Jade Buddha Temple

This is a quick look at the Jade Buddhist Temple in Shanghai. This post has the distinction of being the one-hundredth update!

The Jade Buddha Temple is slightly northwest of Central Shanghai, on Jianguo Lu. The area around it has a comfortable feel, although it's nothing special: a long procession of older two story buildings, with trees lining the street, and small restaurants and shops often occupying the first floor.



Right next to the temple, there's a number of smaller stores selling Buddhist relics. They generally aren't selling the incense in force, however, like can be seen near some other Buddhist temples. Outside incense is prohibited, the temple make some claim that's it's for safety's sake. Shouldn't a religious site, you know, not lie? Anyway have a gander, I like the lucky cat!



Compared to the Jing'an Temple, it all feels much more traditional. On the other hand, Jing'an Temple has an 1800 year history, and this temple has a history of only 80 years. That's more a reflection on how poorly Jing'an Temple has been treated, rather than the Jade Buddha Temple being some kind of Buddhist kitsch:



What looks like dust in front of the lens is actually dust in front of the lens, it was a windy day and the ashes of the incense being offered was flying around.



Chinese Buddhist temples follow a regular schematic, with a large main building. This larger main building has a lot of interesting sights, for instance carvings of animals on the outside walls:



And the insides are stuffed with Buddhist imagery, some of which were very impressive.



There were side courtyards that felt peaceful, either as the quarters for the Buddhist Monks living there, or as Buddhist shops! Jade Buddha Temple almost felt like a commercial center. A little commercialism is common in big-city Buddhist temples, and the vegetarian restaurant is probably entirely welcome to some. However the temple feels over-packed with gift stores selling upper-grade touristy things, upper-grade tea, there's a gift shop you exit the temple through, and even the titular Jade Buddha costs an extra $1.25 to see, once you're already inside. No photography's allowed, or I'd show a picture. I don't know what to say about it, it's impressive, but nothing amazing - maybe just because visitors aren't allowed within twenty feet.

The side yards also had some interesting little artworks that I couldn't quite place in context, with my limited knowledge of Chinese Buddhism. There's a pillar of four elephants facing in four directions, which I thought was a Hindu thing. And check out this demon, it looks cool but I have no idea what it does, or why it's missing its left horn:



There weren't all so many people when I was there. But supposedly the place gets massively crowded in just a few days, for the Chinese New Year's celebration.

Thai House

It's a longish walk from my apartment to the Thai House, an unlicensed Thai restaurant I enjoy. Even though delivery is free, I've never really considered doing that. For me, the food itself is overshadowed by its location:



That may not look like much. It actually might look like an anonymous apartment building that could be seen anywhere, which is part of the charm. Locating the restaurant has something of the feel of going to a speakeasy, you have no idea where it is until you step inside. But you won't find the hidden location from me! Not that the Shanghai Restaurant Licensing Bureau regularly reads my blogs, but the place doesn't advertise, it's purely a word of mouth affair.



The layout is like an apartment, with the dining area being divided into three different rooms. But these rooms are actually pretty large, with maybe six tables per room, and also a small bar counter by the entrance.



When I've been, most of the patrons are Japanese, sometimes it's Chinese people. However the language skills of the staff are all lacking, the Thai waitresses only speak very basic English and even worse Chinese. Every single time I've been there I've had a language communication problem. I went with a Chinese person once, and she ended up ordering herself two seperate lunches!

I generously ended up helping her polish off her food. The size of the dishes are too small, and many of the lunch specials feel more like a snack than a meal. I also feel the quality of many of the dishes is adequate, but nothing special - including trademark dishes like the curries and the papaya salad. By far the best dish I've had there has been this steamed whitefish I ordered:



Sort of interesting, it was just the very slightest bit undercooked when I ordered it, under-cooking a whitefish is just a tragedy. However I noticed it uses a dry flame candle underneath the pan. The pan brings the broth of the dish to a low boil, both keeping the dish warm, and fully cooking the meat. The broth was strong-tasting, almost like a soup, with lemon grass, peppers, limes, basil, and the usual suspects of Thai cooking.

The soups are clearly outstanding, the complex balance of flavorings is pretty much exactly what I think food should taste like. They also serve a tea which has a taste I would describe as vaguely chocolate-ish. It always surprises me with how much I like it before a meal, and how little I like it afterwards.



This particular meal of fish, tea, shrimp chips, soup, and a haupia-like dessert, cost me $5, not bad at all! The small bowl of rice cost an extra dollar, what's up with that?

So although the dishes are very inconsistent and too small, now that I have a better idea of what to order, this is my favorite foreign restaurant in Shanghai.


Update 6/20/2009 - I hate to say this about a place I've loved for quite a while now, but the prices have steadily risen while the quality has steadily declined. This is still a quite nice restaurant, and I still go, but it's no longer a great one.

Shanghai Train Station

In the run-up to Chinese New Year's, Shanghai's train station is complete mayhem! Truth be told, Shanghai's train station is complete mayhem any time of the year. It's just a little more extreme around now.

Chinese New Year's in Shanghai is a complete wash. It's the time everybody takes to leave the city and go back to their hometown in the countryside. There's still a little ways to go, and the week-long official vacation starts after New Year's. But a lot of people take personal vacation or have other arrangements to leave earlier, so there's already a stream out of town. On subway line #1, you see a workers streaming off to the train station. They're often carrying cheap plastic knapsacks with a palaka design:



The subway doesn't stop off right next to the train station, transferring in Shanghai always involves spectacularly long walks. The walk first takes you past a long underground hallway full of small shops. They're a little hard to describe - cut-rate boutique stores, perhaps, so you can get a quick gift for the people you're going to visit. I saw a Scorpions T-shirt for sale, underneath is a store selling toys, jade, and pocketbooks.



And even getting out is a challenge, it's crowded at the gateways, and slows down with everybody carrying heavy baggage. Oh, the covering here was of a turquoise plastic, I haven't seen it anywhere else in Shanghai.



I've gotten slightly lost, or at least disoriented, when I've been before. This time, it was possible just to follow the people with their luggage. Doesn't this lady realize her bag has wheels?



Once there, the bus and the train station are right next to each other. Most people have already gotten their tickets at this point, but it's a mass of people waiting for their trains, and wondering if the train is on time or not:



The crowds are so thick, they had traffic cops, to direct the purely pedestrian traffic! I've never seen that before. They blew whistles whenever people came to a complete stop right in the middle of where other people were walking. Come to mention it, I wish they had these policemen all around Shanghai, maybe I could get one as a personal escort?



In constrast to the hectic mad rush of people all about, there was also huge amounts of people just waiting around for the train to arrive:



Lots of people have given me scare stories about trains and train stations, especially around Chinese New Year's. It's the time for people to make the once-a-year trek back to their hometown, a lot of the train travelers are migrant workers from the countryside. They came to Shanghai to make big money, but they didn't earn as much as they thought. So around this time of the year there's extra motivation for them to steal, supposedly, and I've been warned away from taking the train at New Year's many times. This man looks angry, I don't know if he looks like a thief, though.



Another thing I've heard is just how unpleasant it can be to take the train at this time. Going to Western China can take two or three days. However, the trains are absolutely stuffed, in the seated portions of the train (as opposed to the trains with "beds" to sleep on). It's packed to the point of people having to stand in uncomfortable positions for days at a time. Even the bathrooms have people packed solid into them. People literally will take to wearing adult diapers for the journey! And, I don't want to diss on migrant workers, who slave away, thanklessly forming the backbone of China's modern economy. But a trainful of them would have a certain distinct and unpleasant smell. I actually think the migrant-worker type suits are way cool and fashionable, but I guarantee it hasn't been washed and pressed anytime recently:



Some more migrant workers:



This gentleman looks in pain, before the journey has even begun!



And finally, just in time for Valentine's Day, comes this cute little picture:

Shanghai Sharks Basketball

The Sharks are Shanghai's professional basketball team, in the CBA league - the Chinese Basketball Association. The obvious reference point is Yao Ming, who was a star on the team, and still has a massive following in China - usually if I talk to a stranger my age, they'll mention Yao Ming within the first 30 seconds of conversation. Maybe my height gets them thinking about basketball?

Supposedly the Sharks were popular when he was on the team, but the Sharks aren't really that good a team, and the CBA is criticized as being a farm league for the NBA. The criticism seems off to me, as only two players have ever moved from the CBA to the NBA.

My first visit to the stadium was a little weird. If not a very convenient location, it is pretty much in the geographical center of Shanghai. It's part of a very large sports complex, with professional-grade tracks and so forth. I've heard Shanghai's athletes all live in on-site dormitories and train here, something like a Communist-style work group. Not just basketball playerys, but gymnasts, swimmers, fencers, and so on. The complex is big and modern, weirdly enough there's also a large Japanese-branded superstore underneath the main gym.



I didn't go to many Warriors games when I lived in Oakland (who can blame me?), but I don't remember the teams lining up beforehand to shake hands. The red team here is the evil Shandong Bulls.



Another difference was they didn't play the American National Anthem. It was the first time I had heard the Chinese Anthem, everybody stood up and all that. It was a recording of a choir, rather than a live singer. It sounds something like Wagner to me, a little strange.

A look at the game! There's a few small differences between the court and the NBA, I'm guessing it goes by the international standards court. The 3-point line is elliptical, without the side lines, and the lanes are substantially wider at the base.



That serves to discourage an inside game, and I was reminded of pick-up games in Oakland Chinatown - teams of 5 guards! It's a lot of ten or fifteen foot shooters, or people cutting inside for the lay-up. There were also a lot of set plays that involved driving inside and flipping it out for a jumper. Here's somebody calling a play.



Very strangely, Shanghai, which ended up winning the game, had five separate players score in the double digits, with two other players reaching eight and nine. With the Bulls, though, a foreign player dominated the game. He was #21, he played less than half the game but was still scored 33 points, the next highest scorer that night scored 21. I'm very curious why he didn't play more, especially considering the team lost. Would it be considered unfair competition, does the team not care about winning? Unfortunately I didn't get a decent picture of him, here's the team's other foreign player:



I wouldn't call the other foreigners outstanding players, but they did go inside from time to time. And to a casual observer like myself, they also seemed to play a lot harder than the Chinese athletes. Sometimes it seemed like the game was just a friendly match, without the players giving it their all.

A hilarious rule about foreign players is, they can only play five quarter's worth of minutes! So the way the Shandong Bulls did it was to double up on foreigners in the fifth quarter. Shanghai probably would have done that, but one of the foreign players got a minor injury, and took the rest of the game off.

The stadium is pretty small, I'm guessing it could hold a few thousand people max, and was probably holding less than a thousand when I was there. Ticket prices were from $2.50 to $20. I just got the cheapest seats, it was fine. The $20 seats area was pretty small, maybe twenty people in a box right next to the court. It was a bunch of white guys, they seemed to follow the league enough to know who to yell at, and were obviously pretty drunk. Check out the tables full of Carlsbergs and Heinekens. I think I took that picture during the first quarter, to boot.



Most of the crowd was Chinese, of course. People seemed pretty into the game and cheering their team on, although not as much as in the Bay Area, which isn't exactly sports-fanatic capital. It's hard to compare given the smaller crowd and stadium, though. Noisy balloons were passed out (slapping them together gives a clapping sound), but they weren't as loud as the ones from Oakland A's games. There's also a guy there with a snare drum, a few people brought them in.



And of course I'll mention the cheerleaders. They were a bunch of high-school girls, with baby fat and all.



They danced a couple times, it was the same dance every time! There were also a couple girls dressed up as the Sharks mascot, they left the ponytail hanging out though. For the most part they just cheered on the sidelines, they were silly and acted more like a bunch of high-school girls than cheerleaders. They razzed on the people shooting free throws, a couple times the referee had to tell them to cool it down. Most of them were wearing thick yellow jackets during the game, it was too cold for a skirt and tube-top!



A few surprises on commercial aspects: I wanted to get dinner at the stadium, but all they had was drinks and candy, so I waited until after the game. I thought the Shanghai Sharks logo was kind of cool and contemplated getting something branded, but they didn't have anything for sale, there weren't even any bootleg items on sale outside! That was a surprise. Finally, considering Nike, Reebok, and Adidas have NBA-themed advertisements all around Shanghai, it was kind of surprising that none of these companies advertised with the Sharks.

Oh! And, as far as I can tell, the CBA doesn't publish their schedule in English, very strange! A Chinese-language schedule is available at the CBA website. It also lists the scores of past games. My favorite is the 149-135 game, I can't even imagine. There's also Chinese-language box scores and a small collection of pictures for this game.

SH magazine, a free English-language weekly guide to Shanghai, frequently lists dates and prices. Every one of these is inaccurate, so be on alert for that if planning to attend.

Some thoughts

This blog is getting a little too expat-ish over the last few weeks. I don't think anybody who isn't an expat cares about the lifestyle, and there's plenty of other blogs that cover the topic, so I'll consciously be avoiding it in the future. Relapses are inevitable, of course!

While I enjoy posting about foreign places, maybe I've done it a little too much with regards to India. I enjoy travelling within Asia, and I'll continue to write about it. But I'll try to spread out these postings, rather than post them one after the other.

I took a few hundred shots with my Canon Ixus 850 last weekend. Mostly I was happy with the results, and it's very fast and pocketable, which were the main reasons I bought it. Still, I don't think I'll be using it in more "serious" situations.

I ran across Photoethnography.com the other day. Have a look at the amazing galleries with commentary, I also enjoyed her fetishism of old cameras. Along with Boston 1775, these are definitely the models of how I hope to improve my writing and photography.

Finally, Chinese New Year's is coming up. Basically it's a collosal waste of time, with no work, no Chinese teachers, and almost everybody I know out of town. My god. I'd be headed to the US, but my sister's wedding in Honolulu is just a few months away.

Amristar's Golden Temple

Harimandir Sahib - the Golden Temple - is the center of the Sikh Religion, a five hundred year old religion that melds various Indian religions, most prominently Hinduism and Islam. This won't be a treatise on either the history of the temple or the religion, but I encourage my gentle readers to browse Wikipedia on the subject.

A Sikh policy is keeping the gates on all four sides of the temple open, and welcoming visitors of all religions, as long as they maintain basic rules of ettiquite like not smoking, dressing modestly, and so on. Not much of a crimp on my lifestlye, the big difference was I weared a hat, a long-sleaved shirt, and stored my shoes at their locker. Inside the compound, but outside the temple, everybody is dressed up for the occasion, there's streamers overhead.



They also had free meals and free dormitory-style beds on the compound, my sister said that would be too tiring, and she'd be the only woman there. Anyway, I'll cut to the chase:



There. Damn. Beautiful! Right in the middle of a reflecting pool, it's entirely transcendant. The white building was replicated on all four sides. There was a crowded bustle, but still it seemed peaceful and religious, just the way you would want the central shrine of your religion to be. Here's a video, I think it speaks for itself.



Notice how most visitors go around clockwise, like it was a Buddhist stupa! The lady balancing the huge bundle on her head is also pretty cool.

The water of the pool is considered holy, I was encouraged to drink it but turned down the offer. In one spot can be seen people bathing in the water. To me this seems a stark contrast to the modest-clothing policy.



Visitors are allowed inside the Golden Temple. From this angle can also be seen a nearby spire that hasn't yet been whitewashed, I assume this is still a repair left after an Indian military operation against Sikh separatists gutted the place, about twenty five years ago. Anyway I was about not to even bother going in, the line is incredibly crowded and not moving at all fast:



But in a really weird situation, a guy who might have been some kind of tour guide grabbed me and a bunch of foreigners, and led us inside through the exit. It was a very weird situation, I wasn't sure if he was legitimate or he was hoping for us to give him tips. Anyway the center of this holiest temple had people reading from books, and others singing the music that can be hear outside. Very unexpected, dramatically low-key, wow! I also enjoyed the contrast between people's obvious reverence and their natural tendency to push through the tight crowded spaces.

Cameras aren't allowed inside the center, but are perhaps allowed from the rooftop and balconies. The strange guide said it was OK, but then another person who didn't seem strange said it wasn't. I certainly saw others taking photos, and you could see these musicians singing on TV, so obviously it isn't the strongest kapu. However I don't want to further violate some religious code, and the pictures I did take weren't the most exciting, so I won't post them here.

I came again in the evening, for posterity's sake I'll include another picture of the Golden Temple:



People were lined up alongside the outsides of the Golden Temple, some with candles or small lights:



And the temple was lit up beautifully.



There were fireworks that night, but I grew tired of waiting and was feeling the onset of a few day's sickness, where I just felt tired and feverish and sore. I ended up watching the fireworks from my TV, just a few blocks away!