Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou. One of the Most Brutal Vacations of my Life

I'm not much for organized travel. Rather, the ideal trip for me involves flying into developing country X (preferably sans return airfare), with a guidebook, a backpack, and a sense of "well, we don't really have any reason to be here, so let's make the best of it and see how things go". I've had a lot of incredible trips fitting this mold, and hope to continue taking trips like this for many years.

Like Shooting Fish in a....Pond?

This past weekend we had a "company sponsored holiday", which involved a 4-day trip to Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Shanghai. Now for those who have actually traveled in their lifetimes, you'll notice that this is a 3-city trip in 4 days. That is to say, there is a 0% chance that we were actually going to "see" any of these cities, it was just going to be "get on the bus, get off the bus" for 4 days. I sort of expected this, as it's a very Chinese style of travel, and tried to mentally prep myself for the rather ho-hum nature of this type of trip. But my god could I have never prepared myself for what went down that weekend in the Yangtze River Delta.

We left the office at about 5:30am on Thursday. After flying from Shenzhen to Hangzhou, we were immediately hurled into a bus with a tour guide. A really. obnoxious. tour guide. He had a microphone with like a hip-speaker thing, and was yelling into it the entire trip. In very obnoxious Chinese. So that was pretty awesome. Our first stop on the trip was a pretty decent restaurant in Hangzhou, as we arrived about lunchtime. It was immediately obvious that I was going to be something of a "guest of honor" during this trip--I always sat at the head table, immediately next to the sister of the 2 brothers that own this company (the brothers were not on the holiday, and their sister is what I would refer to as the "Company Mom", just a really nice 40ish year old Chinese woman who speaks about as much English as I do Arabic....so she's pitch-perfect). Anyway, so we had a decent lunch. After lunch we went to the pretty amazing West Lake of Hangzhou, and took a very crowded touristy boat around the West Lake. Still decent. We walked around that area for most of the afternoon, before going to a sort of shopping street, then this bizarre Song Dynasty-themed Chinese amusement park/folk village/mental institution/song and dance theater. Yeah, it was all of the above. Weird first day overall, but nothing compared to the devastation of Day 2.

Temple somewhere near Hangzhou

Day 2. A brutal day for sure. We got on the bus in Hangzhou, and our first stop was a "silk museum". By silk museum, I mean a place where they tell you how silk is made, then spend an hour trying to convince you to buy some silk. And of course I'm in the market for silk scarves, bedsheets, and lingerie, if not this may have been a pointless excursion. That said, there was some entertainment when, on their map of the old Silk Road, they had labeled Kuala Lumpur as a city in Northern Sri Lanka (I assume they meant to say Colombo...) Anyway, so after this whole silk business, we went to an equally asinine place that was a "Chrysanthemum Tea Museum". Same thing, "here's our tea, here's how it's made, now buy some". Should also be noted that this was all in Chinese. And of course I"m in the market for chrysanthemum related products, otherwise this may have been a pointless excursion. From here, we went to a place selling various trinkets. And of course I'm in the market for that too, otherwise...well you get the point. Anyway, all these places were ~1 hour apart by bus (ferally hot bus as well), so by the time we'd been harassed to the point of wanting to stab the tour guide, the day was done and we were just arriving in Suzhou.

A brief aside--I asked Lisa why the hell we had wasted 1 of our 4 days doing an unbelievable amount of shopping/completely idiotic activities. She informed me that this is how the tour guide makes money--he gets commission from the shops if we buy things. Frankly, I would be just as happy giving the guy like $10 (or even less, we could realistically each give him like $5, and the $200 he makes would be about 2 weeks' wage in China), and just have that extra day to not be assaulted by merchants peddling their crap. But apparently this is not how China works. Also quite interesting, none of my Chinese coworkers seemed fazed or aggravated about this absurd series of shopping misadventures.

The lads, Jacky (#3 guy in the company) and Michael (Old friend of the owner's, company chef)

Day 3 was interesting, we went to a very beautiful old village called Zhouzhuang, which was definitely one of the coolest places I've ever seen. Appropriately named the "Venice of the East", it is world famous for its canal system, and I was pretty surprised and intrigued to find that many people were still living here despite it being a tourist-infested village.

Zhouzhuang, the Venice of the East

Another brief aside--days 3 and 4 of this trip (Saturday and Sunday) were absolutely mental from the standpoint of the INSANE NUMBER OF TOURISTS AT THESE SITES. And they were all Chinese. I had no idea that domestic tourism in China was such an enormous industry, but I can assure you that having 10 tour guides with 10 hip-speakers screaming at their tour groups inside a relatively cramped temple is not the greatest way to enjoy the historical relevance and general awesomeness of these places. But anyway, such is life when the country you're living in has 1.3+ billion people.

So after our tours around Suzhou, we finally arrived in the center of the center, the economic heart of the People's Republic of China, one of my favorite cities in this world (as of now, currently #3 on my list behind Hong Kong and Seoul), Shanghai. Upon arrival, I left the tour group to go meet up with my old friend Douglon, who I had lived with for about a month in Hong Kong upon my return to Asia in October-November 2011. He's currently living in Shanghai and managing his Dad's building, the House of Roosevelt. I met up with him at the House, which was a surreal experience. Put bluntly, it is one of the nicest buildings on the nicest and most famous street in China's most cosmopolitan and expensive city. The building has a restaurant on the 8th floor, where we went for dinner.

At this point 2 things should be noted--

1) I had already eaten dinner at this point.
2) Douglon is a world renowned eater, and more importantly, a world renowned host. So I knew what I was getting into to some extent, but was sure to tell Douglon upon my arrival

"Now Douglon, I've already had dinner. So can we just do some appetizers or something else light?"
"Of course, no problem at all"

As it was Douglon, I should have known better. The next thing I knew, a waiter asked me how I would like my steak cooked. Sweet jesus. Before dinner, I ended up getting a text from Martin, the old friend that I'd met up with in Hong Kong a couple of weeks prior. He was in Shanghai, and came to meet us at the House of Roosevelt (he's also a good friend of Douglon's, so it was a nice reunion). We were also joined by another friend of Douglon's, a Peruvian girl who had grown up in Sweden. The four of us enjoyed a magnificent meal atop one of the nicest buildings in the city, with a beautiful view of Pudong/Lujiazui and The Bund. Or at least, the 3 of them enjoyed the meal, as well as the sight of me trying to force down more food after having already eaten dinner.

Wuxinting Tea House, Shanghai

Overall a fantastic evening. The following day, I went with some coworkers to a really interesting temple near the Wuxinting Tea House and Yuyuan Gardens. I'd been to the exact place almost exactly a year before, which was kind of cool. Following this, I ended up meeting up with another couple of old friends of mine, Madlien and Martin, who are currently living/working in Shanghai. We went to the French Concession, a beautiful, leafy, up-scale area of Shanghai, and had a few afternoon drinks. I then received a call from Douglon inviting us for an afternoon lunch/few drinks at the House of Roosevelt. It should be noted that they have the largest wine cellar in China there, and that Douglon, being a ridiculously good host, would not take a cent for the food or wine. Consequently, we had a fair bit of food and wine. The food was infinitely better than the night before, as this time I was not already horrendously full, and we had a couple of bottles of white wine/champagne. I was to meet with my coworkers at Pudong International Airport around 4pm. The House is around 1hr from the airport by taxi, and consequently when 3:45pm rolled around, we decided I'd best hightail it to Pudong. And so I did, but not before falling asleep in the back of the cab (too many glasses of champagne it would seem), only to be woken by a call from Jacky asking where I was (though to be fair, they didn't care that I was a bit late, as the weather was crap and our flight ended up being delayed a bit anyway).

So that was the trip to Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou. As I noted in the beginning of this blog post, I tend to prefer trips that are completely unplanned. After returning from this atrociously constricting trip, I decided it was time to book something stupid, so yesterday I booked 1-way airfare from Hong Kong to Dhaka for the day after my birthday, as we have 1 week's holiday for Chinese National Day that week (I was really, really, really hoping to do Tibet, but unfortunately the Chinese government has closed Tibet to foreigners for the foreseeable future....welcome to China!). For those who don't know where Dhaka is, you clearly haven't been reading my blog often enough, as I wrote a fairly decent piece on Bangladesh last year. Anyway, so will be heading there for some amount of time in late September. Interestingly, that's the tail end of the rainy season, so should involve some flooding and perhaps malaria. And I cannot freaking wait.

That's about all from here, interesting and manic trip to the Yangtze River Delta, and making plans for an even more interesting trip to Bangladesh. Some photos from the trip below (apologies that they're a little grainy, my camera broke the other day...5 years old so that'll happen, so I used my iPad camera on the trip, which is not bad, but not sensational. Also, if my grandfather is reading this, a huge thanks for the iPad a few months back, it's been remarkably useful so far, and had I not had it during these last few days, I would have had no pictures of the amazing places I just went to. Also happy belated birthday to my grandfather, and belated father's day to both he and my Dad)

Weird Song Dynasty Themed Theme Park

Near Hangzhou

Love the Chinglish

Yeah it was this crowded in the temple...

The Blaine Curcio Megapost- Update from the Last Week

Its been a long time since I've posted anything here, over a week, so here's a post updating the week that was. Friday class got cancelled, which was really nice, so Thursday night of last week was good, we went out to Lan Kwai Fong before Raphael decided to propose that we hike Victoria Peak to watch the sunrise. So we did. Hiked up around 5:00am, got there about 6:00am, and watched the sun come up over HK. It was a bit foggy, but still very cool. We ended up finding a chair earlier in the night at LKF, and decided to take it with us up the 2,000ft. peak. We trammed it down at about 7:15, got to Central and went to McDonald's for breakfast. I got back around 8:00am, woke up around 11:00am and went to get my mainland visa. Friday afternoon/evening we hung out at Uniersity Hall, and ended up playing Monopoly Friday night before calling it a fairly early one. Saturday during the day Elliott and I went with Riley, an American from Vermont (goes to Tufts in Boston) to the eastern part of Kowloon, and did a roughly 8km hike through some mountains in Kowloon, including Devil's Peak. The hike was all along the Wilson Trail, and we got some awesome views of Hong Kong. Saturday night we got a good group together and headed to LFK, before going to the Kennedy Town docks to hang out and look out at the bay. Sunday I got some laundry done and sort of mulled around before heading to University Hall for the Manchester United-Arsenal match, starting at midnight local time. United won 3-1, good times. Monday I woke up pretty early, went to class in the afternoon, then went to my first "tutorials" as a HKU student. Essentially a tutorial is when you go to a classroom with a relatively small group of students and the TA and review class materials. It was pretty intense, as the local students were really, really, involved in the conversation, and were more or less fighting over the right to answer questions. I provided a few answers that I felt were more insightful than theirs, and the TA seemed to agree, as she gave them a good bit of attention, so I wasn't too far behind. Monday night Elliott and I decided to hang out in the cul-de-sac in front of our building and do homework. Essentially, we live in a cul-de-sac with 3 residence halls around it, so we just sat there with our desk chairs and laptops doing homework and chatting with all the people that we know who were coming/going from Lee Hysan/RC Lee/Wei Lun halls. We got a good deal of work done, and called it an early night. Tuesday was a rough day of classes, as it always is, with 9:30-11:30, then 3:00-6:00, including the last 2 hours being Putonghua, which is incredibly taxing mentally. After class we headed back to Hysan and had some dinner, then sat out in the cul-de-sac and finished the hw from Monday night. Again, got to see a good number of friends and just sort of hung out. People generally thought it was pretty funny that we were just hanging out in the street, but we've sort of embraced the image of eccentricity so its alright. Wednesday was a pretty good time. Ben, Henry, Cindy, Raphael, and I decided to go to Cheung Chau Island (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheung_Chau), as none of us have classes. We ended up doing a lot of hiking, including going quite literally off the beaten path when we walked along a really rocky area out to a cliff, which was pretty cool. We headed back to Hong Kong Island in the evening. After a shower and change of clothes (hiking causes people to sweat, as it turns out), we all headed out to Wan Chai for dinner. We were supposed to meet some people there around 8:00, but we didn't get there until about 8:30. Upon arrival we called the people we were meeting, only to find out they hadn't left their hall yet. We ended up just eating by ourselves then meeting them later at the place they were eating, and sort of hung out with them for a bit. It should also be noted that I'll likely never return to Wan Chai. It was undoubtedly the seediest place I've ever seen. We left there around 10:00 and headed back to Lee Hysan. Thursday was a rough day of classes, with class from 9:30-10:30 then 2:00-7:00. After class we had a magnificent dinner with Marije from Amsterdam. We went to the Wellcome market (grocery store) and bought a bunch of vegetables and a bit of ground beef and some pasta sauce, and made some excellent pasta on her floor of Lee Hysan. After that we went up to the roof to hang out with a few people. It was a relatively early night, without a whole lot of highlights for the most part. Friday I went to lunch with Cindy, then she came to mine and Elliott's class. Note on Cindy: She's a New Zealander who's boyfriend Oliver (also from NZ) is going to school at HKU for a semester. She's still on their "summer break" so she's living here with Ollie for 3 months or so. Consequently, she doesn't have class or any other real obligations during the day, so while Oliver is at class she's bored enough to come to mine and Elliott's Theory of International Trade class. Afterwards we headed into Central so Cindy could get a pair of pants I think, and so that I could pick up my China visa and Elliott could get his phone fixed. Friday night I ended up up going to Macau with Madlien, Rachael, and a group of Austrians. It was a good night, made about $700HK at the poker tables. The next day I was more or less the tour guide of Macau, though the weather was awful so we couldn't see much. We headed back to HK around 5:00pm. After that I headed to UHall for a bit, then went back to Lee Hysan to have some dumplings with Madlien, Rachael, and Dominick. After that I met up with the UHall boys to go to Chunking Mansions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chungking_Mansions) to have some Indian food. It was a pretty seedy place over in Kowloon, but it was definitely an experience. After that I was planning on meeting with with Madlien, Rachael, and the Austrians to go to the "night market" on Kowloon, but it was too close to the United match, so I just headed back to UHall with Ben and Elliott to watch the match with some people there. 5-0 win over Portsmouth, excellent result. That brings us to this morning. It's raining out quite a bit, is very windy, and is just generally unpleasant. I'm doing laundry and writing this, while preparing to finally start reading up on the Philippines (we'll be leaving Thursday night/Friday morning at about 1:00am). Should be a fairly uneventful week for the next few days. More to come later in the week.

Internship Update: Still no word from either, completed my app for The Hague last week (with some help from Madlien to "Europeanize" it), and should be hearing about South Africa sometime relatively soon. Updates will be posted as they're heard

Solution to lack of sleep, The Island Shangri-La, and Finding a Fellow Speaker of La Lingua Bella

So for those of you who read my scathing post yesterday regarding the fact that I haven’t slept through night since literally Christmas, there is hope for me still! Yesterday afternoon, it somehow became painfully obvious what the solution was, a doppio espresso from Starbucks! I went into Starbucks and, while waiting for my coffee, I ran into Bettina, an Austrian girl who was in my class that started in about 40 minutes. We decided to grab a table outside and talk about one of my favorite topics of conversation, travel. We’d been to a few of the same places, and overall it was a decently interesting conversation. After the espresso I felt absolutely magnificent, and walked into my 2:00 class ready to pay close attention and take good notes. It was a good thing I did, as once again, my Economic History of China class proved to be phenomenally interesting. We talked about the improvements in society in general during the Song dynasty, particularly their economic reforms and practices. Definitely made my day. After that class ended at 3:55, I had to more or less dead out sprint across campus to make it to the Meng Wah Complex (from the Knowles Building) by 4:00. I had Elliott save me a seat in our next class, Multinational Corporations, which was a marathon lecture going from 4:00-7:00pm. Given that participation is worth 20% of the grade in that class, I decided to sing like a canary at every opportunity, doing my best to sound like I know what I’m talking about. It went well for the most part. We were also able to form our group for that class for the rest of the semester, Elliott and I drafted Wilson, a local living on our floor of Lee Hysan, and Sofia, a Greek-Italian-Australian who lives just down the road from us. Another interesting story regarding this class today: I was explaining to Elliott how the doppio espresso saved my life today, and naturally I pronounced it in correct Italian. Sofia, who was sitting next to Elliott, overheard my pronunciation, and as it turns out, she speaks fluent Italian. Didn’t really see that coming. While in Multinational Corporations I got a text from Uncle Fred inviting me to dinner at the Island Shangri-La Hotel in Central. That’s certainly not an invitation you pass up, especially when you consider that the Shangri-La won the 2006 award for “Asia’s Best Hotel”. Upon arriving, the first car in the valet parking spot that I saw was a brand new, midnight blue Rolls Royce. Good start to the night. I was the first to arrive, and joining me were Uncle Fred, Uncle Chanwa, a few of their business associates, and Loic, a Frenchman living in Causeway Bay, HK. Loic is some sort of manager at a number of factories up in the mainland, and he invited me to come up and take a tour of the one in Shenzen in the next couple of weeks. Certainly another invitation that I wasn’t going to pass up, so I guess I’ll be touring a factory up in the mainland this semester. The dinner was absolutely wonderful, with several courses including Peking Duck, sweet and sour pork, hot and sour soup, etc. After dinner I said my goodbyes to Uncle Fred and his associates, who are all leaving for the States Saturday. Loic and I exchanged numbers, and he said he’d be happy to arrange for my mainland visa to be provided. Uncle Chanwa was nice enough to drive me back to Lee Hysan, and after returning I decided to go hang out in Victoria Park with Divian, Henry, and Rafael. I headed over there around 11, and we more or less just hung out talking (oddly enough, about the structures of romance languages vs. English vs. Mandarin/Cantonese). I got back fairly early and tried to go to bed around 1:30 or so, but I once again couldn’t sleep. Tossed around till about 3:30, finally got to bed, woke up at about 9:00am. Currently I’m just hanging out till my 2:00pm class, or until Elliott gets up, as we’ll likely go grab some lunch. Playing online poker for the first time in awhile is also nice, and I’ve finally found the time to do that this morning. I am certain, however, that it will be another Starbucks doppio espresso day today. Apologies for the poor flow and pace of this blog today, it was actually a bit of a struggle to write for the first time in awhile.

Interesting fact of the day: I got my bill for my dorm yesterday. I’m paying like $700US or so for a semester of beachfront property. To those who don’t plan to study abroad, shame on you.