This weekend I enjoyed my first games of softball in Shanghai. I was introduced to a couple guys by a friend at work who needed people for their team. I must say it was quite a nice time. Our team is made up of about half American and half Canadians. While softball is important to them, it would seem drinking is priority one. I met them at Oscar's Pub, which is sponsoring our team, at about 9 15 Sunday morning. In addition to having a small bus that got us to the game, they had a large cooler of beer ready to go.
The field was a little ways away but was quite nice. It's a well-organized league, and we got in two games on Sunday. There were few highlights apart from us losing both games (one close, on embarrassing). I actually hadn't played softball since senior year of college, so I was pretty happy that the rust wasn't too intense. They have me playing shortstop but I have no idea why. Anyways, it was a good mix up softball, bullshitting, and drinking. Also, one guy one our team dislocated his shoulder diving for a ball. Good times all around.
The people on my team are almost all older. I'm the youngest person and most people seem to be in their mid late 30s. While that kind of put me off at first, I soon realized most of these people are quite, shall we say, young at heart. One guy, in particular, is called Canada. He's 42 and acts like he's a 16 year-old on meth. Everyone is just fun, nice, and doesn't tend to throw up too much bullshit.
The interesting thing about this league is that there is quite the mix of teams. Some teams are mostly westerners but other teams are groups of expats from all over the place. The second team we played on Sunday was entirely from Japan. The expat population here is interesting. It's relatively tightly knit, as there just arent that many foreigners in the city. I must say though, everyone is extremely nice and happy to meet new people. I guess living here makes meeting people that you tend to already have things in common with a special occasion. It makes for a fun atmosphere. In the US, I tended to stay within basic social circles. Making attempts to meet people and broaden horizons almost seemed taboo. Here, it's pretty much a social free-for-all.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Wild Wild East
All good suggestions by three of the four people who read my blog. Your contributions will not be forgotten. However I feel I finally have something to write about - not having anything to write about!
I sat down for an interview today for a story I'm working on. I met with a guy who works for a hedge fund here. I expected a 10-15 minute chat, it ended up being an hour long discussion of how China may be the most exciting place on earth.
So far, I've struggled to have anything to really write about. I've attempted to avoid things such as "oh man, the taxi drivers here are carazay!!!1!!11!" and "boy, the Olympics have really opened this place up." It has been difficult to come up with good observations that aren't completely idiotic (for references of idiotic observations please see my last post) and I've been trying to figure out why. Perhaps I know why.
The interview/chat I had today left me pretty much dizzy. This guy, Sage, has been in and out of China since 1987. I literally asked about 6 questions and that yielded about 45 solid minutes of diatribe on topics ranging from the internet (what I'm writing about) to the economy, expats, and most everything else. At the end of this meeting I reached one conclusion.
This place is, essentially, Mars. Up can be down, black can be white, dogs and cats can live together, etc. I suppose for my time here so far I've attempted to relate most of the things here to stuff I'm familiar with, usually things stateside. That's a big mistake. You can do it, of course, but you're really shortchanging everything that's important. The differences are far more impressive that the similarities, the similarities are almost inconsequential when compared to the differences.
If you were to get deeply philosophical on this, you could argue that nobody would be able to give a truly effective viewpoint on China. The base assumptions I make about anything and everything automatically cloud any observations I could make, rendering them half-truths at best.
I had read a reasonable amount about China before coming here. I would not say any of it was wrong or misleading. Instead, it's like giving somebody a look at a Monet painting from 10 feet away - "cool, it's a semi blurry picture of people standing near a lake" - without allowing them to check it out up close. Sure the big picture is somewhat clear, makes a reasonable amount of sense, but without seeing it up close you can't quite understand what makes it impressive.
The guy I sat down with kept using a great word to describe China - chaos. Things often time don't seem to make sense. Not that there isn't logic behind individual happenings, but you can rarely extrapolate that logic to other areas. Like the points in a Monet painting, everything seems to be happening independently but somehow coming together to make some sort of picture.
Obviously, I don't have a very good grip on what I think, let alone how to describe it to other people. I guess that's part of the difficulty of writing about things here. The general narrative is elusive and may not even exist. Hence, be prepared for a strange, mind-numbingly confusing posts in the future. If anything, it should be fun to watch me try to figure this stuff out.
I sat down for an interview today for a story I'm working on. I met with a guy who works for a hedge fund here. I expected a 10-15 minute chat, it ended up being an hour long discussion of how China may be the most exciting place on earth.
So far, I've struggled to have anything to really write about. I've attempted to avoid things such as "oh man, the taxi drivers here are carazay!!!1!!11!" and "boy, the Olympics have really opened this place up." It has been difficult to come up with good observations that aren't completely idiotic (for references of idiotic observations please see my last post) and I've been trying to figure out why. Perhaps I know why.
The interview/chat I had today left me pretty much dizzy. This guy, Sage, has been in and out of China since 1987. I literally asked about 6 questions and that yielded about 45 solid minutes of diatribe on topics ranging from the internet (what I'm writing about) to the economy, expats, and most everything else. At the end of this meeting I reached one conclusion.
This place is, essentially, Mars. Up can be down, black can be white, dogs and cats can live together, etc. I suppose for my time here so far I've attempted to relate most of the things here to stuff I'm familiar with, usually things stateside. That's a big mistake. You can do it, of course, but you're really shortchanging everything that's important. The differences are far more impressive that the similarities, the similarities are almost inconsequential when compared to the differences.
If you were to get deeply philosophical on this, you could argue that nobody would be able to give a truly effective viewpoint on China. The base assumptions I make about anything and everything automatically cloud any observations I could make, rendering them half-truths at best.
I had read a reasonable amount about China before coming here. I would not say any of it was wrong or misleading. Instead, it's like giving somebody a look at a Monet painting from 10 feet away - "cool, it's a semi blurry picture of people standing near a lake" - without allowing them to check it out up close. Sure the big picture is somewhat clear, makes a reasonable amount of sense, but without seeing it up close you can't quite understand what makes it impressive.
The guy I sat down with kept using a great word to describe China - chaos. Things often time don't seem to make sense. Not that there isn't logic behind individual happenings, but you can rarely extrapolate that logic to other areas. Like the points in a Monet painting, everything seems to be happening independently but somehow coming together to make some sort of picture.
Obviously, I don't have a very good grip on what I think, let alone how to describe it to other people. I guess that's part of the difficulty of writing about things here. The general narrative is elusive and may not even exist. Hence, be prepared for a strange, mind-numbingly confusing posts in the future. If anything, it should be fun to watch me try to figure this stuff out.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Medal counts and boredom
I have no desire to figure out something interesting to write on and then attempt to finding an interest perspective so here's a smattering of random thoughts.
- I primarily work with two people from Britain and one from the US. It's a relatively fun dynamic, particularly when it comes to the Olympic medal count. The British are doing quite well this year and my coworkers are beaming about it. The US, by comparison to previous years, is doing somewhat crappily. As such, I get minute-by-minute updates on who has won what. It does appear China will finish with the most gold medals, proving once again that Democracy just doesn't work.
- It seems to rain at least once a week here, if not more. And by rain I don't mean a slight drizzle, I mean pouring monsoons. I've already been caught in a downpour twice. On a completely separate note, there seems to be a severe dearth of overhangs on the streets of Shanghai.
- Learning Chinese is pretty difficult.
- My visit to Hong Kong was pretty fascinating. For being a pretty small island, the amount of massive buildings make it seem much larger. It's more Western than Shanghai, but in a slightly annoying way. One thing that is fascinating - you can walk entire blocks without touching the road. Most buildings have enclosed raised walkways that connect buildings. Otherwise it was about how I expected, busy, crowded, and full of Westerners.
That's it for now. i'm going to try to post some more pictures soon. Additionally, i really have no idea who is reading this/what they want to read about. Please, please tell me what you'd want to see here otherwise this thing will die the same death as the australia blog
- I primarily work with two people from Britain and one from the US. It's a relatively fun dynamic, particularly when it comes to the Olympic medal count. The British are doing quite well this year and my coworkers are beaming about it. The US, by comparison to previous years, is doing somewhat crappily. As such, I get minute-by-minute updates on who has won what. It does appear China will finish with the most gold medals, proving once again that Democracy just doesn't work.
- It seems to rain at least once a week here, if not more. And by rain I don't mean a slight drizzle, I mean pouring monsoons. I've already been caught in a downpour twice. On a completely separate note, there seems to be a severe dearth of overhangs on the streets of Shanghai.
- Learning Chinese is pretty difficult.
- My visit to Hong Kong was pretty fascinating. For being a pretty small island, the amount of massive buildings make it seem much larger. It's more Western than Shanghai, but in a slightly annoying way. One thing that is fascinating - you can walk entire blocks without touching the road. Most buildings have enclosed raised walkways that connect buildings. Otherwise it was about how I expected, busy, crowded, and full of Westerners.
That's it for now. i'm going to try to post some more pictures soon. Additionally, i really have no idea who is reading this/what they want to read about. Please, please tell me what you'd want to see here otherwise this thing will die the same death as the australia blog
Thursday, August 7, 2008
The Phlog Phart 1
I'm going to try to post some interesting pictures here and write somewhat amusing captions about them. Here we go.
I'm not quite sure if it's a problem with my camera, or there's really this much smog. I'm guessing the latter. This is a pretty random photo of downtown Shanghai. Nothing really notable other than the fact that you really can't see that far.
This is around the block from my house. It's a random storefront for Spyker automobiles. There's a Bentley one not too far from it. There is a good amount of money flying around this place.
There are also some pretty poor people here. Like every good journalist I enjoy stating the obvious and backing it up with choice examples.
Condom machines are scattered around the city. There seem to be some of them on almost every block, probably to help reinforce that whole one child thing. This one appears to be advertising AIDS. I'm sold.
And here's both of those things, sort of. In the foreground, a semi-ghetto area. In the background is Pudong, which has some really gigantic buildings. Dichotomies are fun!
I'm not quite sure if it's a problem with my camera, or there's really this much smog. I'm guessing the latter. This is a pretty random photo of downtown Shanghai. Nothing really notable other than the fact that you really can't see that far.
This is around the block from my house. It's a random storefront for Spyker automobiles. There's a Bentley one not too far from it. There is a good amount of money flying around this place.
There are also some pretty poor people here. Like every good journalist I enjoy stating the obvious and backing it up with choice examples.
Condom machines are scattered around the city. There seem to be some of them on almost every block, probably to help reinforce that whole one child thing. This one appears to be advertising AIDS. I'm sold.
And here's both of those things, sort of. In the foreground, a semi-ghetto area. In the background is Pudong, which has some really gigantic buildings. Dichotomies are fun!
Saturday, August 2, 2008
The Daily Commute
I've done this a few times now, and it's always pretty thrilling. In addition to taking the metro system or cabs, one mode of transportation is to ride motorcycles/scooters. They're actually pretty efficient in traffic since they don't really abide by basic traffic laws and can weave in and out of traffic. It's also slightly terrifying.
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