Full of amazing "lasts"

A fantastic last Friday.

   On Friday I went out to lunch with my manager in Shanghai to talk about my experience and to discuss some areas of improvement in regards to the transition of information from the home office and the liaison offices (or in some cases lack of information). This meant that I wasn't able to head out to lunch with the rest of the team which I think they were hoping for since I had been packing my lunch all week (trying to use up all the food at my apartment!). I came back from lunch to find a nice little gift from Ewgenia. I decided to give her the bike that I purchased instead of trying to sell it. She has been wonderful to me the entire time I have been here and know that she doesn't currently have a bike. It turns out that she was just about to start looking for a second hand bike to buy...perfect timing. Anyways, she was thrilled at the idea of getting mine and wanted to take me out for lunch or dinner as a thank you. But she must of thought that time was ticking down and that she would get a chance so she stopped and got me a fresh yogurt and 2 types of Shanghai style salami (which I hadn't tried yet). It was so nice of her.

   After work Tina and Oliver invited me out for dessert. I thought it was strange that we would go for dessert without getting dinner first but what the heck...dinner isn't really needed, right? They took me to Raffle City which is a mall around the People's Square part of town. It turns out that it is a young couple's mall...it was filled with girls dragging their boyfriends around shopping. Pretty funny! But in the basement level is a giant food court with all sorts of popular Shanghai treats.

This was our destination.

The two large bowls was the Tiawanese dessert that we came for. It would not

do well in the states due to texture alone. It was a bowl of slightly flavored jelly, sweet 

potatoes and different shaped/colored rice gluten pieces all in a slightly sweet sauce.

After dessert I was able to convince Tina and Oliver to get dinner so we went to 

Tina's favorite noodle shop which was also located in Raffle city.

Last but not least we topped all the food we already ate with more food!

This time it was grilled meats, lamb and chicken hearts.

   The rest of my last weekend was pretty quiet as I had a lot of organizing and packing to do. I did make it out for a little more wandering and shopping, making sure that I got to East Nanjing Rd one last time. Plus, this was the sight of the shop that I wanted to buy a couple treats from to bring home.

Monday night... 

I asked if anyone would want to join me for one of my favorite meals, magical cabbage and fried pork.

I really don't know what they do to make these 2 dishes so good but I was glad to eat it one last time.

Today was my last work day...

Like any good Chinese work team, we posed for pictures :)

And again...

And again...

And again! On the far right is Iris, she was doing the exchange in PDX
and just arrived back yesterday.

    We had the last team lunch that I would be around for. It was my job to pick a restaurant but I don't really know where to go. I can't even remember the names or the locations of places they have taken me in the past so I elicited some help. Itold the group that I wanted traditional Chinese food and Tina stepped up and picked a restaurant that she had been to once and really liked. After taxi-ing over there Diana and Tina started ordering all the things on the menu that I hadn't tried yet, plus a few favorites.

Pig tail...they were most excited about me trying this.

Left, this is only part of our feast (pig ears, spicy vegetable starch noodles, tiny whole shrimp, chrysanthemum greens, pig tail, duck tongue, spicy cauliflower and marinated bamboo shoots.

The pic on the right is the sweet potato "juice" that we drank with our meal, it was really good but

not very refreshing.

Duck tongue. That's all I have to say about it.

Donkey meat.

Our feast just keeps growing in size. Too much food. Additions, giant mushrooms
served like scallops, spicy beef, steamed broccoli stems and really tummy braised chicken.

The men on the team enjoying all the food.

My favorite dish. Spicy whole braised fish. Turns out if was almost
everyone's favorite dish.

   At the end of the meal we had 2 bread-type products show up. One was sweet and starchy (what you can see in Ewgenia's chop sticks, which I just pissed capturing her feeding Iris...they are 2 peas in a pod now that Iris is back. It was like watching big sister and little sister together). The second treat was the "pancakes" that are shown on the right. Iris told me that these bring back memories of grade school b/c she used to eat them a lot back then. These pancakes are a Shanghai specialty made with sake and you could really taste the sake, they were so good.

   Now it's my last evening in Shanghai, I have finished packing and am now looking forward to starting my journey home. I have a small 3 day pit stop in Vietnam for work but will land in PDX Sunday morning. I am lucky to have Donald, Matt and Lily picking me up at the airport.

I can't wait to see my PDX friends and family soon.

My Sunny Sunday

Can you guess where I went?

The plum blossoms are blooming around Shanghai, a sign of spring, right?

Tuyade Hunshi / Tuya’s Marriage, 2006

Directed by Wang Quan’An

Produced by Yan Ju Gang

Mandarin with English subtitles

Screenwriters: Wang Quan’An and Lu Wei

Cast: Yu Nan

The film is set in cold and arid Inner Mongolia where aggressive industrialization has had a huge impact on the natural environment and nomadic way-of-life of its largely Mongolian population. The farmers have ridiculously harsh lives reduced to grinding struggle for physical and economic subsistence.

Wang Quan’An, born in 1965 and ethnically Mongolian himself, made this film to record what he sees as the final phase of Mongolian life in the ‘grasslands’ before they are forced to move by the government or by the impossibility of survival. He set the story and filmed in the area where his mother was born and, in classic 6^th

Generation style, used many non-professional local actors in principal roles. The farmers Bater, Senge and Zhaya are all played by themselves, as is the personification of industrial wealth, Baolier. The startling exception is Yu Nan who plays Tuya. She was born in 1978 and graduated from the Beijing Film Academy’s Acting Department and was discovered by Wang Quan’An in his 2000 film Lunar Eclipse, for which she won Best Actress Award at Deauville Asian Film Festival. She won her second Best Actress Award at the Paris Film Festival for her role in Wang Quan’An’s second film The Story of Ermei, 2004.

Tuya is a beautiful and resilient shepherdess in a desert-like area of Inner Mongolia. Her husband, Bater, who she loves, was injured whilst digging a well three years before the film begins. They have two children and Tuya is the matriarch of the family, tending her herd of a hundred sheep on her camel, lugging water from the well 30thirty kilometres away, cooking and caring for her family. Whilst helping her horseman neighbour Senge, she injures her back. Under protest she agrees to divorce her husband and find a new healthy spouse, but only on the condition that the replacement will take care of her Bater. Tuya refuses to submit to the hardship of her life or to government and personal pressure she struggles against and remains determined to preserve her family life. Whilst a love story, there is no happy-ever-after ending, but there is a resolution that recognizes the ambiguities of her life.

Tuya’s Marriage is no ethnographic curiosity, Wang Quan’An and his screenwriting collaborator, Lu Wei (who was also the screenwriter for Farewell My Concubine and To Live), portray a world of hardship that nevertheless is thoroughly recognizable in its human complexity. Its characters are motivated by the familiar needs for companionship and material well-being, with greed, lust, jealousy and despair all making appearances.

Awards:

Berlin Film Festival 2007, Golden Bear

Chicago Film Festival 2007, Best Actress

Chicago Film Festival 2007, Special Jury prize

Things that I appreciate and will miss...

   As I was walking home last night I came across some thing that I will really miss but never really gave much thought to before. Check out this video (sorry, the lights are a little blurry at first):

   I love that the traffic lights here give you a countdown of how long the light will stay green or how long it will stay red. I think it's very handy and will have to get used to not having this in Portland. I think that it does allow for more last minute light running...

Something that I will not miss

   I will not miss having to do tiny loads of laundry, just enough to hang in my shower to dry. I will appreciate being able to procrastinate doing laundry until Donald and I have run out of clean clothes then do multiple giant loads then tossing them in the dryer.  I have a washer/dryer (one unit that does both) but can only use the washer portion of it b/c the dryer gets SO hot that it put holes in several garments the first time I dried them when arriving to Shanghai 6 months ago. Most people here have to hang dry everything but they all have good spots to hang dry clothes outside. Since I'm on the 18th floor I think that I would loose everything to the wind if I put it out.

YuYuan Garden and People's Square

   It was another beautiful weekend, cold and sunny. Almost needed the sunglasses :) I figured that it would be good to spend as much time outside as possible so I checked out all my park and garden options in and around Shanghai before deciding to visit the Yuyuan Garden. Not visiting this garden before I move back to Portland almost seemed like a crime plus Trisha made it there when she was visiting ans had good things to say about it. Yu Garden is located in Old Town which is only about 5 subway stops from my apartment. I've visited the bazaar around the garden many times, it's always busy with tourist and Saturday was no exception. If you can blow up the below picture you will see just how busy this area was.

Yuyuan Garden Bazaar located outside the actual garden

Yuyuan Garden entrance

   Yuyuan garden is an excellent model of a Chinese classical gardening architecture protected by the state. It was built during the reign of Ming Emperor Jiajing (1559) as the private garden of Pan Yunduan, an administrative commissioner of Sichuan Province. With an area of over two hectares, the garden is famous for many Chinese architectural marvels.

Even with all the crowds I was able to get some good photos :)

This is the Naturally Hollowed Jade Boulder (famous at the garden),
although it just looks like a big rock with holes. It doesn't look like jade to me.

Yu Hua Hall, a study used by the original owner of the garden

Plum blossoms are a big deal here in China (like Cherry blossoms are in Japan).
They are starting to bloom!

   Left, a very cool opera stage with a beautiful inner ceiling that has a bright round-shaped mirror in the center. It was designed to give perfect acoustical effects. Right, the Chinese dragon is such an important symbol and can be seen in the roof line in part of the garden.

A large zig-zag bridge.

Left, more dragons! Right, the famous Big Rockery...a giant pile of rocks. At some 

point it was apparently the tallest point in Shanghai and one could see the Huangpu River 

from the top (this is the river that divides the 2 parts of Shanghai (Pudong and Puxi).

Nanxiang Steamed Bun Restaurant

   I hadn't really planned on it but since I was hungry after walking the garden I decided to wait in the long line that is always outside the Nanxiang Steamed Bun Restaurant which is within the Yu Garden Bazaar. I ate here with Trisha and Shawn but we ate inside to try some of their fancier buns instead of waiting for the to-go window buns which is super popular. The picture on the right shows a sign annoucing the prices, for the first hour of business 16 buns costs 12rmb ($1.90) then it goes up to 20rmb ($3.18) for all hours after that. I hopped in line and waited...and waited...

...and waited some more. After about 30 minutes I was getting close to the ordering window.

   I finally got to order and received my tray of 16 mini steamed buns. I doused them with vinegar then went to find a place to sit and enjoy them (and take a picture to share!). When I was at the front of the line people that weren't in line were harassing those that were to buy them buns (i'm not totally sure but I thing they were offering more money then they really cost). I think that everyone in line was ignoring them due to the sole fact that we all waited so long for ours that we weren't going to help those not willing to wait in the same long-line. After scarfing my snack I decided to walk off my full belly by walking up to People's Square. Just like Yu Garden I had been to the People's Square many times but never really wandered the entire park. Today was the perfect day to explore.

People's Square

   Turns out there is a full on park in the city square. I had been around the parameter with Donald when I first  arrived to Shanghai but had later heard that there was a lake in the center so I was determined to see it.

You can see the skyscrapers surrounding the city square.

The lake turned out to be a pond but was still kind of nice.

    Another thing that I was determined to do on Saturday was spend an hour or two relaxing at the Shanghai Library, the largest public library in China. I made it there just as the sun was going down and was excited to visit the foreign publications on the 4th floor... to enjoy some newspapers and magazines that would be available. Seems that a couple of things weren't going to work out. The first, I had missed the Reader Registration by an hour and a half...who knew that you couldn't just get a library card at any point during business hours. The second thing to go wrong was once I wandered to the 4th floor to just view the foreign publication room (since I couldn't get in without a reader card) that it wasn't even open... apparently, this must not be a popular section, they close earlier then the rest of the library everyday!

Left, the dark forth floor. There was a couple there that were also hoping to get in.

The view from the library :)

   On the way out I noticed that they had a 24 hour self-check out stand along the street outside of the library. Certain titles were available at this booking vending machine...they were all Chinese books though. Maybe there aren't enough foreigners that would take advantage of this service. Do we have this service in the states?

   Since I had some extra time and wasn't ready to head home I walked the 10 minutes to the Avocado Lady for my last visit before leaving Shanghai for good. I stocked up on veggies that would last me until close to my leave date. Only 8 more days as of today...can you believe it?!