little trouble in big china

I think Urban Chicken WBAGNFARB.

Why, how do you get your trees delivered?

I forgot that I had promised an answer to the bar-club-lounge quiz upon finishing the Yunnan portion of the blog. Are you ready?

There were no acrobats, at least none performing while I was there. The panda was partially explained by the Movie Night theme -- if you came in costume, you got a free trinket -- and the panda was the bar's contribution (Kung Fu Panda is in theatres here). It kept disappearing behind a door, so we think the employees were taking turns inside the big head. Though you can't tell from the photo, this one was dancing suggestively, hence the mildly surprised looks on the faces behind.

As for the other answers: one of the barmen also got up on the club's stage to do some magic tricks, mostly successfully; there were two white guy-Asian woman couples (sitting together); the staggeringly drunk blonde was a bit of a stretch, as she was most definitely drunk and most definitely staggering, but actually only blonde for about 10 minutes while she borrowed a wig from what appeared to be the only customer in attendance to have followed the theme. The dice games were taking place at two of the bottle-service tables, and reminded me of the game that Bootstrap Bill plays in Pirates of the Caribbean.  I asked a woman at one of the tables how to play, but she didn't know and referred me to the bartender standing next to her.

Of course, he seemed to have his hands full administering to something called a Flaming Lamborghini (yep, that blue stream is fire). And once one table had one, all of the other tables had to have them, so he was a little busy. I wasn't familiar with the drink, but it's apparently all the rage on the interwebs. I had thought the bartender told me that it was Kahlua and cognac, but it was loud, and my Chinese liquor vocabulary is mainly limited to the more generic bottles (vodka, whiskey, and the "local"ish maotai jiu), so who knows what they were using here. They like to pile up the pint glasses, though, so it makes for a bigger flame, and there are 4 martini glasses at the bottom so that you can have multiple drinkers leaning in to set their hair on fire, I mean, partake. Frankly, I think it sounds like an awful drink (not being into either coffee or cream, per the online recipes), but it does have quite the visual effect.

Movers, shmovers. Dining set for 8?

A taxi in Shangri-La, that's what. These little oddball cars were all over Shangri-La, though I didn't see them anywhere else. It's pretty funny to watch them do a U-turn. Apparently they're not street-legal in Kunming (nor, I would assume, other moderate-to-large cities), but things in Shangri-La are evidently a bit more lax. I was told they're frequently used as taxis up here.

This isn't the only make and model; there are a number of different ones (a little Googling shows that there is a knockoff 3-wheeled Prius, among others). And they do come in other colors, too.

I don't know if this is an up-and-coming trendy field, but they do some quirky-cool things with escalators over here. In Hong Kong, there are the outdoor commuting escalators, and some half-spiral escalators in at least one mall (I know, San Francisco also has the latter). Other features I've seen in a few places (Beijing, Singapore, possibly here in Shanghai) tie into a question my friend Philip asked a while back -- the most common are energy-saving escalators that shut off when not in use, and activate when someone approaches. Sometimes these are even two-way escalators -- the same escalator will go up or down, depending on the direction of approach (that one was obviously not a particularly heavily-used escalator, and although I wanted to do a trial run to see what happened when two people walked up on opposite ends simultaneously, it didn't happen. Hopefully it's programmed for that eventuality so that it doesn't blow a schizophrenic fuse). Anyway, I think these are all really neat, because I am a nerd.

This is my latest escalator find -- an escalator with a landing! I've decided to name it the "double hill" escalator, after a similarly shaped hill we used to sled down at my old high school. This one is at a new downtown subway stop. It starts out normally, then flattens for the equivalent of about five stairs, then picks back up. The person I was riding with didn't even notice the change until I pointed it out.

Nifty.

Well, I've found internet, but the connection appears to be pretty poor, so this will be a short post in case it never makes it.

I'm spending about a week and a half traveling around Yunnan province, which is in southwestern China -- east of Tibet, south of Sichuan, and north of Vietnam/Laos/Myanmar. There's been some amazing scenery, and even Kunming, the largest city, is markedly different from Shanghai -- more relaxed, less honking, less construction and therefore better air, and not quite as dense (although the city is still 2.5million people, plus 2.5M again in the suburbs).

But never mind the city -- I've been logging some serious highway time getting shuttled from city to sights to city. This is helped by the fact that buses can only go about 60km an hour on the highways, so that a 330km trip today took us about 5 hours. This is normal.

Anyway, I deemed yesterday Rural Domesticated Animal Day. On a 40-min drive between two scenic points, I counted no fewer than 7 horses/donkeys, 27 oxen (including a baby with parents), and about 6 dozen goats, plus approximately one herding dog per dozen goats.

Also, I ate peacock for the first time. It was better in kebab form than in the ground-meat stirfry dish.

That's all I've got for now. With any luck, I'll be able to get this post up and another sometime before the week is out.

I mentioned a while back that there is sometimes little distinction between public and private life here. This applies mostly, if not exclusively, to the locals, and by locals, I (and others) refer mainly to blue-collar workers of a slightly older generation, who have roots in Shanghai and whose living habits have not necessarily changed as the city around them does.

While I tend to be either intrigued or amused (or both) by it, this spillover of private into public has apparently caused other city dwellers some consternation, such as over the topic of wearing pajamas in public.

Let me assure you that while you probably wouldn't see it in any of the main tourist or shopping areas, people wearing their pajamas in public is not exactly an uncommon sight here. In my first couple weeks here, I saw a guy wearing what looked like quilted pajamas. They were marooon, top and bottom, with some beigeish pattern, and he was standing near a driveway. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it, and when I saw a different guy wearing exactly the same outfit in a nearby location a week or so later, I thought maybe it was a uniform. But other sightings since confirm (to my mind, at least) that nope, they were pajamas.

The pajama epidemic seems to be strongest around public parks and among the older generation, but is certainly not limited to those categories. I have also heard that it is primarily a Shanghai thing, although I'm not entirely clear on why the city is special in this respect.

Anyway, my favorites so far have been (a) this guy, whose wheelchair-bound patient/relative is nonetheless dressed "normally", and (b) a woman wearing Mickey Mouse pants that I'm sure Disney intended for home use. To be fair, she was wearing a non-pajamaesque top, so perhaps she doesn't actually consider those nightwear.

"Can I have the one in middle? No, not that one... one more up... the one next to that..."