Street Food!

Before I left, my roommate Alex Field cautioned me not to eat any street food. Three hours into my first day in China, this happened:



Yes, we ran into a series of street carts serving all manner of asian goodies!

In what is the clear leader in the clubhouse for most remarkable picture, here is my mother eating a spicy whole fried baby quail from a street vendor. They were served twelve or fifteen for $1 in small cardboard trays. Sadly, the quail was oily and the crunching baby bird bones were a little unnerving.



Like the quail, most of the food from these carts was greasy, fried and one-note. We had a leek pancake, the quail, and nibbled on some steamed dumpling. After a taste or two, we were done and tossed a fair amount of stuff. Our guide, eager to show us that something delicious was just a few feet away, led us to a cafeteria-style restaurant. It's 11:30 at this point, just three hours after putting away several plates at the hotel's buffet.





Eating clams is one of my favorite things to do. I freaking love clams. These clams were small and sweet, served in a light, gingery sauce, thickened with corn starch. Unfortunately, nothing else was better than just okay. We also had grilled chicken strips and a light Chinese beer. The most delicious thing I've eaten in China was the ripe papaya at breakfast. To be fair, it's hard to beat out a ripe papaya.

Due to technical challenges and intermittent internet access, our first day in China has taken four days to post, and the posts are out of order. Not to worry! We'll have our days in Shozhou and Hangzhou up soon, along with more food pictures, landscapes, gardens, temples and ephemera.

The French Concession

I know, I know, the place is called the French Concession. Is it that they've conceded so many times that the act itself has been immortalized in the name of a Shanghai neighborhood? Perhaps. The district may also be the part of Shanghai that the Chinese ceded to the French during the Opium Wars. I feel additional investigation is unwarranted.

It's a pedestrian-only walkable network of modern restaurants and bars that caters to a Western audience. There are nightclubs and restaurants. The hewn stone streets and the outdoor cafes give the place a very European feel. We stopped and had a beer at one of them. I had a Leffe. Best beer of the trip, so far.

The Shanghai Museum

Here I am, with our great guide Kenny, outside the Shanghai Museum. When the shot gets run in National Geographic, be sure EM Kirsh gets photo credit.



This is a massive bronze "food vessel" from the 6th-4th Century, BC.



Some bronze bells.



These guys are about 3' tall, multi-colored and fierce. I call them Bebop and Rocksteady, but the mueseum calls them "tomb guards" from the Tang, in the 9th century AD.



Chinese pottery varies substantially by period. Color. Thickness. Quality. Design. They were different kilns for different empereors and dynasty, with secret locations and techniques. These are some of my favorites, scattered across centuries.



We also checked out the paintings, which were beautiful. Those roosters should be in my room. If anyone has any strings to pull, let me know.

Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition

I was rolling my eyes when I heard this was next on the agenda, but it was worth the hour we spent there.



That's the mascot for the 2010 World Expo. I've forgotten its name, and really, do we need another amorphous blob mascot for an international event? Whatever-the-shit it was in Atlanta '96 should have covered it.

Anyway, this large, modern, four-story building is wholly devoted to celebrating Shanghai's winning proposal to and monitoring their preparations for the 2010 World Expo. My diagnosis is a fierce case of penis envy over the internationally acclaimed spectacle Beijing knocked out for the Olympics in '08. Still, the scope of the project is very impressive. It makes the Big Dig look like a kitchen-and-bath remodel.



The 500:1 scale model of Shanghai was the coolest bit. If I'd been just a touch less frightened of my treatment at the hands of the Chinese authorities, I'd have gone Godzilla all over this thing. Raaaargh!



Here's a tastefully-done shirt depicting a panda mother and her child. Or a dirty, dirty panda with an amazon fetish. It could go either way.



Good advice to follow when riding escalators in Asia, spelunking, or at a phish show.

Yu Guardens

After the temple, we headed to Yuyuan Gardens, a centuries-old garden complex including bridges, koi ponds and various outbuildings.

It was really cool. The weight of years hung off the place, in the worn cobblestones, the narrow archways and the stunted, gnarled trees. It was every bit my picture of a an old chinese garden -- Pai Mei would have been very comfortable.

Check it out.



On the famous "zig-zag bridge", there was a local entrepreneur gently cooking fresh green tea leaves in a large, heated wok. They finished product was going for something like 3000RMB a kilo, which is a little less than $500. When Kenny asked what it smelled like, my mother chimed in with marijuana". We quickly moved on.



In a cultural aside, here is an example of the hair favored by today's Shanghaiese youth. I can now confirm that the mullet is a worldwide phenomenon. Scandinavia. The Mediterranean. South America. The Far East. The American South. You cannot escape.



Hey look, I took my picture in a mirror. Now all I need is a MySpace page. Though it's a little hard to tell from the picture, there are benches to my right and left, and the mirror allows the people sitting with their backs to the garden to enjoy the view.



For those of you who don't know what koi look like, they look like goldfish on steroids.



Here we are, at the Yu Gardens.

Temple of the Jade Buddha

Right after breakfast, we met up with our tour guide and headed to the Temple of the Jade Buddhas. Behind a non-descript exterior, this primary courtyard is surrounded by rooms, corridors and small gardens. Today has some sort of spiritual significance, which meant that the temple was full of people kneeling before statues, lighting incense and offering "ghost money" to their ancestors. My friend Matt Lee, who spent years in mainland China, maintains that seeing one temple is enough for anyone. We'll soon find out if he's right.

Some of the coolest things at this temple...


Here are two of four Buddhas, each representing the four winds. Each has a special weapon -- on the left is one wielding a musical instrument, which he uses to stun his enemies. Anyone who was party to my elementary school cello lessons can relate to this. On the right, a Buddha with a sword. Not pictured is one wielding a snake, which I'm told opens into a net, and another wielding a parasol, which he used to capture his enemies.



This jade, reclining Buddha is not one of the two for which the temple is named (no photos of those allowed), but it's representative of what you're missing. As the story goes, this Buddha is near death, but content because his 500 followers will carry on his teachings.



Sorry about the crappy photo, but this marble 1000 hands Buddha was too cool to pass up.



The two of us at the Temple of the Jade Buddha. Much more to come from our first day in Shanghai!

Breakfast of Champions

Shrimp dumplings with chiles and soy sauce, smoked salmon, papaya, a strange black-and-white melon, croissant, slices of sweet tamago-like egg, no big deal. Clearly, this is the second of two plates and the first image from one very busy day.

Good Morning!

Here's what I woke up to in Shanghai today.


I'm feeling pretty good, ready to face a full day even with the pummeling my circadian rhythms have taken. A 12 hour time difference is about as serious as it gets. Of course, this might as well be my theme song.

Beating the US Passport Office

I dunno how many of you saw the limp, battered, threadbare passport I've been hauling around for the past six years, but for those who missed it, know that the Chinese Embassy's claim that it was "too worn" is unassailable.

Unfortunately, they told me this on Wednesday afternoon, meaning I needed to get a new passport on Thursday, get a visa issued on Friday and get on a plane at 840 AM on Saturday.

The good news is that this is possible, largely because the US Passport Office is well-organized and efficient, when compared to other government consumer-facing organizations I have battled. Here's what I learned:

- DC's Passport Office doors open at 8 AM and close at 3 PM, but the best time to go is around 1015 or right at 2:50.
- The appointment system is a total sham. Making an appointment gets you nothing but a finger pointing you to the same line everyone else stands in, and an inability to make an appointment is not prohibitive. Just show up.
- When you show up, make sure you have all the proper documentation or they will send you packing before you get through the metal detector.
- For the first trip, I recommend showing up at 2:50. The document checking lines have shortened by then, and they don't start dealing with the couriers until after 3.
- For the second trip (to pick up your passport), I recommend showing up at least one hour after your scheduled pick-up time, if not later. Almost everyone I was in line with, including myself, was told that our passports were "still an hour away" when we made it to the front of the pick-up line the first time.

Because of the time crunch, I shelled out $200 for an expediting service to secure my Visa. If I had to do it again, I would just go down to the Chinese Embassy and get one myself, but it was worth the money for the guarantee that I was getting on that flight (thanks Arlene!).

Anyway, the moral of the story is that US Passport Office is well-run, as agencies go, that you can buy a ticket to Shanghai on a Tuesday and wake up there on a Sunday, and that the microbrew renaissance has not come to the "The Aviation Lounge" in the Shanghai airport. I'm getting another Carlsberg.

I'm Halfway Around The World!

So, the past month has been a rough one, in that I'm newly single and unemployed. Like any man confronted with a personal crisis, my flight response kicked in. In this case, it was DCA-ORD-PDG. Yup, I have just arrived in Shanghai, where I am killing time in the aiport, waiting for my mother/traveling companion/benefactress to show up. She wears a lot of hats.

In order to preserve what is sure to be one of the coolest vacations of my life, I've dipped back into the world of blogging. I'm going to try to upload videos and pictures to this blog, and will certainly catalog my experiences here. In addition, my first, abortive attempt at blogging is preserved in the archives. It's hard to kill your children, even the smelly, ugly ones.

So, I'm drinking a 20 oz Carlsberg draft in the "Aviation Lounge," I've got a dope mini pocket video recorder and three hours to kill. Once I switch to whiskey the footage is going to get interesting.

In the interim, I'll crank out some advice on slicing through US and Chinese travel document agencies, murky waters that I've navigated under extreme duress.

Chinese Itinerary

March 28: Fly out of DC at 8:40 AM.
March 29 - April 2: Arrive in Shanghai at 2:05 PM (+12)
April 2-7: Beijing
April 8-9: Xi'an
April 10-12: Kashgar
April 13: Urumqui
April 14: Yanghshuo
April 15-19: Sanya
April 20: Get back to DC at 9:40 PM