China Vacation 01

So, I am going to break up my writing about the China trip into two or three posts, with this first one covering my time in Macau and Shanghai.


I began my trip in Macau. Macau is an odd city. The Portuguese conquered/leased it in much the same way that the British did in Hong Kong. However, while the British turned Hong Kong into a world class trade and financial center, Macau built Casinos.

This has had a strong impact on the distribution of wealth in the city. There are certainly has rich neighborhoods. The eastern side of the Island is littered with jewelry and electronics shops of all kinds. But outside of the hotel/casino areas of the city, Macau appears significantly poorer. Decrepit high-rises litter much of the island’s skyline, looking like background props from Half Life 2’s dystopian City 17.


With a few exceptions, things seemed better at the street level. While the building style and markets and congestion all feel Asian, something about the winding alleyways and boulevards came off as distinctively Iberian. Maybe it’s the Portuguese signs or the smell of paella coming out of the neighborhood cucinas. Or maybe I’m full of crap and it was all in my head.


I arrived in Macau around 11:30 and promptly decided that I would walk the length of the island tip to tip, to see all the fortresses and cathedrals and temples and whatever. The city is pretty small, but this plan still turned out to be as ill advised as one might guess. Most every monument or historical sight on the oversized pile of coral and casinos and catholic relics is atop its own big goddamn hill. Perhaps I was just overly ambitious, because by the time I had to return to the airport I had completely grouchified myself.


It is well known that casinos are built and designed specifically to prevent their patrons from leaving. Food and entertainment is available and subsidized if not comped entirely, and there are no windows or clocks to remind gamblers how long they have been emptying their wallets. Many have described Macau to me as one big casino, and though I never made a bet while there, I began to see the resemblance while trying to get back to the airport.


The shuttle bus to the airport leaves from a 3x10 foot square of pavement in front of the hydrofoil ferry station. From that same strip of nothing leaves the shuttles for every casino, resort and hotel on the island. The thing is so crowded with people and vehicles that the bus passed by twice before I could flag it down to get it to stop. Worse, the fare is $4.20. You cannot buy tickets in advance and no, they do not give out change thankyouverymuch. I ended up losing a twenty because I had only $4.15 otherwise.


This was especially a problem because I was running low on patacas, the currency for Macau. That’s right, Macau, with just over a half a million people and no sovereignty to speak of, has a currency. It is pegged to the Hong Kong Dollar, and they charge a hefty sum to convert from dollars or yuan. Imagine if the 711’s of Vegas only took casino chips. It is, for the record, a total racket.

In the end, I reached my plane on time only because it was seriously delayed by smog in Shanghai. I got into the city late and made my way to the hotel by bus after spending the Taxi Salesmen *coughcough* I mean “Information Stand” that No, I really didn’t want to spend 200 Yuan on a airport car rather than 25 on a bus ride. It’s funny how different a single place can look from night to day. I was confronted with dark, deserted streets. The hotel was in a semi-residential neighborhood wedged between the convention center and the freeway belt road. The only visible sign of life was the construction crews idly chatting while on break from resurfacing the street.


Upon waking in the morning, I was presented with quite a different view. The streets were almost unrecognizable, with teeming sidewalks of shopping pedestrians. Even the over represented and oft repeated pattern of dvdshop/friedchickenplace/hairsalon seemed more unique and welcoming each time. In Shanghai, people live in gated projects that seemed gloomily authoritarian in the dark, but that morning they bustled with a warm sense of community as the locals hung laundry or picked through the the vegitible stands that appeared to have sprouted from previously abandoned alleys.


Upon exploring deeper into Shanghai, I made a startling discovery; the Shanghainese have gone to great lengths to make their city appear to be an affluent American suburban town. The restaurants are nicer chains of the Noodles & Co variety, the shops are exclusively selling western luxury brands, and the coffee shops have spread in the same kudzu-like fashion that they have back home. Honestly, Shanghai is two Chic-Fillets away from being a Maryland urban planner’s wet dream.

The one exception to Shanghai’s strict rule of modernity is a little tourist trap neighborhood surrounding the city gardens. This collection of teahouses and trinket hawkers has all the authenticity of the China section in Epcot, and the crowds require loads of jostling and not a few sharp elbows to navigate. Still, the buildings and especially the gardens are undeniably beautiful. The gardens feature rivers of gold fish and rockeries. Rockeries, in case you had never heard the term (I hadn’t) are artistically arranged piles of stones that take up most of the area. Yeah, they do that.


The garden also featured a small art museum, filled with cool paintings. Most of the paintings were of guys getting high on opium and talking to monkeys. I am not making this up. China appears to prefer the streetcarnameddesireBrando-style Buddha statues, rather than the apocalypsenowBrando-style Buddhas favored by Chinese take out places back home. Not sure what the reason for that is.

In other areas of the city, newly built high-rises dominate. They are architecturally beautiful, but have contributed to the city’s pollution a surprising amount. Everyone knows China is polluted. But Shanghai’s evil air makes your throat feel raw faster than other areas with far more industry. One reason that I heard for this, beyond the city’s tremendous population (26m!), is all the construction and the lack of adequate building codes. I was told that, in most countries, before doing blasting or other similar construction activities, you need to wet down the area your working on to minimize the amount of dust you kick into the air. Shanghai doesn’t do that. So, with new skyscrapers being built all the time, there is a lot of dust.

More about other cities in the next one! Woo! Something to Write About!

Taiwan Journal 11: Hashrun and Kenting

Well, it has been a while since I posted. In the mean time, quite a bit has happened. More importantly, I have had the opportunity to screw up in a couple of notable and hopefully entertaining ways.

One somewhat legitimate (but utterly untrue) reason for the lack of posts recently is that for weeks my computer was thoroughly incapacitated by viruses. I was unable to solve my problems independently. His presented me with a problem; while there is no shortage of places that could fix my PC, I was not sure who I could find who spoke English. Computer repair is necessarily jargon-laden, and my Chinese just barely escapes the purview of shopping and transportation. I eventually found a guy by searching the English language teacher forums. I called him up and asked him where I could drop off my laptop. He told me not to worry, and that he could come by to pick up the laptop in fifty minutes.


This made me pause. I was suppose to hand my computer to someone I have never met without even knowing his permanent base of operations? Though it was broken, my computer remained a reasonably valuable piece of technology and I was handing it over to a guy in a station wagon. I consoled myself by thinking that, because the guy was a foreigner and the expat community is pretty small, if he screwed me over I would probably be able to track him down. Still, when he called me later that night to tell me he had cleared my PC of Trojans and viruses, and that he could drop off the laptop whenever I was ready, I was quite relieved.

I finally had the opportunity to help lead a run with the Hash Run. The club paired me up with Kevin, one of the older members of the club. Kevin only hares (the run leaders are called the Hares) one run a year, but he has been doing it for a long time. He therefore goes (far) out of his way to make sure he is bringing the club to virgin territory. So we drove out to Dashi, a town south of Taipei close to Chang Kai-Sheik’s burial place. Dashi has a nice mix of farms and jungle hills, but what it lacked was hiking trails of any kind. That was what the “weed whacker” is for.


When I say “weed whacker”, I am not talking about a thing for cutting down dandelions or scrub grass with a spinning plastic whip. This thing is a gas powered buzzsaw at the end of a four foot pole. It cut through saplings and bamboo quite nicely, thank you very much. It is a tool that is appropriate for leaving a “pretty radical” section of lush jungle “smooth as a baby’s butt”, as Kevin says.

So we pieced bits of road and farms together by cutting trails in the hills. At first, Kevin would lead with the weed whacker and I would remove the debris. Now, as some of you might know, I have an irrational phobia of spinning sawblades swung close to and in the direction of my person. The motor is pretty loud, so I would have to get right next to Kevin to tell him anything. Every comment would usually lead to him terrifyingly swinging the whole tree-felling apparatus around in order to reply with a helpful “what!?!” I have had sawblade and woodchip related nightmares quite often recently.

Mind you, on this subject I am a total hypocrite. Once I had my chance with the weed whacker, I happily unleashed a fern holocaust on the jungle. I was like a villain from an episode of Captain Planet. Something about having a diesel-powered cutting device in my hands made me want to violate nature. Only pure willpower allowed me to stifle maniacal laughter as I hacked and gouged a trail through the thick underbrush.

Note: sunny photos are not of my hash run

Rain kept many people from the run, but it was still a pretty good time. However, the whole day I was something of a failure as a navigator. The plastic bag of flour I carried to leave a trail for the other runners sprung a leak early in the run. This meant I had to use chalk to mark the path, and chalk washes away pretty quickly in the rain. Nobody got totally lost, but the run was not as clearly marked as it should have been. After the run, my fellow hashers went out of their way to ensure that I got utterly sloshed. I readily obliged, which was fine until I was asked to help everyone reach the restaurant for the bash. Let’s just say that, while we did reach the restaurant, missteps occurred along the way.

This past weekend, I went down to Kenting for the annual music festival. Kenting is a big national park on the southern tip of Taiwan. My friend Kelly planned the trip and organized rental vans for a group of twelve of us to drive down in. Kenting’s music festival itself was nice I’ve heard, but for me and my friends it was just an excuse to go south for a bunch of wild beach parties on a long, two day weekend.

The parties were pretty wild, too. They were concert/dance clubs in these little coves on the beach. Cheap too, since the 7/11 was just down the street so there was no reason not to BYOB. The music was good and the air was filled with the lights from the many amateur fireworks displays launched from either side or within the crowd. I wont go into too many specifics, but the music kept playing until about 7am, I knew people who slept in McDonalds rather than “splurging” for a tent, and at least one of the people I was with ended up passed out on their tent rather than in it. Good times.


Going to the beach is a little odd in Taiwan. I knew from talking to my students and friends that many Taiwanese people are either incapable of swimming or terrified of the ocean. And yet they still go to the beach decked out in swimwear. I was confused about this until my friend Yvette pointed out that they are just taking pictures of themselves. And truly, that was what they did more than anything else I saw. People were posing, smiling, making funny faces, and jumping in the air all so that they could have pictures of themselves doing all those things, at the beach. The pictures were not to remember the trip, instead they were the purpose of the trip. I am sure I must be missing something, but it was a strange spectacle.

Prior to the trip, I had talked to a bunch of people about driving down to Kenting who had done it before. They all warned me about hellish traffic due to people traveling during Tomb-Sweeping Day weekend. They told me to expect to sit in traffic for hours on the trip back on the Sunday after the festival. On the way down around 1am Saturday morning we sat in pretty bad traffic too, which seemed to hint that Sunday would indeed be bad.

So, once in Kenting I spent a decent amount of time wailing like Cassandra and advocating that we delay returning until Monday, or drive north on smaller roads of Taiwan’s east coast rather than the big superhighway that everyone and their mother would be on. I was ignored, and this caused me not a little bit of consternation. Of course, irony of ironies, we hit zero traffic on the drive back. It took us just six and a half hours to drive the length of the island, two hours less than the trip down. I felt like quite the douchebag for making such a fuss the whole weekend. Still, glad I was shown to be wrong.

Friday I am off to China to hang out with my parents. I am sure that trip will arm me with much to talk about. So, more should be coming fairly quickly.