle-school-aged girl walks up to you, shaking her camera saying, “Hello, hello. Hello? Hello!”
• ‘Look at the silly foreigner!’ - a five-year-old sitting in his mother’s bicycle-basket turns around, points at you and says, “Hello!”
• ‘You forgot your bag’ - my taxi driver has kindly said “Hello” a few times now…
• ‘Did I just see a 6 foot tall dude with blue eyes!?’ - This is the best one of all. Imagine walking. On a sidewalk. You pass someone. Or maybe you’re sitting on the ground in a park reading, and someone walks by. About 3 seconds later, when they have well cleared out of conversational striking distance you hear a rapid, “hello!” sometimes followed by a flutter of giggles. Of course, if you turn around, try to figure out where that rare English came from, you will notice the person is already well behind you, causing you to twist your neck all the way around in a jolt of politeness to see who might be greeting you. Vanished! Sometimes I let out a fleeting “hello!” - and if the person is yet within earshot, they often break into a run - NEVER looking behind them to see who might have responded to their alien hail.

Anyway, just say hello whenever you want. It usually is said with a smile or with an exclamation point, or both. Have fun with it. The more body language used simultaneously, the better. I promise if you say it quickly, 20 times in a row, you too will come to understand many more of the beautiful meanings of this word.

I don’t like censorship.

I cannot access the following websites:

1. http://wikipedia.org - bad info about China/Tiananmen Square
2. http://bbc.co.uk - don’t know why…
3. http://flickr.com - put up pictures of newspaper which got a Tiananmen memorial ad past the editors
4. http://blog._____ - blogs are dangerous by their nature; lots of easy examples
5. http://youtube.com - this weekend the HongKong and Taiwanese (traditional charactered) Youtube launched official sites. Also in the midst of the Communist Party’s Congress.

Generally the blockages come after very specific, sometimes small but poignant incidents. Usually, english websites aren’t worried about - as most of the “masses” can’t well use those websites (though this is changing). Further, most Chinese websites are self-policed rather than literally blocked. The Great Firewall just creates the threat with which to govern.

Proxies work to get under the firewall, but are slow. And further, if any of these sites is embedded in another site, that new site has long time-outs when loading. As many of these new-fangled-2.0 websites are very highly cross-linked, every blocked host slows the whole net…

The worst part about it is that there is no way to check/troubleshoot, etc. There is no list of blocked websites. No official word about when/how connections are blocked. I spent 2 hours wasting my time debugging my software/connection/etc. So frustrating…

Restaurants are different here.

“Spr Coffee” is right across from “…ing Restauant” which is right next to “+…ing” which is next to “W/sou Doing” which is thankfully near the “Cafe of Tibet.”

The etiquette is for waiters/waitresses to hang out by the door and chat, from about 9am until closing at 10-11pm.  If you need something, you raise your voice and shout “Fu-yen!” or sometimes less pleasant words, and a waitress will come running to your table to help you.  Wouldn’t it be bothersome if someone interrupted your meal every 10 minutes just to ask how you were doing?

Once you sit down, the waitress will stand over you and wait for you to decide what you like - even if it takes 20 minutes.  Sometimes she’ll help you decide too - though inevitably she will recommend the most expensive dish on the back of the menu.

You get free refills on rice.  And if you have your own tea-bottle (mini-nalgene bottles everyone has) they’ll fill it up with hot water for free as well.

Everyone eats every dish - it’s all ‘family’ style.

Well, my roommate and some friends wanted to go skiing. There’s this indoor ski place in the southern part of Shanghai. I like skiing, but I have only really been on a mountain in Nagano, Japan, so my skills are limited. I decided to try out the snowboard - especially since this wasn’t the most dynamic of ski-slopes.

Well, with about 20 minutes left, one of the girls fell hard. She ended up fracturing her upper arm really badly. This ski place had no kind of medical staff or equipment… and it was fairly upsetting that of all the staff/people there I was the one who knew most what to do for her. Once we figured out it was just her arm, we moved her off the slope, got an ambulance (about an hour an a half later…) and they drove her to the Fudan Hospital. They gave her some morphine, X-rayed her, sent us home about 1am, and completed surgery on her the next day - adding in a metal support to her upper arm.

Don’t break bones or get hurt in China. The hospitals in Shanghai are alright, but no staff or anyone other than those doctors at the hospital, are trained for any kind of emergency. Really quite a crappy evening.

Today the trees fell down, so all the workmen had to put them back up. We had another typhoon, and it blew down all of the newly planted trees (those ones that make the expensive apartment buildings look like they are really more than 3 years old). You realize they plant those trees with an absolute minimum of root-base… I really am amazed that any survive - especially when they’re surrounded by pavement. Most of the trees along the road I live on went down. A few more on the way to school. And I saw some Fudan groundskeepers using a come-along winch back a bigger tree from falling on one of the dorms.

A few weeks ago I went with my Argentinean roommate to a bar on the Bund called ‘Latino’ for Mexican Independence day. Everyone spoke Spanish. The Spanish to English to Chinese language ratio was estimated at 10:4:1. Good place, but everyone just stays out too late - when it gets to be after 2/3am I need my sleep.

Today is China’s version of Independence day. Abbreviated to “10-1” much as we do “July 4” (their months are just numbers - month 10, month 11, etc.). I woke up to a barrage of fireworks. Not too uncommon to hear fireworks here anyway, as they seem to be a regular part of any celebration - and when you have about 5000 people living in apartments per city-block you have such celebrations occurring all the time. This morning’s fireworks sounded more like a truckload rather than the usual wheel-barrow-load, though. Pretty loud with a couple of real explosions in the mix. There are supposed to be grand firework shows this whole week out on the river in front of that famous en-spired shanghai skyline. I haven’t seen a good fireworks show in a while. I’ve been outside the US on the 4th of July for the past 3 years.

The whole country was given this week off, basically. Most worked Saturday and Sunday the days before the vacation (we had school on Sat and Sun). An interesting compromise. I don’t yet have plans, which is probably a bad thing, as the transportation network and tourism facilities are at a maximum this week.

I’ll let you know how it goes…

I finally have ramped up to full existence.  It took longer than I expected.  A few contributing factors that separate this life from Japan.

First, I am on my own - no host family to make dinner every night, keep a simple schedule, and ask simple questions of.

Second, the school is not like undergraduate - I have immense amounts of free time, little homework, and no culturally/socially similar classmates.

Third, this is essentially a third-world country.  I am pretty adventurous, but even I cannot, in good health, eat at most of the local food establishments.  I’m afraid of certain water sources, I must carry toilet paper everywhere, I fear the fumes of glue and clouds of demolished buildings, and the fog of car exhausts.

But I’m used to all that now……..

Well, things are going alright.  I am not getting done as much as I should/want, though.  I blamed it initially on just getting used to my surroundings, but that excuse is getting old.  It is hard to find motivation when context is stripped away.  I am not useless, but I do need to get myself started.  In the past, in order to do so, I just walk.

Yesterday I walked 15km to the west.  It never really becomes night in the city, so darkness wasn’t a problem.  I went past some of the poorest places I’ve yet seen, past some of the wealthiest apartments I’ve yet seen, another two universities and their block-sized university towns, and a wooded park at the end of my walk.  So much construction - so much change occurring, so much out of order and out of place.

Tonight I walked 10km to the east.  The river intercepts you if you go too far in that direction.  This was older, more sparse, less populated (if that can be justified).  Went past two grand hospitals, a few middle schools, some very old looking temple-like buildings now repurposed, a guard-tower-guarded factory and at the end of that journey I came to the forest park in the northeast part of town.  But obviously the trees close at 5pm.  It was raining tonight - a ocean-style sprinkle, so I got pretty wet - but I had no reason to care.  It was warm, I wore simple minimal clothing, and I just walked.

The nice part about Shanghai is that you can walk as far as you want, and when you get too tired, hungry, or it gets to late, you can just hail the next cab you see and be back home in 10 minutes for $2.  It’s a devils’ bargain, but I guess the tab has already been paid.

Unlike elsewhere I’ve been, geographically and psychologically Shanghai seems far more trapped.  City and sprawl for as far as the mind can travel.  In Tokyo - the most populated center on Earth, I at least felt that you could walk into any local train station - and for a price - you could get off the train on a mountain, in the middle of northern Hokaido, or at the oceanside.  I was connected to anywhere by walking into a local train station.  Here, psychologically, it feels like the people don’t stop from here to Tibet - and that’s a long way.