Badminton is not a crime!

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

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

The Annals of Irresponsible Parenting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.