little trouble in big china

I finally made it to the Shanghai Aquarium. It's a pretty good aquarium, with a decent-sized underwater tunnel, lots of sharks and a decent diversity of other creatures, good signs, etc. But it turned out to also be an excellent place to observe non-aquatic creatures -- in this case, Chinese tour groups.

My second Shanghai sightseeing partner, Matt, and I were taking our time ambling through the first floor of exhibits and had just reached a large, open circular area with big ground-to-waist-height tanks (like the one in the picture at bottom) along half the perimeter. Matt had apparently just been about to comment on how he hoped the aquarium saw enough business to stay afloat, as through two special exhibit rooms we'd seen only a couple handfuls of other people (which was fine by me, since it obviated the need to jockey for space when reading the signs). Before he could vocalize this, though, there was a sudden clamor from the direction of the entrance escalators. Like a train, you can usually hear a Chinese tour group coming before you see it.

Within a few seconds, we found ourselves in the middle of a river of (possibly overseas-) Chinese tourists. The leader was a short woman holding the obligatory tour-group flag (this is common to most Asian tours, in my experience -- the group leader holds the flag aloft so that everyone can look up for the brightly colored piece of cloth rather than crane about for the top of someone's head) and squawking rapidly, only she wasn't so much leading as standing near the top of the escalators and barking out something I couldn't understand.

This was okay because the tour members -- all distinguishable by the matching red baseball caps they sported -- didn't seem to have any interest in being led. The first ones off the escalator strode quickly towards the first tank, and then swiftly around the room, barely stopping, but nonetheless managing to keep up a steady stream of oohing, aahing, and generally excited chatter. I'm pretty sure the first batch of thirty or so had made it completely around the room and had headed off into the rainforest section (at the barking behest of the tour leader, still at her escalator post) before the tail end had even gotten past the entry turnstile.

Matt and I had by now stepped back out of the river and into the center of the room to watch the entertainment. The stream kept coming -- every time there was a small break that we thought might signal the end of the line, another gaggle of red hats emerged into the atrium. The middle and back of the pack contained those sightseers not trying to qualify for the Senior Olympics, but they still moved at a good pace -- a few stopped to pose for pictures in front of some of the tanks, but for the most part it was a line in continual motion. Nobody strayed, nobody skipped around; they just beelined from escalator to first tank, clockwise around the room, and out the door. I would guess that there were at least a hundred people in the tour, and from first to last, with some stragglers scrambling back for pictures at the first tank, they managed to do a complete sweep of the place in less than ten minutes. A very raucous ten minutes, mind you (imagine the sound of indecipherable cocktail chatter, but at 80 decibels). I'm pretty sure they made it through the entire building before we even got to the second floor. At any rate, by the time we moved on to the rainforest area, they were out of hearing range, and we neither saw nor heard them again.

Apart from that adventure, I still can't get over the way aquarium glass only goes up to waist height here. I keep waiting for some American tourist to walk up and stick his or her hand in to try to pet the crocodile/fish/turtle (the shark tanks are in fact fully covered, except for the one where you actually are allowed to pet the animals).

I play basketball a couple times a week with a local women's rec club. I might have more to say about that in another post, but for now it's just to explain that I've had ample opportunity to scope out the public basketball-court scene. We've been rained out a lot lately, but before the Olympics began (I'll be curious to see if things have changed post-Games), I took note of the sampling of jerseys on display: on any given day, there are usually a good number of NBA jerseys, perhaps a sprinkling of Team USA or Chinese-pro-team shirts, and once a clubmate pointed out a Chinese-university uniform (she also noted that it wasn't a very good university, though I'm not sure whether she meant for education or basketball).

No one wears a Yao Ming jersey.

No, really. I've seen Stackhouse (Wizards edition), Pierce, Iverson (Philly), several Jordans and Kobes, LeBron, some generic team uniforms featuring neither name nor number, and even a Bird. Bird!! I would wager that the guy wearing it could not have been school age when Bird was still playing, but there was big ol' number 33 on display on a Shanghai court. But no Yao Mings. Which I thought was funny, since they do seem to love him here. When I asked another clubmate about it, she laughed a little and confessed that she prefers Kobe, then conjectured that people might just not like Yao's playing style.

Poor Yao. You have a season-ending injury, and then your hometown fans (he's actually from Shanghai) don't want to buy your jersey. And somehow I doubt it'll be more prevalent after the Chinese team's Olympic flameout.

These are the other (xiao long bao) Shanghai dumplings I mentioned. They have a thinner, less bread-like skin, and you dunk (or douse) them in vinegar before consuming. They're only steamed, no frying involved, but I would hesitate to call them a health food. Still, they're delightful. I actually like these better than the sheng jian bao, but it's just a personal preference. I'd definitely take either over most of the other food here!

I believe I've confessed that Shanghainese cuisine is not all that much to my liking. As with all good rules, however, there are exceptions. In this case, little meat-and-soup-stuffed exceptions.

Along with various seafood dishes (hairy crabs in the autumn), the fatty pork, and the overuse of sugar, salt, and oil, this part of China is also known for a couple kinds of dumplings: xiao long bao and sheng jian bao. They're both soup dumplings, but not the kind where the dumpling is served in soup -- in these cases, the broth is actually inside the dumpling. Both are traditionally made with pork, but you can sometimes get different meat or seafood fillings.

The little white bumps in the giant wok at the foreground of this picture are sheng jian bao. The outer skin is a thick dough; inside is a ground-pork meatball, and the resulting broth from its cooking inside the dough. The dumplings are both steamed and pan-fried, which means the dough is soft on top, crispy on bottom (and good for holding in the soup). The amount of soup in the dumpling is significant, or "enough to squirt all over your shirt if you're not paying attention."

The way most people eat both of these kinds of dumplings is to bite a small opening in the skin, let the steam escape and the soup cool a bit, and then consume. Biting straight into the dumpling usually results in either a seriously burned tongue, or soup flying in one or more directions (if you're lucky, merely leaking down onto your plate).

I took this photo on a food street where this little stall does so much business that it cloned itself, such that there are two of the same shop within about 20 metres of each other, both with long (but fast-moving!) lines. It takes the army of 5 or 6 dumpling makers behind the server to just about keep up with the pace of the line, but given the limited space in there (there's also the actual cook just to the right of the photo), it's a very smooth operation. And the dumplings are... mmmm, dumplings. 

I met this guy Oliver in here. He couldn't get enough of the stuff.

See, I go and say that there aren't any more Vietnam posts coming, and then I realize that I never mentioned the new "Vietnam" tab at the top of the page, which has more random images and commentary from that trip. Duh.

I'm still working on getting some more driving-in-Vietnam photos up, but am otherwise back to posting about Shanghai, seeing as that was originally the point of the blog and all.

You may have heard that there is a major sporty festival going on in China right now. I like watching sports, and I am glad to be free of inane American commentary (the Chinese commentary may be equally inane, but it's generally too fast for me to catch, so it doesn't bother me), and it is also quite hot here, so I have probably logged more hours in front of the television in the past week than in the rest of my time here combined.

As is the case in the US, the vast majority of coverage is given to events where domestic athletes are expected to do well. Luckily, China has many athletes competing in many events, so this is not too much of a constraint. I have, however, watched more weightlifting, riflery, archery, fencing, handball, badminton, and table tennis than ever before. The Chinese really like table tennis. And weightlifting. And basketball, which makes me feel bad that their team is having a tough time.

They also like Michael Phelps.

I'm back! Apologies for the disappearing act -- I took off for a few days, not to Beijing, as one might expect, but to the middle of the country. I met up with a friend who's over for the Olympics, and we took a 4-day cruise down the Yangzi to see the famous Three Gorges and the infamous Three Gorges Dam.

The gorges are pretty cool, but I don't know whether I'd say they're China's best scenery. It's a big country; there's a lot of scenery. Also, this isn't the best season to see it -- lots of summer rain also means lots of fog, and very muddy water (more so than usual, if the tour guides are to be believed). However, there are still some very good sights.

I was most interested in the "hanging coffins" found in the rock cliffs along the river. They're believed to have belonged to the Ba people who lived in the area around 500BCE, and to this day no one knows for sure how they got the freaking coffins up there (context: from the bottom of the picture to the bottom of the treeline is roughly 20m, and the water level until a few years ago was 60m below the bottom border). Many of the coffins have been removed and put in museums or are being studied, but a few have been left behind, I suppose either for posterity, tourism, or because they're too hard to get to and not in any danger of being reached by flooding (the guides point out the ones that you can see from the river). Some of the coffins are in what look deep enough to be called caves, while others are squeezed into a sort of three-sided tunnel indentation on the cliff face. In some places a bar (wood or bamboo; it was too far away to tell) is placed across the cave opening, presumably to keep the coffin from falling out.

These coffins don't actually hang; I think they're just called that because the practice wasn't exclusive to the Ba -- they just get lumped in with other ancient peoples' high-coffin practices, some of which date back to 3000BCE, and include such sights as coffins lodged on stakes driven into cliff walls. Anyway, they were neat.

[Right: View from the "Observation" Deck]

On our last day, we went to see the monstrous Three Gorges Dam. It's 600 feet high and 1.4 miles long (NB: Wikipedia disagrees with me on the height by half, but that's what we were told and what the Chinese embassy has to say on the matter). I'd elaborate more on what that kind of scale looks like in person, but it was raining so heavily -- I was very soggy after walking up to the hindered-observation tower --  that we couldn't even see all the way across it. There were many generators, and it was very large. Take my word for it.

A couple instances of crossing the street in Saigon -- I hope they work, since I can't check them from here! Your player isn't broken in the second one; the video really is only about a second long, because both my camera and I were too slow to start recording. I thought it went well with the post title, though, so I put it up anyway.

There's a huge, intricate tunnel network outside of Saigon, known as the Cu Chi tunnels, that was used extensively by Viet Minh/Viet Cong forces during the French and American wars. Imagine an ant farm, with all of its routes and levels, for humans -- it's a pretty incredible display of labor and determination: the tunnels totaled over 200km in length, over multiple stories, and included features such as medical rooms, sleeping rooms, and underwater entrances with trapdoors.

Trapdoors were also the way in and out of the tunnels -- small and concealed by brush, they made it easy for the Vietnamese to disappear in mid-pursuit. Not all of the trapdoors were entrances, though; the guerillas also developed a large assortment of booby traps, samples of which are on display at the tunnels.

Pretty much all of the traps involve some form of lever or pivot, and spikes that come hurtling or snapping at you (or you into them, as at right); you can probably figure out the differences from their names. There are the clipping armpit trap, the door trap, the leg trap, and the window trap, among others. I forget the name of this one, but it's basically a see-sawing floor trap. Guess what's on the other side of the leaves -- yep, lots of pain.

Most of the network was pretty well bombed out by the end of the American war, but portions have been reconstructed and opened to tourists. Our group of about 15 was given the opportunity to traverse what I think was 100m of tunnel. A few of the more claustrophobic (or injured) chose the surface route, while most at least descended to see what it was like, but exited at one of the first two (of four) opportunities. The tunnel we entered started out as you see in the picture -- probably a bit under four feet tall, and reasonably wide. With a line of people between you and the exits, it was uncomfortably hot and humid, and that's coming from someone who likes heat and humidity. By the time we reached the last 20m, there were only four of us still remaining in the darkness (the guide had gotten too far ahead and taken the light with him), crawling in a much more compressed -- both narrower and shorter -- space. There were Vietnamese soldiers who spent months in those tunnels, but it took no more than five to ten minutes for some members of our group to start freaking out.