Shanghai and Suzhou with Andy

Last weekend a couple things were going on in Shanghai. Andy was in town and had the weekend off, so I meet him after he got off work on Friday night and had dinner together at a Japanese restaurant. He was shocked when I first opened my mouth to order in Chinese (though not very good Chinese), because the last time he had seen me was seven months ago. It’s barely noticeable to me because its slow and incremental, but I’ve improved a lot in that time and now can get by pretty well interacting with people in Chinese.

On Saturday we saw a lot of the city and did quite a bit of shopping. We were on the streets much earlier than when most stores open, so we spent the early morning walking around new and old parts of central Shanghai, including the new skyscrapers around People’s Square, the old two-story stone houses in Xintiandi, and the run-down, local neighborhoods around the touristy Old Quarter and Yu Yuan Garden. We saw the same little shops and businesses – noodle restaurants, barber shops, bike repair shops, tobacco vendors – over and over again. When we came upon a street full of fresh produce, seafood, and meat, the first thing sight we saw was a butcher chopping a chicken’s head off and draining the blood into a bucket before tossing it into a pot of boiling water. It’s very different on the streets of China, all normal to me now, but it was fun to see Andy’s culture shock and his interest in every little aspect of daily life.

Inside the Old Quarter, we waited in line for over an hour to buy a couple servings of xiao long bao, the Shanghai specialty of soup dumplings. The long wait was livened up by watching all of the tour groups shuffle around in big herds, and we were both interviewed by a marketing researcher, and then pestered with questions by an eager young Chinese guy. I get lots of attention, but even more when I’m with other foreigners. Andy and I seemed to be pretty popular.

When we started to make our way to an antiques market, the first taxi we saw was a three-wheeled motorcycle with a little bench in the back. It didn’t take long to realize we were both thinking, “sweet, let’s do it!” so we immediately hired the driver to take us to the antiques market. We later took some pictures by the river and then went to shopping in a big store… I can’t say the name of the place because it will give away the contents of many Christmas gifts.

That evening I met my roommate and about 18 of our friends for dinner. He only recently was able to check out of the Chinese hospital where he had been receiving treatment for his TB and get permission to return to his home country. (I got another TB test that weekend, by the way, and am still TB free!) We were there until the place closed and we all said our goodbyes before he flew home the next day.

On Sunday Andy and I took a day trip to Suzhou, a medium-sized city (5 million to Shanghai’s 18 million) roughly half an hour away by train to the southwest. We took another pseudo-taxi from the train station. This time it was an old guy with a bicycle rickshaw. It was a rusty old single gear bicycle, and with the two of us on the rear bench we were going along at about walking speed, until we reached a bridge and the poor guy had to get off and pull us up and over the bridge.

Our first stop was a silk museum, were we saw lots of old silk clothing and looms and a large, flat basket of leaves where hundreds of pasty white little silk worms were munching away. They were funny little things with six little feet near their heads that they use to hold a leaf, and then they nibble from side-to-side, making little half circles in the leaf. Like all worms, they have several hearts (or simple artery pumps, rather) that you could see rhythmically pulsing under their pale skin. It was a fascinating site to see this ugly little worms turning green leaves into beautiful silk (and feces).

Our next taxi ride was a regular taxi, probably an old VW, and the driver dropped us off on a street with plenty of good restaurants. We vacillated between a few before settling on one serving food from the southern Hunan province. Little did we know what we would discover on the menu. In the picture-filled English menu there was lots of good pictures and descriptions of dishes for adventurous carnivores, such as duck gizzards, “duck cooked in soil sauce,” hotpot with pig intestines, and turtles, both large and small (baby turtles). On the Chinese menu only there were two hotpots with dog meat. Finally, there was a simple vegetable dish with the most shocking name imaginable, “Fuckness w/ eggplant.”

It was hard to control our laughter (to the point of tears in our eyes, it was a good laugh), we attracted a few stares, and then were disappointed to learn that they were out of the fuckness with eggplant and that we could not keep the menu, despite Andy’s steady pleas.

We browsed some silk shops, a book store, pet stores, an antiques store, and saw a few canals and lots of rundown housing, and then got lost after walking for miles around the city. Minutes after Andy said in exasperation, “My dogs are barking, I don’t think I can walk much longer,” we came upon a foot massage parlor. Another spontaneous, “what the hell - let’s do it!” decision and we both found ourselves reclined in armchairs with our shoes off about to get our first ever foot massage. Two sister, Xiao Lei and Da Lei, spent 45 minutes soaking, moisturizing, kneading, and massaging our calves and feet. Most of the time we were gritting our teeth from the pain (it sometimes hurt a heck of a lot) or laughing from the ticklishness of the whole ordeal. And the two sisters were hilarious. They rarely get any foreign customers, and only from nearby countries such as Japan and Russia. Most of the time we were able to communicate in Chinese, and even when we couldn’t, they always understood our yelps of pain or our laughter from the ticklish sensations (or from the whole absurdity of a getting a foot massage in this little place).

Those are just some of fun stories and adventures from the weekend. I took some pictures on my iPhone, so the quality isn’t so great.

Lastly, the Milwaukee Bucks played an exhibition game in China the week before. And who knew their 2008 draft pick, Joe Alexander, spent part of his childhood in China and speaks Mandarin?