shanghai marathon

on saturday morning i had to make a presentation in the office, so i woke up very early (for me) and headed out of my hotel at around 7:45am. i had no idea that saturday was the day of the 2004 shanghai international marathon with the course running right past my hotel.

so i walked outside to see an enormous amount of people running by with a group of yellow-suited cheerleaders lined up in front of the hotel, crashing cymbals together and waving red tassles.


it didn't strike me as a marathon at first as the runners were of all ages, running in groups of similarly dressed people. teenagers with backpacks looking like they were late for school, older folks holding large banners, men in their pajamas, men running holding camcorders, and every imagineable type of person was running past. it looked like a parade, except very very fast.

i took a few mpeg movies of the scene and when i was reviewing them earlier this evening i noticed a toddler running amongst the crowd. you can see her jogging (just as fast as everyone else) with her dad in this clip (3451kb).

with so many different types of people participating it looked like a lot of fun. i felt like joining in- with my dress shirt and laptop bag i would have made a nice addition to the ecclectic mix of folks running through the streets.

nanjing donglu

the first weekend i arrived in shanghai i did some exploring in the area around my hotel. there's a large pedestrian shopping street nearby called nanjing donglu (nanjing road west) that's absolutely packed on the weekend.

i took this photo from near remin park looking east. you can see the enormous crowd which walks nanjing donglu- hundreds of thousands of people over the weekend. either side of the road are large department stores, clothing shops, restaurants, coffee shops, and the like.


another view of the same area. the oriental pearl television tower can be seen in the background- it's one of shanghai's best known landmarks. if there's another clear day soon i'll go to the top of the tower and take some photos.


at night the street is lit by an amazing amount of neon and there are still a lot of pedestrians walking back and forth. shortly after i took this photo i stopped by a haagen daaz and wound up having to wait in line outside (behind a red velvet rope) to get in.

proxified

thanks to an internet proxy i'm back online, though i don't know how long it'll last as my first proxy died after about 5 minutes, the second after less time.

haven't been able to post at all as i can still access blogger.com through the great firewall of china but actual posting is blocked. let's see if i can get this post up....

hazy days

i took this photo out of my window at around noon last weekend. there was an incredibly thick haze in the city all weekend- i thought it was pollution but one of our office staff insists it was due to a 'thermal layer inversion'. umm... sounds good to me!

thought police

i've encountered something quite unexpected while using the internet here in china- censorship of a wide variety of websites. i had read something about the blocking of websites here in the past but assumed it'd be something along the lines of what exists in thailand, annoying but not overboard.

so imagine my surprise when i couldn't get a lot of common websites to work and even google was only working sometimes. at first i thought something was wrong with my connection to the internet, as i kept getting an error message instead of a notice like thailand's 'police aleart' (sic) page. here's what the error message looks like:


after reading various websites i realized that this is the china 'great internet firewall' in action. what amazes (and frustrates) me is how arbitrary the censorship is. for example the first google search i did on censorship brought up a bbc article on the china firewall, so i clicked on the link... only to find that the bbc news website is blocked! the irony is that i'm watching bbc world right now on my hotel television, and it's widely available here.

the government even went so far as to ban google a couple of years back, though that didn't last for too long. seems as if the general approach is to ban any domains outright that are too difficult to monitor- i've found that i can't read most of the blog sites out there, including blogspot.com, typepad.com, and blogs.com, though xanga.com seems to be ok.

i just did a search on banned blogger sites in china and i can't read half the results because they're on banned sites. argh!!! found a slashdot entry about the banning, that apparently took place earlier this year putting the blame on some chinese bloggers who tried to slip in banned info onto their blogs.

the most frustrating thing is that so many useful sites, sites that i used every day, are banned here. most google caches are banned. even altavista's babelfish language translation site is banned. argh!!!!!!!!!!!

anyone have any good proxies i can use???

crazy taxis

in bangkok every so often i'd get a mad taxi driver who'd swerve in and out of traffic and in general they drive fast... but it's nothing compared to how taxis drive here.

the drivers seem relatively mild-mannered, but after you've managed to communicate your destination to them (not always easy) it becomes a real-life version of the crazy taxi video game.

swerving around cars, cutting other taxis off, swerving *towards* pedestrians to watch them jump back, careening around intersections, and a whiplashing brake/gas/brake/gas driving style. the only thing slowing the drivers down is the traffic, which can be almost as bad as in bangkok at times.

the good news is that taxis (unlike nearly everything else here) aren't very expensive. on friday i took a taxi about a third of the way across town and it cost me only 14rmb, about 70 baht. also the taxis always use their meter, so no worries about being charged 200 baht to go from silom to sukhumvit, and each taxi prints out receipts!

as far as the crazy driving is concerned, i've learned that the best thing to do is to just not look.

life at the hojo

here's where i've been staying for the past couple of weeks and where i'll be at least through the end of the year. it's the hojo shanghai!


hotels in shanghai are notoriously difficult to book, so when my company told me they couldn't put me into their normal hotel and i'd be in the howard johnson i was prepared for the worst.

in america the howard johnson chain has a reputation for being one step over a motel, somewhere one might stay if driving cross-country and need just a bed and a pillow. you can read about peoples' wonderful hojo adventures here.

so i was surprised to find that the howard johnson is a brand new hotel, doing it's best impression of a 5-star facility. there's a (little used) gym, spa, several restaurants, and the rooms are very nice.

really the only issue has been with the service, as it seems like everyone is still getting used to how things work. room service is a good example, as every time i call it seems like i'm the first person ever to have ordered anything. then there's housekeeping which invariably knocks on my door at around 8am unless i turn my 'do not disturb' light on.

last friday i was settling in for an early night when there was a lot of commotion outside my door. i thought it was some people walking down the hall who had stopped near my room, but i peeped through my door only to find that about a dozen people had rented a single room across from mine and were using it as a staging area before heading out on the down.

they were shouting and carrying on so loudly (with their door open) that i couldn't sleep. all of a sudden they became very quiet so i looked out again to see if they'd left. saw a weird sight of a man standing with his back facing the bathroom door, reminding me very much of alfred hitchcock.


i'm in a very busy part of town, near a major pedestrian shopping street called nanjing donglu. there's really no equivalent in bangkok, though i suppose the closest could be staying on silom road in terms of how busy this area is.

here's a view looking down from my window:


on the bottom-left side of the photo is a dvd store that during the day puts some large speakers outside and blasts an ecclectic mix of western music, ranging from coco lee to ub40. all three buildings at the intersection are apartments and there's a convenience store at the corner which i've used a couple of times.


at night shanghai really puts on a show- most tall buildings are well-lit, not just by ordinary spotlights as with the all seasons buildings in bangkok but with multi-colored lights and neon, often in moving patterns.

even though the building on the right-side isn't in a big intersection it has a series of horizontal lights that change colors from red to green to blue and move in changing patterns.

the architecture here really is amazing- such a mix of contemporary styling and the old ex-colonial architecture. i'll definitely try and take some photos of the more interesting places for you to see.

hello shanghai

i wanted to capture my first impressions of shanghai on here but have been so busy since arriving that i've not had much time to collect my thoughts, yet alone get on the internet and do some blogging.

i arrived on a monday evening and the next couple of days were spent with some bigwigs from our head office who had set up meetings to introduce me to the people here. unfortunately, during the run up to moving i had been working until almost 11pm many nights to try and finish everything so wound up catching an awful cold.

between being sick and being in totally new surroundings, i was in a blur for those first few days. this person does this, that person does that, be sure to fill out these forms for this, next week a customer is arriving and wants to do that, we've got a big problem with this, a new person is arriving on monday, be careful of that, and so on and so on. my head was spinning!

fortunately i got a chance to breathe last weekend and headed out on the town to explore. i'm staying not far from the bund, an old commercial district from the pre-war days and the former 'downtown' before the construction of the last 10 years began. also nearby is a big shopping district and park so there's a lot to see and do within easy walking distance.

without too much analysis, my first impressions of shanghai are:
- a huge city which at first glance seems much more developed than bangkok
- much less dirty than i had expected, everything seems new and (notable, after living in bangkok) the sidewalks are walkable
- the noise. worse than nyc with all of the car horns, sirens, banging and miscellaneous din. my office is on the 16th floor and all day long i can hear the 'symphony of car horn'
- mad taxi drivers. oh yeah, you thought bangkok taxis were bad? you ain't seen nothing yet!
- the city is completely lit up at night with many buildings having colored lights, advertising, spotlights, and so on- the overall look is ecclectic but nice
- shanghai is a city of opportunity. seems as if this is where everyone is coming to make their fortune
- much less of a developed foreign community than i had expected. i'm amazed at what's lacking here- there doesn't appear to be a decent bookstore at all, and certain items (like deodorant) must be shipped in
- everything is new but the service often isn't there. every time i use the room service in my hotel it's as if i'm the first person to call
- beautiful architecture. all over town there are old houses dating back to the old 'colonial' days that are in remarkably good condition. these are being turned into restaurants, bars, and new residences. the streets are broad and lined with trees, very nice.
- i'm not used to the currency yet, so i wind up converting everything into baht (multiply by 5) as it's easier than converting into dollars (divide by 8)

as a whole it's bigger, cleaner, and newer than bangkok. but i've got to say it's missing a certain personality that bangkok definitely had- it's like the framework is there but it's not filled out yet. and of course part of it is i'm missing all of my friends back there as i don't yet know anyone here outside of work.

khit-tung pratheet thai!