Category: Eric

It’s a rainy Monday in Shanghai. We were lucky to get invited on a special tour by our friend Patrick, a tour of historic Shanghai that Patrick built around the life story of Mrs. X, who is our fellow traveler for the day. She is an American citizen of Russian descent who was born in Shanghai in 1940. Patrick led us to the buildings where she lived as a child, the private french school she attended, and other important historic landmarks. It was a fascinating day, made vibrant by Patrick’s extensive knowledge of Shanghai history and Mrs. X herself telling us memories of her childhood.

So much of Shanghai has changed in the past 60 years; Mrs. X was a 10 year old girl when her family fled Shanghai in 1949.

Eric and Eric and I ended the day with a delicious hot pot dinner at a neighborhood spot.

Sunday night Eric Lee insisted that we take him to the Sichuan restaurant that we had been raving about, so we did. We got the TUB of fish soup again, plus two new dishes: a stirfried tofu and pork dish, plus a wilted lettuce dish. Neither were as hot as the Sichuan green beans had been the previous night, but they were still nice and spicy and really delicious. I thought the tofu dish was especially good as it was stir-fried in chili oil and spices together with great big slices of pork belly (with the skin on) which kind of looked like the slices of tofu, but definitely did not taste like tofu. Even with three people, we still couldn’t finish the fish soup. The same young man waited on us, although he seemed preoccupied with his cell phone, so his younger sister ended up doing most of the work and was much more attentive. The check came to 101 yuan (about $15 for the three dishes and three bottles of beer), and we tried to tip the sister 10 yuan (about $1.40), and she absolutely positively would have nothing to do with that. We could NOT give her a tip. Period.

After we left the restaurant, Eric headed to the apartment while Alison and I doubled back to a clothing store we’d passed on our way to the restaurant because we’d seen that they had pajamas on display, and we wanted to buy some pajamas. Why buy pajamas? Apparently Shanghai and the Shanghailanders are famous for wearing pajamas all the time, including out on the street during the day. Plus we will be spending two nights on a train in the next few days, and it seemed appropriate to have some pajamas available to slip into for the ride.

Sure enough, the place was still open, and they had exactly the kind of pajamas we were looking for — the kind meant for locals, not the kind meant for tourists. However, the saleswoman took one look at me and shook her head when we held up the style I liked. She turned to the stacks of extra stock and found what she was looking for: the same style, but she held up the label and said, very slowly while pointing to the size: “Extra Extra Large!” I didn’t know that I was a giant, but I guess I am.

Alison did not have to get a giant size, and now we are very happy with our new pajamas, especially mine because in addition to having a very domestic design, they also exhibit the nonsense English phrases that are common on t-shirts all around the city.

Eric Lee biked all over central Shanghai while we were shopping at the Market; needless to say he worked up quite an appetite, so we took Eric north of our apartment to the string of street food shops we’d been using to get breakfast bao and tofu in hot sauce. One of the stands had an empty table, so we ducked in and ordered “jiaozi” — dumplings — and two “pijiu” — beers — for a quick and satisfying lunch. 21 Yuan = $3.

Patrick and Tina invited us to go shopping with them at their local “wet market” where we could stock up on supplies for a meal or two. We met in front of a park across the street from the US Consulate where a group of women were doing their tai chi exercises, and a group of men were selling local specialty roots and shoots from the back of a mini-scooter. On to the market where we ate a few of the local Shanghai bao dumplings fresh off the grill, then explored a two story market building, from preserved meats and eggs, through fresh fish, vegetables, noodles, dried fruits and spices, and more. So much more that it would be ridiculous to post all of my pictures here, therefore you’ll have to visit my Picasa album to see them all.

Patrick picked us up in a taxi at 6:30pm and we were off on a wild rodeo ride through the Friday night streets of Shanghai. We inched and bucked our way toward The Bund, Patrick explained that the word was not English or German, but from the Urdu term for “embankment.” It is, simply, a collection of architectural piles on the western bank of the Huanpu River, a famous symbol of the city as well as a trenchant reminder of it’s colonial past.

But we had come not to look at The Bund, but to look from The Bund, specifically from M On The Bund, at the symbols of the new Shanghai: skyscrapers featuring light shows, and haute western cuisine. The scenery from the balcony overlooking the Huangpu on this warm and breezy September night was amazing, and the food more than matched it.
Continue reading “M on the Bund” →

Our friend Eric will join us today, and he asked that we arrange to brew our own coffee in the mornings (one of the perks of being in an apartment as opposed to a hotel room). So this morning I walked out to the local coffee spot, “The Coffee Bean”, which by no coincidence is in a group of restaurants that includes a Mexican restaurant and an Italian restaurant. At a table outside sat three VERY American looking dudes chatting in English: “…good to see Dave at xxxxx last night…” Inside I was greeted with a “Good morning!” from the Chinese staff. I ordered a large coffee and a small latte: 49 yuan. Then I picked up an 8 oz package of coffee beans, which they ground for me: 98 yuan. At about $15 for 100 yuan, that’s $30/pound.

So in the space three minutes I spent more on coffee than we spent on food all day yesterday, which included buying a bunch of fruit for breakfasts this week. To put it in another context, in the book “Oracle Bones” we learn about several of the Chinese students that Peter Hessler taught English to, who graduated to become English teachers themselves. At one student’s first job they were paid 100 yuan a month.

Coffee, it turns out, is a luxury item in China.

Tonight we ventured “outside our comfort zone” as Alison said when we returned from dinner. What that means is that we visited a restaurant with no English on the menu at all. It was a little (seven table) restaurant specializing in Sichuan food that the apartment owner pointed out to us as she walked us around the neighborhood as we arrived.

Although there we could not read the menu, each dish in the thick menu-book had a large color photo so we would know a little more about the dish then ordering blind. Even so, we resorted to the oldest trick known to tourists: point to dishes on other people’s tables. That way we knew that the dishes must be good, and the live dishes were a little easier to interpret then the photos.

What we ended up ordering was a tank of fish soup, and a plate of spicy fried green beans. The tank was a ridiculous size — bigger than most soup tureens meant to serve six or eight in America. And it was chock full of chunks of fish that had a similar texture to cat fish, together with a bok choi like green, plus tons of garlic and ginger creating a nice full flavored broth. It was so good that Alison asked if I thought there was MSG in it, and it could have been, but I didn’t get that chemical waft in the back of my sinuses that usually is the red flag for me.

There were an equal amount of hot red pepper pieces as there were green beans in our side dish, along with a post-fry sprinkling of course salt. Both dishes were hot, but we were prepared, and there were other flavors to meld with the hot flavors, and it was all good. Plus the young people we met outside the Shanghai Museum assured us that hot peppers were good for your skin, so we were looking forward to not needing moisturizer for the next month…

The hot food demanded cold beer, and there was plenty of that in the form of liter sized bottles of Tsingdao Draft. Soup, a bite of fish, beer, a couple green beans, beer, some more soup, some green beans, more beer. Pretty soon my nose was full running, but we were both enjoying the experience

As we paid our bill (77 yuan, or about $12), the skies opened up, so we got soaked sprinting back to our apartment and that almost, ALMOST cooled us off.