Photoblog link
09/18/07
I started my day by going to see Jim Thompson's house. He was an OSS/CIA operative during World War II who fell in love with Thailand during his posting here, and returned to the country after the war was over. He became interested in the Thai silk, an unknown product at the time. He promoted the silk by bringing samples to New York and Paris, creating interest in fashion circles there earning huge profits by exporting it. His home is actually a compound of several traditional teak wood Thai stilt houses he had disassembled and transported to Bangkok. He preserved most of the style and observed traditions like moving in on an astrologically favorable date, but he added western comforts like electric lighting and a table and chairs to eat at.
Jim Thompson disappeared while on vacation in Myanmar in the 60s. He went on a walk and never returned. No one knows exactly what happened, but theories include being eaten by wild animals or being hit by a truck driver who panicked and disposed of the body.
Things I learned on my tour of the house:
-Chopping off a Buddhas hands and head is believed to cancel their protective powers.
-Thai houses typically had their front door facing the canals, which served as streets.
-A Thai pastime involved placing mice in small mazes built to resemble houses. Bets were placed on which mouse would emerge first.
After the house I went back to the hotel, taking a pass on the expensive silk products available at the gift shop. Dad was napping. After he woke up we got free drinks at the hotel lounge before rushing out to Lumphini Stadium to see muay thai fights. We took a taxi, but it quickly became stuck in traffic, so we hoofed it to the subway and then to the stadium. We heard the stadium before we saw it- crowds cheering and shouting.
The touts at the entrance fell on us quickly, and got oddly angry that we didn't want to talk to them. One woman asked dad why I wasn't listening to her as I was walking away trying to scout out the entrances. Due to a miscommunication between us at the hotel it turned out that neither of us had enough money to buy the tickets that turned out to be twice as expensive as the Lonely Planet had said, so we turned around and walked (ran) back to the ATM at the subway stop, not noticing a couple of ATMs along the way. When we got back another tout approached us. The first has offered to take us inside to show us seats, this one was trying to tell us about the fights. I bought tickets at the official window as he was talking to us, which made him pretty angry. He snatched away the 'free' fight sheet he'd handed me, snarling something about how other people wouldn't care about us like he did. Whatever. It turns out the fight schedule was free at the door and there was no assigned seating, so I don't understand what their business model was.
The fights were obviously in progress when we got in, but we were far from the last to arrive. The biggest fighters weighed 136 pounds. Some of them looked 15 to me, but dad said he'd heard the announcer say that the minimum age was 18. The announcer was marvelous. Between her accent, the bad sound system, and the crowd noise we caught maybe one word in ten.
We tried a few different vantage points for the best view, finally giving up on our front-row (of the 3rd class section) bleacher seats for a spot 20 feet closer leaning on a railing. That 20 feet gave a much stronger sense of immediacy to the fights, and it also brought us closer to the densely-packed Thais betting and cheering.
Before each match the fighters dance around wearing spiritually protective arm and head bands. The dance also seems to be a stretch and warm up. They pray, and then they sit on chairs in shallow metal trays in their corners as their handlers spray them with water and rub them down.
The 1st round is slow. They feel each other out, but the consistent lack of action, and the fact that the Thais pay zero attention to the 1st round suggests that there may be some inviolable tradition about the 1st round being slow. The 2nd round starts fast and hard. After the fighters clinch, the ref sometimes leaves them to knee each other (the arms are too locked up), but sometimes breaks them apart. We couldn't figure out how the decision was made, but my guess is that it involves the way the arms are positioned. After the ref splits the fighters there's no lull as they feel each other out again, they lunge right back at each other. Muay thai has more action and seems generally more brutal than western boxing, but there was only one KO in the evening. That fighter took a kick to the head and kept throwing punches, then collapsed after taking a glancing punch. It seems you have to land 2/3 of the blows in the fight to win, so the matches were mostly tied.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
High wattage
Photoblog link
09/17/07
I found out that I could crash the IEA conference dinner that evening, so I spent the whole day keeping my eyes open for yellow clothing, the theme of the evening. Monday is yellow day in Thailand. The king was born on a Monday some 80 years back, so now every Monday a huge portion of Thais wear yellow clothing. The monarchy is one of the most loved institutions in the country, and hugely respected. Besides the crowds of people wearing yellow, the king's image was sold on amulets and icons right next to images of Buddhas. Religion is the other widely respected institution. Thai men are expected to become monks at least twice in their lives, usually once while children as 10-vow novices, then again maybe after school as full 227 vow monks. I don't really know what the vows entail, so that's probably worth looking into when I get back.
My first stop of the day was the Grand Palace, home of Wat Phra Kaew and the Emerald Buddha. The emerald Buddha isn't really emerald, just a dark jade, but it's still spectacular. The king no longer lives in the grand palace, but the Wat there is still his personal temple. Every season he changes the solid gold clothing on the Emerald Buddha as part of an elaborate ritual. Again, I don't know how to describe everything that I saw, so I'll let the pictures do most of that. I especially liked the juxtaposition of classical European architecture with traditional Thai design. There was one building that reminded me very much of Versailles with the wood and mirrors and chandeliers, but instead of fleur de lis on the wallpaper there were Buddhas.
I asked a lot of different people to take my pictures. The Chinese lady was surprised that I was talking to her in Mandarin, but the guy I asked in Spanish responded in English. Ah well.
I'm not sure where the tactile boundary is in a place like the Grand Palace. What part is simply a building, something you interact with and touch, and what's considered art? There are mosaics on most of the walls, and some parts were roped off. Does that imply the rest of the mosaics are fair game to handle? Maybe it doesn't matter here. Yesterday the Reclining Buddha's feet were well worn, and I have clear memories of people touching paintings at the 798 district in Beijing.
In one park near the palace I had corn forced into my hands by a couple of different people, the immediately transparent scheme being that I feed the pigeons and then they hit me up for cash. So I resisted for a while, actually tossing the unopened bag of corn back at one girl from 20 feet away so she couldn't hand it back. One pair of guys actually dumped the corn into my hand, saying, “Present. Happy new year.” I walked down the sidewalk without throwing the corn on the ground, being mobbed with pigeons. I eventually dropped the corn, and when they asked me for money I explained to them that since I didn't have anything they'd given me and I didn't want anything from them now they didn't have any leverage, and that they should strive to live by the mantra of 'get the money first'. I'm only exaggerating slightly, and and I'm certain I confused them. As I walked away I smiled, waved, and bade them a happy new year. I've been generally very friendly on this trip, smiling a lot, as the Thais do, but there's only so much haranguing I can take.
After the Grand Palace I tried to find the river and ferry dock to cross to the other side, but I kept getting turned around in the rabbit warren of markets that hugs the shore of the river. I spent a while wandering a market in a more open area selling everything from washing machines to underwear to herbal medicine to new tires for cars. What do they do with the washing machines when it's time to close for the night? I tried to find yellow clothing, but all of the ubiquitous yellow polo shirts with the king's seal seemed to be for women.
I finally found the ferry taking near Wat Rakhang, but when I got to the other side I promptly became lost again. Next trip like this I'm brining a damn compass. Wat Rakhang, when I found it, wasn't visually spectacular, but it was a 'working' wat, with monks' orange robes hanging to dry, locals making offerings, and a small school attached with classes in session.
My next stop was Wat Arun, the temple of the dawn, which has an 82m stupa that looks like something out of Angkor Wat. (Note: I later found out that it's a 'prang', not a stupa. Chedis and stupas are the typical Thai style. A prang is Khmer, and that's why this looked Cambodian to me- it's the same design as Angkor.) Up close to the tower you can see that it's covered in mosaic. There's a fair bit of Chinese porcelain built into the decoration. It turns out that Chinese merchants sailed ships to Siam loaded with broken porcelain as ballast. They dumped it here when they loaded up on whatever they were bringing home, and the porcelain was dragged out of the harbor by the Thais to incorporate into their temples.
After Wat Arun I crossed the river and took the express ferry all the way down the shore to where there's a dock below a skytrain station. I like how you get around in Bangkok- some combination of car/tuk-tuk/motorcycle taxi/bus, skytrain/subway, boat, and walking through alleys.
I got back to the hotel just in time to shower before racing over to the mall next to the hotel to find yellow ties for dad and me to wear to dinner. The meal was a western menu, which was disappointing, but the entertainment was MCed by what I imagine were typical Thai presenters, a guy and a girl who were, for lack of a better word, cute. There was live music and a dance troupe performing a sampling of traditional Thai dance. The 4 women had numerous costume changes. One of the girls, now wearing a tail, paired up with a guy in an ornate, stylize monkey costume (that looked a lot like a demon) to tell the story of a mermaid and a monkey falling in love.
09/17/07
I found out that I could crash the IEA conference dinner that evening, so I spent the whole day keeping my eyes open for yellow clothing, the theme of the evening. Monday is yellow day in Thailand. The king was born on a Monday some 80 years back, so now every Monday a huge portion of Thais wear yellow clothing. The monarchy is one of the most loved institutions in the country, and hugely respected. Besides the crowds of people wearing yellow, the king's image was sold on amulets and icons right next to images of Buddhas. Religion is the other widely respected institution. Thai men are expected to become monks at least twice in their lives, usually once while children as 10-vow novices, then again maybe after school as full 227 vow monks. I don't really know what the vows entail, so that's probably worth looking into when I get back.
My first stop of the day was the Grand Palace, home of Wat Phra Kaew and the Emerald Buddha. The emerald Buddha isn't really emerald, just a dark jade, but it's still spectacular. The king no longer lives in the grand palace, but the Wat there is still his personal temple. Every season he changes the solid gold clothing on the Emerald Buddha as part of an elaborate ritual. Again, I don't know how to describe everything that I saw, so I'll let the pictures do most of that. I especially liked the juxtaposition of classical European architecture with traditional Thai design. There was one building that reminded me very much of Versailles with the wood and mirrors and chandeliers, but instead of fleur de lis on the wallpaper there were Buddhas.
I asked a lot of different people to take my pictures. The Chinese lady was surprised that I was talking to her in Mandarin, but the guy I asked in Spanish responded in English. Ah well.
I'm not sure where the tactile boundary is in a place like the Grand Palace. What part is simply a building, something you interact with and touch, and what's considered art? There are mosaics on most of the walls, and some parts were roped off. Does that imply the rest of the mosaics are fair game to handle? Maybe it doesn't matter here. Yesterday the Reclining Buddha's feet were well worn, and I have clear memories of people touching paintings at the 798 district in Beijing.
In one park near the palace I had corn forced into my hands by a couple of different people, the immediately transparent scheme being that I feed the pigeons and then they hit me up for cash. So I resisted for a while, actually tossing the unopened bag of corn back at one girl from 20 feet away so she couldn't hand it back. One pair of guys actually dumped the corn into my hand, saying, “Present. Happy new year.” I walked down the sidewalk without throwing the corn on the ground, being mobbed with pigeons. I eventually dropped the corn, and when they asked me for money I explained to them that since I didn't have anything they'd given me and I didn't want anything from them now they didn't have any leverage, and that they should strive to live by the mantra of 'get the money first'. I'm only exaggerating slightly, and and I'm certain I confused them. As I walked away I smiled, waved, and bade them a happy new year. I've been generally very friendly on this trip, smiling a lot, as the Thais do, but there's only so much haranguing I can take.
After the Grand Palace I tried to find the river and ferry dock to cross to the other side, but I kept getting turned around in the rabbit warren of markets that hugs the shore of the river. I spent a while wandering a market in a more open area selling everything from washing machines to underwear to herbal medicine to new tires for cars. What do they do with the washing machines when it's time to close for the night? I tried to find yellow clothing, but all of the ubiquitous yellow polo shirts with the king's seal seemed to be for women.
I finally found the ferry taking near Wat Rakhang, but when I got to the other side I promptly became lost again. Next trip like this I'm brining a damn compass. Wat Rakhang, when I found it, wasn't visually spectacular, but it was a 'working' wat, with monks' orange robes hanging to dry, locals making offerings, and a small school attached with classes in session.
My next stop was Wat Arun, the temple of the dawn, which has an 82m stupa that looks like something out of Angkor Wat. (Note: I later found out that it's a 'prang', not a stupa. Chedis and stupas are the typical Thai style. A prang is Khmer, and that's why this looked Cambodian to me- it's the same design as Angkor.) Up close to the tower you can see that it's covered in mosaic. There's a fair bit of Chinese porcelain built into the decoration. It turns out that Chinese merchants sailed ships to Siam loaded with broken porcelain as ballast. They dumped it here when they loaded up on whatever they were bringing home, and the porcelain was dragged out of the harbor by the Thais to incorporate into their temples.
After Wat Arun I crossed the river and took the express ferry all the way down the shore to where there's a dock below a skytrain station. I like how you get around in Bangkok- some combination of car/tuk-tuk/motorcycle taxi/bus, skytrain/subway, boat, and walking through alleys.
I got back to the hotel just in time to shower before racing over to the mall next to the hotel to find yellow ties for dad and me to wear to dinner. The meal was a western menu, which was disappointing, but the entertainment was MCed by what I imagine were typical Thai presenters, a guy and a girl who were, for lack of a better word, cute. There was live music and a dance troupe performing a sampling of traditional Thai dance. The 4 women had numerous costume changes. One of the girls, now wearing a tail, paired up with a guy in an ornate, stylize monkey costume (that looked a lot like a demon) to tell the story of a mermaid and a monkey falling in love.
Meditation on a rainy Sunday
Today's photoblog link
09/16/07
After breakfast, a lavish buffet with Western and Thai dishes, we went to the Red Cross snake farm to see a snake handling, feeding, and milking demonstration. The slide show was interesting and informative, and the presenter was good except for an accent that led to gems like 'lespilatoly fairule'. The presentation itself was fun. We sat in bleachers under a canopy as it poured down rain outside. The handlers seemed very unconcerned about their safety around cobras, pythons, and vipers, despite the presenter's comment that every handler at the hospital had at one point been bitten. His own story involved a Siamese cobra and a paralyzed, necrotic finger that was saved by grafting a big chunk of tissue from his forearm. The cobras struck a lot while we were there, but didn't hit anything.
It was still raining after the presentation, but less, so we decided to push on to our next destination- Wat Pho. We took the subway to near a river dock, but by then the rain had started again in earnest so we holed up in coffee shop. Oh, the subway. It uses a different system from the skytrain, meaning to transfer between the two you need to buy tickets twice. The skytrain uses a paper card with a magnetic strip, the subway uses a small, black, plastic token with an embedded RFID chip. The subway itself was modern, had AC, and was nearly empty, which seemed stranger. Maybe it was a Sunday afternoon thing. Also of interest, there was a cop checking bags at the entrance to the subway, but not hard enough that I couldn't had carried, say, 10kg of high explosives on with me.
After sitting with our coffee for a while, dad reading the guidebooks and me catching up on journal writing, the rain eased off again and we pushed on. We got a bit lost, but a Thai guy stopped and tried to point us toward the boats. He gave up, but another Thai guy came over. He was friendly, spoke good English, and gave us some story about being a schoolteacher. He said that the boats weren't running because of the rain, and that Wat Pho was closed for a holiday. For some reason my father, who's read the same scam advisories I have, bought the story and was trying to get info on this guy's recommended Wat as I was trying to get us out of there without explicitly saying that he was full of shit. I finally pulled my dad away (“I want to explore this neighborhood”) and waved off the tuk-tuk driver who was conveniently standing by. When I outlined the characteristics of the guy's scam my dad felt suitably foolish, and we both got a good laugh out of it.
We couldn't find the dock. We walked through back alleys and poor neighborhoods trying to find the place, but none of the alleys were on our map and we didn't even have the sun to navigate by. We were approached by another Thai guy who suggested a different Wat, but in the end he gave us good directions, and it was unclear how he might have profited from the situation, so I guess he was probably on the level. We finally found the dock and waited for our boat.
On the boat, the orange line of the Chao Phraya express ferry, they tore our tickets in intricate ways that made us afraid to hold the damn things for fear of invalidating them by some subtle fold. The river itself was opaque brown and fast-flowing, carrying patches of floating vegetation as it moved. There were ferries like ours, long-tail river taxi boats with outboard motors driving long propeller shafts, and one gargantuan barge carrying an indeterminate cargo. On the way we passed a combination of river-front slums, gleaming white luxury apartment towers, the naval headquarters, and the imposing Wat Arun.
We got off the boat right at Wat Pho. I don't have much to say about the place that can't be better conveyed in pictures. We took off our shoes and entered a side temple, kneeling on a plastic Winnie the Pooh mat in front of an 800 year old golden Buddha. The main Reclining Buddha was huge. Again, the pictures tell the story better, except for having to fight small crowds to actually take them, and this was a rainy Sunday in the low season. The Reclining Buddha's toes were inlaid with a gorgeous mother of pearl depiction of other Buddhas, but were rubbed down right next to a 'do not touch' sign.
After Wat Pho we quickly hit the amulet market outside of nearby Wat Mahathat before heading in. We were there for meditation classes, and at 6PM we sat down with a Buddhist monk and 3 other Americans. He gave us a primer on meditation theory, most of it fairly vague to my unenlightened mind, but my dad, who's read some texts on meditation, understood some of the subtleties. One idea the monk had that was new to me was the idea of moving a hand slowly up and down with your breath in order to help you focus. He also suggested banishing wandering thoughts by identifying them and repeating them 3 times, for example, 'pain, pain, pain” or, “noise, noise, noise”. After the primer we practiced walking meditation, in which you focus on the soles of your feet, then seated meditation, where you focus on your abdomen. The seated meditation lasted until 8, over an hour, and got pretty excruciating. That was by far the longest I've ever tried to sit still and not think.
09/16/07
After breakfast, a lavish buffet with Western and Thai dishes, we went to the Red Cross snake farm to see a snake handling, feeding, and milking demonstration. The slide show was interesting and informative, and the presenter was good except for an accent that led to gems like 'lespilatoly fairule'. The presentation itself was fun. We sat in bleachers under a canopy as it poured down rain outside. The handlers seemed very unconcerned about their safety around cobras, pythons, and vipers, despite the presenter's comment that every handler at the hospital had at one point been bitten. His own story involved a Siamese cobra and a paralyzed, necrotic finger that was saved by grafting a big chunk of tissue from his forearm. The cobras struck a lot while we were there, but didn't hit anything.
It was still raining after the presentation, but less, so we decided to push on to our next destination- Wat Pho. We took the subway to near a river dock, but by then the rain had started again in earnest so we holed up in coffee shop. Oh, the subway. It uses a different system from the skytrain, meaning to transfer between the two you need to buy tickets twice. The skytrain uses a paper card with a magnetic strip, the subway uses a small, black, plastic token with an embedded RFID chip. The subway itself was modern, had AC, and was nearly empty, which seemed stranger. Maybe it was a Sunday afternoon thing. Also of interest, there was a cop checking bags at the entrance to the subway, but not hard enough that I couldn't had carried, say, 10kg of high explosives on with me.
After sitting with our coffee for a while, dad reading the guidebooks and me catching up on journal writing, the rain eased off again and we pushed on. We got a bit lost, but a Thai guy stopped and tried to point us toward the boats. He gave up, but another Thai guy came over. He was friendly, spoke good English, and gave us some story about being a schoolteacher. He said that the boats weren't running because of the rain, and that Wat Pho was closed for a holiday. For some reason my father, who's read the same scam advisories I have, bought the story and was trying to get info on this guy's recommended Wat as I was trying to get us out of there without explicitly saying that he was full of shit. I finally pulled my dad away (“I want to explore this neighborhood”) and waved off the tuk-tuk driver who was conveniently standing by. When I outlined the characteristics of the guy's scam my dad felt suitably foolish, and we both got a good laugh out of it.
We couldn't find the dock. We walked through back alleys and poor neighborhoods trying to find the place, but none of the alleys were on our map and we didn't even have the sun to navigate by. We were approached by another Thai guy who suggested a different Wat, but in the end he gave us good directions, and it was unclear how he might have profited from the situation, so I guess he was probably on the level. We finally found the dock and waited for our boat.
On the boat, the orange line of the Chao Phraya express ferry, they tore our tickets in intricate ways that made us afraid to hold the damn things for fear of invalidating them by some subtle fold. The river itself was opaque brown and fast-flowing, carrying patches of floating vegetation as it moved. There were ferries like ours, long-tail river taxi boats with outboard motors driving long propeller shafts, and one gargantuan barge carrying an indeterminate cargo. On the way we passed a combination of river-front slums, gleaming white luxury apartment towers, the naval headquarters, and the imposing Wat Arun.
We got off the boat right at Wat Pho. I don't have much to say about the place that can't be better conveyed in pictures. We took off our shoes and entered a side temple, kneeling on a plastic Winnie the Pooh mat in front of an 800 year old golden Buddha. The main Reclining Buddha was huge. Again, the pictures tell the story better, except for having to fight small crowds to actually take them, and this was a rainy Sunday in the low season. The Reclining Buddha's toes were inlaid with a gorgeous mother of pearl depiction of other Buddhas, but were rubbed down right next to a 'do not touch' sign.
After Wat Pho we quickly hit the amulet market outside of nearby Wat Mahathat before heading in. We were there for meditation classes, and at 6PM we sat down with a Buddhist monk and 3 other Americans. He gave us a primer on meditation theory, most of it fairly vague to my unenlightened mind, but my dad, who's read some texts on meditation, understood some of the subtleties. One idea the monk had that was new to me was the idea of moving a hand slowly up and down with your breath in order to help you focus. He also suggested banishing wandering thoughts by identifying them and repeating them 3 times, for example, 'pain, pain, pain” or, “noise, noise, noise”. After the primer we practiced walking meditation, in which you focus on the soles of your feet, then seated meditation, where you focus on your abdomen. The seated meditation lasted until 8, over an hour, and got pretty excruciating. That was by far the longest I've ever tried to sit still and not think.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Landing in the land of Thailand
This is a partial transcription of my handwritten journal for my trip to Thailand, September 2007. Note: I'm posting the same text with accompanying photos on my domain here. I'll continue to post the text of these entries on this blog as I type it, but I think it'll be more fun to read with the photos.
09/14/07
Flying into Bangkok, I was amazed by how far I could see lights. There doesn't seem to be the Dongbei haze cutting off visibility after a couple of miles. Right now I'm holed up in a corner of the airport behind some palm trees, thinking about getting some sleep before I head through customs and find a cab downtown.
I'm less prepared for this international trip than I've been for any previous. I don't even have a guide book until dad arrives with the Lonely Planet, only some phrase lists I printed off of the internet and the names in the Thai alphabet of a couple of tourist sites I got from Wikipedia. Escalators and moving walkways in the airport go forward on the left side. Do they drive on the left side of the road here? (Note: Yes, they do, and it's more confusing than I thought it'd be.)
(Written the next day)
I ended up sleeping at BKK for a couple of hours before going through customs. I tried to lie on the ground behind some palm trees, but the stone floor was sucking the heat right out of my body, so I ended up across some chairs.
I decided to take the public transportation into town, so after wandering and reading signs 2 or 3 times over I figured out that I had to take a shuttle to the bus station. At the station I got on bus 552, paid the bus attendant after I figured out he wanted to know where I was going, and was off. Again, I was amazed by how clear and blue the sky was. I guess I'd gotten used to the haze. I listened to what other passengers told the attendant and I noted someone with the same stop as me to follow out of the bus. I got off at On Nut, the terminal stop of one of the Skytrain routes (Bangkok's elevated rail system). I figured out how to get change for the ticket machines by asking an attendant. You tell them your stop and they give you the fewest coins necessary to buy the ticket, the rest comes back as bills. The fare varies with distance, and at 35 baht my long ride was 6-7 times as expensive as a bus, so I guess the locals enjoying the fast, air-conditioned ride were of the privileged set. I got out at the Siam Square stop, probably at about 8AM, and wandered around the still-shuttered shopping district. (As an aside, my total cost from airport to hotel was 67 baht on public transit. My dad's cost later that day was 1400 baht for a BMW limo.)
It was hot, maybe mid 80s, and humid when I stumbled our Pathumwan Princess Hotel. It's a 30-story tower abutting the MBK shopping center. I went in, unsure of whether I'd be able to check into my room so early, but they let me in right away. I think the nicest hotels I've ever been to have been on my dad's business trips, with the possible exception of the Westin Dragonara in Malta, where I myself shelled out $200+ a night for a couple nights. The Princess has several restaurants, a huge pool, a spa, a gym, a running track, and a cold 'check-in drink' handed to you in the lobby. In addition to a concierge it has a limo desk, a tour desk, a business center, and a lounge for corporate guests (including me, ha!). The view from our room on the 17th floor was spectacular. There's a university nearby with the traditional red-peaked Thai roofs. The towers in the distance have architectural twists that make them distinctively Thai: a gold pyramid on top, a gold Buddha's crown coat of arms on the side, minarets, etc.
After oversleeping from my nap, I caught the skytrain to Chatuchak market. Most of the 'new' Bangkok, the parts I've seen so far, have been very rich. I've seen beggars in the streets, but only a few hovels. One of the shacks seemed to cling to the side of a building right next to a clean, shiny skytrain station.
Chatuchak market sells everything- used and new Converse shoes and jeans, silk bed covers, wood carvings, music, books, household consumables, food, electronics. Everything. One thing I immediately noticed was the large number of Thais shopping there, not just tourists. The place smelled of pleasant things rather than slime and waste, a pleasant change from Chinese markets. I bought red shoelaces to go with the black Converse hightops I've been trying to find for ages and was convinced I'd get here, but as in China the shoe sizes available top out well below my far-from-freakish 11.5 feet. I got my first hit of Thai food at the market- red curry over a bowl of rice, which would have been great but for the bones, coconut milk, a fresh-squeezed orange juice, a styrofoam container of lo mein-like noodles, and a bowl of spring rolls. I also had a weird green popsicle out of a steel drum that somehow keeps them frozen. On the way out of the market I stumbled on a separate market selling produce, where I bought excellent caramel-sesame cashews that would last us the rest of the trip.
I went back to sleep when I got back to the hotel, waking up when my dad arrived at the room to chat a bit before we called it a night.
09/14/07
Flying into Bangkok, I was amazed by how far I could see lights. There doesn't seem to be the Dongbei haze cutting off visibility after a couple of miles. Right now I'm holed up in a corner of the airport behind some palm trees, thinking about getting some sleep before I head through customs and find a cab downtown.
I'm less prepared for this international trip than I've been for any previous. I don't even have a guide book until dad arrives with the Lonely Planet, only some phrase lists I printed off of the internet and the names in the Thai alphabet of a couple of tourist sites I got from Wikipedia. Escalators and moving walkways in the airport go forward on the left side. Do they drive on the left side of the road here? (Note: Yes, they do, and it's more confusing than I thought it'd be.)
(Written the next day)
I ended up sleeping at BKK for a couple of hours before going through customs. I tried to lie on the ground behind some palm trees, but the stone floor was sucking the heat right out of my body, so I ended up across some chairs.
I decided to take the public transportation into town, so after wandering and reading signs 2 or 3 times over I figured out that I had to take a shuttle to the bus station. At the station I got on bus 552, paid the bus attendant after I figured out he wanted to know where I was going, and was off. Again, I was amazed by how clear and blue the sky was. I guess I'd gotten used to the haze. I listened to what other passengers told the attendant and I noted someone with the same stop as me to follow out of the bus. I got off at On Nut, the terminal stop of one of the Skytrain routes (Bangkok's elevated rail system). I figured out how to get change for the ticket machines by asking an attendant. You tell them your stop and they give you the fewest coins necessary to buy the ticket, the rest comes back as bills. The fare varies with distance, and at 35 baht my long ride was 6-7 times as expensive as a bus, so I guess the locals enjoying the fast, air-conditioned ride were of the privileged set. I got out at the Siam Square stop, probably at about 8AM, and wandered around the still-shuttered shopping district. (As an aside, my total cost from airport to hotel was 67 baht on public transit. My dad's cost later that day was 1400 baht for a BMW limo.)
It was hot, maybe mid 80s, and humid when I stumbled our Pathumwan Princess Hotel. It's a 30-story tower abutting the MBK shopping center. I went in, unsure of whether I'd be able to check into my room so early, but they let me in right away. I think the nicest hotels I've ever been to have been on my dad's business trips, with the possible exception of the Westin Dragonara in Malta, where I myself shelled out $200+ a night for a couple nights. The Princess has several restaurants, a huge pool, a spa, a gym, a running track, and a cold 'check-in drink' handed to you in the lobby. In addition to a concierge it has a limo desk, a tour desk, a business center, and a lounge for corporate guests (including me, ha!). The view from our room on the 17th floor was spectacular. There's a university nearby with the traditional red-peaked Thai roofs. The towers in the distance have architectural twists that make them distinctively Thai: a gold pyramid on top, a gold Buddha's crown coat of arms on the side, minarets, etc.
After oversleeping from my nap, I caught the skytrain to Chatuchak market. Most of the 'new' Bangkok, the parts I've seen so far, have been very rich. I've seen beggars in the streets, but only a few hovels. One of the shacks seemed to cling to the side of a building right next to a clean, shiny skytrain station.
Chatuchak market sells everything- used and new Converse shoes and jeans, silk bed covers, wood carvings, music, books, household consumables, food, electronics. Everything. One thing I immediately noticed was the large number of Thais shopping there, not just tourists. The place smelled of pleasant things rather than slime and waste, a pleasant change from Chinese markets. I bought red shoelaces to go with the black Converse hightops I've been trying to find for ages and was convinced I'd get here, but as in China the shoe sizes available top out well below my far-from-freakish 11.5 feet. I got my first hit of Thai food at the market- red curry over a bowl of rice, which would have been great but for the bones, coconut milk, a fresh-squeezed orange juice, a styrofoam container of lo mein-like noodles, and a bowl of spring rolls. I also had a weird green popsicle out of a steel drum that somehow keeps them frozen. On the way out of the market I stumbled on a separate market selling produce, where I bought excellent caramel-sesame cashews that would last us the rest of the trip.
I went back to sleep when I got back to the hotel, waking up when my dad arrived at the room to chat a bit before we called it a night.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
River crabs
I'm blatantly stealing this post from imagethief, a highly regarded China blogger I read. He links to Rebecca MacKinnon's blog and quotes this:
Imagethief also notes that Chinese is an excellent language for puns.
In China these days, if your website gets blocked, your blog-hosting service takes down a politically edgy post you wrote, or your ISP deletes your site completely, you say: "I've been harmonized." The word for harmony, harmonized, or harmonious (all the same word in Chinese) is pronounced "he xie" in Chinese and is written like this: 和谐. For those without Chinese fonts on their browser.
However, there's a slight problem, which is that since this phrase is so often used sarcastically on Chinese blogs and forums, it has been flagged as a sensitive keyword by many of the blog and forum hosting platforms, increasing the chances that a post using this phrase could itself get "harmonized." So bloggers and chatroom denizens have switched the characters to another phrase, 河蟹, also pronounced "he xie" (with slightly different tonation) which means "river crab".
Thus, when bloggers seem to be writing nonsensically about "river crab," they're actually talking about censorship.
Imagethief also notes that Chinese is an excellent language for puns.
Saturday In the Park
09/07
I was absolutely determined to go out on Friday rather than watch more DVDs, but didn't really have firm plans with anyone, so I ended up sitting alone at the Rickshaw for a while. I chatted briefly with strangers, but I wasn't nearly as successful at insinuating myself into a group as I had been the previous week. I think I probably have to be more forward; relying on situations to present themselves is silly and boring. Later in the evening, Randy, formerly of Harvard, and his friends joined me. We all ran into another group we knew and decided to bar hop together. So I met some new people, some of whom I'm meeting tonight to play poker, and successfully avoided another movie night. I went home late and slept in.
09/08
When I woke up it was still way too early to just sit around in the apartment. Because it was unusually clear and sunny I decided to finally go check out some of the nearby parks. Chaoyang Park, the huge one across from my apartment, was sort of unimpressive, at least the parts I saw. I pretended I didn't hear the gate guard yelling after me as I biked past. I thought she wanted money, but it turns out bikes are banned. She didn't run after me, though, and it wasn't until I was on my way out that I figured out what she'd wanted. The Beijing Pop Festival was going on, so I stood on the opposite side of the lake and listened a bit, but I was eager to find something more scenic.
The next stop was Hong Lingjin (Red Scarf) Park, by way of an interesting street. One side of the road was crumbling and filthy. The stores all sold construction supplies: racks of steel piping, bags of concrete, wire, simple metal tricycles for transportation. This is your destination if you need to run a labor-intensive, low-tech, somewhat shoddy building project. The other side of the road has the Park Avenue apartments, gleaming new towers on manicured, gated grounds. I imagine the side of the building with views towards the park is substantially more expensive than the side overlooking the slums. I tried to take a picture to capture the contrast, but it didn't work very well. I ended up stitching 2 together using photoshop. Had I known how easy the stitching process was I would have taken the pictures with that in mind and gotten a much better shot. Next time. In fact, I think I'm going to try to get some skyline shots in Beijing using stitching, and maybe play around with making the seams invisible.
The park itself was surprisingly nice considering the 4th Ring Road, one of the 5 concentric highways in Beijing, cuts right through the park and over its lake. But the gardens were pleasant and the trees and the bridges were elegant and very much fit my China archetype. The park was also filled with art. There were steel sculptures illustrating Chinese legends, painted mobiles hanging from trees, huge rocks split in half revealing foot-long 'fossils' of insects, and even garbage cans shaped like- well, something anthropomorphic.
I've noticed is that there's no graffiti around town, at least not the spray painted kind. I don't know if they clean it up quickly, if a severe punishment deters artists and vandals, or whether it's just that I live around a snooty expat neighborhood and a neighborhood probably too poor to afford paint. There is, however, extensive use of spray stencils. The otherwise beautiful bridges in the park had at least 4 'No fishing' signs each, and the walls around the park repeated that message and others. I guess the extensive use of sprayed behavioral dictums are a vestige of the Cultural Revolution. If the spray-painted signs aren't enough there are plenty of more western sign boards. I particularly like the warning not to swim in the water translated into English; I can't imagine anyone from a western country even considering a dip in the green, soupy lake. The locals seem not to be bothered by the idea of eating the fish that they catch in brazen violation of the many signs. My view is that if the water's so green you can't see a millimeter below the surface there's probably too much nitrogen in it, and one has to wonder, especially in a city of 17 million, what exactly happens to the nitrogen from human waste?
Here are the pictures from the park. You have to scroll down, I'm afraid, because iWeb messes up my old links if I put the new pictures on top and it doesn't let me use HTML anchors to send you to the bottom. It's lame, and I'll try to figure out a workaround soon. (Edit: I sort of fixed it. Still gimpy, but it'll work for now.)
I was absolutely determined to go out on Friday rather than watch more DVDs, but didn't really have firm plans with anyone, so I ended up sitting alone at the Rickshaw for a while. I chatted briefly with strangers, but I wasn't nearly as successful at insinuating myself into a group as I had been the previous week. I think I probably have to be more forward; relying on situations to present themselves is silly and boring. Later in the evening, Randy, formerly of Harvard, and his friends joined me. We all ran into another group we knew and decided to bar hop together. So I met some new people, some of whom I'm meeting tonight to play poker, and successfully avoided another movie night. I went home late and slept in.
09/08
When I woke up it was still way too early to just sit around in the apartment. Because it was unusually clear and sunny I decided to finally go check out some of the nearby parks. Chaoyang Park, the huge one across from my apartment, was sort of unimpressive, at least the parts I saw. I pretended I didn't hear the gate guard yelling after me as I biked past. I thought she wanted money, but it turns out bikes are banned. She didn't run after me, though, and it wasn't until I was on my way out that I figured out what she'd wanted. The Beijing Pop Festival was going on, so I stood on the opposite side of the lake and listened a bit, but I was eager to find something more scenic.
The next stop was Hong Lingjin (Red Scarf) Park, by way of an interesting street. One side of the road was crumbling and filthy. The stores all sold construction supplies: racks of steel piping, bags of concrete, wire, simple metal tricycles for transportation. This is your destination if you need to run a labor-intensive, low-tech, somewhat shoddy building project. The other side of the road has the Park Avenue apartments, gleaming new towers on manicured, gated grounds. I imagine the side of the building with views towards the park is substantially more expensive than the side overlooking the slums. I tried to take a picture to capture the contrast, but it didn't work very well. I ended up stitching 2 together using photoshop. Had I known how easy the stitching process was I would have taken the pictures with that in mind and gotten a much better shot. Next time. In fact, I think I'm going to try to get some skyline shots in Beijing using stitching, and maybe play around with making the seams invisible.
The park itself was surprisingly nice considering the 4th Ring Road, one of the 5 concentric highways in Beijing, cuts right through the park and over its lake. But the gardens were pleasant and the trees and the bridges were elegant and very much fit my China archetype. The park was also filled with art. There were steel sculptures illustrating Chinese legends, painted mobiles hanging from trees, huge rocks split in half revealing foot-long 'fossils' of insects, and even garbage cans shaped like- well, something anthropomorphic.
I've noticed is that there's no graffiti around town, at least not the spray painted kind. I don't know if they clean it up quickly, if a severe punishment deters artists and vandals, or whether it's just that I live around a snooty expat neighborhood and a neighborhood probably too poor to afford paint. There is, however, extensive use of spray stencils. The otherwise beautiful bridges in the park had at least 4 'No fishing' signs each, and the walls around the park repeated that message and others. I guess the extensive use of sprayed behavioral dictums are a vestige of the Cultural Revolution. If the spray-painted signs aren't enough there are plenty of more western sign boards. I particularly like the warning not to swim in the water translated into English; I can't imagine anyone from a western country even considering a dip in the green, soupy lake. The locals seem not to be bothered by the idea of eating the fish that they catch in brazen violation of the many signs. My view is that if the water's so green you can't see a millimeter below the surface there's probably too much nitrogen in it, and one has to wonder, especially in a city of 17 million, what exactly happens to the nitrogen from human waste?
Here are the pictures from the park. You have to scroll down, I'm afraid, because iWeb messes up my old links if I put the new pictures on top and it doesn't let me use HTML anchors to send you to the bottom. It's lame, and I'll try to figure out a workaround soon. (Edit: I sort of fixed it. Still gimpy, but it'll work for now.)
Convictions for Sale
An article in the NYT and the IHT today discusses American investment in Chinese companies developing sophisticated surveillance equipment. Because the companies do their technology development in China they're exempt from US export controls, but they're still welcome to take funding from US investors and hedge funds. So, with a $110 million loan from the Citadel group, a Chinese company called China Security and Surveillance Technology is buying up all of its competitors, celebrating each acquisition with a banquet for potential acquisitions and public officials. From the article.
While that's a very Chinese way of doing business, the idea of one company buying out all of its competition with money it receives from the US, all the while cozying up to the Chinese government and in effect bribing its remaining competitors, is sickening and scary. In fact the Minister of Public Security is now director of the company, meaning the number of degrees of separation between the US investors and the Chinese government is frighteningly small. China just passed a law restricting monopolies, and The China Daily recently condemned monopolies as bad for the nation, calling them the major obstacle in the promotion of social interests. I don't know the full story behind this company, but a government minister is in control, the company is consolidating the industry, the competition's bosses are being wined and dined, and unrestricted money is flowing in from Wall Street.
The equipment China Security and Surveillance Technology develops is ostensibly for public safety and crime reduction. Surveillance companies in China point out that the UK has a more sophisticated and extensive camera network already in place, and Manhattan is setting up a similar system, so they argue that we're in no location to criticize. Representative Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argues that surveillance in China is not the same as surveillance in the West, as China is a one-party state with little to check its actions. Mr. Lantos also plans to investigate “the cooperation of American companies in the Chinese police state.”
I don't like China's government, and I don't like its restrictions on its people, but I'm simply appalled by the idea of Americans directly supporting its worst characteristics. Institutions like the NYT are good at getting attention, though, for example when the UAE wanted to buy a controlling interest in our ports. Hopefully I'm not the only member of the American public who feels this way, and the attention will lead to support for Mr. Lantos and his investigation.
“When they come, they hear central government officials endorsing us, they hear bankers endorsing us or supporting us, it gives us credibility,” Mr. Yap said. “It’s a lot of drinking, it’s like a wedding banquet.”
While that's a very Chinese way of doing business, the idea of one company buying out all of its competition with money it receives from the US, all the while cozying up to the Chinese government and in effect bribing its remaining competitors, is sickening and scary. In fact the Minister of Public Security is now director of the company, meaning the number of degrees of separation between the US investors and the Chinese government is frighteningly small. China just passed a law restricting monopolies, and The China Daily recently condemned monopolies as bad for the nation, calling them the major obstacle in the promotion of social interests. I don't know the full story behind this company, but a government minister is in control, the company is consolidating the industry, the competition's bosses are being wined and dined, and unrestricted money is flowing in from Wall Street.
The equipment China Security and Surveillance Technology develops is ostensibly for public safety and crime reduction. Surveillance companies in China point out that the UK has a more sophisticated and extensive camera network already in place, and Manhattan is setting up a similar system, so they argue that we're in no location to criticize. Representative Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argues that surveillance in China is not the same as surveillance in the West, as China is a one-party state with little to check its actions. Mr. Lantos also plans to investigate “the cooperation of American companies in the Chinese police state.”
I don't like China's government, and I don't like its restrictions on its people, but I'm simply appalled by the idea of Americans directly supporting its worst characteristics. Institutions like the NYT are good at getting attention, though, for example when the UAE wanted to buy a controlling interest in our ports. Hopefully I'm not the only member of the American public who feels this way, and the attention will lead to support for Mr. Lantos and his investigation.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Lost In Translation - A movie about a boy and his dog.
I was going through some of my flatmate's pirated DVDs and found some gems.
On the back of Munich they've included DVD extras for Skeleton Key, which I'd never heard of.
The Chinese synopsis of Cinderella Man is accurate, but the English is taken off of a review by some random movie goer
On the back of Munich they've included DVD extras for Skeleton Key, which I'd never heard of.
The Chinese synopsis of Cinderella Man is accurate, but the English is taken off of a review by some random movie goer
Photos from Scot
Scot crashed on my couch for a couple of nights before flying back to the US to re-up his visa, eat Ana's, and spend September in Boston, the lucky dog. We took the opportunity to trade some of the photos we'd taken when I first got to Beijing. Here are some of his.
Friday, September 7, 2007
I've never wanted a briefcase before.
I just had my second meeting in as many days. I spent 2 unproductive weeks trying to to line up meetings and make things happen. Now things have finally started falling into place, but maybe a bit faster than I'd like.
09/06
I had a meeting at the Beijing Pharma and Biotech Center, a biotech promotion group funded by Beijing. The meeting was at 2PM, and their office is about 25km from work, so I knew I had to leave at 1 at the latest. I had some preparation work to do, but I also had a morning meeting with a UN coworker to deal with.
The coworker was trying to get me to help rewrite our Country Service Framework, the description of our activities in China. I had helped on an earlier draft, and it turns out I inadvertently changed UN policy by combining our listed 'priority' and 'goal' in our development and aid framework language. It turns out that the priority was China's and the goal was our own, so for about a week our goals matched China's phrasing. They're similar; it's not like I was devoting the UN to a new socialist countryside or anything. Anyway, besides finding out I accidentally set policy, this conversation took forever. We realized after an hour of discussion that the only tasks I'd actually been given so far were 2 copy/paste operations. I wanted to leave, to get ready for my afternoon meeting, but our talk dragged on and on. She realized it, too, but we've got scheduling problems coming up and had to finish outlining the work. She left for a quick talk with our boss, I scrambled to organize my notes for my meeting, then we got back together to talk some more. I ended up with a real assignment, one involving a working brain and plenty of writing, but I spent my whole morning getting it.
I raced downstairs to a cab and across town, writing notes on the ride. I got out somewhere near the address I'd been given and walked across a medical school campus, complete with beautiful bridges and Chinese eaves, stopping to ask a security guard directions. I was a bit confused about where to turn, but I stumbled on the place, a much bigger office than I'd imagined. That part of town is much less vertical than others, and the office had a big parking lot of its own and an open field on the other side. It wasn't what I'd imagined.
So I sat down with 'Alice' from public affairs, who was translating, and Hong from research, and ended up talking to them for 3 hours. I knew the meeting was running long, but I didn't realize to what degree until I'd left. They gave me some decent information, but since it was mostly translated I didn't get much in the way of quotes. The most exciting part for me was 2 books they had, both reports in Chinese on the local industry and full of statistics. I photocopied the cover and title pages of the books so that I could find them later; they may be the only way to get some damn numbers around here. Hong was very interested in biotech elsewhere in the world, a topic on which I'm now fairly knowledgeable, so I gave them some stats I'd gathered and promised to email them a few reports, in addition to my own when it was done, then we took a picture and I left.
I took a bus to meet Scot nearby at Zhongguancun, the computer and electronics district, where he'd been shopping. I wandered around a bit to check out the huge cell phone and MP3 player selection, but only ended up buying some blank DVDs and an iPod wall charger ($3!). At this point I'm seriously considering these external hard drives with card readers that they have around here. I'd just buy the case and put my own laptop drive in it, I think, rather than trust whatever discount drive they're pushing. The kind of cases I like are light, have batteries built in so you can use them on the road without a wall plug, and have a slot to load a CF card. A setup like this, maybe $100 for a hard drive and $25 for the enclosure, would give me almost unrestricted space for digital pictures while I'm traveling. I just ordered a second 2GB compact flash card for Thailand, so the drive isn't urgent, but I'm seriously thinking about it for the future.
Afterward our getting our geek fix we met Matt and Ben, 2 MIT grads from my year who just moved to Beijing to start work. We had a hot pot dinner in Wudaokou, yet another Beijing district I hadn't seen before. Haidian and Wudaokou are where most of the universities are, so they have a young feeling. Microsoft, Google, and a lot of other tech companies are there, too. After dinner we had some beer on the street and chatted for a bit, then I said goodbye to Scot before his visa run back to the States and rushed off to catch the train home. I only made it part way before the system shut down for the night (I couldn't make a connecting train), so I had to take a cab part of the way.
I got home right before midnight, thankfully, or the elevator would have been off and I would have had to climb up to my apartment. I'm getting sick of the damn Cinderella routine.
09/07
I met Alessandro at the office at 8, and his driver took us to our meeting at the National Center for Biotech Development. Alessandro normally pays this Chinese guy to drive his wife around during the day and leave the car back at the office afterwards. It's cheaper than buying another car, a local guy gets a pretty sweet job, and his wife doesn't have to learn to drive, so I guess it's good all around.
\We had about 5 minutes with the center's director, then he left us with a staffer to answer the rest of our questions. The staffer was polite and nice, he just didn't really know what I want to find out or he doesn't want to tell me. Honestly, I think they don't know. One thing I want is a list of biotech companies in China. He thought they had such a thing in each individual department of their center, and it could maybe be compiled. These guys work in a building together, have a focus on biotech, and rely on their contacts to get anything done, but they don't have a master address book. It's not incompetence, I don't think, just this Chinese attitude wherein you don't coordinate between departments.
Then, as I'm writing this, I get an email from the staffer thanking us for the meeting and 'reminding' me that I have to submit my report to him for approval of any reference to their center before publication. I haven't responded yet, but if a guy in the US asked me for editorial approval after the fact I'd probably laugh at him. I doubt it'll be an issue; I don't think I got anything interesting enough to make it into the report.
09/06
I had a meeting at the Beijing Pharma and Biotech Center, a biotech promotion group funded by Beijing. The meeting was at 2PM, and their office is about 25km from work, so I knew I had to leave at 1 at the latest. I had some preparation work to do, but I also had a morning meeting with a UN coworker to deal with.
The coworker was trying to get me to help rewrite our Country Service Framework, the description of our activities in China. I had helped on an earlier draft, and it turns out I inadvertently changed UN policy by combining our listed 'priority' and 'goal' in our development and aid framework language. It turns out that the priority was China's and the goal was our own, so for about a week our goals matched China's phrasing. They're similar; it's not like I was devoting the UN to a new socialist countryside or anything. Anyway, besides finding out I accidentally set policy, this conversation took forever. We realized after an hour of discussion that the only tasks I'd actually been given so far were 2 copy/paste operations. I wanted to leave, to get ready for my afternoon meeting, but our talk dragged on and on. She realized it, too, but we've got scheduling problems coming up and had to finish outlining the work. She left for a quick talk with our boss, I scrambled to organize my notes for my meeting, then we got back together to talk some more. I ended up with a real assignment, one involving a working brain and plenty of writing, but I spent my whole morning getting it.
I raced downstairs to a cab and across town, writing notes on the ride. I got out somewhere near the address I'd been given and walked across a medical school campus, complete with beautiful bridges and Chinese eaves, stopping to ask a security guard directions. I was a bit confused about where to turn, but I stumbled on the place, a much bigger office than I'd imagined. That part of town is much less vertical than others, and the office had a big parking lot of its own and an open field on the other side. It wasn't what I'd imagined.
So I sat down with 'Alice' from public affairs, who was translating, and Hong from research, and ended up talking to them for 3 hours. I knew the meeting was running long, but I didn't realize to what degree until I'd left. They gave me some decent information, but since it was mostly translated I didn't get much in the way of quotes. The most exciting part for me was 2 books they had, both reports in Chinese on the local industry and full of statistics. I photocopied the cover and title pages of the books so that I could find them later; they may be the only way to get some damn numbers around here. Hong was very interested in biotech elsewhere in the world, a topic on which I'm now fairly knowledgeable, so I gave them some stats I'd gathered and promised to email them a few reports, in addition to my own when it was done, then we took a picture and I left.
I took a bus to meet Scot nearby at Zhongguancun, the computer and electronics district, where he'd been shopping. I wandered around a bit to check out the huge cell phone and MP3 player selection, but only ended up buying some blank DVDs and an iPod wall charger ($3!). At this point I'm seriously considering these external hard drives with card readers that they have around here. I'd just buy the case and put my own laptop drive in it, I think, rather than trust whatever discount drive they're pushing. The kind of cases I like are light, have batteries built in so you can use them on the road without a wall plug, and have a slot to load a CF card. A setup like this, maybe $100 for a hard drive and $25 for the enclosure, would give me almost unrestricted space for digital pictures while I'm traveling. I just ordered a second 2GB compact flash card for Thailand, so the drive isn't urgent, but I'm seriously thinking about it for the future.
Afterward our getting our geek fix we met Matt and Ben, 2 MIT grads from my year who just moved to Beijing to start work. We had a hot pot dinner in Wudaokou, yet another Beijing district I hadn't seen before. Haidian and Wudaokou are where most of the universities are, so they have a young feeling. Microsoft, Google, and a lot of other tech companies are there, too. After dinner we had some beer on the street and chatted for a bit, then I said goodbye to Scot before his visa run back to the States and rushed off to catch the train home. I only made it part way before the system shut down for the night (I couldn't make a connecting train), so I had to take a cab part of the way.
I got home right before midnight, thankfully, or the elevator would have been off and I would have had to climb up to my apartment. I'm getting sick of the damn Cinderella routine.
09/07
I met Alessandro at the office at 8, and his driver took us to our meeting at the National Center for Biotech Development. Alessandro normally pays this Chinese guy to drive his wife around during the day and leave the car back at the office afterwards. It's cheaper than buying another car, a local guy gets a pretty sweet job, and his wife doesn't have to learn to drive, so I guess it's good all around.
\We had about 5 minutes with the center's director, then he left us with a staffer to answer the rest of our questions. The staffer was polite and nice, he just didn't really know what I want to find out or he doesn't want to tell me. Honestly, I think they don't know. One thing I want is a list of biotech companies in China. He thought they had such a thing in each individual department of their center, and it could maybe be compiled. These guys work in a building together, have a focus on biotech, and rely on their contacts to get anything done, but they don't have a master address book. It's not incompetence, I don't think, just this Chinese attitude wherein you don't coordinate between departments.
Then, as I'm writing this, I get an email from the staffer thanking us for the meeting and 'reminding' me that I have to submit my report to him for approval of any reference to their center before publication. I haven't responded yet, but if a guy in the US asked me for editorial approval after the fact I'd probably laugh at him. I doubt it'll be an issue; I don't think I got anything interesting enough to make it into the report.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
A rooster this is not.
It's interesting to me which sounds wake me up in the morning. At No. 6 it could be a passing truck on Memorial Dr., or the football coach yelling into his megaphone, or the grounds staff mowing a lawn. Maybe it was someone upstairs playing music too loudly, or a snowplow beeping in reverse as its blade scraped pavement. Sometimes it was my neighbor's alarm clock, screeching ceaselessly and incessantly for the past 23 minutes. Sometimes it was my own alarm clock, reminding me that if I hit snooze again I'd never make it to class. There was a panoply of sounds, each unpleasant in its own way.
Not so, China. There is but one morning reveille- the joyous sound of Progress. Construction wakes me every morning at ungodly hours, and on the bad days it doesn't stop until well after dark. There is no break for holidays, no rest on the sabbath, only endless building. It's not just up and out and bigger, in my building it involves gutting the place and redoing every wall, window, door, and floor.
I think the Chinese have admitted defeat. The truly rich have moved away from the construction, the poor are the ones who run it, and the middle classes have surrendered to and been subjugated by the dust and the jackhammers and the drills.
---
It's been pointed out that my practice article's paragraphs are too long (true); that there aren't enough quotes (that's because I didn't interview anyone); that I use acres, square miles, and kilometers at different points; and that the 30 year estimate is awfully precise to be used without an approximation word. I only went to MIT, and you want consistency of units and error bars? Picky.
I LIKE saying, "Mr. Xiaoyuan". I think the Economist gets the title thing right, and saying, "Mr. Bush" gives it that pleasant invective feel without being too obvious.
I also noticed that I assumed that Yu Xiaoyuan's surname was Xiaoyuan because that's how it was written on an English language site, but upon further thought I'm almost certain it's Yu. We have an interesting way of addressing that problem at the UN, or maybe it's in all business in China. We write the last name in all caps, so you sign your email LEI Nuo, or John SMITH. It's like that on my business card, too.
My defensiveness aside, thanks for comments from those who gave them, and feel free to make your own if you haven't.
Not so, China. There is but one morning reveille- the joyous sound of Progress. Construction wakes me every morning at ungodly hours, and on the bad days it doesn't stop until well after dark. There is no break for holidays, no rest on the sabbath, only endless building. It's not just up and out and bigger, in my building it involves gutting the place and redoing every wall, window, door, and floor.
I think the Chinese have admitted defeat. The truly rich have moved away from the construction, the poor are the ones who run it, and the middle classes have surrendered to and been subjugated by the dust and the jackhammers and the drills.
---
It's been pointed out that my practice article's paragraphs are too long (true); that there aren't enough quotes (that's because I didn't interview anyone); that I use acres, square miles, and kilometers at different points; and that the 30 year estimate is awfully precise to be used without an approximation word. I only went to MIT, and you want consistency of units and error bars? Picky.
I LIKE saying, "Mr. Xiaoyuan". I think the Economist gets the title thing right, and saying, "Mr. Bush" gives it that pleasant invective feel without being too obvious.
I also noticed that I assumed that Yu Xiaoyuan's surname was Xiaoyuan because that's how it was written on an English language site, but upon further thought I'm almost certain it's Yu. We have an interesting way of addressing that problem at the UN, or maybe it's in all business in China. We write the last name in all caps, so you sign your email LEI Nuo, or John SMITH. It's like that on my business card, too.
My defensiveness aside, thanks for comments from those who gave them, and feel free to make your own if you haven't.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Shared experiences.
8/31
On Friday the UNIDO director general came through the office. Our Chinese office manager decided that this was an important event, and came by my office to make sure I'd stay until 6:30 to join the staff meeting and photo op. I agreed with them that that was a good idea, and wondered why they'd waited until a few hours beforehand to give me a heads up. Whatever, the only thing I would have done differently is wear a tie. The director seemed to be a nice guy, definitely a politician, but I hope my colleagues will excuse me if I wasn't too impressed by his rank. I looked up his CV out of curiosity, and what immediately struck me is how he went from assistant professor at U. Michigan Dearborn to Minister of Finance in Sierra Leone. That's some kind of a promotion.
I went home around 8 and relaxed for a bit, but I didn't have long before I was supposed to meet Linda and her boyfriend at a bar. They're leaving China soon, and I just wanted an excuse to go out. I didn't get around to eating dinner, usually a bad idea before hitting bars, but drinking coffee all day had messed with my appetite. I changed clothes, decided against the bike lights because I didn't want to carry them all evening, and set off, showing up at the Rickshaw a while before they did. While I was sitting alone in a lawn chair in the courtyard, drinking my expensive Tsingtao, I was invited to join a couple of girls and a guy at a table nearby.
Have I mentioned how much I love this phenomenon? In my experience, friends either have shared interests or shared experiences. These are the bonds that hold people together, and the best friends have plenty of both. In a place like China, expats all have a common shared experience before they even meet. If nothing else, you're guaranteed to be able to talk about China, and that makes starting conversations relatively easy. Of course talking about China with everyone gets old after a while, but the potential is there. Think about it- people in a NYC subway would never talk with strangers, but the instant there's a power outage, boom, there's a shared experience and people emerge from their bubbles. In line at the airport? I bet you're silent unless the line's brutally long or your flight's delayed, when the shared suffering gives you something in common. There are exceptions, but the rule works fairly well. It's one of the reasons I was such a fan of drinking shots of liquor in college (Hi, mom!) If you drink a beer nearby someone you don't know then it's a just couple of people having a beer, but inviting them to gather in a circle, coming up with a toast, grimacing about the burn of the liquor all produces a weird camaraderie that lingers beyond the act of drinking. And no, it's not just the additional intoxication brought on by the booze.
Anyway, so I join these 3 at their table. One's a heavily-tattooed, 30-something American guy living for years in Indonesia on his savings, claiming to spend $8 a month on rent. Another's a Canadian girl working for a security publication in Beijing with aspirations of holding public office back home in Toronto. The third's a Greek/Italian girl whose line of work I missed. Linda and her boyfriend come, other people join the original 3, and after a hanging out for a while we go our separate ways. I got the Greek girl's cellphone number, and I'll likely see her again, by coincidence if not on purpose. Such is the small world of the Beijing expat ghetto. This happened all evening- meeting and chatting with new people, being asked directions by strangers (and me accidently telling them the wrong street), being offered pot disguised as Marlboros by the Libyans who don't speak English, Chinese, or Spanish but welcome me at the open seat at their table. No thanks, I don't like the idea of Chinese jail, but it was nice of them to ask.
09/01-02
It was a quiet weekend. I didn't get in until 5AM after seeing Linda and her boyfriend off on Friday, and I didn't get up until 2:30 on Saturday. I watched a lot of movies, read some books, and did some research on freelance writing for science publications. The article below is one of my reject ideas, something I wanted to write about that didn't really fit into the science category. It feels strange not citing sources, but I guess I should try to get used to that. I'm also not very good at this style of writing, I don't think, so I'll try to get some more practice in before I start sending things off for real.
On Friday the UNIDO director general came through the office. Our Chinese office manager decided that this was an important event, and came by my office to make sure I'd stay until 6:30 to join the staff meeting and photo op. I agreed with them that that was a good idea, and wondered why they'd waited until a few hours beforehand to give me a heads up. Whatever, the only thing I would have done differently is wear a tie. The director seemed to be a nice guy, definitely a politician, but I hope my colleagues will excuse me if I wasn't too impressed by his rank. I looked up his CV out of curiosity, and what immediately struck me is how he went from assistant professor at U. Michigan Dearborn to Minister of Finance in Sierra Leone. That's some kind of a promotion.
I went home around 8 and relaxed for a bit, but I didn't have long before I was supposed to meet Linda and her boyfriend at a bar. They're leaving China soon, and I just wanted an excuse to go out. I didn't get around to eating dinner, usually a bad idea before hitting bars, but drinking coffee all day had messed with my appetite. I changed clothes, decided against the bike lights because I didn't want to carry them all evening, and set off, showing up at the Rickshaw a while before they did. While I was sitting alone in a lawn chair in the courtyard, drinking my expensive Tsingtao, I was invited to join a couple of girls and a guy at a table nearby.
Have I mentioned how much I love this phenomenon? In my experience, friends either have shared interests or shared experiences. These are the bonds that hold people together, and the best friends have plenty of both. In a place like China, expats all have a common shared experience before they even meet. If nothing else, you're guaranteed to be able to talk about China, and that makes starting conversations relatively easy. Of course talking about China with everyone gets old after a while, but the potential is there. Think about it- people in a NYC subway would never talk with strangers, but the instant there's a power outage, boom, there's a shared experience and people emerge from their bubbles. In line at the airport? I bet you're silent unless the line's brutally long or your flight's delayed, when the shared suffering gives you something in common. There are exceptions, but the rule works fairly well. It's one of the reasons I was such a fan of drinking shots of liquor in college (Hi, mom!) If you drink a beer nearby someone you don't know then it's a just couple of people having a beer, but inviting them to gather in a circle, coming up with a toast, grimacing about the burn of the liquor all produces a weird camaraderie that lingers beyond the act of drinking. And no, it's not just the additional intoxication brought on by the booze.
Anyway, so I join these 3 at their table. One's a heavily-tattooed, 30-something American guy living for years in Indonesia on his savings, claiming to spend $8 a month on rent. Another's a Canadian girl working for a security publication in Beijing with aspirations of holding public office back home in Toronto. The third's a Greek/Italian girl whose line of work I missed. Linda and her boyfriend come, other people join the original 3, and after a hanging out for a while we go our separate ways. I got the Greek girl's cellphone number, and I'll likely see her again, by coincidence if not on purpose. Such is the small world of the Beijing expat ghetto. This happened all evening- meeting and chatting with new people, being asked directions by strangers (and me accidently telling them the wrong street), being offered pot disguised as Marlboros by the Libyans who don't speak English, Chinese, or Spanish but welcome me at the open seat at their table. No thanks, I don't like the idea of Chinese jail, but it was nice of them to ask.
09/01-02
It was a quiet weekend. I didn't get in until 5AM after seeing Linda and her boyfriend off on Friday, and I didn't get up until 2:30 on Saturday. I watched a lot of movies, read some books, and did some research on freelance writing for science publications. The article below is one of my reject ideas, something I wanted to write about that didn't really fit into the science category. It feels strange not citing sources, but I guess I should try to get used to that. I'm also not very good at this style of writing, I don't think, so I'll try to get some more practice in before I start sending things off for real.
Writing headlines is harder than writing post titles.
With the 2008 Olympics fast approaching, and China’s ambitiously green Beijing still invisible through the smog, the government is exploring radical options to ensure that the environment doesn’t spoil their pageant.
The city recently tested a partial ban on private cars, taking an estimated one million vehicles off the road for 4 days. Beijing’s streets were noticeably less gridlocked, but the success of the experiment in clearing the air is questionable. On August 20th, the final day of the ban, the city’s air pollution level remained unchanged. Yu Xiaoyuan, environmental director of the Beijing Olympic Organizing committee, declared the experiment a success: “If we had not had the traffic controls we could not have maintained this level because the temperature and humidity were very high. So we can see the restrictions worked.” Despite Mr. Xiaoyuan’s enthusiasm, at the time of writing, air quality data for August 20th was unavailable on China’s State Environmental Protection Administration website, the only day this year without statistics provided.
A ban on cars is only one of the drastic measures under consideration. China has ramped up its weather control program in order to prevent Beijing’s frequent summer downpours from disrupting the event, and perhaps to use nighttime showers to clear the air of dust and pollutants. The government has trained and recruited over 37,000 peasants to operate Mao-era artillery, firing exploding shells of silver iodide into clouds to accelerate their growth and induce rain. The weather controllers hope to intercept any cloud formations heading towards the city, dumping any rain safely out of sight of the Olympic dignitaries and press.
These experiments are nothing new- party bosses have long addressed symptoms of environmental problems rather than their cause.
Mao proposed in 1958 to connect the flood-prone Yangtze with the silt-choked Yellow River. In Mao’s vision, currently under construction, man-made channels stretch 1200 km to bring water to the parched North. However, environmentalists, including the State Environmental Protection Agency, doubt the plan’s potential. They propose water conservation as the solution to shortages in northern China, blaming artificially low water prices that encourage waste and make conservation technologies less economical. Environmentalists are also concerned that the plan could dry up the Yangtze River in 30 years.
The aridity of the North is a significant problem for China. Overgrazing, drought, and deforestation expand the Gobi desert by 950 square miles a year, and have led to sandstorms that reach Tokyo and are detectable even in the United States. China is responding by planting the Great Green Wall, a network of tree belts covering 9 million acres, to act as a windbreak and eventually to reclaim the desert. While hopes are high that this wall, the largest ecological project in history, will be a success, China continues to cut down 25 million trees a year for chopsticks alone.
The future aside, addressing the symptoms of environmental problems may be just the short-term fix that Olympic planners need. If a car ban and weather control are insufficient, China is reserving the option of pushing the big red button- shutting down all industry in Beijing. However, even bringing the city to a screeching halt may not work. For years Beijing has been coercing its heavy industry to relocate, but factories have settled nearby in the welcoming Hebei province, where summer wind conditions blow their pollution right back over Beijing.
This puts China’s government in the unenviable position of deciding between wielding their enormous influence and paralyzing the country’s industrial heartland or allowing Olympic athletes to arrive in Beijing wearing the activated charcoal masks issued by many teams. With the amount of international credibility China has staked on the games, it seems likely that some sort of shutdown will occur. What remains to be seen is how an increasingly liberalized Chinese market will react to command economy restrictions on a scale not used in years.
The city recently tested a partial ban on private cars, taking an estimated one million vehicles off the road for 4 days. Beijing’s streets were noticeably less gridlocked, but the success of the experiment in clearing the air is questionable. On August 20th, the final day of the ban, the city’s air pollution level remained unchanged. Yu Xiaoyuan, environmental director of the Beijing Olympic Organizing committee, declared the experiment a success: “If we had not had the traffic controls we could not have maintained this level because the temperature and humidity were very high. So we can see the restrictions worked.” Despite Mr. Xiaoyuan’s enthusiasm, at the time of writing, air quality data for August 20th was unavailable on China’s State Environmental Protection Administration website, the only day this year without statistics provided.
A ban on cars is only one of the drastic measures under consideration. China has ramped up its weather control program in order to prevent Beijing’s frequent summer downpours from disrupting the event, and perhaps to use nighttime showers to clear the air of dust and pollutants. The government has trained and recruited over 37,000 peasants to operate Mao-era artillery, firing exploding shells of silver iodide into clouds to accelerate their growth and induce rain. The weather controllers hope to intercept any cloud formations heading towards the city, dumping any rain safely out of sight of the Olympic dignitaries and press.
These experiments are nothing new- party bosses have long addressed symptoms of environmental problems rather than their cause.
Mao proposed in 1958 to connect the flood-prone Yangtze with the silt-choked Yellow River. In Mao’s vision, currently under construction, man-made channels stretch 1200 km to bring water to the parched North. However, environmentalists, including the State Environmental Protection Agency, doubt the plan’s potential. They propose water conservation as the solution to shortages in northern China, blaming artificially low water prices that encourage waste and make conservation technologies less economical. Environmentalists are also concerned that the plan could dry up the Yangtze River in 30 years.
The aridity of the North is a significant problem for China. Overgrazing, drought, and deforestation expand the Gobi desert by 950 square miles a year, and have led to sandstorms that reach Tokyo and are detectable even in the United States. China is responding by planting the Great Green Wall, a network of tree belts covering 9 million acres, to act as a windbreak and eventually to reclaim the desert. While hopes are high that this wall, the largest ecological project in history, will be a success, China continues to cut down 25 million trees a year for chopsticks alone.
The future aside, addressing the symptoms of environmental problems may be just the short-term fix that Olympic planners need. If a car ban and weather control are insufficient, China is reserving the option of pushing the big red button- shutting down all industry in Beijing. However, even bringing the city to a screeching halt may not work. For years Beijing has been coercing its heavy industry to relocate, but factories have settled nearby in the welcoming Hebei province, where summer wind conditions blow their pollution right back over Beijing.
This puts China’s government in the unenviable position of deciding between wielding their enormous influence and paralyzing the country’s industrial heartland or allowing Olympic athletes to arrive in Beijing wearing the activated charcoal masks issued by many teams. With the amount of international credibility China has staked on the games, it seems likely that some sort of shutdown will occur. What remains to be seen is how an increasingly liberalized Chinese market will react to command economy restrictions on a scale not used in years.
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