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!

Foreign Spirits

I'll start off by saying I hope I don't come off as some kind of alcoholic from this update. Fancy hard alcohols excite some kind of collecter impulse with me, I'm interested to compare and contrast the different styles, and learn how cocktails work, like I was a leading man from a 50's movie!

In Shanghai, by contrast, very few people I know care for alcohol, and nobody I know drinks cocktails - when I try to push a drink on Chinese people, it never gets more than a few polite sips. I'm not much of one to drink alone in my apartment, believe it or not, so the end result is my collection is growing to the point of being a little absurd.

Which isn't to say China is alcohol-free. Having a light beer or two with a meal is relatively common, and China has various native alcoholic drinks. Chinese hard alcohols more popular with the older generation and the poor, I think.

Western spirits are commonly found, though. Their main place is as an extremely expensive bottle that is given as a particularly elite gift, or perhaps to have around the house to show off that you can afford money on such things. It's much more common than in the US to run across bottles of Scotch or brandy in the $50+ range, any upper-end mall or shopping district will sell them one after the other . They often come in gift boxes, with a couple of tumblers, or perhaps an extra 200mL bottle on the side:



I hate to apply the term "good deal" for a $135 bottle of Scotch, but that's how much it costs for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue, a bottle you see all over the place. In the US, the bottle would cost perhaps $170 or $180, after taxes. On the other hand, $135 is a lot more dear in Shanghai, where the average salaries and cost of living are both much lower than in the US.

These bottles are mostly to be seen in the more elite shopping centers. But even in the boonies of Shanghai, there's generally bottles of Johnnie Walker Black and Red behind the counter of every convenience store.



I have to guess not very many bottles actually get sold this way. I've never seen it, and I go to convenience stores every day of the week! Perhaps it's behind the counters as part of a promotion. Johnnie Walker and Chivas Regal regularly sponsor events aimed at ex-pats, for example House music DJs visiting Shanghai, or the Black Eyes Peas a short while back. They also have large signs in front of a lot of bars - I think especially those aimed at HK & Taiwanese Chinese, although I'm hardly expert.

If you look at the above picture you can also see some Japanese sake and Korean shochu, which is popular with Japanese. The picture was taken at a Japanese-branded convenience store in a part of town with a relatively large number of Japanese people. I have to believe Chinese people would never purchase Japanese alcohol, and they're entirely intended for Japanese. So in most of Shanghai it's not so common, but in stores aimed at the Japanese, there's a wide selection:



Westerner-style alcohol selection is much wider, have a gander:



There's a European tilt to all of this, and not just because it's the chain of a French superstore. Scotch-style whiskey predominates, there's excellent but uncommon-in-American bottles such as Pernod and Pastis, etc. There's a little of everything, but some categories only have cheap knock off brands, or the famous brands that taste nasty. Some decent tequila is high on my wish list - 1800 Anejo Jose Cuervo is OK and the only real tequila in town, but not worth the $40 cost.


Personally I think vodkas are all the same, brand loyalty coming from which one has the best marketing. And vodka doesn't seem to be very popular in Shanghai, although you can get some of the major brands like Absolut or Stoli, substantially cheaper than in the US. Recently, a few vodka brands have launched big. They don't advertise as heavily as the whiskeys. With an immature market, and no real difference between the end product, these brands differentiate themselves by price. This bottle of Grey Goose goes for about $50, almost twice what it is in the US.



Oh, speaking of wish lists again, definitely #1 on my wish list is for Wild Turkey Rye - even though Scotch is common, other whiskeys are pretty rare. Probably the best local subsitute for Rye in a Manhattan is Canadian Club, which you can find at a few foreign grocery stores. And, my wish list for the US is Havana Club, the US has a political policy of not allowing US citizens to buy goods from Cuba.



This is different than Barardi's Havana Club knock-off they sell in Florida, which comes from the US refusing to recognize a Cuban trademark. The Havana Club 7 years is the most delicious rum I'm ever had. When you can find it at Carrefour it goes for $23. If it was in the US at that price, it would dominate the market! Well maybe not - it's a little hard to find in Shanghai, and most bars stock Bacardi, which is nasty and not much cheaper, but has the advertising and the familiar name. Oh, there's also a Havana Club 3 that is very light but good, and a Havana Club Reserva, I found it in a Thai airport, that is still good but perhaps too mild and smooth for me.

The US doesn't allow Absinthe, it is allowed in China. This brand tastes almost exactly like Listerine, and the whole absinthe mystique is BS, based on French prohibitionist hysteria from a century ago. It is an attractive bottle, though.



Another weird US policy is limits on the legitimate sizes of bottles - 700mL is not permitted. However, 700mL is the norm in France and in former French colonies, perhaps this encourages French companies to have vastly different pricing schemes for the US market. Cointreau, for example, is an absolutely necessary component of several common mixed drinks, like the Margarita. It costs $35 a bottle in the US, very steep, but goes for a comparatively cheap $15 in China.



For mixed drinks, the quality of the juice and other mixers are just as important as the quality of the alcohol. It pains me to hear Taiwanese people talking of mixing their expensive Scotch whiskeys with the sweetened iced tea you buy at convenience stores - a very popular mixed drink in Shanghai. It also pained me to use the limes that were available in Shanghai when I first arrived, I also use them a lot in the rare instances when I cook - they were fragrant, but too astringent and weird. In the last half year, it's become easy to find more familiar limes in the foreign grocery stories, but the prices are somewhat prohibitive - three normal-sized limes are here selling for $2.50.

Street Music, Part 1

I'm mostly going to let the videos do the talking in this update. Suffice it to say that Shanghai has a fair number of street musicians. Perhaps not as many as in San Francisco or New York, but they're common enough to see in areas that are crowded, but not too crowded. I guess the police keep them away from performing inside the People's Square Station, or the central shopping district of Nanjing Lu.

The following three videos were all taken in the tunnels leading to Jing'an Station. I'll start off with perhaps my favorite.



Pretty talented! Compare and contrast to the following fellow, who as far as I can tell isn't actually playing a song, just making loud noises. On the other hand his tone is OK and I wonder if he can actually play pretty well, and just makes these loud nonsese sounds due to having only several seconds to attract people's attentions as they walk past.



Here's a longer video of an erhu player whose talents lie somewhere between the first two. I've heard him play better, but I wasn't getting it on tape!



Most of these street musicians are blind. Perhaps it's an expected profession for the blind, and they don't recieve government assistance or have much infrastructure to help them. Another common thing to see is street musicians being led down the street by a partner, such as this example from near Beijing Lu. It usually looks like a husband and wife partnership, but I have no idea if that's really the case - I'll talk about it in a future update.



The large majority of the musicians are playing the erhu, a two-string violin-type instrument, traditionally with a snakeskin base. There's also the occasional college kid playing guitar, or other traditional instruments being played, such as the Souna (a sort of bugle), the Xiao (a kind of flute), or the Sheng. That last instrument is a really complicated mouth organ, as shown below, with a video taken near Zhongshan Park:



Oh, and a few notes. First off, the videos are hosted on tudou.com, a Chinese imitation of youtube.com. Please let me know if there's any problems viewing them, it's no bother to mirror or move the videos onto youtube.

Also, a lot of the videos, and some of the recent pictures, have been taken with my new Canon Ixus 850 (SD 800), an ultra-compact that I take with me everywhere I go! I wish it had manual controls, but I'm otherwised very pleased with the camera.

The tagging system is new, it should make navigating content a lot more manageable than posting several year's of content by month. I'd appreciate any recommendations on that.

Finally, about this update, it's an area that interests me greatly! I won't follow-up immediately, but expect some more posts on the subject over the next several months.