Fake Market and the Shanghai Subway

Ok - long day of class - my mind is shot. Pictures good - complete sentences bad.

The subway is very clean, very user-friendly (everything is in Mandarin and English), and cheap (4RMB a ride).

Buying tickets:


Entrance Gate:


TV's showing how long till the next train arrives:


The subway trains are one long compartment - no doors or separate cars. This is from one of the non-rush hour rides.


I know it's hard to see, but this guy has 12 motherboards in boxes (US street value of ~2000US). I guarantee you would not see this on a US subway without armed guards.


And GOOGLE!


The fake market is located underneath the Science and Technology Museum, right off the #2 (Green) subway line. Everything is fake (or on the off chance it's real - it either fell off a truck or was over produced). Also a surprise - it's more of a mall - with 'legit' looking stores, AC, and *lots* of people willing to sell you crap you don't need.

Vendor "iPhone - you want?"
Me "I have a real one"
Vendor "Oh - mine only copy. You still want?"
Me "No, but thanks for the honesty"


Lot's of iPhone models I didn't know existed:






It's real! Really:


Gibson Les Paul's - Only 4200RMB!


One last story. Even though I didn't need it, I decided to negotiate with one of the vendors for a two piece Northface jacket ('Gortex' shell and fleece liner). He started the price at 1000RMB. After 5 minutes of negotation, I had him down to 230. I walked away from his shop and rejoined my group. He *followed* me for 10 minutes, continuously asking me 'What your best price?'. Decided to have fun with him - I kept negotiating. Got him down to 174RMB before he started screaming and swearing at me saying I was wasting his time. Ah - the fun of negotiating when you don't really care about the outcome :) As the man was running back to his shop I yelled back at him to have a good day. Pretty sure he didn't care, but the other shop owners were laughing with our group at him. Everyone understands a good laugh!

Bar Rouge and Babyface

To celebrate the successful end of the data warehousing and business intelligence portion of our training, we went out on the town. First stop - Bar Rouge (www.bar-rouge-shanghai.com). Bar Rouge is a great bar located on top of a building overlooking the Huangpujiang River and the Shanghai Skyline. Once again, my night pictures didn't turn out, so I'm sourcing those from a friend. You'll have to trust me, the view was magnificent.

After a while we decided to go to Babyface (http://www.babyface.com.cn/), one of the premier nightclubs in Shanghai.


I loved this place! The music was a mix of house, trance, techno, and remixes. The sound system was the loudest I have ever heard, and the lighting system was amazing. Here's two videos giving a brief insight into our evening - the videos do have sound, so be aware.

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Karaoke

Karaoke is a religion in China. So when my Chinese co-workers said they had organized a karaoke night, almost everyone was in. Karaoke is *very* different in China. We arrived at the karaoke place, known as KTV. When we walked inside the atmosphere reminded me of a movie theater. There was a 'grocery store' where you could buy soda, beer, liquor and snacks.


Each 'group' had their own private room which you could either reserve (just like a dinner reservation) or you could show up and wait for the next available room. Since we had a large group, we had a room for about 50 people. Some of the rooms only fit 5 or so people. If you bought bottles of alcohol, they were carried to your room for you (like here - where we bought a liter of Bacardi for 160RMB)


The room itself was very nice - multicolored illuminated walls, granite countertops, and leather sofas and stools.


Thank goodness we had some native Chinese speakers with us, as the controls were in Mandarin, which led to some 'interesting' song choices. I've got a few videos of the revelry, so make sure you ask to see them when you see me :)

I can't recommend Chinese style karaoke enough.

Fabric Market

One of the highlights of Shanghai is the South Bund Soft Spinning Material Market, commonly know as the 'Fabric Market'. The fabric market is a large, three story building full of individual stalls selling clothing items. Everything can be tailored (and usually is, they only 'stock' display items, which are rarely American sized).

My apologies - but none of my pictures from inside the market turned out. I'm currently sourcing pictures from co-workers and will add them once I get them. In the mean time - imagine!

How does it work? You tell the worker what you want (for instance, I ordered a suit from one vendor, two dress shirts from another, and a pair of dress pants and a winter coat from a final one). You can either point to one of their models, bring your own picture of the style, or look in many of the books that they have available. They have tons of rolls of fabric, so you select the fabric right off the bolts. They then measure you - all before talking price. Next comes the negotiation.

This is where it gets fun or tricky depending upon your view. They'll always start the price ridiculously high - I'll use my pair of pants as an example. She said 700RMB, about~$105 (well she didn't really say - all the price negotation is done on a calculator as it's easier for everyone to understand). I laughed and said 'tài guì le' or it's too expensive in Mandarin. At this point she dropped the price to 600RMB, saying it's "Special Friend Price". I kept laughing and said 'jiā yóu' - or come on in Mandarin. At this point, she asked me (in Mandarin), if I speak Mandarin, so I replied (in Mandarin of course), that I speak a little and that her prices are for Americans - I want the Chinese price. Suddenly the Special Friend Price is 300RMB. That is when I offered 100RMB. I knew from doing some research on the expat forums that anything under 175RMB is a good price for dress pants from this particular stall. After a few more rounds of back and forth, we're at 200RMB. This is when I told her it's too expensive and not worth my time, I'll go to someone else. As I'm walking out the door she grabs my arm and pulls me back in, showing her final price of 150RMB (~$22). Mission accomplished. She says the pants will be ready in four days - I knew I don't need them any sooner, so I said thanks and goodbye.

A week later:
Class got really busy, so I didn't get a chance to head back any sooner. Went to the stall and said hello. She got the pants out and tried them on (right out in the open - hope you've got clean underwear on!). For women trying on clothing they'll hold up some fabric as a makeshift changing room. The pants fit great, they were just about 3/4" too long, so I pointed that out and they altered them in about 20 minutes. Good to go. Every other item fit perfectly the first time. For some reason they couldn't find the vest for my suit, so they're making another one which will be ready tomorrow (although I won't go back until next week).

So what did I all get?
- Two dress shirts
- One three piece suit
- One pair of dress pants
- One cashmere winter coat
for a grand total of about $200. I win!

How do they look? Check it out for yourself!

Suit and one of the shirts:


One of the shirts and the other pair of pants:

For some reason the shirt looks terrible in this picture - it actually fits great - possibly my new favorite shirt!

And the fabulous cashmere coat:


As an added bonus - I can now email the stalls that have my size and request fabric swatches. They'll mail them over to me in the states and I can let them know which ones I want and they'll make another shirt/suit/pair of pants and mail them to me. I just need to avoid gaining weight!

Suzhou

Today was back to work here in Shanghai, so expect this next week to be pretty boring :( On the upside, I went with a small group to the 'small' city of Suzhou, about an hour and a half outside of Shanghai. How 'small' is Suzhou? About 6 million people. I suppose when you compare the city to Shanghai (which is 22 million - or about 2.5 New York City's). If you own a laptop that's not a Dell, it was probably made in Suzhou. If you own a Dell, all the components were probably made in Suzhou. The Technology Park in Suzhou is the largest in the world - so chances are there's a part of every electronic device that was made there.

Fortunately, we spent our day in the old city, which is much more in line with what one would expect to see in 'traditional' China. We started off the day by visiting two beautiful gardens. I've combined the pictures below, but of note was that one of the gardens was the Master of the Nets Garden, which is considered to be one of the finest gardens in all of China.

Check out the amazing detail in the arch engravings.


This 'painting' is natural marble that looks like a landscape.


My favorite picture of the view.


Enjoying the round wall openings.


Beautiful inlay of stones making up the floor.


Next up we took a rickshaw tour. Here's Nicole and I in our rickshaw!


Suhzou is famous for it's canal system. It's often referred to as the 'Venice of the East'. Here's some locals on a typical boat.


Here's yours truly along the canal.


We also stopped in a silk factory and saw the silk making process, from larvae to finished product. I took mostly videos, and I can't seem to get the videos to embed properly, so you'll have to take my word for how impressive the process was.

And finally, one of the many arches over the canal.


Hope this can tide you over for a bit - data warehousing and BI reporting will be taking over my time for the next few days.

City Tour

Today we had the day off - so we took a guided tour around Shanghai. Our first stop was the Jade Budda Temple.







Interesting note - below are some pictures of bamboo scaffolding waiting to be erected. We noticed that most of the buildings being constructed (including the sky scrapers) were using bamboo scaffolding!





Not quite the Wall Street Bull:



Next stop was the 'Old City'.



Within the 'Old City' was a large garden.





Did I mention it was very hot and humid today? How hot you ask? Try a heat index of 106 degrees. Here I am catching a break from the head in a cave within the garden.





We went to a tea house and had various teas. Here's the Jasmine tea immediately after adding water.



And here's after a few minutes. Notice how the tea leaves have 'blossomed' a flower.



After a brief torrential downpour (in which I got completely soaked) we went to the Shanghai Financial Center. The Shanghai Financial Center is Asia's 2nd tallest building, and the world's tallest observation deck.



There were three floors that provided various views, including the famous sky walk at 474 meters above ground. Although it was cloudy, the views were still breathtaking.



If you look where I'm sitting, you can see I'm on a piece of glass (along with one of the sky scrapers in the background).









That's all for today folks! I have some videos I've taken of the past few days, I'll see I can find a way to get them up here soon.

The Great Firewall of China

Forgot to post this earlier. The Great Firewall of China is in full effect. This blog is blocked, so I have to post while I'm on my work VPN. Other notable sites blocked/modified:

Twitter (blocked)
Facebook (blocked)
Google (modified results)
Blogspot/Blogger (blocked)
Youtube (blocked)
CNN (blocked depending on front page content)

If you're curious if a site is blocked, feel free to email me the link to my gmail account and I'll check it and get back to you.

One more thing I'm really disliking - using IP Geolocation to determine my preferred language. I don't care that my IP address belongs to an Chinese ISP, my user-agent string says I want my pages in English, so don't give me Mandarin (Google - I'm looking at you).

Lions and Tigers and Subnets Oh My!

Just finished up with our final networking case study. Had to spec out the entire LAN/WAN infrastructure for a 4 building campus with a data center supporting an e-commerce system, remote access, and MPLS access to other company site. After our team got first place in all three previous case studies, the running joke was that everyone was getting 'brand0wnd'. I guess something about the fact that I knew almost as much as the instructor. See kids - playing with technology will get you something.

Anyway - the rest of this post has nothing to do with networking. Last night our team finished our exercise early (about 9pm), so I decided to be adventurous and explore the city. I talked to Tony (the Hotel's sales manager) and he gave me a suggestion for a good local massage place. It was about a 10 minute cab ride (which cost 12RMB). When I got there it was, I asked (in Mandarin) if anyone spoke English and was promptly handed a menu (that appeared to be Google translated). After careful review, I picked the 98RMB foot reflexology and chinese massage. This turned out to be one of the best choices I had made since arriving in Shanghai :)

After a brief soak in warm water, the foot massage began. The technique was very unique - lots of circular motion, deep pressure, and 'smacking' (for lack of a better word). The massage lasted for about 45 minutes. The foot massage was amazing - I don't think my feet have ever felt this good. I was then led to a separate room with a massage table, and the back massage began. Similar in method to the foot massage, I was surprised at how much pressure a tiny Chinese woman could apply to my back! This part of the massage lasted for about an hour and fifteen minutes. That's right, I got a two hour massage for about $15! I'm just looking forward to going back soon :)

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Right of Way

Things are getting busy with class - last two days have been 14 hours of work, so not a ton of time to explore the city.

Interesting observation for the day - pedestrians DO NOT have the right of way. You might have a green light to walk across, but the cars (and especially the buses) have no qualms about running you over in the middle of the street. So when crossing the streets in Shanghai, look both ways, then run and pray :)

I went shopping in a local grocery store yesterday (I think - don't remember). Next post will be about that fun experience.

The most interesting dinner.....

We went out to a local place and tried a ton of Chinese dishes, some typical, some not. Pictures and brief descriptions (where I remember) below. And yes - I did try everything.

Whole Duck:


Deep Fried Breaded Octopus:

Jellyfish:


Mushrooms:


Baked Octopus:


Duck Tongue:


Tripe (Pig stomach lining):


Whole Chicken in a Bowl:


Just the head:


And yes - one of the more adventurous ate the meat from the chicken head.