Category: Luce2016
Shanghai!

This was my first bullet train experience in any country. It felt like riding on an airplane, except, you know, you could see hills and towns and streams as you whipped past. We also got glimpses of the massive high-rise building projects China undertakes in remote towns — the half-finished bones of skyscrapers rose from otherwise quiet squares. It was a terrible pollution day in Beijing on Friday, so it was fun to gradually emerge from the cloud of smog — and somewhat terrifying to see how far the cloud extended out into the country.
Quick geography lesson: Shanghai is divided along the Huangpu river; Puxi is the western part, and Pudong is the eastern part. Puxi has historically been the heart of the city — “I’d rather have a bed in Puxi than a room in Pudong” was apparently a common refrain of yesteryear (this is the only thing I retained from our bus tour) — but Pudong is now the financial center and is its own kind of impressive. More on that in a second. We stayed in a Puxi neighborhood called Xintiandi, which is sort of right between the Bund the colonial/art deco part of the city that hugs the river and the part of the French Concession that actually looks French.
Here’s the view from our hotel:
Our biggest lesson that first night was learning that Shanghai restaurants shut down early — at 9:30 p.m., everything serving local fare seemed to be shuttered. This is in sharp contrast with Beijing, where you can find restaurants and street vendors turning out snacks into the wee hours. Our friend Ami, a food writer whose parents live in Shanghai, told us not to bother with the non-Shanghainese regional Chinese in Shanghai; it’s better in Beijing. We ill-advisedly ignored her suggestion and had a feast of mediocre Sichuan food only to be filled with regret.
Western food, on the other hand, she recommended highly, and while we still feel a smidge guilty about eating non-Chinese foodstuffs in this country on the other side of the world, we took her cocktail bar recommendation and had a couple of drinks at Union Trading Company in the French Concession. You know the type. Well-mixed classics, house creations made with weird ingredients like mustard and banana, denim-aproned and be-vested bartenders, low lights, soundtrack that blends indie and motown, rare whiskey on the backbar, inside jokes. As Rob says, “This is like every bar we go to in Brooklyn.” Drinks were good, though, and maybe a wee bit cheaper than they are in Kings County (but not much!).
Pro-tip for anyone trying to see all of Shanghai in a weekend: consider buying a bus tour ticket on the City Sightseeing bus tour (not to be confused with the much more expensive, and likely much more informative, Big Bus bus tour). We spent 50 kuai each (less than $10) for two days worth of transportation among Shanghai’s highlights — we could jump on and off the bus whenever we pleased, and we could switch bus lines. This was way more economical than taking a cab, and cabs are cheap. Just don’t expect to come away incredibly informed. The English audio tour channel occasionally filtered through in Chinese, which didn’t matter much, because insights were fairly surface level.

And now, because this post is very long, a list of other Shanghai highlights:
This massive row of photographers agrees:


In the tourist market, we met a very nice Chinese man who asked us for recommendations about where to go in Boston, New York, and Washington D.C. After we talked to him for awhile, he warned us not to talk to Chinese people at the market, because they would take us to a bar and rob us. Then he invited us to a bar. And we were like, is that what you’re trying to do? He didn’t rob us, thankfully. He seems to have actually just been nice.
-M50: This is the Shanghai arts district. The Beijing arts district is larger and more renowned, likely because Beijing attracts more artists. But we did duck into a few cool contemporary galleries, and we happened upon an opening at a really cool space — Island 6, mayhaps? Also, the streets and buildings themselves were interesting — warehouse-y and labyrinthine.
Our biggest surprise treat of the weekend was the pan fried soup dumplings we picked up on the street one morning. These have thicker bottoms than the steamed version, and they get nicely crisped in a well-seasoned pan. You get the same savory deluge of pork soup plus the juicy meatball, but with a nice textured bite of fried dough. Hello, beautiful.
Lowlights:
-Heading to the restaurant M Shanghai because the patio’s view of Pudong came so highly recommended, and then deciding it was too hot to sit on the patio. And getting roped into spending a fortune on brunch anyway. (Note, if you are reading this for Shanghai ideas: do not make our mistake. Go during an off hour and have a cocktail and a pavlova and call it a day.) But at least we got that photo up top out of the deal! That was good for a few Instagram likes!
-Knowing that restaurants close early in Shanghai, and so hauling ass to a Shanghainese restaurant to dine before it closed, only to get turned away because the kitchen had closed long before the restaurant did. Unfortunately, this meant we also screwed ourselves out of eating at any other Shanghainese restaurant, too. Hence our lack of experience with Shanghainese food and our abundance of experience with mediocre restaurants. Night two, we hit Boxing Cat Brewery, where the beer was quite good, but we could have done without the pizza.
-Not going to the National Museum, despite the fact that it’s supposed to have some really good Chinese artifacts, because the line was an hour long each day. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
-Enduring the swamp-like heat and humidity, and the frequent torrential downpours. Apparently, August is not the best time to go to Shanghai.
And now for a discussion of Shanghai vs. Beijing: You likely know that Beijing is the country’s cultural and political center, while Shanghai is the financial hub. Shanghai has had more western influence than Beijing, at least in fairly recent history — after the Opium Wars in the 1800s, it became (by force) a trading hub with the West, and foreigners moved in to areas like the French Concession, a piece of the city that was given up to the French for development (I’m sort of glossing over the history here, so Wikipedia at your leisure). It served as sort of a gateway between the East and the West until China kicked out the foreigners after the revolution.
Shanghai was one of the first cities to really open up under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, and it got a head start on development in the ’90s. It now attracts finance types from all over the world: the very first thing we noticed about the city is that it feels much more globalized than Beijing — most people seem to speak English, and foreigners are everywhere.
Beijing, by contrast, attracts expats interested in politics and culture — there are a lot of writers, artists, and chefs here, as well as people working in think tanks, NGOs, and consulting firms with a regulatory or political bent. They’re also further and farther between — the expats cluster in a few key areas in Beijing, but even there, they’re mixed into Chinese neighborhoods. That doesn’t seem to be quite so in Shanghai.
Not that Beijing is a backwater. In the lead-up to the Olympics (and in the years after), the city gutted old sections of its city to erect new buildings, built a massive subway system, and propelled itself at lightning speed to the modern metropolis it is today. In fact, we’ve heard a few long-time Beijingers say, noses wrinkled in disgust, that Beijing is becoming more like Shanghai, and it seems fated to continue this trajectory, especially since it just won the winter Olympics. It also happens to have some of China’s most famous old sites — the Great Wall, the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, the Lama Temple — some of which are actually located in the center of the city, engendering a bit of a preservation of Chinese flavor and culture amid all that new architecture.
Our own thoughts? Only hasty conclusions. We feel like we made the right choice to go to Beijing — Shanghai feels a bit like it could be anywhere in the world, only there are more people there, and crowds give me anxiety attacks. But we’d like to explore Shanghai more at some point, if only to eat more soup dumplings and see the National Museum. And hey! It’s only a five-hour bullet train ride away.
Here, look at a couple more photos:


The Written Word + a Chinese Name
This stands in contrast with my experience with learning Spanish — that was more like an academic pursuit, and I treated my semester in Argentina as a means to solidify my skills. Learning Chinese like this has shown us how language is inextricably linked to culture and society — language really frames everyday life in a way that’s hard to think about when you’re operating in your native tongue. Beijing’s rhythm and feel comes, in large part, from the way people talk to each other.
As a bonus, learning THIS language is doubly rewarding: In addition to spoken Chinese, we’re learning a whole new alphabet, or, more accurately, system of writing, for written Chinese is actually a series of glyphs. Signs are slowly becoming less cryptic — we still can’t understand those things, but we can usually pick out a character or two, and we’re beginning to understand how written Chinese is organized.
Though reading seemed like a necessity, I didn’t have a lot of interest in learning to write Chinese before I came here. But today, one of my Chinese teachers did a calligraphy lesson with me, and I gained a new perspective on these little works of art. See, each character corresponds with one syllable, and often, one character represents a whole word. Some characters look like the words they represent. Mouth, for instance, looks like this: 囗 Not impossible to imagine that’s a mouth, right? Right. Others have little connection. This is the character for good or well: 好 The bits of that character break down into woman and child. A tenuous connection at best.
Anyway, when you see those characters printed in some blocky font, or even scribbled with a pen, they don’t seem all that special. Or at least, they didn’t seem all that special to me — more like a means to an end. Once I can decipher these characters, I’ll be able to figure out what the heck that sign says, I thought. But calligraphy really beautifies those suckers, and I suddenly had an intense appreciation for the characters themselves. This writing system was standardized more than 2,000 years ago, and its roots probably go back three millenia. Sure, it’s evolved a bit since then — in an effort to improve literacy and make the script easier to understand, for instance, mainland China simplified the glyphs in the 20th century, so characters are stripped down from their traditional forms (Taiwan still uses traditional characters).
I learned to write my Chinese name today, which is Shàng yi lán (尚伊兰). Shàng is a transliteration of my last name. My teacher says yi means “pretty girl,” but my dictionary translates it as a formal pronoun for “she.” Lán means lily magnolia, but really, this is a house plant we know as a spider plant. My teacher says it’s one of four symbolic plants in China; it represents a person who always does nice things. Nice AND pretty! It’s like I paid her!
I also learned to write mín yǐ shí wéi tiān 民以食为天, which is a saying that loosely translates to “food is the most important thing in the world.” Yes. Yes it is.
Here’s a photo of my handiwork, my teacher, and her handiwork. Her (much more beautiful) banner has the characters of those four aforementioned plants (plum blossom, magnolia lily, bamboo, and chrysanthemum). She gave it to me as a gift because she is the nicest.

Scootin’

As mentioned previously, Rob loves the bus. And so we take the bus to most of the places we go to in Beijing. But the apartment we’re currently subletting also comes with a bicycle and e-scooter (basically a low-speed electric motorcycle) — and so we thought maybe we’d scoot around town, too, especially when we’re running too late for the bus (which, you’re probably not surprised, is frequently).
The first time we scooted across a couple of avenues, it felt really daring — wind in our hair, we zipped past bicycles and weaved in and out of traffic until we jauntily dismounted at our destination.
But then we took the bike to school this morning and realized we might have been in awe of the novelty more than anything. We’re not small people, you see, and when we both sit on this wee e-scooter, we practically crush its shocks into the ground. And then we give it a bit of gas, and it whines its way up to full speed, which is approximately 22 kph (13.67 mph). I like to imagine it weeping under our full body weight. I also like to imagine that we look like a couple of circus bears sharing a unicycle, a sentiment that was confirmed by the dude on a shiny blue scooter giving us the unabashed amused yet judgmental stare when we paused at a light.
Anyway, to add insult to injury in all of this, this morning we were passed by a fat man with a sweaty crotch. He was riding a bicycle.
Zoop zoop.
Here’s a video of our friend Nick passing us on his bike:
Bears on a bike. from Rob Christensen on Vimeo.
(Although, the rusty spring noises are from his bike.)

Here’s where we had lunch today
The Wilds of Inner Monglia
This seems like a bold move, leaving Beijing this early in our adventure, especially considering we haven’t even been to, oh, the Great Wall yet. But we were invited by the Beijing Farmers’ Market to visit some herders, which sounded awesome, and so early one morning last week, we found ourselves crammed into a seven person van with nine people for a six-hour voyage to Xilinhot, where we’d spend the night and then continue on from to smaller towns up near the Mongolian border.
Xilinhot is a growing city, and we spent some time wandering around a new mall, where we bought essentials: instant coffee and Great Wall wine (made in China!). Buying that wine is also how we learned that everywhere in China is BYO — and later in the trip, we learned that you can carry your beer out on to the street after dinner. High five.
Anyway, the highlight of the temple was to climb the stairs to the shrine covered in prayer shawls, which we did at sunset.
Day two, we cruised up north to a small village called Ejin Noor, where we spent most of the rest of our time. A rancher gave us a tour of his land, which included:
3. Meeting our tour guide’s brothers, who rode in on ponies. These guys were wearing some killer boots. They rounded up a herd of camels for us so we could take turns sitting on them. Here’s Rob sitting on a camel:
We also drank a lot of milk tea, which tastes sort of like watered down hot chocolate, except salty. The pro move is to float some biscuity puffs in it, or maybe a cheese brick or two. This also has the nice effect of softening the cheese, which can be as hard as hard candy.
Feels like it’s conclusion time, so I guess the moral of this story is that Inner Mongolia was wild — in many ways, literally so, for there’s still a nomadic spirit, even if the people aren’t actually nomadic anymore. It provided an intense contrast with the international sensibility of Beijing, and we got a great first taste of life in other provinces. And should you ever spy Inner Mongolian lamb or yogurt, buy that stuff immediately. It’s good.
Here are some more photos:











Here’s where we learn Mandarin.
The Best Thing I’ve Learned in Chinese So Far
We Live in China!
Let’s start here: China is basically nothing like what we expected. It’s really hard to explain what we mean by this, because we had little idea what China was going to be like, and we tried to come into this experience without any preconceived notions. But we sort of thought maybe it would be a little like New York City’s Chinatown/Flushing — sidewalks so thick with people you want to windmill people out of your way, a little run down, a little dirty, full of delicious food. Beijing is full of delicious food, that’s true, and some parts of the city (read: the tourist parts) are teeming with people. BUT. Beijing is SPOTLESS. Like, seriously, maybe the cleanest large city (outside of Germany) I, Laura, have ever been to. Our program director also said it’s deceptively not foreign, and based on our admittedly limited experience, I think that’s an excellent descriptor. Architecturally (well, maybe besides the hutongs — more on that in a hot sec), it feels like it could be in America. It feels oddly familiar in several other ways, too. It even runs at a similar rhythm — more similar to the U.S. than much of Europe is similar to the U.S. (I find much of Europe runs at a very…whimsical…pace.) Except that China has better public transportation — trains and buses are easy to use, clean, and always on time.
Here are the answers to a few pertinent questions coupled with some first impressions:
1. We’re dealing with the smog just fine, thank you. Probably the question we got most when we said we were moving to Beijing was, “How are you going to deal with the pollution?” We felt ignorant, because we did not know if the pollution would be sort of like grim New York winter or sunny but hazy Los Angeles day. It seems fitting, then, that our very first impression of China was actually pollution-related: As the plane touched down, we asked each other, “Clouds or smog?” Smog, dear reader, smog. On par with grim New York winter or San Francisco fog, only, you know, not exceptionally healthy for the lungs. We even started calling the sun the day star because it was so hard to see (hat tip to Nick, the other Luce scholar in China, for that one). HOWEVER. On day three, when we dipped into a brewery (there are a lot of those here — come get down on some craft beer) on another smoggy day, the bartender said, “Don’t you find that all the worry about pollution is seriously overblown?” We could not fathom that at that very second, since we were busting out the masks the Asia Foundation gave us to wear on bad pollution days. BUT. 24 hours later, a huge rainstorm and a good deal of wind blew the smog out, and on day five, we got a glorious crystal clear day (see that photo of us above for proof). AND. It stayed that way for many days, then got a little smoggy, then clear again. So the jury is out, but it does seem that the nice days are frequent, possibly even more frequent than the bad ones. And Beijing is BEAUTIFUL beneath the azure sky. Poetry-inspiring, even.
In daily life, we have an air quality app on our phones that tells us when to go for a run because the air is good (we mostly ignore that) and when to mask up because the air is bad (we mostly obey that, or stay inside).
Oh and as for the written language, we’re slowly decoding it, but rightthisverysecond, we know somewhere between 24 (Laura) and 50 (Rob) symbols. That’s enough to pick out about two, maybe three characters on a sign or menu, if we’re lucky, some of which are part of a two-symbol word that we miss entirely. So, you know, not entirely helpful. Laura’s practical grasp of this part of the language extends to looking at characters and thinking, “not noodles, not noodles, not noodles, NOODLES!!” We did learn the symbol for organ meat, however, and that was very helpful in informing our choices at restaurants.
Before we got here, we had our hearts set on living in the hutong houses, which are the traditional courtyard homes set among winding alleys littered with bars and restaurants. It feels like many cool things happening in Beijing are happening in the courtyards — Sanlitun is, like, Chelsea or Soho or Tribeca (i.e. established and kind of expensive), while the hutongs are, say, Williamsburg (maybe Williamsburg five years ago) or Crown Heights or Bushwick around the Morgan stop (do you resent my New York references yet?). POPPIN’, in other words. Problem is, hutongs can actually be quite expensive, especially if you want one that’s, oh, insulated (essential in the Beijing winters; I sorta think people’s perception of how cold the winter is here correlates directly with whether they have to live in a drafty hut during the cold snaps). So the hunt — and debate — continues. We’ll keep you posted!
4. But what will we do for fun, you ask? Same thing we always do, as it turns out. For example: our first friend here (besides the other Lucer, Nick, and some former Lucers who are possibly contractually bound to be our friends) is the food editor at one of the weekly papers. And so on day seven of our intrepid voyage into lands unknown, we ate a very large meal and drank Zweigelt (nice Austrian red wine) at a very trendy and new Austrian restaurant so that our new friend could write about it for her job, which is basically the same as my old job at the Village Voice. So yeah, even on our own, with no professional requirements, mostly we eat. Often, we drink, at aforementioned craft breweries and divier places, and we hear there’s a burgeoning cocktail scene here, too, though we have yet to check out the flagships of that movement. Sometimes we even eat Mexican food, like on the 4th of July. It exists here! As another Lucer said, good thing we didn’t blow our shipping stipend on that! Also, we go to cafes, including a place called Rager Pie, which has nitro cold brew and American-style pie. And sometimes we go see art — 798 is an artist district sort of like the Chelsea galleries (Pace, which also has a Chelsea location, is even there) that’s also full of bars and coffee shops. Ai Wei Wei’s new studio is out in another burgeoning gallery district called Caochangdi; that neighb is comparable to way-out-there Bushwick — grittier and not so developed yet. We’ve been to each of those places. I suspect we’ll go back to each. Probably frequently. We’re also knocking off the tourist attractions — more on those in another post, because I promised not 55,000 words — and we hang out with the farmers’ market crew a fair bit (we went to Inner Mongolia with them…again, another post). We went bowling with them, which was fun, because most of them had never been bowling. Also, the bowling alley had shoes in Rob’s size (huge), which we considered a miracle (our Chinese friends agreed).
Here are some things we like here so far: The line-dancing grandmas that take over public spaces at twilight and dawn, the bus (Rob loves the bus…loves it; we’re barely allowed to use the subway), the courtyard houses, realizing we know more Chinese than we did yesterday, the feeling that new things are happening all the time — and people are genuinely excited about them, the babies wearing pants with a slit in the butt (no diapers!), the craft beer, the cheap beer, street snacks, all the Sichuan restaurants, okay almost all the food actually, the lettered exits of the subway so you know exactly where to meet someone, the bike culture, the wind because it gets rid of the pollution.
Okay, okay. I think that’s enough for now. Here! Some photos of our first days! Come visit us.





