happy wanderings

Olympics: Hockey

2010-03-01T02:46:00.000+08:00

The first event we had tickets to was to women’s hockey. This was the much anticipated match between the very blond Finnish team and the very unblond Chinese team. We haven’t lived in Canada long enough to appreciate much more than the gladiatorial aspects of the game, which were strikingly absent from this event. We were rooting for China, as were a surprisingly large number of other people, but the Finns won handily despite a good effort from the Chinese, whose goalie looked absolutely overwhelmed by the size of her protective gear.

Buntzen Lake

2010-02-01T02:45:00.000+08:00

This is a place about 10 minutes from our house called Buntzen Lake. In the summer a lot of people come to swim and fish. January offered a few sunny Saturdays so I took the kids for a little hike on one of them. It’s pretty wintery and cold, but they still ended up wading into the water until their feet were freezing. Ethan was the first one in, but he wasn’t too happy about it after the fact.

Little friends

2010-01-10T09:04:00.001+08:00

We regularly get what seems like a family of raccoons showing up at the sliding glass door leading to our back yard at night. They give us these very blank but hungry looks and ogle any food we've got in hand. The kids think it's great and its all we can do to keep them from opening the door and letting the whole crew in for a bite. There is a little fish pond in the back yard and we used to have some goldfish in there, but the raccoons would turn it into a raccoon hot tub and night and eat all the fish while they were splashing around. I guess its their revenge for our poor hospitality.

Train place

2010-01-07T02:36:00.000+08:00

Here is a campground-ish place we ran onto on on the way from Vancouver to California. Its somewhere between Redding and Mount Shasta. It seemed to be closed when we stopped (for one of our many many biologically compelled stops), but it looked like you could sleep in old cabooses, which sounded pretty cool to most of us.

Full contact cookies

2010-01-05T02:34:00.001+08:00

At the age and stage of our clan, making cookies is a full contact sport. Why sit on a chair and decorate cookies with all your clothes on when you can strip down and get on top of the table to do the same thing?

Shark!

2009-12-13T10:00:00.000+08:00

I used to surf at a place called Sunset Beach when I was in high school. Its right next to Gladstones on PCH below the Palisades. I saw this picture from the LA Times taken at the same beach and thought it was kind of crazy. Its the same place I cut my head open surfing after my freshman year at college. I guess the rocks were the least of my worries.

http://sharkresearchcommittee.com/pacific_coast_shark_news.htm
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-shark8-2009oct08,0,2454627.story

The horror of it all!

2009-12-09T11:13:00.001+08:00

Here is the aftermath of a recent road trip from San Francisco to Vancouver. I thought this was a good compare and contrast to the flying with children pictures. The good thing about the airplane is that you can walk away feeling only minimally guilty, since you probably had a worse go of it than the cleaners will. With a car you can’t externalize the grossness.

Travelling with kids on very very long flights

2009-12-03T10:28:00.000+08:00

Do you ever wonder what its like to fly on a really long international flight with little kids? Well, it generally starts out fine - an initial fascination with the airplane evacuation brochure, a bunch of questions about whether the plane is going to crash, lots more questions about when the food will come out and about how much Sprite they will give you, then a trip or two to the bathroom. Then you take off.

After that, they'll watch the loop of kids movies and cartoons on the in flight system. On a US airline this takes only 3-4 hours. Most foreign airlines have much better entertainment systems so you can get a lot more time. Eventually the boredom sets in and the questions about how long until we arrive. The airline food gets cherry picked for the dessert and crackers. The vegetables get squished around. Half the fruit ends up on the floor and it eventually starts mixing with everything else that the floor begins to attract - shoes, socks, books, DVDs, crayons, sippy cups, snacks brought from home. Then all that stuff starts getting smooshed up and stepped on until it becomes a really gross and sticky mess. Kids fall asleep in all kinds of weird postures. When you arrive, most are asleep. Some are excited to arrive. Others just want to keep sleeping, upside down covered in smashed grapes and dirty socks.

Its actually not as bad as it seems...

Halloween

2009-11-04T02:30:00.008+08:00

A solid showing this Halloween costume-wise. A witch with very frizzy hair. A Transformer who didn’t really like wearing his mask, which, when coupled with the inability to turn into a machine, somewhat diminishing the authenticity of the get up. A race car driver who wanted to be a fireman who wanted to be a race car driver who wanted to be a fireman who ended up as a race car driver. And a lion who liked the candy but couldn’t really understand the causal relationship between the sweets and the costume.

Oregon coast

2009-10-24T10:53:00.000+08:00

We headed to the Oregon coast recently for a long weekend. None of us had ever been there and we ended up with warm sunny early October weather that made for a great weekend, though it was a bit of a drive. We saw a Lewis and Clark IMAX a few months ago in Seattle so the kids were really excited to see the fort where they spent the winter. The recreation they had didn’t make it look like a lot of fun for its inhabitants. The beaches and dunes were great. The kids liked rolling around in the sand and we were probably potentially in violation of some Canadian agricultural rules with the amount of sand we ended up bringing back on the floor of the car.

Meet the mayor

2009-10-19T10:50:00.000+08:00

Abby and Ben both read enough books this summer to qualify for the distinguished Super Reader Medal personally presented by the Most Honorable Mayor of Port Moody, British Columbia. We had admittedly not heard of the Super Reader program before getting our library card soon after moving in, but it was quite an affair and everyone was excited.

Butchart Gardens

2009-10-08T12:33:00.003+08:00

On our trip to Vancouver Island we made a stop at Butchart Gardens, a lovely garden created in an old stone quarry. The grounds and summer flowers were beautiful and the day, like most days in British Columbia in the summer, was clear and mild.

While I'm no connoisseur of gardens, I probably take a keener interest in these things than most Americans and while I wouldn't say that it’s on the same level as Keukenhof in the Netherlands or Sissinghurst in England, it’s close to that league.

The kids liked it for a while, but eventually began to focus on where they could get an ice cream cone.

Vancouver Island trip

2009-10-06T12:33:00.002+08:00

We took a trip to Vancouver Island and the city of Victoria a few weeks back. It was a beautiful ferry ride over, a nice day in the pseudo-British town and then good trip to a very lonesome beach on the western side of the island. Once you get a little ways out of the city you realize that there is almost no civilization on this huge island, which is perhaps a bit more eerie feeling after being in China where it seems you are never more than a few feet from other people.

It was our first trip using our new minivan and tent. How about those for clear indicators that we’ve come back to North American reality?

Mount Rainier

2009-10-05T02:32:00.007+08:00

We've been down to Seattle a few times this summer. Once we went hiking on Mt. Rainier.

Here's Abby's take on the whole experience -- "When we where hiking the snow didn't melt so we had a snow ball fight!!! After that we had more snowball fights and more hiking. Pretty soon my shoes started to hurt and I took them off. My Dad said my feet would get cut. But I said my feet really hurt. So he said O.k. Soon I tripped and my toe got cut and bled. I was crying beacause it hurt a lot. My dad carried me part way down. When we got to the car it was ok and we drove to the Hotel".

Aside from Abby's shoe travails, things were fine and it was a strikingly beautiful place. Wildflowers, meadows, glaciers. Ethan hiked basically the full 3 miles, which was pretty impressive for a 3 year old. In any case, here are some pics.

Vancouver

2009-07-28T09:00:00.005+08:00

We finally made it to Vancouver. So far, so good. Beautiful mountains, lakes to swim in, tap water you can actually drink. What more could you ask for? Here are a few early pics.

More Bali surfing

2009-07-10T06:14:00.009+08:00

Here are a few more good pics of the kids surfing in Bali. Good stuff, huh? Ben with the victory stance and Abby with an intense look does a little rail grab.

I got to surf quite a bit which was fantastic for me. I ended up hiring this local surfer guy I met on the beach to take me to some local spots, partly to get access to the spots and partly to have someone make sure I didn’t drown or get my head split open on a reef. One day he took me a reef break which was pretty far offshore. We got a guy with a little boat to drive us around to the back of the reef, since it would have been a very very long paddle out. He dropped us off at the back side of the reef and we threw our boards out and then paddled towards the break from behind. I’d never done this before. The current was intense, pulling sideways quickly across the reef, parallel to the beach, so you had to paddle pretty hard just to say in one place. I ended up getting a few waves before being too tired to paddle back out. I learned that without a beach in front of you, there is no undertow or rip to make it easier to paddle out. Its just you against the waves. Too hard for me in my old age, but a great day none the less. I think having the guy pull up to our hotel

with a scooter and two boards on the side rack was fun enough in itself.

Chocolate dreams

2009-06-12T16:09:00.001+08:00

Did you ever wonder what happens if you fall asleep at night eating a 5 pound bag of chocolate chips that you sneaked out of the refrigerator unbeknownst to your parents?

I didn't think so.

We'll here's what it looks like anyway. Courtesy of 3 year old Ethan Woodward.

Bali

2009-06-11T17:51:00.000+08:00

We are moving to Canada soon so we're taking our final family Asia trips now. We went to Bali about a month ago. I love Bali because it’s sort of a mix of Hawaii type developed tourism, Hindu culture with a very pronounced boho element of scraggly Australian surfers and random European college-ish kids. The later part pleasantly reminds me of my younger years when I was able to float around South America a bit with a backpack, $15 a day and a high tolerance for very risky looking eating establishments.

The older kids also got to do their first surfing. Private lessons, one hour, board included - $10. This was my kind of place. Both Abby and Ben got up quite a few times. They are so small that they could pop right up, even on a 6 foot board. Anyway, here are some pictures from Kuta Beach.

More Bali pics to come.

Shaolin temple

2009-06-11T15:22:00.000+08:00

I went to the Chinese city of Zhengzhou in early December of last year to speak at a conference and figured out after I was booked that it was near the Shaolin Temple – the birthplace of Kung Fu. Zhengzhou is a 3^rd tier Chinese city in the middle/northern part of China with aspirations to be something more. It sits in the middle of the Yellow River valley and has a large agricultural area around it. I thought if had an agricultural feel despite the fact that it had a large urban area and pollution that shows the presence of surrounding industry. I admit that I could hardly wait for my speech to be over so I could get out to the temple. The temple was about 1.5 hours out of town and the ride was nice enough once you got out into a little more of the countryside. At that point some rather large mountains jutted up abruptly from the Yellow River valley that Zhengzhou sits in and they were very pretty. Near the base of one of the mountains was the Shaolin Temple. It was hardly isolated and rather small, but it was pretty and there is a large cemetery outside with tall pillars marking the burial spots.

The funny thing was that there were tons of Kung Fu schools all over the place. There were literally hundreds of kids sparring in school yards on the sides of the roads. Later I read that there were something like 100 Kung Fu schools there. The kids looked to be about 8 to 18 years old. They had sticks, shield, boxing gloves and sparring helmets. Some had these swords that were more decorative than sharp, but still, they were swinging them around like crazy.

The big question that came to mind for me was what do you do after Kung Fu school? Sure, China is a big country, but what are all these wannabe Bruce Lees going to do when they grow up? We can’t all be Ralph Maccio.

Kyoto

2009-06-10T17:40:00.001+08:00

I went to Kyoto in late November of last year on a stopover from Singapore to Miami between meetings. I was on a red-eye out of Miami and they originally had me going through Tokyo and then spending a day in Miami. I changed it to go through Osaka. When I got there, I got a bus to Kyoto, which was about 1.5 hours away. The ride was mostly city, until you got a ways out of Osaka. I actually always liked flying through Osaka. The airport is right on the water and you can see the ships and port well and I liked the maritime feel of the place. Anyway, the mini-bus took my right to my hotel, which was actually a small inn. The place was nice. All tatami mats inside so you had to leave your shows at the door. I had no bed, but at thin futon on the floor. I put on a fleece, bought a bus pass and a map and started walking. The day was beautifully cool and clear. I walked through a fairly normal neighborhood until I reached an older neighborhood with smaller streets then I walked up a hill and began going in a series of temples.

This was the Asia you dream about and you see in movies and postcards. Red, yellow and orange maples covering the hills and walkways. Bamboo groves nestled in the foothills. Raked zen gardens next to ponds filled with slow moving koi. The buildings were lovely with the large thick roofs with the rounded eaves. You took your shoes off in many of the shines and temples as you walked along in their open raised platforms above the gardens and ponds. By mid-morning the large Japanese tour groups had arrived, but with them the touristy geishas wandering the small streets. The streets were full of vendors selling different snacks. I tried quite a few, not knowing what almost any were. Most were good. A few a discreetly chucked when I got to a trashcan out of view of the seller. I saw very few non-Asian tourists. I ate at this little ramen bar at night. Gyozo and udon from this giant steaming pot that was almost vat-like in dimensions

The striking thing is how different it is than China. So clean and orderly. None of the pushing, pollution and dirtiness that characterizes so many Chinese tourist locations.

In flight meal

2009-03-22T08:27:00.000+08:00

Next time you complain about the lack of a free in-flight meal on a U.S. airline, just look what you're missing. In China they generally still serve some sort of snack. Here's one I had on a recent flight to Guangzhou.

None of it stands out as particularly good, or for that matter edible. The "squids lice" (zoom in on the upper left hand package) tastes about as good as it sounds.

Birthday Carnival

2009-03-21T23:55:00.002+08:00

Here are a few pics from today's double birthday party for Abby (8) and Ben (6). We invited all the kids in each of their school and church classes and we ended up with over 50 kids! We hired a local streetside cotton candy guy to come for the afternoon. Since cotton candy is about 10 cents a pop here, this is quite feasible and it was a huge hit. Zachary fell down on the street right before the party. He seems to have fallen directly onto his nose, since he had no scuffs on his hands, knees etc. Everyone had a great time and the weather turned just in time for the party.

More birthday pics

2009-03-21T23:36:00.005+08:00

More birthday pics

Chinese nursery school

2009-03-08T00:03:00.001+08:00

Ethan attends a local Chinese nursery school where he is the only non-Chinese kid in his class. Check out the poster of his class and see if you can pick him out. The room is not really heated much so you can see the kids all wearing their coats while eating a morning snack. He loves the place and they are really nice to him.

Dubai continued

2009-02-03T21:20:00.005+08:00

Here are some more Dubai pictures. The stinky camel farm, out on some sand dunes, Indian tourists taking pictures with our kids, shopping for curly toed shoes.

Dubai

2009-02-03T17:07:00.006+08:00

I'm trying to catch up on some posts. Here are some pictures from a trip we made to Dubai as a stop over to see my parents in Brazil. We went to this amazing water park next to the Burj Dubai, the fancy hotel you see in all pictures of Dubai. The kids loved it.

Brazil

2009-02-02T17:06:00.000+08:00

Here are some pictures from a cloudy day we spent at the beach near Sao Paulo while we were visiting my parents. Oh, and plus a picture of a python skeleton - a highlight on everyone's Brazilian itinerary.

Suspension bridge

2009-01-10T02:33:00.001+08:00

This place is in North Vancouver, over a deep, but narrow gorge over a river. A very pretty place, but it freaks some people out. Here’s a picture of Jenny and Natalie.

British school

2008-11-04T11:20:00.001+08:00

The kids recently started school here in Shanghai at a British school called Dulwich College. Its a branch of a British school. The kids are each assigned to one of four "houses" that compete against each other in different contexts, which they think gives a Harry Potter-ish feel to the setup. Anyway, the uniforms are a bit different than the Batman shirts that they might be wearing in the U.S.

Promotion

2008-11-02T12:21:00.001+08:00

Here's a spelling error that you wouldn't see at home.

A Hot Liver trustworthiness

2008-11-01T02:23:00.000+08:00

I recently bought some prescription eyeglasses at an enormous eyeglass mall by the main train station here in Shanghai. It was a big building, about four stories high and every floor had probably 20 different glasses shops on it. If you want eyeglasses, this place is definitely the place to go and its very cheap. I ended up buying some glasses at a store and they gave me an English business card that they had proudly printed. Just yesterday, I was flipping through some papers and came across the card and noticed the text on the back for the first time, which you can see below. This is probably the roughest translation I've seen since I've been here. I don't know about you, but I generally don't associate Hot Liver trustworthiness with anything as mundane as eyeglasses.

Listerizing

2008-10-28T23:11:00.002+08:00

Here's a room in a hotel where you can go to listerize or perhaps its where the staff does the requisite listerization or maybe instead its where the listerization equipment is stored.

What is listerization you might ask? Good question.

Chinese room service

2008-10-26T22:58:00.000+08:00

Here's a room service menu from a hotel I stayed at recently in a 3rd tier city called Rizhao in Shandong province (on the coast between Beijing and Shanghai) where I was speaking at a conference. Click on the image to see it better.

How I got on the bill in this place is sort of a mystery to me. I asked someone at the hotel if they got foreigners very often. They said they'd had a German there about 2 years ago. Anyway, the room service reflected this fact.

Jellyfish with vinegar or pig's ear with chili oil. Tough call.

Very fresh chicken

2008-10-25T22:44:00.004+08:00

There is a guy who sells fresh chicken about a block and a half from our house on weekends. He pulls up with is scooter which has a cage full of live chickens in it and also has some live ducks. The ducks aren't in the cage usually, but instead just sort of sitting on the ground next to the scooter. He must either clip the wings or perhaps they are smarter than chickens and are just sitting their depressed, contemplating their impeding doom.

This is very fresh stuff. You pick the chicken and he does all the dirty work right there on the street. You can see that its messy business. Tough way to make a living. Tougher on the chickens I suppose.

Jiu Hua Shan pics

2008-10-24T20:52:00.008+08:00

This was the next stop on our road trip. This place is basically totally off the foreign tourist map, but it was a very cool place. Its one of the more famous Buddhist stops in China - monasteries carved into the side of high misty mountains, chanting saffron robed monks, lots of incense and gongs. Very atmospheric stuff. Anyway, this was another cable car place since our little band wasn't hearty enough for the 5 hour hike up. This place could have actually been crazier than Huangshan in terms of steep stairs and long fall possibilities, but the kids liked the incense stores and the hiking around. They also couldn't stay away from the souvenier stands. Ethan wanted a wooden sword like you wouldn't believe, but it would have been a disaster walking around the paths, let alone during the car ride home.

The people, as usual, were fascinated by the blondness and smallness of our crew. We were with one other family which upped the numbers of small blond people. Once you get out of Shanghai, Beijing and maybe Shenzhen and Guangzhou, your chances of seeing a foreign kid in real life are pretty slim so you get used to your kids being followed by a cellphone camera paparazzi.

Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) pics

2008-10-24T20:21:00.006+08:00

We went on our first Chinese road trip over the recent October holiday (which is sort of the Chinese 4th of July). We drove about 6 hours to a place called Huangshan. This is a very famous tourist destination for Chinese. Many a contemplative Chinese poem has been written about the place over the centuries. Its a mountainous place that sort of reminds me of Yosemite. Lots of exposed granite. Anyway, unlike Yosemite, you can take a cable car to the top of different sections of the park. It was sort of a crazy place to take little kids since the paths are very narrow and carved into fairly steep cliffs so someone small and wiggly could be in trouble, but we made it and they loved it.

Painted face

2008-10-22T20:01:00.000+08:00

I've been sort of slacking on posts lately. I'll catch up a bit.

Here's a pic from a funny painting gone awry day recently.

Copenhagen

2008-08-25T22:30:00.002+08:00

I went to Copenhagen a few weeks ago for a customer meeting. It was beautiful Northern European summer weather - long days, warm days and cool nights. Anyway, I'd been to Copenhagen before a few times and I was only there for about 36 hours, but it was nice as jet-laggy intercontinental business trips go. We had dinner in Tivoli Gardens, which was very pretty at night. On the way back to Shanghai I had an 8 hour layover in Helsinki. I went into the city for about 4 hours. It was ok, but there wasn't anything particularly attractive from a tourist point of view asides from a few art museums. No offense to the vast Finnish readership of this blog.

More Beijing Olypmics pics

2008-08-20T21:21:00.000+08:00

Here are a few more pics from the Olympics in Beijing. Look how blue the sky is! When do you ever see that in Beijing...

Beijing Olympics pics

2008-08-16T00:23:00.006+08:00

We made it to the Olympics. I'll fill in a bit more later, but here are a few pics from today. We went to track & field in the Bird's Nest and it was fantastic. We were sort of a tourist attraction in our own right for many a Chinese tourist who took pictures with our kids.

Here today, gone to...

2008-08-04T17:23:00.003+08:00

We went to Hawaii a while back - Maui specifically. This is a lazy posting, just pictures, but well suited for Grandparent edification purposes.

Everything but the kitchen sink

2008-07-23T19:36:00.001+08:00

When you live in China, every time you go to the U.S. you stock up on things that are hard or expensive to get in China. This means mostly fairly mundane food items for most Americans. When a box of Cheerios costs US$10, the local oatmeal starts to look better. Anyway, a recent Hawaii trip was no exception. We went there with 2 suitcases of stuff and 7 empty suitcases nested inside each other.

After a big Costco trip (on everyone's Hawaiian tourist list - beach, luau, Costco), we showed up at the check-in counter with 9 bags, each maxed out on the 50 pound weight limit, 3 car seats and a bunch of carry-ons. It was obvious that people thought we were insane – did we each bring 100 swimsuits? One guy made a comment incorporating a reference to the kitchen sink. I had to fill him in on our living arrangements, which I think at 5:45am both clarified and confused things for the poor guy.

Movie review

2008-06-27T10:09:00.005+08:00

I recently picked up this Jimmy Carter documentary at the local DVD store. Like most DVDs that are available for purchase here in China, the origin of this particular DVD is somewhat murky. The funny thing you see on a lot of these is that the basics of the DVD cover look fine, but if you really look at the text it often turns out to be pretty funny. This is a great case in point. You probably can't read it on the blog itself, but double-click on the second image to read the review of this movie. Either this is a fake DVD or Sony Pictures has to take a much better look at the quality of its marketing department.

Baby shower game/quiz

2008-06-16T22:10:00.002+08:00

Jenny recently threw a baby shower for her friend Elizabeth. Besides the lame grunt work that is normally assigned to me on these occasions, I was tasked with coming up with a game. I wrote up a baby/child oriented quiz. A few questions have a some China-living specific elements, but most are pretty generic. The answers are fairly negotiable so we had a hard time determining a winner. I suggested a sudden-death playoff involving the decidedly un-PC sounding Indian leg wrestling that we used to do in Boy Scouts, but was voted down. Anyway, try your luck!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Baby Shower quiz

1) What’s the best way to deal with labor pains?
A) Acupuncture
B) Well rehearsed breathing techniques
C) Holding your spouse’s hand and knowing his love can sustain you through this trial
D) Heavy doses of prescription pain killers injected directly into your spine

2) Which of the following are you more likely to buy with your first child than with your third?
A) Bottle sanitizer
B) Changing table
C) Diaper genie
D) All of the above

3) What can you never have enough of?
A) Money
B) Love
C) Peace of mind
D) Sippy cups

4) You drop a pacifier on the floor of a restaurant. Match the responses below
When the pacifier belongs to your:
a) 1st child
b) 2nd child
c) 3rd child
d) 4th child

then you will:
1) Rinse it off with some Diet Coke
2) Brush it off on your pants
3) Rinse it off with some water
4) Wash in soap and water then boil to sanitize

5) What goes well with ketchup?
A) Hot dogs
B) Hamburgers
C) Macaroni and cheese
D) Pasta
E) All of the above

6) The remote is lost. Where’s the most logical place to look for it?
A) Under the couch near the TV
B) In the toilet
C) In the garage mixed in with the bike helmets or garden tools
D) It doesn’t really matter since someone has probably pulled the batteries out anyway

7) Your spouse calls you at work to tell you that one of the kids has somehow gone to the bathroom on the computer keyboard. Your most likely response is:
A) “I’ll come right home and take care of it”.
B) “Just pour some sawdust on it and I’ll take care of it when I get home”.
C) Say “Hold on just a second” then go ask your boss if there is some special project that he needs done right away, then get back on the phone and say “I’d love to help but I’ve got a big deadline”.

8) Your cordless phone is missing. What probably happened to it?
A) It’s in the toilet
B) It’s in the toilet with the remote
C) It’s in the toilet with the remote and maybe some car keys

9) What’s a sure sign that your spouse isn’t pulling his/her weight?
A) When sudden and conveniently timed “conference calls” start popping up whenever there’s a particularly stinky diaper to change
B) When a husband tries to disrupt the natural order of things by suggesting that his wife should start taking out the trash.
C) When you suspect that you’re the only one who cares about cleaning the lint filter in the dryer.

10) What’s the biggest problem with pet bunnies?
A) The cute bunnies grow up into plain old rabbits
B) They eat all the plants in your backyard up to about 18 inches high
C) You feel guilty as they just sit there in that little cage looking at you with those rabbit eyes and those wiggly noses with a look that is basically the same always but you somehow know that this time it means they’re totally depressed and wondering about what they could have possibly done in a prior life to deserve this miserable existence
D) Once they grow up you can’t give them to your ayi to take home, skin and eat because if the kids ever got wind of it you’d be branded “The Rabbit Killer” for life.

11) What is the most difficult thing to find?
A) The lid to the only clean Tupperware left in the cupboard
B) Both of your three year old’s church shoes on Sunday morning five minutes after you were supposed to leave to be on time
C) Enough spaghetti sauce after you’ve already put the spaghetti in the water to boil
D) The remote, your cordless phone and maybe your car keys all at the same time

12) Your kids want to get some goldfish real bad. What’s the best response?
A) “OK, but fish are a big responsibility and you’ll have to take care of them”
B) “OK, but you’ve got to catch them with a mini-fishing pole in one of those little ponds in a Chinese park”
C) “No, you’ll get bored of them and overfeed them and we’ll end up with a murky green fish tank with nothing in it except for a fake mini-treasure chest and some water skeeters scooting around on top”
D) Don’t make a fuss and just let them get the fish, but know that they’ll end up in the toilet with the remote, the cordless phone and maybe some car keys.

13) You know that you’re getting old when:
A) You start thinking reading glasses might actually come in handy
B) Your child’s teacher was born when you were in high school
C) Your kids ask you if the extra skin under your neck has a special name
D) You look back nostalgically at Soap on a Rope

14) Circle who would win in a fight (for clarification, no knives, guns or bombs allowed even secret super infinity power bombs that could destroy the world a million zillion infinity times):

Transformer vs. GI Joe
GI Joe vs. Island Princess Barbie
Island Princess Barbie vs. My Pretty Pony
My Pretty Pony vs. Webkins
Webkins vs. Blackberry
Blackberry vs. iPod
iPod vs. Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates
Bill Gates vs. Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett vs. Jimmy Buffett
Jimmy Buffett vs. Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter vs. Jimmy Dean Lil’ Smokies Mini-sausages
Jimmy Dean Lil’ Smokies Mini-sausages vs. Trans-fat Free Cheetos
Trans-fat Free Cheetos vs. Transformer

15) Why is it called a baby shower anyway?
A) I really have no idea
B) Because you shower the future mom with gifts and love
C) Because the first one ever held was during caveman times and they had no chairs and they sat around in the mud talking about babies so naturally they got dirty and towards the end one of them said “Man, after all this sitting in the mud and talking about babies I could really use a shower even though its not invented yet” and another said, “Yeah, me too, but first we’ve got to invent a shower curtain or we’ll get water all over the floor”

Spooky soap

2008-06-08T01:09:00.001+08:00

This is a lame post, but I've always found this sort of funny. Whitecat is a popular Chinese brand of dishwashing soap. I think the cat in the picture just looks weird - maybe a little spooky or haunted or something. Would you trust that cat to get your dishes clean? Can you imagine someone in the US buying dishwashing soap with a picture of a creepy cat that looks like it could have come off of a santeria candle?

New Beijing Airport

2008-06-01T12:41:00.000+08:00

Beijing opened its new airport a couple of months ago. Its a beautiful building that is purportedly the largest terminal in the world. Huge high ceilings, lots of marble and glass. Its sort of like the Hong Kong airport, but the shopping isn't as varied and restaurants are almost all Chinese, which isn't a surprise. The Chinese are good at big public buildings.

Dora in Chinese

2008-05-30T12:01:00.004+08:00

Ethan is a big Dora the Explorer fan, but he watches it on Chinese DVDs. Its actually a version that's translated into Chinese, so imagine all the Spanish words in U.S. version of Dora being translated into English and all the normal English speech translated into Chinese. Some of the character names are still in English, Dora and Boots, for example, but others such as Map are translated into Chinese.

Ethan actually understands quite a bit of Chinese. There are some basic food words, like eggs or apples, which I'm not sure if he knows in English are not, since usually asked for these things in Chinese. we have a made here and she only speaks Chinese. She'll tell Ethan to go put his shoes on or pick up a toy and he'll go and do it, so he understands more Chinese than he speaks.

Asleep at the wheel

2008-05-26T15:26:00.006+08:00

A lot of people in China take naps at their desks at lunch time. They just fold there arms and zonk out for a while. I'm not sure how they figure out when to wake up at the end of lunch. You see it all over the place.

This has got to be the best I've seen though. This picture is of a booth at a trade show I spoke at this past weekend. That's what I call putting your best foot forward from a corporate point of view. If you had questions, I'm not sure if you'd wake him up or just leave a business card. I'd be most concerned that people might just help themselves to a couple extra free pens.

Badminton is not a crime!

2008-05-22T19:37:00.000+08:00

I took this picture in a small park across from my office. When was the last time you saw a “No Badminton” sign in a U.S. park? Those badmintoners always were a troublesome lot.

Letter to an Old Man

2008-05-20T13:32:00.004+08:00

When you start getting letters like this, you know you're getting old.

The Annals of Irresponsible Parenting

2008-05-14T15:47:00.004+08:00

When you think "zipline" you don't usually think "safe". If you add the adjective "Chinese" before "zipline" any sensible person will definitely think "dangerous". But you can say that about most things in China. If the Chinese had big station wagons you'd certainly see kids in the "way back", though I guess there wouldn't be many of them with the one-child policy. Danger aside, Abby and I went on this zipline over the bamboo forest. It was probably a couple of hundred feet off the ground when we were over the valley floor. Surprisingly, Abby was the instigator. It actually looked a bit safer than one we saw in a brochure here in Maui this week. It had a double connection to the zipline itself. Needless to say, there were no release forms or waivers to sign.

Fresh off that success, we found a smaller one over a small river at another place we visited and everyone went on it except myself and the baby - that's cautiousness for you. Ethan thought it was the greatest thing ever (he went on Jenny's lap).

Chinese bamboo industry

2008-05-08T21:33:00.000+08:00

Here are some more pics of the area near the bamboo forest. They harvest the long shoots to use in everything from scaffolding to flooring to chopsticks. They dry in out on racks or in these haystack looking arrangements. They haul the raw bamboo on these really long flatbed trucks.

$2 Haircut

2008-05-07T21:10:00.001+08:00

Here's Ethan getting a haircut at the local $2 barbershop. They are thrilled to have a little guy with platinum blond hair wander in. Ethan was okay for a while, but started getting bored and wiggly toward the end. He had a couple of people dancing around him making funny faces toward the end.

Treasure Island

2008-05-06T08:52:00.000+08:00

The kids and I have been reading Treasure Island recently at bedtime. I hadn't read this book in years and years, but it's still a great tale. It's got it all -- treasure maps, sailing ships, buried treasure and plenty of semi-scurvy double-crossing pirates. The kids thought that Pew, the blind, mean and scary pirate who was posing as a beggar at the start, was particularly spooky. They were pretty disappointed when Long John Silver turned out to be something much worse than a cheerful ships cook as well. I'm just happy that they now know that Long John Silver is something more than a third tier fast food chain in the United States.

Bamboo Forest near Anji

2008-05-05T20:24:00.006+08:00

This past weekend we went to a bamboo forest about 3 hours outside of Shanghai near a city called Anji. We got up really early so the kids would be sleeping part of the way, which only sort of worked. They filmed part of a famous kung fu movie named "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" here. It was a very beautiful place. The hillsides are covered solely with giant bamboo - a true bamboo forest. Bamboo as far as the eye can see, occasionally broken up by terraces where they are growing tea. We hiked up a fairly big hill and came down on an alpine slide they had built through the bamboo. That was a huge hit with the kids.

At the Shanghai Zoo

2008-05-04T23:14:00.000+08:00

A couple of weeks ago I took the three oldest kids to the zoo in the Hongqiao neighborhood of Shanghai. It was a cool overcast day but not too cold. The zoo is really nice in that it’s a giant park with lots of green space. There were a number of cherry trees blooming which was fantastic. We saw some snakes, zebras, pandas, red pandas, monkeys etc. Pandas are pretty rare outside of China so that was fun for the kids. There are three of them at the Shanghai Zoo. Chinese zoos are funny in that they are a lot looser on the “don’t feed the animals” culture. The signs are there but people tend to ignore them. At the giraffe pen a lady climbed over the fence so she could feed an obliging giraffe some potato chips (see picture). Here's also a picture of one of the many photos the kids are asked to pose in. Ethan, in particular, with his big smile and light blond hair, was better than any giraffe or zebra for many of the people at the zoo.

It was a big place so the kids were pretty tired, but not tired enough to forget that I’d promised them that they could go on the ferris wheel. We had to walk back to get to it. It was big, fully enclosed capsules, sort of like a dingier version of the one at Luna Park in Sydney. After that, we bought some Wall’s ice creams and headed to the car. Jenny had gone with Zach to do some shopping.

Shanghai's Super Tulip Garden

2008-05-02T23:32:00.000+08:00

Last weekend we went to a huge tulip garden outside of Shanghai. It was modeled after the famous Keukenhof tulip garden in Holland between The Hague and Amsterdam. We went there when we lived in the Netherlands and it was truly amazing in the springtime. Thousands and thousands of flowers.
Well, you’ve got to admire the Chinese. While the Shanghai Flowerport tulip garden isn’t as mature or as immaculately manicured, they do a pretty impressive job. Give it about 10 years and the trees will be bigger. Then it will be really something. At this point though it still has the huge swaths of flowers that make the Keukenhof so spectacular. Jenny stayed at home with the baby enjoying a bit of a break from the whole crew.

Sweet potato vendor

2008-04-26T22:37:00.001+08:00

Here’s a picture of a place I buy lunch once in a while. This lady has an old metal drum with one end cut off of it. She puts some coals inside and cooks sweet potatoes and corn on the cob on top. The corn on the cob in

China

is popular, but I’m not sure why. Its very bland tasting and sort of unpleasantly chewy. The sweet potatoes are good though. At first she charged me 4 RMB or about 50 cents

U.S.

, but after a while she started charging me 2 RMB. I felt good that I had qualified for local pricing. My Chinese coworkers think its hilarious that I buy from the metal drum lady.

New digs

2008-04-24T20:13:00.001+08:00

We moved into a new office this week. I found the place after a lot of looking around. I had real estate agents take me to probably 30 or 40 different locations over the course of a month or so. When I first started looking all I could find in our price range were sort of dingy high-rises. These were generally built in the late 90s when the Chinese were first figuring out how to build skyscrapers. Since then they basically mastered it and have some amazing buildings now. Anyway, I found the prospect of moving into a C class building with two elevators for 25 floors a little disheartening so I asked the real estate agent if he could find us some sort of loft-like space -- an old warehouse or factory conversion. They told me that they had actually started doing those things in Shanghai and they took me to a few. I finally settled on a space with ceilings that are probably 20 feet high. When I saw how high they were I figured we could probably build a mezzanine, which is what we ended up doing. It provided a pretty nice space since I had them push the mezzanine against the back wall and away from the windows so we now have an atrium-like feel to a good portion of the space. The designers were initially pushing these really wild colors; pinks, yellows and light greens. We ended up settling on something sort of modern but Chinese-y. I'm not sure I'm sold on the traditional red and yellow Chinese colors that they painted the main pillars, but all the employees seem to like it. It's still a work in progress and were occupying about half of the space currently while the rest of the furniture is coming in. These pictures are from a few weeks ago. They can really put things things together quickly once the basic construction is done.

Mr. Handsome pics

2008-04-23T19:48:00.003+08:00

Here's some more pictures of young Zachary Woodward; a.k.a. Mr. Handsome. We think he's pretty cute now. When babies are first born you are supposed to say they are really cute but to be honest I think most newborns have this sort of smooshed face/space alien look to them. They're still nice to hold since they are so tiny, but I think they definitely get better looking as they get older.

Shanghai Springtime

2008-04-22T12:54:00.001+08:00

Spring has sprung here in Shanghai and there are lots of flowers blooming all over the place. While they aren't the cultural phenomenon they are in Washington, DC or Japan, there are quite a few cherry trees as well as lots of peach and plum trees all blooming very nicely. The Chinese are very good and quite particular about their gardening. Traditional Chinese gardens are very specifically planned so that you have good views of different plants, rocks and water features everywhere you look. They do a good job in public parks and they are some nice blooming spots in them right now. The willows and the forsythias came on first as usual. I was happy when the metasequoias have started to leaf out. For the uninitiated, these are redwood looking trees with deciduous needles. When the new needles come on in the spring they are very tender, bright green and super pretty. I hate the winter so I'm a happy man again.

Anyway, this time of year I usually reread the A.E. Housman poem about cherry trees. As I get older I suppose the lines regarding how many more springs I will enjoy have a slightly different feel to them.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my three score years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

Bombay and Pune

2008-03-22T03:56:00.007+08:00

On the most recent India trip I also went to Mumbai (Bombay) and Pune. I arrived in Mumbai on Monday night after a long trip – 5 hours to Singapore, a 5 hour layover, and 5 more hours to Mumbai. I stayed at a hotel near the airport – a Marriott that was ridiculously overpriced – about US$350 per night for a so so place. I had meetings the next morning in the hotel with some local logistics providers we might work with. I was really just trying to pump them for information about local business practices and they were fairly open. I had tried to push the meetings to the morning so I could go downtown in the afternoon and it worked out. I took a cab, one of these old black Fiats with yellow stripes. They are very small and when you get in the back seat you feel like you are sitting very high, almost like your head is going to hit the ceiling. The traffic is absolutely horrible and it took me almost 1 ½ hours to get into the city. I had an MP3 player with only Pimsleur Chinese grammar lessons on it, which didn't do much to take the edge off the boredom of the traffic. We stopped at a place where people wash clothes - a warren of little sinks and tubs. Quite a place.
He dropped me next to the port at the Gateway to India which is an old British archway in the manner of Wellington Arch or Marble Arch in London. I walked around the old colonial district between the Gateway to India and Victoria train terminal. Here's a picture of a cricket match on one of the streets in this zone. After that, I walked around a central market district which was pretty chaotic and kinetic. I didn't see another non-Indian person for at least an hour.

I remember driving past one of Mumbai's many big slums and seeing lots of kids standing on top of the corrugated tin roofs of their houses flying small square kites. I thought it sort of makes sense that if you didn't have a yard or a lawn or any open space, you take advantage of the relative openness of your roof.

After a couple of days of meetings in Mumbai, we drove 3 hours to Pune, which claims to be the Detroit to India. There's a lot of auto manufacturing near here. It's a pretty scruffy place with not a lot to recommend it as far as I could tell. The most memorable part of Pune was a trip we made out to a General Motors auto plant that is being constructed. The construction crews lined up on this road outside the plant, which was in the middle of nowhere, and waited for the gates to open so they could start their day. It was a pretty amazing sight to see the hundreds of workers with their lunch pails all lined up in the boondocks get ready to build an incredibly modern auto plant.

Flat earth

2008-03-19T23:33:00.000+08:00

I went to India for the first time last week.

The first thing that struck me about India is not the poverty or the press of the masses, but instead a mustache concentration has to be unrivaled anywhere else in the world. I kept thinking, are there really that many off-duty cops in this country?

We made a stop in Bangalore, which is sort of Ground Zero in Thomas Friedman's Flat Earth world. I thought that the UK, US accent options in this sign for English lessons was sort of funny. There's actually a decent number of manufacturing activities in and around Bangalore, which is what brought me here. I ended up eating lunch in the employee cafeteria of a large consumer electronics distribution warehouse. My mom has always been a quasi-vegetarian, so I picked up some of those tendencies growing up. I think if you are strict vegetarian then India's got to be one of the best places to live because they have so much vegetarian food and a lot of it is very good. Bangalore itself has a very nice temperature, sort of like San Diego, though it's landlocked and much more polluted. The town itself is a bit nicer than most of the other Indian cities we saw, though there is quite a bit of the hodgepodge disorganized zoning here. This is the place where I definitely saw the most foreigners. We had lunch at an amazing hotel that I think was called the Leela Palace. It was huge, old-ish looking and had really pretty gardens.

Disaster zone

2008-02-28T13:00:00.003+08:00

Recently Shanghai had its heaviest snowfall in 50 years. The kids loved it and we made snowmen, an igloo and snow angels. The most dramatic thing for me personally occurred when the roof of a very large warehouse my company operates collapsed under the weight of the snow. The warehouse was full of flat screen TVs, computers, cell phones, refrigerators, stoves and microwaves. It was right before Chinese New Year, the busy season for our customer, which exacerbated the disaster. I ended up spending about a week of very long days and late nights out at the warehouse organizing a recovery effort which involved hiring demolition and recovery crews, renting giant cranes to pull the scraps of roof off and finding trucks and new warehouse space to move the salvageable stuff into. It was high drama with millions of dollars of damage and plenty of screaming Chinese people. In law school or forestry school I never imagined I’d find myself in an industrial zone outside of Shanghai in the middle of a snowstorm wearing a hard hat while climbing around on rubble and remnants of plasma TVs.

Flower markets

2008-02-18T13:08:00.000+08:00

Today after stopping in at a design company to look over some plans for a new office we’re moving into I stopped in at the Hongqiao flower market to get some flowers for Jenny, today being Valentines Day. The flower markets here are fantastic, particularly if you’ve got botanical leanings. There are quasi-wholesale markets in different parts of town with a huge variety of plants and flowers. I love just wandering around in them. The orchids are the best part for me. They have long been my favorite flowers – the colors, the shapes, the symmetries. In college when working on a paper for an evolutionary biology class I remember checking out this book by Charles Darwin on orchid pollination and evolution. It had been there for probably 20 years and it had been checked out maybe twice before! Anyway, orchids, cut flowers and plants are cheap in China so I load up.

New Addition

2008-02-04T21:23:00.000+08:00

Our new addition arrived on Friday morning. He weighed in at 10 pounds 2 ounces, 20 inches, a bit of hair, healthy, happy. From Jenny's point of view, it was the best birthing experience she's had compared to the other births in the Netherlands, the U.K. and the U.S. Great doctors, nurses, hospital, etc. Everyone's a bit tired, but doing very well.

Speak of the Devil

2008-01-22T23:11:00.000+08:00

The kids have been sort of into the devil lately. What does he look like? Where does he live? Why is he so mean? I turns out that Ben has a friend named Sadan or something like that. The kids in their classes are from such a wide variety of countries that a kid with a typical American sounding name is the exception rather than the rule. For a while he kept talking about his friend Satan, which was a bit worrisome. No parent, no matter how religiously disinclined, is happy to hear that their kid has befriended the Prince of Darkness. When I figured out that Satan was actually in Ben’s preschool class, it became clear that we had a pronunciation issue rather than a need for an exorcism. It got me thinking that from an employment perspective being named Satan may not be that bad, since it would definitely get you noticed in a pile of resumes. Plus people would think of the tiniest nice thing you happened to do as a huge upside.

La Vie en Rose

2008-01-11T13:41:00.000+08:00

I went into my 2 dollar haircut place the other day and they were playing an Edith Piaf album. This is in boondocks Shanghai, not central urban sophisticate Shanghai. Where did they find this stuff? Given my linguistic limitations, I was only able to ask them if they liked French music. I was happy to have even been able to communicate this. They said they did and that they liked Edith Piaf. I asked them if they also liked Charles Trenet, but they didn’t know what I was talking about. They all had spiked up or dyed hair, one dyed bright red. None of them was older than 25.

King of Citrus

2008-01-07T16:50:00.000+08:00

In the fall and winter in China it's common to see big piles of what appear to be steroid enhanced grapefruits being sold by vendors on the street and in supermarkets. They are gigantic. They are actually pomelos, which I had never seen in the U.S. The taste is in between an orange and a grapefruit in terms of sweetness, probably siding more towards a grapefruit. The white-ish semi-see through skin in between the sections is pretty tough, so you have to peel the whole thing and then peel off the white section-y stuff. Pretty labor intensive, but very good.

Jet lag

2007-12-12T13:05:00.002+08:00

Most people who work in China for foreign companies become more familiar with jet lag then they ever thought they would. If you travel back and forth between coastal China and the East Coast of the US it's particularly bad since the time difference is 12 hours -- your schedule is basically turned upside down. He usually takes me about a week to get over the jet lag. The pattern is roughly as follows, on your first day in either the US or China, depending on which way you're going, you fall asleep pretty early, maybe eight or nine o’clock, but then you wake up about two or three in the morning still tired though basically awake. There's not a heck of a lot to do so early in the morning so you usually call home, check e-mail or call back to the office in the country are not in to talk to people who are in the middle of their workday. Then you can go workout if your hotel has a gym. At that point, it's still pretty early, but you're hungry so you go to the restaurant for breakfast. You're almost always the first one there in the US. Sometimes you actually stand around the door waiting for the restaurant to open. If you come on a China business trip, you find that you've never seen a restaurant so crowded at six in the morning. It's full of fellow jet lag sufferers. You generally feel okay in the first half of the workday, though a little tired. But by the afternoon it's a real struggle just to keep your head off the desk. On each passing day you wake up about an hour later, so after five or six days you are waking up at a fairly normal time. Unfortunately, with many business trips this is exactly the time when you're ready to get back on the plane go back in the other direction and face the same process for the following week.

This past year I had two periods where I had meetings in the US every other week for a six week stretch. One was in March/April and the other in August/September. I didn't want to leave my family nor work behind for a three week period so I ended up going to the US for a week, back to China for a week, back to the US, back to China, backed to the US, and finally back to China again. This is a pretty awful pattern and in during the latter stretches of one of these I'd get almost a little delirious. Its not a good time to make any meaningful decisions. I read an article In the Harvard Business Review a year so ago about jet lag. It was by a doctor and he was suggesting that business people who travel you have three or four days before they're in a situation where they have to make any decisions. It's actually not a bad sentiment, but it's unbelievably impractical.

Jet lag can sometimes have advantages though. My very best weeks for exercise are always the weeks after I get back from a trip, because it's not much else to do at four in the morning. I was in LA on vacation with my family this summer visiting my parents and as usual I found myself awake at about three in the morning. I ended up in the car and going for a drive. My parents live pretty close to Universal Studios so I drove over the hill past the Hollywood Bowl in and down Hollywood Boulevard then over to the Sunset Strip. This was midweek, so there wasn't much of anything going on except for people cleaning the streets and a few homeless guys wandering around. Even places like the Roxy were dormant. I decided to keep driving along Sunset Boulevard. I don’t think I’d ever seen Sunset as quiet. On Sunset you wind your way through Westwood and Brentwood and eventually through Pacific Palisades before hitting the coast. Pacific Palisades is a very nice neighborhood bordering Malibu. I never knew anyone personally who lived there until I was in LA working as a lawyer and it seemed that a disproportionate number lawyers seemed to live there. As I drove through the Palisades I was reminded of Bud Kling, the fiery coach of the Pacific Palisades tennis team. When I was in high school, I played on the North Holland High School tennis team. Tennis is a sport that is in many ways very geographically predictable. Almost universally the high schools with the best tennis teams are in the wealthiest enclaves. When I was attending North Hollywood High, there was a huge mix of people both racially and economically. Our boundaries went up to Mulholland Drive, taking in Universal City, Studio City and Laurel Canyon and spread all the way out into the flatlands of the Valley, which with their significant gang concentrations, couldn’t be more different. Still, there was enough diversity in a school that could still manage to marshal a very good tennis team. The last two years that I was there we played in the city finals against Palisades, winning once and losing once. I just remember the coach of Pali vividly because he was such a character. He was incredibly competitive and incredibly intense. The contrast between him and our coach could not have been greater. Our esteemed leader, Pete Bristol, didn't know how to play tennis far as we could tell and really just provided us with tennis balls and came down to the courts after school in his flip-flops to watch us play. I suppose we had the discipline to practice enough to be fairly good. And some ways Bristol was a perfect coach if you're a high school kid that just wanted to have a good time. He was happy when you won, but he really didn't put any pressure on you.

Just below Palisades is a small beach near Gladstones, a fish restaurant on the beach, located at the intersection of Sunset and PCH, which is where I ended my nighttime sojourns. This is the same beach where I cut my head open surfing as a 19-year-old. Ironically, this was also a fond memory. It was one of the bigger swells of the summer and my friends happily paddled out. While there was sand on the beach, once you got past the sand by a few feet it became all rocks underneath. I fell and hit my head on a rock. Luckily, I wasn’t knocked out but my head was throbbing and I walked up onto the beach dragging my board by the leash on my foot. The horrified looks on everybody's faces on the beach let me know something was wrong and then the blood started to run down from my head onto my arm. My friends came out and slapped a towel on my head and lifeguard came and told me to keep pressure on it. I remained conscious the whole time and my friends drove me to the nearest hospital. I called my mom who insisted that I wait for a plastic surgeon to stitch it up. The best part of all, once my friends saw that it might take a while, they started getting visibly antsy knowing it was one of the better surf days of summer. I just told them to head back to the beach and let me know how that it was. Later my mom came in and then the doctor. It was 40 or 50 stitches in the end.

So there’s the silver lining of jet lag. You get to drive around LA in the middle of the night reminiscing about goofy things that happened to you when you were young.

Disaster relief

2007-12-05T16:05:00.000+08:00

We saw these the bumper car things not long ago and liked the FEMA/Power Ranger combo. Look at the logo on the back. Maybe FEMA should bring these guys in during the next hurricane disaster.

The Feast

2007-12-03T23:45:00.000+08:00

I recently spent most of a weekend in Wuhan, a 2^nd tier city in central China along the Yangtze river. It has about 7.5 million people and is thus big, but not huge by Chinese standards. I was there speaking at a trade show which was actually pretty weak – not too well attended. They had me fly in early, about 10am, so I had to get up very early and miss all the Saturday activities, soccer, park, lunch out, etc. Frustratingly, I arrived to find out that my speaking slot had been delayed so they had me go to the hotel for a rest. I had just arrived! Anyway, I didn’t want to go and just hang out at the conference, so I said ok and then ended up going for a walk for a couple of hours. I like to walk around and see what places are like. I always have. Wuhan looked about the same as most other Chinese cities, maybe even more non-descript since there was no topography to speak of and the part I was in was not near the river. A bit dingier than Shanghai for sure, but I like walking into the side alleys and small streets to see what is really going on. All the open air restaurants with their giant steaming woks and markets full of odd vegetables, fish and portions of meat that Westerners don’t often eat.

The convention center was a typical new, swooping chrome and steel structure, but the inside wasn’t that nice. Many of the very modern buildings look great for a year or two, but then the cheap construction begins to show through. My speech was fine, but they didn’t have the normal simultaneous translation so I don’t think very many people could understand me well. Afterwards, we went to the dinner banquet, which was in a big restaurant, lots of gilding and chandeliers. It was the typical banquet dinner with a couple of bottles of maotai on the table, the clear high-proof grain alcohol often consumed at these things, and a tall stack of Double Happiness cigarette packs. At one point I counted 8 people smoking at my table of ten. I’ve never been as appreciative of a religious excuse not to drink or smoke as I have been here.

The program started with the awards ceremony. We got three. One for best foreign company in our industry, or something like that, another for my personal contribution to the development of our industry in China and another one in a sort of made up sounding category. The competition for these awards was clearly pretty thin.

Then came the entertainment. It was a fairly typical cavalcade lasting about 90 minutes. First there was a guy singing Chinese pop songs – sort of a karaoke superstar. Then came another guy singing Chinese folk songs. He was wearing traditional garb of some sort. Then there was a woman doing traditional dancing in a fairly elaborate costume with very puffy sleeves and pant legs. After that a woman who was wearing a totally normal sweater and pants and looked like she just got off work at an office job sang some Chinese opera favorites. Her voice was very high and it pushed the audio system to its limits and beyond, squealing out a couple of times so bad that everyone covered their ears. After that two pairs of ballroom dancers came on and did some salsa and tango routines. The women had incredibly elaborate eye make-up, lots of color and sparkle, and the guys wore very rico-suave looking satin outfits – super slimy looking.

All the while there is constant toasting to anyone and everyone. By the end, most everyone at my table was totally hammered. This is no surprise when you consider the rounds of traditional “gan bei” (bottoms up) toasting that occur. Its like doing shots with half tumblers of the grain alcohol. Half of the people at my table had a blank glazed over look by the time the salsa crew came on and slurred some goodbyes to me as I moved out when it was all over. You have to imagine all this overlaid on a meal in which about 15 dishes are brought out, one every minute or so, and placed on the giant lazy suzan that is in the middle of the table. The dishes will be nothing that you recognize from a Chinese restaurant in the U.S. (In fact, one of the biggest complaints that my employees have when they visit the

U.S.

is the terrible food. Panda Express and its ilk are almost an affront to any self-respecting Chinese). Many of these dishes will be, from a westerner’s eyes, pretty disgusting. Pickled sun-dried jellyfish, chicken soup with the whole chicken in it, head and all, a sort of garlic jello, duck tongues still in the detached beaks, these spotted brown caterpillars with a long proboscis (long proboscii? - you don’t get to use that word everyday) and if you are a real VIP, sea cucumber. There are a few dishes that are semi-normal, but not many. These banquets are interesting the first couple of times you do them, but quickly become one of the low points of an expat’s responsibilities.

The Emperor's Children

2007-12-01T23:21:00.000+08:00

I recently read a book called The Emperor's Children by Claire Messaud. I read about it in one of the mini-reviews in The Atlantic or The New Yorker, which I still subscribe to, but which are delivered to me a few weeks lake via the intercompany pouch that makes its way from our US headquarters building to China every week or two. There are a few English bookstores in Shanghai but they're pretty small. These magazine reviews and whatever happens to catch my eye in one of the airport bookshops on a layover on a US work trip are my sources for book tips now. Not much coming from my Chinese work colleagues. It was a pretty quick read and a sort of entertaining story, but it didn't do that much for me. Had I been raised among intellectuals in The Dakota perhaps I would have liked it more.

Chinese Christmas Tree

2007-12-01T21:41:00.000+08:00

One of our neighbors heads up the Maersk Shipping operation in China. He is Danish and his wife complained that they couldn’t get decent Scandinavian Christmas trees in China, so when he was home in the summer, he cut a deal with a guy with an organic Christmas tree farm near his summer house and arranged to have a 20 foot container full of Christmas trees shipped to our subdivision in Shanghai. A perk of working for a shipping company I suppose. He and his kids opened up the container and sold them out of the back. They sold out in a weekend. His two oldest kids did the delivery via one of the three wheel bikes things that are common here. A bit different than driving your car to Home Depot or the local Christmas tree lot.

The Avalon

2007-11-20T21:55:00.000+08:00

I bought a box set of Hitchcock movies a while ago and we’ve been making our way through them. We watched The 39 Steps recently and it reminded me that the first time I saw this movie was with my grandmother, who I called Mammy, that having been the way I pronounced grandma as a 2 year old. I was the oldest grandchild and as such I got grandparent-naming privilege that is often bestowed on the first grandchild. I’ve known quite a few people whose grandparents nick names are the result of the same poor pronunciation process. Anyway, she was a real character. Born around 1919 in a tiny town called Grantsville, about 60 miles west of Salt Lake City on the edge of the desert that stretches between Salt Lake and Reno. At that time Grantsville couldn’t have had many more than 1000 people and she said that growing up she knew everyone and their dog.

She was enamored with Hollywood and movie stars, going once or twice a week to Grantsville’s little movie theater as a girl. It was an incredible escape for a poor girl in a Depression-era hardscrabble little town whose economy was at that time largely based on the Western Pacific railroad, salt extraction from the lake, and cattle and sheep ranching on land perhaps best left to sagebrush. She was a fantastic and very funny person who loved to laugh and was as positive and supportive as anyone I’ve known. Her mother probably spoke more Swedish than English though Mammy claimed she only knew “tack sa mikket” (phonetic), which was all I ever learned and apparently means thank you. Anyway, once I was a little older, maybe 8 or so, my sister and I would go and spend 3 weeks or so with them each summer. It was fantastic and we always looked forward to it.

One of the great memories I have was going with Mammy and grandpa to the Avalon Theater on State Street in Salt Lake City. The theater wasn’t anything particularly special, but it was an old style theater with one big screen. It showed only old movies, most often in double features and it cost 25 cents. We, not having lots of money, would buy snacks and drinks at a normal grocery store and sneak them in Mammy’s purse. It was Mammy that taught me that a woman’s purse was a sort of sanctum sanctorum, never to be violated with out specific permission and even then very cautiously. This rule and the attitude that lay beneath it served us well in our snack smuggling trade. The drinks we took in were usually in glass bottles, which were pretty common back then.

One night during a movie, Mammy finished her bottle of Pepsi (Pepsi and absolutely not Coke was the undisputed drink of choice for Mammy) and set it on the ground under her seat. A few minutes later, perhaps in a swoon at the entrance of Clark Gable, Gene Kelly or Errol Flynn, she accidentally kicked the bottle over and it proceeded to noisily bump and roll its way all the way down the floor of the theater. We all played dumb as people huffed at the racket. We still laugh about this, years after her death.

Anyway, I remember seeing The 39 Steps with her as a kid at The Avalon, being totally spooked and loving Hitchcock movies ever since.

No Psychopaths

2007-11-13T10:42:00.000+08:00

I saw this sign last week at the bumpercars in Century Park, Shanghai’s version of Central Park. The first line is the best.

You get a pyschopath on the bumper cars and there's no telling what will happen, but I think that their instincts are right -- better not leave it to chance.

IT clean out

2007-11-07T13:48:00.000+08:00

Last night I cleaned out a box of old 1.44M floppy disks, now technological relics. I’m trying to move files onto my hard drive so I don’t lose them to new technologies, as I have tried to do with my college writings that weren’t printed out. In doing so I threw out a whole bunch of old software disks. Programs used to come on so many disks before the advent of CD ROMs. Here are some samples.

Wordperfect for Windows (10+ disks)

Wordperfect 6.0 for DOS

Westmate

Lexus 2000

Windows 3.1

LotusWorks

Virex for the PC

Font packs for WordPerfect

Quicken 7 for DOS

Clean Boot disk

The demise of WordPerfect is still sort of amazing to me when I think about how dominant it once was.

The Monkeyshed

2007-11-05T23:00:00.000+08:00

This is another example of some funny translation. You may have to click on the picture to try to zoom in. This is from a hiking place a few hours from Shanghai were I was this summer. This is the kind of place that, while not that uncommon in China, would put any PETA person over the edge. If you double click the picture you can read it better.

The first sentence is the best - they were caught "by accident" with "something bow-shaped". Hmm. I also thought that I couldn't blame the other monkeys for moving on given the uneviable combination of severe deforestation and "the great bomb sound". You might be able to handle one, but both - no way!

I've heard that the government in Beijing is making a huge effort to improve the translations on signs in all the tourist areas there prior to the Olympics. A small gain for linguistic precision; a huge loss for comic relief.

The Chris Quiz

2007-11-01T10:06:00.002+08:00

My only responsibility in the 40th party was to make up some sort of game. I’ve never been a good Pictionarian or much for charades so I made up my own test. Here it is. See how many you can get right. Many of the answers are highly negotiable.

Super Easy Multiple Choice

1. What is Chris’ usual breakfast?
a. Cheerios
b. Bangers and mash
c. Congee
d. Whatever is left on the kids’ plates (nasty!)

2. What is Chris's favorite book?
a. Chicken Soup for the Middle-Aged Soul
b. Charly
c. Anna Karenina
d. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

3. Which movie would Chris prefer?
a. Fried Green Tomatoes
b. Ghost
c. Beaches
d. Anything with Godzilla in it

4. Why did Chris major in Botany?
a. Easy – he’s sort of crazy
b. He liked plants
c. He always wanted to open a lawn mowing company
d. Everybody knows all the hottest girls major in Botany

5. Why did Chris go to law school?
a. Easy – he’s sort of crazy
b. He liked John Grisham books
c. He always had a passion for justice
d. What else are you supposed to do after graduating in Botany?

6. How would you describe Chris's current state of hair loss?
a. Pretty thin on top
b. An awkward stage of male pattern baldness
c. Starting to look to comb over-ish
d. All of the above

7. How many times has Chris told you the story about army ants coming through his house in the jungle?
a. five or more
b. two or more
c. zero (if you pick zero, you're asking for it)

8. What best suits Chris’ musical tastes?
a. Seriously boring classical
b. Ella Fitzgerald and friends
c. Zydeco/klezmer fusion stuff
d. A mix of today's hits and yesterday's favorites

9. Where did the scar on Chris’ forehead come from?
a. Attack by a knife-wielding madman
b. Surfing accident
c. Bad paper cut
d. I’d rather not go into it

10. What is Vitello’s, the restaurant where Chris worked in high school, famous for?
a. Veal parmesano
b. It was once owned by Dean Martin
c. It was the place Robert Blake (supposedly) shot his wife
d. It was often frequented by Erik Estrada

11. What is Chris most proud of?
a. His cute kids
b. His highly efficient dishwasher loading skills
c. The fact that he’s never done the Macarena
d. Having eaten one pot of lentil soup for twelve days straight as a missionary

Word Problems

12. Chris, a monkey and a lion are stuck on an island with a coconut and a little rowboat. The island is one km from the safety of shore and only two people can go in the boat at once (the animals and the coconut all count as people, don’t ask me why). The lion will eat the monkey, the monkey will really bother Chris with his non-stop yapping and the monkey and the coconut sometimes play chess together, but always end up arguing. What is the fewest number of trips they can make to all get to shore safely?
a. One
b. Two
c. Three
d. I think this question got on here by accident

13. Chris has an important appointment 5 kilometers from his house. His driver has a “flat tire”, i.e., he’s eating lunch with his girlfriend. A taxi costs $5 and takes 5 minutes. The metro costs $1 and takes 10 minutes. When do you think Chris will leave the house?
a. Five minutes early
b. Ten minutes early
c. How long does it take to walk?

14. When they turn 40, many people are filled with a profound existential angst due to the fact that there’s not much to look forward to except a long slow descent towards decrepitude and the grave. Plus you gradually start to get that old man smell. What will Chris most likely do to combat this?
a. Become obsessed with golf equipment
b. Run a marathon to demonstrate his youthful vigor to himself (and to anyone he could casually mention it to)
c. Buy a cheesy sportscar
d. Make a stupid Photoshopped T-shirt of Jenny

15. Chris, the monkey, the lion and the coconut are still stuck on the island with a little rowboat. Apparently, you didn’t do a very good job of answering the earlier question. Suddenly, a rat appears and gives them a flare gun. Man, where’d he come from? The monkey high-fives the rat and the coconut looks disturbed. What should Chris do next?
a. Yes, definitely
b. Wait until they see a bigger boat and shoot off the flare
c. Shoot the lion
d. I’m totally confused by this whole thing

One More Super Easy Multiple Choice

16. What do you wish Chris on this momentous occasion?
a. I wish him a long and healthy life
b. I wish him a year supply of fresh and juicy eels
c. I wish he’d mind his own beeswax
d. I just don’t want to hear anything else about that stupid coconut

Matching

This section is really only here to make those of you who have done terribly so far can feel better. If you don’t get 100% on this you should probably just go home.

17. Where was I born?
18. What’s my birthday?
19. What’s my sign?
20. What was my favorite TV show as a kid

a. Virgo
b. Inglewood, California (ex-home of the Lakers)
c. Gumby
d. September 1st

Tally up your answers. If you got more than 10 right, send your score to Chris for your free gift. Please include US$5.00 cash for shipping and handling.

40th Birthday

2007-11-01T09:05:00.000+08:00

Jenny threw me a great 40th birthday party a couple of weeks ago. I’m officially middle aged now. It was really beautifully done, in true Jenny style, and a lot of fun. I’ll post a couple of pictures in a few days when I’m back in Shanghai (I’m in Hong Kong for the next couple of days). It was a mix of expat friends (who are all foreigners) and work friends (who are all Chinese). Everyone had a good time. We had it at a friend’s house who is a partner at Deloitte. Their house is huge and I think some of my Chinese colleagues were a bit wide eyed. I figured it must have been a bit like getting an invite to a big bash in a Beverly Hills mansion. Despite my attempts to dissuade them, some brought some gifts. One was a set of Peking Opera masks hand painted by one of my employees on egg shells. I found it quite touching.

Amusement Park Darwinism

2007-10-30T09:59:00.000+08:00

We went on this crazy ride at the Ho Chi Minh City amusement park that was like a version of It’s a Small World with these really cheesy looking dinosaurs in it. Some rubber toothed dinosaurs were set up to pop out at you when you went around a turn. They definitely succeeded in scaring you, but they were so goofy looking it was just funny. How about the ape-man and the snake? Is it is pet python or is it trying to kill him?

The kids were really into this poster outside the dinosaur ride. I was forced to give an explanation of evolution that conformed to the visual, which the kids found very authoritative. It went roughly as follows - first monkeys walked around on all fours, which was probably pretty boring since you couldn’t see very well, plus your hands were always dirty and just plain muddy on rainy days. Eventually, one got really mad about this situation, picked up a stick, stood up and started yelling. Fortunately, the artist captured this very event.

After that a fairly straightforward evolutionary process kicked in in which the monkeys gradually got taller, less hairy, happier about their clean palms plus the sticks they carried got better. The picture was clearly painted before vintage t-shirts, cargo pants and hand sanitizer were invented. That would have been the next picture. Why did I spend a whole semester studying evolution in college when I could have just gone on the dinosaur ride in Saigon?

The Sphinx of Saigon

2007-10-30T09:33:00.000+08:00

We went to this crazy amusement park in Ho Chi Minh City the day before Jenny came to meet us. This followed the basic pattern of finding activities that at times included levels of danger that would have been impermissible with a full parental complement. Anyway, it was like a giant State Fair full of sketchy rides. One of my favorites was the Sphinx, a faux Egyptian haunted house place. Abby insisted on visiting it as she felt she had developed a certain expertise in Egyptology by watching “Scooby Doo and the Pyramid of Giza” on the flight down to Vietnam. It had some scary fake mummies inside that sat up when you walked close by. Abby’s verdict – scary, but somewhat lacking in authenticity when compared to the Scooby treatment of similar content.

Almost Lonely Planet

2007-10-29T17:10:00.000+08:00

I thought this was kind of funny. This is in Ho Chi Minh City. The Chinese are good at DVD pirating, but I'd never seen pirated books until I got to Vietnam. These are fake Lonely Planet books. The paper seems to be thicker and the pictures were mostly black and white. The asking price was about US$4 per book. You’ve got to hand it to these guys for knowing their market – if you’re looking for a place to sleep for US$10 a night, there’s a decent chance you’ll be interested in a cheaper way to help you find it.

Phu Quoc

2007-10-28T18:50:00.000+08:00

Our next stop was a little island called Phu Quoc in Southwestern Vietnam. There is a big very developed tourist island in Thailand called Phuket. This place is sort of like Phuket with almost no development. Get there while the gettin's good because you can see the build up beginning. Now the economy is pepper farms (the black spice kind), squid fishing and one little fish sauce factory. Almost all the roads are dirt and at night you can lie on the beach and see the Milky Way. I hadn’t seen it in many years, since camping way up in the mountains in the Western U.S. The kids weren’t even sure what it was when they first saw it. Anyway, here are a few pictures. Double click the small ones if you want to see them better. My good friend and tennis doubles partner in high school died a few years ago of skin cancer so since then I’ve been a big enforcer of these high sun protection swimsuits for the kids. They don’t seem to mind yet. (Jenny is pregnant so I’m required to keep posted pictures of her at a minimum at this point, which I believe most women other than Demi Moore or Britney Spears will completely understand). You could buy seafood at these little shack-ish restaurants on the beach and they’d cook some right on your table. Super fresh and super cheap. The beaches were beautiful. No waves, a la Apocalypse Now, but that is better for the kids anyway.

Tuk-tuk

2007-10-26T18:13:00.000+08:00

Here are a few more Cambodia pics. One night when I let the kids pick the restaurant, they picked Indian food to my surprise. We eat it once in a while on Saturdays in Shanghai. When I was little I would have assumed that Indian food was what Navajos or Hopis ate and I had no idea what that was. Anyway, we got to and from the hotel to the town via tuk-tuk or a sort of trailer thing hooked on the back of motorped. The kids loved it. They used to have versions of these in Bangkok where the motorcycle and the seat were sort of one unit – think Sophie Ellis-Bextor riding around Bangkok in the Spiller video of “If this ain’t love (groovejet)”. I heard those have been banned there now.

After Cambodia it was back to Vietnam via prop plane on Vietnam Airlines.

Temple of Doom

2007-10-25T17:43:00.000+08:00

The coolest part of Cambodia are the Khmer temples. Real Indiana Jones stuff. Here are some pics. Double click if you want to see more detail.

This is where the absence of a maternal influence really came into play. We climbed up some really steep and slippery pyramids. The kids were clearly instructed that if they didn’t follow my strict instructions they would not only fall and get seriously hurt, but I’d also get in huge trouble with their mom. Luckily, compliance was reasonably high and no one fell.

The Circle of Life

2007-10-24T19:08:00.000+08:00

We ate lunch at a restaurant next to one of the more remote temples in Angkor Wat in Cambodia.This is a good example of the plunging levels of hygiene that I found acceptable under the circumstances. The kids loved this place. It had dirt floors, no walls and there were some workers sleeping in hammocks about 10 feet from the tables. A dog wandered around the place as did a chicken.

We ordered chicken with rice and the kids asked me whether the chicken that was walking around and eating the spilled bits of chicken with rice was actually a cannibal chicken and if it would end up getting eaten next by other people who wanted chicken to eat. Then Abby started reflecting on The Lion King and the circle of life.

Best of all somebody spotted a walking stick on the ground in front of the restaurant. Its one of those weird bugs that actually does look like a stick with legs.

Rice, Sprite, cannibal chickens, dogs and walking sticks. What more could you want?

Beat that Rain Forest Café!

Stuffed Animals

2007-10-23T18:45:00.000+08:00

One of our stops in Saigon was the building where the former South Vietnamese government was officed. The décor was basically left as it was when the tanks rolled in in the late 70s so there was a certain grooviness to the place. The high point from my kids’ point of view was the ex-President’s office which had a variety of mangy looking stuffed animals in it. Not teddy bears but small dead carnivores. If you’ve got a taste for taxidermy this bad, I’m not sure that you should be running a country anyway.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

2007-10-23T18:28:00.002+08:00

On our trip to Vietnam we spent a couple of days in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. We hired a tour guide who took us to one temple that was full of these graphically illustrated pictures of all the absolutely awful things that happen to you in the afterlife if you don’t mind your p’s and q’s while in this mortal coil. It reminded me of a Hieronymus Bosch painting I saw once in Spain called “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. Anyway, the tour guide was happily chatting away to the kids about grisly punishments such as having your legs chopped off by a blue guy with a cow's head or getting eaten by long-fanged snakes while you’re tied to a stake. The kids were mesmerized (and scared). It was a bit freaky for me too. Fortunately, all thoughts of eternal doom quickly vanished when a little cat walked by and the kids ran after it.

Heart of Darkness

2007-10-22T22:13:00.000+08:00

We recently got back from a vacation to Vietnam and Cambodia, a perennial family-friendly destination. I told people at work that we rented a motor boat with a machine gun mounted on the back and headed up river. I think they sort of believed me.

We booked the trip before we realized that Jenny, being pregnant, couldn't take the needed malaria medicine for the Cambodia leg, so we decided that I'd go on first Cambodian leg (3 days) with Abby and Ben and then we'd meet up in Vietnam after that.

Needless to say, with me alone at the helm the acceptable hygiene level dropped way down, the danger level went up and I think the general fun level went up quite a bit also. Once we got back together in Vietnam things normalized, but we still had a good time.

Anyway, I'll try to post some pictures etc. of the trip soon.

Remote problems

2007-10-20T20:17:00.000+08:00

Does this happen to anyone else with little kids? This drives me crazy and it seems like it happens every other day. First, the back cover of the remote gets lost, found, lost, found, etc. The batteries drift in and out during the cycle. Eventually the cover gets irretrievably lost. Then the batteries are just gone most of the time or at least one of them is. Then I try to tape the batteries in, but that's apparently just as much temptation because the tape gets torn off and batteries just disappear again. Asking where the cover or the batteries are is absolutely useless. I'll ask if anyone knows where the batteries are and get an answer like, "No, but can we get a dog?"

Notorious

2007-10-19T17:47:00.000+08:00

We watched this movie again recently. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. This is the disturbed and twitchy Cary Grant of the Hitchcock films he did and not the goofy romantic comedy Cary Grant. And Ingrid Bergman… Rio looked so clean and elegantly exotic – every one dressed up for day to day life. Great stuff.

I remember when I was in high school there was a theatrical re-release of a series of Hitchcock movies – Rear Window, The Man who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, etc. A new one would come out every 3 or 4 months. I would rally my friends to go see them and they were great on a big screen. They weren’t at too many theaters, but I remember going to an older theater on Hollywood Boulevard, which hadn’t been cleaned up at that time. My friends were pretty reluctant at first, but after seeing one of these on a big screen people started wanting to go. Plus it was a little offbeat, which had an appeal to a certain sort of LA high school kid. LA was a fun place to grow up.

Bienvenidos a Guangzhou

2007-10-18T20:27:00.000+08:00

I saw this ad in the back of a cab in Guangzhou (near Hong Kong) recently. I just thought it was sort of weird. Its hard to read, but its an ad entirely in Spanish for a sourcing coordinating company. How many people that understand Spanish ride in the back of cabs in Guangzhou?

17th National Congress

2007-10-17T18:24:00.000+08:00

Recently the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party began. On the first day I was in Qingdao, a city by the sea between Shanghai and Beijing for some meetings. I unfortunately had a long negotiation and ended up stuck with a 10pm flight back to Shanghai. We watched part of President Hu Jintao's opening remarks in an airport restaurant.

There weren't many people there and most didn't pay much attention to the speech. One guy was playing solitaire on this computer. About the same level of interest as would be generated by the State of the Union address in a US airport restaurant I imagine. It looked like there were 1000's of delegates in the meeting which is being held in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. I went to a anniversary party for a big Chinese shipping company there last year and it was very impressive.

Mooncakes

2007-10-12T21:51:00.000+08:00

The Mid-Autumn Festival recently passed in

China

. This is the second biggest traditional holiday in China, after Spring Festival (which in known in Western countries as Chinese New Year – if you talk to someone Chinese about Spring Festival they’ll think you’re pretty savvy). It’s a lunar holiday, like Easter, so it doesn’t fall on the same day each year. Families get together and celebrate under a full moon, traditionally eating a celebratory meal outside and presenting their food to the moon before eating. One of the big traditions of this time of year is the giving (and eating) of mooncakes. Mooncakes are circular in shape, usually about the diameter of a racquetball and have a pastry shell on the outside. The inside was traditionally a sort of sticky sweet red bean paste filling, but it sometimes has a lotus root filling and maybe a hardboiled egg yolk in the center. When I first tried these about six or seven years ago on a trip to

Singapore

, I didn’t like them too much, but now they’ve grown on me. In the last few years, mooncakes, like everything else in China, has both modernized and bowed to commercial pressure. Now there are lots of new and different flavors, including caramel, tapioca, apple, peach, even grapefruit. There are even ice cream mooncakes. Haagen dazs even makes them now.If you have a business, you usually get a bunch from suppliers etc. Sometimes they are given via gift certificates from certain shops or bakeries. Fancy hotels make their own also. I got a box given to me that was from the Shangri-la Hotel in Shanghai – where Yao Ming recently had his wedding banquet. What could be cooler? The fancier the origin, the better perceived in a very status conscious society.

As a side note, there are number of common dessert components in China which are basically unknown in the West. Red bean and lotus root are two that come to mind. These are both sweetened and used in various ways in desserts, much like chocolate in other places (you almost never see anything chocolate in a real Chinese restaurant – too sweet). The only place in the U.S. I’ve run into anything similar is at shaved ice stands in Hawaii where you can usually order red bean as an extra with your shaved ice.

Anyway, someone told me that they had read a Wall Street Journal article that said that mooncakes were analogous to fruitcakes in the U.S. at Christmas. I disagree. First of all, there is almost no one over 85 years old who likes fruitcakes, as far as I can tell. When we set out the mooncakes at our office party before Mid-Autumn Festival, they get downed in no time. While some people don’t like them, most people do. Second, I think fruit cakes are basically a thing of the past in the U.S. I haven’t seen one in quite a few years at Christmas. As was a child it seemed like there were always a few that my grandparents would pick at. They do get re-gifted a bit. The mooncake giving season starts 3-4 weeks before the holiday and the coupons in particular can see several different temporary owners. Whoever ends up with the coupon a few days before the holiday rushes out to redeem it for the mooncakes, since the coupons expire on the day before or the day of the holiday. The difference between mooncakes and fruitcakes is that the person who ends up with them is rarely disappointed.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

2007-10-11T17:24:00.000+08:00

I was playing rock, paper, scissors with Ben and Abby the other day. The game started pretty normal, with the usual elements (rock, paper, scissors) and hierarchy. Then other things started to creep in. First it was ground, fire, rain and wind (which made me wonder if they were studying medieval medicine or alchemy in school), then gun and bomb got added. These things were added slowly at first and then in a flurry of one-upmanship. Nobody really seemed to mind if you added something. The relationship between rock, paper and scissors was always straight forward. The relationship between some of the others was pretty fluid and situational. As far as I could tell most of the time rain beats fire, as does wind, and ground beats rock. Gun beats rock, paper and scissors. Gun doesn’t seem to hold much sway over ground or wind, which seemed vaguely logical, but it doesn’t necessarily win either – it really depends on what the third person has. Bomb beats most anything, but it seems like if you use it too much everyone just gets mad, so it drops out after one or two uses. The winner was sometimes defined by who hadn’t won in a while or who was crying because of the injustice of it all.

Looking for work in all the wrong places

2007-10-02T21:56:00.000+08:00

We were interviewing for a senior operational manager recently and a bunch of my staff settled on one candidate. I usually have them filter down a pool of candidates to a few before I talk to them, just to be more efficient. Anyway, I interviewed the top pick recently and wasn’t too impressed. I asked him about how to handle situations where the customer might not be too happy, for example. He just said that those situations shouldn’t happen since you should always make the customer happy. While that sounds good, it’s not very realistic and worried me.

In any case, I asked my HR manager about it and she shut the door to my office and began to tell me in a characteristically matter of fact way that we shouldn’t hire him because he was over 35 and unmarried. I was then informed that if a woman in China is 35 and unmarried that’s her business, but if a man is 35 and unmarried, he’s got to be a total loser. Either he’s a dismal failure in his professional life or a complete social incompetent. What if he’s very shy, star-crossed or maybe had bad luck?, I asked. No, in China even the bashful and unlucky will have plenty of options if they’ve got their act together, particularly in a big city like Shanghai, which she believes has many more available women than men. Why should a global company like ours hire someone so patently inadequate?, she asked.

The HR conversations here are really crazy some times. There are plenty of times when people say things that are so insanely un-PC or clearly biased that simply having said the thing about a person in the US during an interviewing process would almost force you to make them a job offer.

A family first

2007-09-28T17:51:00.000+08:00

Today was a milestone in family maturity for us. We started soccer. Not for the year, but actually just started for the first time. Neither Abby nor Ben had ever played in any organized way and I wanted them to play and not get behind their peers.

I never played growing up, but in my global wanderings I’ve often been pulled into matches only to demonstrate my football lameness.^† I’d either get totally outmaneuvered or just kick with wild abandon, batter other people’s shins and then play it off to American inexperience. I think that too many people in

America

play now so that technique won’t work for much longer so I figure our kids need to at least learn the basics. Ben, who has not shown much of a predisposition for balls or sports, caught us totally off guard. He jumped right into the practice and then when they started these little games he just went for it, dribbling the ball and scoring a bunch of goals. At 4 years old most of the kids were just wandering around and looking at their parents for some sign as to which way they should be running. The only exception was a little Italian kid who could do these amazing slide kicks and turns. Ben can be sort of aggressive and once someone told him where the goal was, there was no stopping him. Abby absolutely did not want to play and she just started really whining and resisting when we tried to get her to go to the practice. I really insisted that she at least try it, but Jenny didn’t seem to care. This lack of parental unity didn’t help. Jenny and I were essentially arguing about whether a 6 year old was best left to decide whether or not she wanted to play soccer. We eventually gave up and went to eat at a place called Johnny Wu’s. Johnny Wu’s looks suspriciously like Johnny Rockets in basically every respect – menu, décor, uniforms. The food is actually pretty good and the chicken strips, always a kid favorite, were really good – it tasted like they had a bit of cumin in the batter. I’ve found that the combination of my growing experience as a parent and my inherent cheapness has turned me into a relatively indiscriminate consumer of the leftovers on my kids’ plates.

† Note: That said, one of my athletic moments of glory did come as a 7^th grader at Walter Reed Junior High School in P.E. In 7^th grade they had a semester of rotating instruction on a variety of different sports. One day, they pulled out a soccer ball, set up some goals and gave a half-baked demonstration. After that they divided us up into a couple of teams and turned us loose. Basically nobody had done this before and it was like throwing a cat into a pack of feral dogs. Just wild kicking and running around, people falling down and getting kicked and stepped on until the pack stumbled past them. My moment came when the ball suddenly appeared close to me in my section of the pack. I kicked it as hard as I could having no idea what would happen and it sailed above everyone falling into the top corner of the goal. It was the only goal scored before the coaches realized that there were kids lying on the ground with bloody noses and they stepped in to stop the mayhem. Resigned to defeat, they just had us run laps for the last 15 minutes of P.E. This was the last time I remember playing soccer in any sort of formal setting. I was known as a good soccer player for a couple of weeks.

Welcome to Hong Kong – want a donut?

2007-09-28T12:55:00.000+08:00

This is one of the first things you see when you emerge from the luggage area in the Hong Kong airport. I’ve always found it a bit ironic.

If this is what the wonder of globalization gets you, I feel short-changed. That said, I have to admit that I once bought one of these once in a moment of trans-fat nostalgia.

Yellow fish mobile

2007-09-26T12:26:00.000+08:00

Here’s an end of summer picture taken in front of our house on the way to the community swimming pool. The three wheeled bike acts as a minivan of sorts for us in our neighborhood. The kids pile in the back and love it. You see these all over China, but they are usually hauling a 5 foot high pile of old cardboard, some watermelons or maybe a pile of used tires. When Chinese people see me pedaling around with three kids in the back they think it’s hilarious. In Shanghai the Chinese nickname for these is “yellow fish mobile” because in the past they were often used by local fishmongers who bought piles of yellow fish from the Yangtze River or its tributaries and pedaled around the neighborhoods selling them. I paid about US$35 for it and I think the shopkeeper that I bought it from thought I was totally crazy because he couldn’t imagine what I would possibly be using it for.