Bombay's Urban Cattle

I know the subject is a little stereotyped and small, but I found the urban cows of Bombay so amusing. It's so unexpected in a large urban city, and I could never imagine it in Shanghai, but in a city as haphazard and unique and organic as Bombay is, it somehow almost fits.

I don't want to say the cows were everywhere, but I did run into them in unexpected places. Here were four of them, right in what could probably be called the hub of Bombay, and immediately aside some BMWs. I'm curious what they ate. I can only speculate that they eat grass from the nearby parks, but it wasn't their mealtime yet.



Yuck. Cows are even an urban nuisance, eating garbage. I talked to somebody about it, he says cows, or sometimes pigs, are allowed to route through area garbage dumps. They eat everything organic.



More on the cow as urban scavenger: this family was having a picnic, when the cow butted in and started begging for food, the way a dog might beg for table-scraps. It wouldn't go away, and eventually the family swatted it a little with a small branch.



Of course cars and trucks are normally used for hauling things in Bombay. I saw people using cattle a couple of times, though. I imagine it's much more common to see in the countryside.



Of course cows have a protected status in traditional Hindu culture, but it's not just the cows who benefit. Bombay has a significant Muslim presence, Muslims don't go for eating pork. And Hinduism, along with many other Indian religions, encourages vegetarianism. So it's difficult to please everyone, and many restaurants don't have either pork or beef on the menu. There was a lot of chicken, some lamb, but mostly I noticed very large vegetarian sections. Restaurants that offer meat generally make it a point to conspicuously not mix the vegetarian and meat offerings, having separate countertops, or perhaps even separate lines for ordering. Also, a lot of stores and restaurants have a simple sign system, where a green dot means vegetarian, and a red dot means meat. Even this tea specificies it's vegetarian:

Driving in Bombay

India has been a dream destination for me since I was a college student, and my sister did a study abroad program to Delhi. The stories she told me were unbelievable, one after the other, and I wanted to know more. I recently made a short vacation there. I'd love to say I left my short vacation enlightened (in the most religious sense), but I still feel just as ignorant as before I left. It was too much to grasp, and I'm now stuck somewhere between the urge that I should spend a spectacularly long trip backpacking the length of the country, and a revulsion that I should never again set foot there.

All that leaves me with a difficult time distilling my experiences to compact and themed blog updates. Also, I wasn't there long enough to form expert opinions, and may make some mistakes. But I'll start by talking about one of the odd things that I ended up really enjoying about the first city I visited, Bombay: my long and uncomfortable drives through the city. I'm not crazy enough to drive myself, of course, I took the taxis around town:



They're the black and yellow cars, there's two important points to notice. First is that they're spectacularly small. I am spectacularly tall, and found my head pressed agains the roof for the entire trip. Secondly, a lot of them have certain patterns of decorations or stickers, maybe a single sticker from four or five different religions, maybe being covered in Hindu decorations like a small shrine, maybe some sparse Arabic script. As far as I can tell it isn't just decoration, the taxi drivers form or come from different groups. If they have to ask directions from other drivers, they seem to pass by drivers with different styles of decorations. While it's a little different, there were many colorfully decorated trucks and busses:



Also, there were a lot of three-wheel taxis:



Actually that was a huge pain. These three-wheel taxis were much cheaper, but couldn't go into the city center. Still, they formed the vast majority of taxis in the area around my hotel. It would take several seconds to call a three-wheeler, but maybe five or ten minutes to get a normal taxi. They're essentially motorcycles with a metallic covering, and are both smaller and more uncomfortable than the small and uncomfortable normal taxis.

Driving across town was surreal and slow. Most noticeable was there were large elevated highways, they were pretty fast, but they would only last for several minutes before coming to an end, and then the taxis plunged into narrow and crowded city streets. This was particularly true around my hotel, where I found myself going down roads that were more intended for foot traffic than taxis. Also check out the Diwali decorations, off to the side, it's an important Indian holiday.



So it was slow and probably not very safe - my taxis made it a habit of going the wrong way down one-way roads. But I enjoyed the opportunity to look through Bombay. I ended up walking spectacularly long distances through the city, but I felt I saw more just looking out the window of the taxi. Here's a cool short video clip, looking out the taxi window near Bombay's central train station:



While that may seem everyday, the constant rush of people, and the changes in the demographics while moving about the city, fascinated me. Just looking at the rather pedestrian picture below:



To be noticed: Women in traditional clothes (one with a bindi) selling vegetables I'm not familiar with, and actually laying the vegetables on the street. A fat man, dressed entirely in white, letting his belly hang out, next to some kind of rolled up mattress. A shop selling STDs - a type of phone card I believe. A stack of sugar cane. A slender woman in jeans walking alongside a slender women in jewelry and beautiful flowing traditional clothes. A long string of flowers, decorating a small underwear store. Clothes drying. A man wearing slacks and a Kufie. A hidden cornerside store - perhaps a restaurant. A man in a pink shirt, transporting boxes on his scooter.

You get the idea, there's a lot to see, and it's all streaming so quickly there's not much time to see it. Furthermore, the taxis ended up driving past places I wouldn't feel comfortable going on foot. Actually I'll have more to say about that in another update. I'd also like to give my respects to the women of Bombay, who manage to ride motorycles side-saddle, despite the constant traffic and the fact that it's a completely insane thing to do.

Ruminations on China and India

Over the next several weeks I'll be talking about the nation of India, interspersed with my normal updates about Shanghai. Before I begin, I'll collect a few thoughts and observations about the relation between Shanghai, and China, with India.

First of all, one of those small things about Shanghai that I still find immensely amusing is that if I ever mention India, in any possible context, the automatic reaction will be "Indian women are beautiful." It goes alongside other memes like "Tibet is very mysterious, I want to visit" or "I don't like Japanese people." From what I gather, it comes from the supernaturally beautiful and glamourous actresses of Bollywood movies - India's famously singular film industry, where movies are three hours long, encompass as many genres as possible, and incorporate lengthy and elaborate music videos.

Indian movies aren't now popular in China, although the older generation still seems to have a sentimental attachment, and the soundtracks have a measure of popularity. In the 50s through 70s, though, Russian and Indian movies made up the bulk of the movies allowed to be imported into China. It's a little strange, as China and India were at war with each other. However India was positioned somewhere between the two sides of the Cold War, and economically and culturally shared much with Chinese Communism. For instance, the classic "Mother India" is a melodrama that's more fun than didactic, but with a firm Communist message of strong peasants being brow-beaten by their capitalist landlords. And even now, India has a very large number of businesses, small and large, that advertise themselves as being an economic concern of the central government:



If you're curious to have a look at Bollywood movies, here's an iconic if slightly old-school video, taken from the film "Dil Se."



I am a very passionate fan of Bollywood movies, I'm a little starved for them out here. Even with the largest DVD bootleggers, who carry the most obscure French art films or blaxploitation flicks, you'll be lucky to find even a couple modern Bollywood movies. The older ones aren't so difficult to find, though, especially on VCD.

Anyway, I admit dwelling on Bollywood comes off as a little trite, and I joked with Chinese people that that was the only thing I knew about India. They joked back that the only thing they knew was from "Journey to the West," probably the most famous literary work of China. It chronicles four Pilgrims (most famously, the Monkey King) who travel to India, all the way battling various monsters, to retrieve Buddhist texts.

I've talked a little about Buddhism in China before, and I definitely will say more in the future. But as a quick look at an obvious difference between Chinese Buddhism and Western Christianity: even though Christianity comes from the Middle East, the Western European Jesus looks firmly Nordic, and various American Christian leaders claim America as a kind of chosen land. In Shanghai, on the other hand, Buddhism remains largely an exotic Indian religion, despite millenia of history, and being much more popular in China than in India. As a small example, this Jing'an Buddhist Temple is decorated with Indian elephants:



A few more things: from what I understand, ten years ago there were no yoga studios in Shanghai. Now, they're relatively common, and extremely trendy with women. I've heard it's most popular with the expatriate community, but I know some Chinese people who practice. Some of these studios employ Indians as the main instructor. Just today, my apartment building recieved a mailbox drop of brochures for a Yoga studio, one of them is pictured on the right. As far as I know, I'm the only foreigner in the complex, and the brochure is almost entirely in Chinese, although the part I show offers both English and Chinese writing.

Furthermore, if you look at very old movies of Shanghai, they often show a few Sikhs, acting as low-level police officers. This is also true of older Hong Kong movies - both Shanghai and Hong Kong were touched by the British Empire. The difference is that Shanghai's Indian community dispersed alongside the British Empire leaving, while Hong Kong retains a large, segregated Indian presence. I try to keep this blog in the first person, but Tales of Old Shanghai has some interesting historical anecdotes.



And, from what I understand, Shanghai's Indian restaurants are actually very good. Honestly I haven't tried them, it wasn't much of a priority for me as I generally believe foreign restaurants in Shanghai to be average at best. However I definitely will make it a point to try a few places in the near future.

But I don't want to overstate the case. I don't think India dominates the imagination of most Chinese people. When I told people I was going, the average reaction was of a poorly-hidden confusion about why I would choose to go there.

And now for the inverse! I did see a surprisingly large amount of things Chinese in India. It certainly didn't compare to being in Honolulu or Oakland, but I did run across Chinese stores and neighborhoods, I did see Chinese religious signs being used as talismans (most often the Taoist yin-yang sign, which I rarely see in Shanghai), and I did see a huge amount of Chinese food - both aimed at tourists and not. Not only are Chinese restaurants and snack stalls common, it seems every Indian diner has a large selection of Chinese food. The cooks are Indian and the food is localized, of course, with some seeming like a small variation, and some being unrecognizably Indian. I wish I had taken photographs so I could describe the food in detail, but I didn't! I did take a snapshot of this funny store:

A Pudong Construction Site

This is a short update about a construction project, using pictures again taken from my father. This will be my last update to use his pictures, at least until next time he visits! He snapped a number of shots of a massive multi-use complex that's going up in Pudong - upscale shopping and upscale apartments. The location is directly between the Jinmao Tower I mentioned in my last update, and the enormous Super Brands Mall. Actually none of these shots are my own, except for this picture showing the scope of the project. The image is pretty evenly split in halves. The bottom half shows the area being worked on, the top half shows a mall and six skyscrapers:



I've said it before, I'll say it again: there are construction projects everywhere you go in Shanghai, and everywhere I've been in China for that matter. I talked before about an apartment complex going up. This project is much larger, you can see it's one piece of heavy equipment after the next:



This project is a lot more modern than most you'll come across in China. For instance, much of the equipment looks brand new, and recently imported - Liebherr is a German brand, this site also features some American brands, although in general imported construction equipment in China comes from Japan or Korea.



But there's also equipment that looks like a relic from the Great Leap Forward. I'm not the expert, but this looks something like mining equipment. I assume it has to do with building deep foundation supports, a necessity given the Pudong being marshland and all.



Construction projects often have a fundamentally different look to them in China. There's less ready access to advanced machinery and skilled workers, but construction worker wages are extremely low and there's less safety regulations for workers. The end result is you see a lot of people doing things by hand, or a large crowd of workers working directly alongside the machinery. Honestly, this worksite is more modern than most, but you can still see oildrums being carted on bike, or trenches being hand-shoveled.



Many Shanghai construction sites feature on-site living for the workers, who are usually young men straight from the countryside. They're just tin-shack accomodations, obviously. I don't think this site features on-site living. Regardless, I enjoy zooming in on my top-down photo like it was a spy satellite, and I did come across this complex. While I'm pretty sure it's not on-site housing, have a look and judge for yourself:

A View From Above

This will be a quick take on something that was more interesting than I thought it would be - a top-down look at Shanghai. Most of these pictures were taken from the Jinmao Tower, a very tall (one of the tallest buildings in the world), very odd-looking building in the Pudong district of Shanghai - you can see the massive steel girders on the outside, arranged in a step pattern. The location provides look over both the Pearl Tower, and downtown Shanghai:



You can zoom in on the picture by clicking on the image, of course. Below is another view, slightly to the left. Some of these places will be familiar to the gentle readers of this blog. For instance, the central riverbank defines the Bund, the river flowing into it on the right is the Suzhou River, the area around alongside the Suzhou River could be call the North of the Bund Area, and the skyscraper with two immense prongs on top is located across from People's Park.



One thing that impressed me was the view of the Peace Hotel, the building in the below zoom with the pointed green roof. The road it's on is the shopping street of Nanjing Donglu, and the riverfront area is the center of the Bund.



The Peace Hotel was built in 1930. At the time it was the tallest building in Asia. Now it's a small speck on the face of Shanghai city. Here is a photograph of the same area taken from Shanghai's well- regarded M on the Bund restaurant - you can again see the green roof of the Peace Hotel. Personally I prefer T8 to M on the Bund, if you're going for an elite non-Chinese restaurant - more on that in another update.



Even though Shanghai is located at the base of the Yangtze River, I had never given much thought to Shanghai being a port town, just because it's mostly out of site, out of mind - as opposed to living in Oakland, where I saw distant views of the docks every day of the week. Looking down from the Jinmao Tower, it came as a surprise to see the constant flow of commercial boats, making their way through the city:



I also got an interesting view on the construction of what will perhaps very briefly be the world's tallest skyscraper. It will be around fifteen hundred feet tall, as opposed to the Jinmao Tower's fourteen hundreed feet. Both will be dwarfed by a tower going up in Dubai, that's just a few feet short of five thousand, two hundred and eighty. Note the tract housing, immediately aside the skyskraper:



Simple economics doesn't ever necessitate building these kinds of buildings, it's especially true in Shanghai. Like other modern ultra-tall skyscrapers, propaganda and projecting an image of wealth is the largest part of the reason for its construction, rather than direct economic concerns. This is especially true with the location of Pudong, which is essentially over-loaded and receding swampland, expected to recede even quicker with the Three Gorges Dam now holding soil runoff. More scary is, these buildings lack adequate earthquake bracing.

On the other hand, perhaps the propaganda does what it's supposed to do, as the skyscraper boom has been accompanied by a wealth of elite hotels opening branches in Pudong, corporations re-locating their Asian headquarters to Shanghai, and hyperbolic magazine articles about Shanghai's Blade Runner-esque skyline.

Jet Set Jeff Encounters the Terra-Cotta Warriors

In my last post, I found myself in the ancient city of Xi'an, ready to encounter what lay ahead: the clay statue remains of the ancient Qin Dynasty warriors!

As a very short history lesson, the Qin Dynasty united China 2200 years ago, and set about standardizing the written language, measurements, culture, and so forth. They also ruled heavy-handedly, and enacted a large number of expensive, fanciful public works - the secret Terra Cotta Warrior burial chamber, searches for immortality magic, and the unification of many smaller walls into the Great Wall were a few of them. Ultimately the dynasty only lasted twenty years, and the Terra Cotta Warrior Site never was uncovered. It was forgotten to history until its discovery in the 1970s, by farmers digging a well - the actual site lies in the rural suburbs of Xi'an city.



Again I'll talk about Imperial Chinese historical sites in terms of quantity: while the statues were memorable, individually made with a great skill, what most impresses in the scope of the project - the statues just go on and on, there's thousands of them. The first (and by far the largest) dig is located inside what seems like an airplane hangar:



You can see that that it's not only soldiers. Terra-Cotta Horses were also buried, they were carrying chariots that have long since decayed.



Behind the horses can be made out the outline of clay sculptures, still being assembled. As solid as the sculptures seem in the above picture, all the terra cotta warriors had been smashed to bits. Thousands of years ago the statues had been originally housed in wooden structures, the roofs have long since collapsed.



Bringing the statues back together looks like an amazingly painstaking process, and even now the large majority of the site is unexcavated - not only that, but there are other nearby Terra-Cotta sites that haven't even been touched yet! It's such a large job, with new sites still being discovered, that I don't expect the work to be finished in my lifetime.

Once outside the excavation sites, there's a huge industry of hawkers aggressively pushing small-scale Terra-Cotta Warriors, latching on parasitically, starting with high-ball prices and quickly dropping to prices so ridiculously cheap you almost wanted to get them as a whim. You can see them ahead...waiting...



Also! On the walk to the parking lot, there was a ridiculously lengthy procession of newly constructed one and two story buildings. They looked very plain, something like an office park or an off-market shopping center. They were all empty, except for people with tables out front, selling fruit and silly tourist junk. As the walk went on and on, it felt eerie, like walking through a ghost city. I'm not sure how they expect to full so many buildings in such a remote area, I imagine they hope future tourists will stay entirely in this complex, not even bothering with the trip to Xi'an proper.

I also visited another excavation site, Banpo Neolithic Village. It's ancient, nearly six thousand years old, and naturally there's a lot less to see: a few clay pieces, burial sites, foundations of houses, etc. To my inexpert eye there seems to be some connection to a more modern China, but how they fit in exactly is unclear. As with the Terra-Cotta Warriors site, the excavation is still in process, they're less than half finished.

Finally, I had a quick look at Xi'an Shaanxi History Museum, where Shaanxi is the name of the Prefecture. I don't have much to say, other than that there were many interesting items: