Today, Peilin, Paul and myself visited Chrystal and her husband Steve in Pudong, the East side of Shanghai which has grown from nothing in 1990 to a city in it’s own right. Chrystal works at Yi-Fu Polytechnic who have had some sort of relationship to AUT for many years. She has visited Auckland several times including a trip to our house where she fell in love with the garden, Daisy and Sissy. Since then she has kept in touch with Ann and sent her a present, so I was there to take a return gift. She and Steve probably represent new China. A young couple in professional jobs but not particularly well off buying a new apartment and filling it with really cool Danish furniture, a 42 inch plasma screen, a top of the range cooker (for him). The apartment wouldn’t look out of place anywhere else in the world. Had a great visit and went out to (yet another) lunch. In the afternoon I went to the Shanghai Museum. Really good, it’s new, well laid out, well curated, with a particularly good ceramics collection and good jade, furniture, and minority artefacts – and a good shop. Then some shopping and another evening in the hotel. The three of us have spent a lot of time together and have got on well generally, but we have also spent a lot of time with other people being insufferably nice and so I guess we all need some time out. My treat is a club sandwich with chips in my room watching HBO.

Some bits and pieces:

the hotel I’m staying in – Le Royal Meridien – is brand new, French, really cool (and expensive). The designer is known as the Cultural Curator. It’s situated on floors 8-11 and 20-43 of the building as well as a bar on the 65th floor. It’s only problem is that it appears to be fairly full of very loud Americans. 10 years ago, there were modern hotels in China but they were not of the same quality as say Signapore, Hong Kong or Malaysia (particularly the service) but that’s no longer the case and all the international chains now have huge operations here. The service is fantastic.

I’m usually quite good with chopsticks, good enough that nobody notices that I’m not perfect. So, as the Lazy Susans pass by with their 20 dishes I can usually look OK. In Tianjin we went to China’s most famous dumpling restaurant which has been there since 1858. The host was the Chair of Boustead College and the son of Tianjin’s most famous (well infamous) Mayor. So it was a very plush afair. Even the chopsticks were upper class. Thet were bigger, fatter and glossier and I simply couldn’t use the them. Every time I tried to pick something up, the chopsticks seemed to collapse and soon people were ducking as food started flying all over. No one could avoid seeing it because they can’t eat until I do. The Chinese, as always not wanting to embarass their guests, kept a straight face but eventually brought me a knife and fork. The humiliation! As more and more dishes came out it got easier as I could pick the dishes I wanted to eat and could avoid the eels, fish heads, pigeons etc and stick to the chunkier stuff. It turned out that dumplings were easy so I stuck to them. Unfortunately, three days later they seem to have stuck to me.

I like Shanghai and the centre has really smartened up and it’s pleasant to walk along, except as a single white male I get constantly harrassed. Men are always coming up saying Rolex, Bags, DVDs and then when you say no, they say, Ladies Club (which don’t do sex), Ladies (who do), or Massage (which is). Even more difficult are the trail of young women, all rather studenty and preppie looking, who come up and say You’re tall; You speak English?; You Swedish? You want to go for coffee and help me with my English? You want to be my friend etc etc. Peilin tells me that some may be genuine, but the others are there to persuade you to go into cafes and restaurants and spend a lot of money for which they get commission. They’re very amiable and leave you alone when it’s clear you’re not interested, but it is quite difficult to just walk along and look at the shops.

All young Chinese, like Chrystal and Steve have an English name. Chrystal’s Chinese name means ‘clear’ so that’s why she chose Chrystal. Steve actually chose Stephen because he liked the sound, but then nobody would call him it. The other day we met a student who had chosen Beryl! I didn’t like to ask.

I will get round to talking about Tianjin eventually! Tomorrow is another of what we call Happy Happy days – meetings and meals, talking and toasting. After that however, it’s Penang anhd then no more banquets, speeches, toasts!.

In Shanghai, with some spare time at last, and the hotel has a very sophisticated online service so at last I can do another blog. Staying at a very posh hotel – Le Royal Meridien – overlooking the centre of Shanghai and the Bund from the 43rd floor. At the moment can see all the neon lights of Nanjing Road including an electrified flashing seven story high Coca Cola bottle – this is modern China. When I came here in the mid-90s the top shop was Number 1 Department Store and they had just opened the first fast food outlet – KFC. Now you walk outside of the hotel and there are people sitting on the street outside Costa Coffee, and Nanjing Road – the main shopping street – is partly pedestrianised with every Western shop you could think of. The millions of bikes and very few cars have been replaced by millions of cars and very few bikes. Old Shanghai is still around but everywhere there are huge new buildings going up of every shape and size. Even the less modern cities such as Tianjin – where I’ve just come from – are seeing developments you would never have imagined ten years ago – for example new waterfront apartment blocks being sold as ‘New York’ and ‘Down Town’ apartments. Communism and capitalism seem to be mixing very well.

Shanghai is the fourth city in seven days. The first was Yantai, one of China’s small cities (1million, as compared with Shanghai’s 20+m). Much cleaner, surrounded by sea and mountains, less busy and quite pleasant. The city is in Shandong Province which is very prosperous and is China’s only internationally recognised wine growing district. When we had lunch (think 25 different dishes) at our partner institution we were given a large amount of their best red cabernet sauvignon and it was excellent. Shandong is far enough North for drinking to be a compulsory part of business development, so lots of food and drink and toasts to the Partnership, The Future, The President, the Pro Vice Chancellor, China, New Zealand etc etc. After lunch they decided to take us to the wine museum where we had a wine tasting with Riesling, Charonnay, another Cabernet and brandy. And then in the evening another banquet! Further toasts and speeches but I made a major error. When the President raised his glass and said ‘Bottoms Up’ I responded ‘Bottoms Up’ forgetting that this means I am supposed to enter a drinking competition and need to empty my glass (and the 15 after it) in one go. I didn’t. A major no-no. I was deemed important enough to be forgiven but lost about 10 points in manliness and status. However, while I’m bad at drinking (by Chinese standards) I’m good at making very long and flowery speeches praising China, the President, the Future etc etc so gradually I redeemed myself. The food is truly fantastic, beautifully cooked and artistically presented: Pumpkins sculpted like dragons; ice fish covered in all sorts of sea food, pigeon with the head artfully sitting on the side of the plate looking at me. All the heads (fish mainly) have to be directed towards me as the guest of honour. I pointed out that I lived in a vegetarian household (at least for the humans) and they gave me looks of sympathetic pity, but nearly half the dishes were actually very tasty vegetable dishes. Most of the last six days have included at least one such banquet (except at the New Zealand Embassy) but as we moved away from Yantai, the drinking calmed down, so obesity and not alcoholism is the issue. We were just two days in Yantai and it gave us a different, less crowded and noisy view of China. Next stop was Beijing, but that’s for the next blog

My translated proposal regarding the future of the paths was put before the local council, at their meeting last week, by Kostas Skouras, the political representative for the KKE party. By the time they got to my item, it was 1.30 in the morning! I sat in the small public gallery section of the Town Hall meeting room, together with a small group of others who had items on the agenda. The mayor responded by agreeing to my proposal and before I knew it, they moved on to the next item. However, I still had no idea of when they were going to give me workers or indeed what had happened to the funds that I had been told by Mrs Mimika Rekka were available for this project. Although Mrs Rekka was present at the meeting, she made no comment whatsoever, even though she had set up the initial meeting at the town hall last March, during which I chose 4 routes to be cleaned. In the meantime, a volunteer and myself have cleaned a long portion of trail in the Potami valley, in our spare time. A regular update and images were sent to Mrs Rekka during that time, again without response.
The walking season is almost over and it is a crying shame that local authority has not taken advantage of my offer to project manage the clearing of the most popular trails. After twenty years of doing it myself, together with the occasional volunteer, the situation has become such that I cannot continue. Meanwhile, my Skopelos Trails book is selling well.

I’m playing truant from the most boring conference in the history of conferences even taking into the account its in Chinese and English. I don’t even get the chance to see Beijing as tomorrow I’m off to Tianjin. We came from Yantai which is by the sea and, according to the Chinese is a very small city of just a million people! However it was much cleaner and tidier than normal. Because we’re doing business people keep feeding us banquets with 20 or so dishes, as well as trying to force large quantities of alcohol down us. All part of a business partnership apparently. I of course have been resisting. In Yantai they were overwhelmingly hospitable because the President wished to repay Ann and me for having him to afternoon tea when he visited Auckland.

I’m going to keep blogging even though I have to do it on a chinese site so I keep guessing which button or icon to press. I just hope that when we move from Beijing, some of the technology starts to work.

Cute pictures!

Rob

In the middle of technology nightmare. No Blackberry, no laptop. A PC in the hotel business centre that is only in mandarin and a hotel telephone line that won’t do international! So this blog is my last chance. Here’s trying!

You can read this blog but not add comments!!! Just email me if you want to get in touch – you all have my email address. Rob