Shanghai (2) - traditional heart

The buildings in the modern center of Shanghai are truly impressive by size, shape, and materials used. However, the overwhelming impression fades next to the traditional ancient Chinese architecture and art collected in places like the City Temple of Shanghai and the Yu Garden.

A stone throw away from the city center these places stand in stark contrast to Shanghai's progressive skyline of long straight lines, steel and glass.

At the City Temple, colorful incent sticks, the color red for good luck and gold for financial fortune dominate the picture. People come here to honor their ancestors, and to wish for luck and financial fortune. They light up huge incent sticks, hold them to their head and heart and bow in all for directions of the temple area. The air fills with scent and a haze.

Outside the temple, connecting to the Yu Garden, the old quarter extends. Shops with Chinese art, mainly embroidery, stamp carving, fans in all sizes and colors, and tea are housed in traditional houses lined up along the narrow streets. No cars here! And, if you would succeed in imagining this place without all the tourists you might feel like back in old China.

You have to close your eyes though, for signs like Dairy Queen, Starbucks, McDonalds and KFC (complete with their Chinese characters) hanging from traditional roof tiles might ruin your imagination. And, looking over the three or four floor old buildings you can see the tops of the Shanghai World Financial Center Observatory, the Orient Pearl Tower, and the Jin Mao Building in the far distance. What a perfect visualization of China's stretch between preserving its traditional heart and being a modern player in this globalized world. For now, I guess the compromise is a traditional building housing Dairy Queen. The Shanghai tourist map calls it 'History meets 'new' modern'. Are they saying the Chinese have always been modern, but now it's just a 'new', meaning revived or different' modern?

In my opinion, the great modern buildings are a collection of the latest building technology, architectural skills, building materials and, most importantly, money. Meaning, the most outstanding building has, whoever can afford to pool the resources. The race is about, who can display this resource mobilization best. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the Taipei 101 in Taiwan, the World Financial Center in Shanghai. Bigger, higher, more expensive. The problem is, whoever has the resources next, will surpass you and leave your latest state of the art building in the dust within 2 years. What is truly unique, I come to think of more and more, is the 'foundations', literally spoken, which each culture is built upon. Which, I think, is building techniques based on the raw materials the people had available when they started to inhabit a certain place and called it their land. Structures in sync with the natural forces they had to withstand. I'd love to see these basics mixed with modern materials and technologies.

What is truly traditional, at least that is how it appears to me, is the Chinese cuisine. The menu in the restaurant reads quite different from my vegetarian cookbook: stewed bird's nest with pumpkin and honey, braised shark's fin (despite international protests, shark fin is still highly recommended), mixed jellyfish with special sauce, white marinated pig stomach, steamed abalone, quick fried bullfrog with special sauce, and braised pig ears with local greens.

Good thing I'm a vegetarian. At least I have a valid excuse not to have to try any of this. Except for the local greens, which I really like. Call me ignorant, I know.

Luckily, I'm already quite savvy in tackling noodles, rice and vegetables with chopsticks. While I was heaving some of these goodies on my plate, I was corrected though. Chinese do not eat from the plate, but from the small bowl, which food from various serving dishes is transferred into. The plate is for bones and other food trash.

Sharing of dishes is common. Often, someone’s chopsticks dive into the food, pick out a piece or two and dive straight back into the mouth. I was wondering if 'food hygiene' ever becomes an issue. For now, I am happy to know the people on the table I am sharing my food with.

One of my biggest successes in facing the tough culinary challenges of China was to substitute my immense daily coffee intake with green tea, and milk tea with grass jelly.

Shanghai (1) - first impressions

Hot or warm. The choices on the water dispenser at Shanghai's Pudong airport are not necessarily, what I call refreshing. Looking at the flood of tourists clogging the immigration counters, I opt for the lesser evil and enjoy a lukewarm water drink. Welcome to China!

To my surprise, the line in front of me moves quickly. In no time, I smile into what looks like an upside down iPad with the navigation button being a camera. My passport details, including the number of my China visa, show up on the screen. I hear the stamps slamming down on my passport. Welcome to Shanghai!

Signs with English translations interpreting Chinese characters guide me to the metro, which links the airport to the center of Shanghai. All transactions are automated limiting the human face-to-face interaction when I buy my metro ticket. A big screen with the map of Shanghai lets me easily chose where to go. The results are short waiting lines and no language barrier.

After a 45 minute metro ride I get off at Lujiazui station (make sure you change trains at Guanglan station. The train leaving the airport does not go all the way to downtown!). An escalator surfaces me right into the center of Shanghai: in front of the Oriental Pearl Tower. What I realized first was the smell of clean air! And, everything else seems clean and organized for that matter. Massive skyscrapers give this part of town a modern, advanced and even futuristic touch. It's hard to ignore that the Dragon has awakened.

I forego the proposed 2-hour waiting line to go up the Pearl Tower, which promises a great view over Shanghai and the Huangpu River on three different levels (each level up costs additional 50 RMB, approximately 6 Euro or 340 Pesos).

Instead, I make my way to the JinMao Observatory, which looks like the Empire State Building. Well, at least it has a pointy top.

At 9:30 PM the waiting lines here are still long. At least I can enjoy watching the Chinese going crazy over picture taking next to Chaki Chan (his wax model of course) while I'm waiting. Again, in no time I'm inside a huge elevator, speeding me up 370 meters in no time, traveling at a speed of 9 meters a seconds. I pop my ears several times to balance the pressure. Up top, I get a great night-lit view of Shanghai in an almost 360-degree circle. It’s impressive how much light I see! Now I understand why China just surpassed America as the number one electricity user.

The elevator still spits people out onto the platform when I make my descent. This place is clearly prepared for tourists. And, to my surprise, they are mostly local. I am almost the only white nose.

The people here clearly understood to channel tourist up and down their sights in no time. They are making many tourist bugs by the mere fact that their 'tourist throughput' is incredible!

A quick cab ride and 18 Yuan later I check in at the Jinjiang Inn. 45 Euro a night for a nice air-con room with a big double bed, hot shower and complementary water is appropriate, I think.

Typhoon Basyang

It seems every time my sister overcomes her fear of air travel and visits me on my assignments, nature conspires against her to make each trip more adventurous and memorable.

While it was the forest fires in Utah in the year 2000, which trapped us in Salt Lake City longer than expected, it was yesterday's typhoon “Basyang” hitting Manila.

According to Pagasa, the Philippine weather bureau, my sister should have gotten out of Manila just in time on her 1a.m. flight back to Germany. Little did we know how useless Pagasa’s forecast was. While they still talked about a tropical depression and the predicted the storm to hit way north of Metro Manila, every other weather website and satellite picture clearly showed the eye of the storm was coming straight for Manila.

I already had a weird gut feeling when we said our goodbyes. The wind had picked up remarkably and it started to rain. According to the airline’s website however, all flights were on time. To be honest, I hoped they would not take off during this storm!

Sure enough, soon all flights out of and into Manila were cancelled the hour she was supposed to leave. After electricity went out with a big bang at around midnight, we were not even able to check any online flight schedules and such.

While Anja spent a night at the airport and later at a hotel (the bus ride through the typhoon will surely stay with her forever!), we were busy trying to secure our house and garden from complete destruction.

Wind speeds up to 95 kilometers per hour not only tortured our plants and wind chimes. At their peak even moved and dismantled our outdoor furniture. Time to bring the stuff inside! Equipped with headlamps we tried our best to minimize the damage. After that, all we could do is go back to bed and try to catch some sleep (frequently interrupted by smashing and banging sounds which were hard to locate if coming from our or the neighbors house).

The day after started with an assessment of the damage done. It's amazing how this storm wrecked our backyard! And the whole neighborhood for that matter. Age-old trees broke like toothpicks; concrete power poles did the same.

Chances for the power to come back on any time soon seemed slim. We unearthed our generator and got the hell-machine going to prevent the fridge from defrosting, and to charge phones and laptops.

All these skills a typhoon is teaching! Would I ever have learned which plug needs to go into which socket or which circuit to put the fridge on without frying it (or myself for that matter!)!?

Despite our power-self-sufficiency, we appreciated (and I’m sure our neighbors! Our genny could be heard three blocks away!) that the power came back on later at night.

“Basyang” was a unique experience for Anja but an almost 'normal' event for the Filipinos. It's amazing how this nation, constantly the turf of typhoons and floods, quickly responses to such events by cleaning up and going back to normal daily procedure.

World Cup 2010 (5) - Germany vs. Spain

Another 2:30 AM soccer match. Ugh! Learning from our world cup experience we identified the biggest problem of these early morning matches: getting out of bed and dragging our carcasses in front of the TV in the living room.

Well, we figured it's an easy problem to fix! Simply move a bed in front of the TV! Game! Now, watching the match was simply a matter of working the remote control and managing to keep your eyes open.

My sleepy eyes still had trouble to follow the little white dot on the playing field. Gee, these Spaniards are fast! I'm sure it takes them longer to fix their hair in the morning than preparing and executing a perfect shot at the goal! I sleepily wondered if these guys, after being too old to play soccer in like a year or two, will make a career as models for hair products, such as shampoo, conditioner, and hair accessories.

However, the wavy curls could not distract from the fact, that the Spaniards dominated this match. After 90 minutes of struggle, the Germans were defeated... Again, we did not make it into the finals of the world cup.

Anyway, no regrets of having moved the bed. We definitely did not break into a sweat doing so. Unlike the German team who fought a great match.

World Cup 2010 (4) - Germany vs. Argentina

It seems the closer Germany gets to the World Cup Finals, the more eventful the days of their matches get for me.

Not only was July 3 the day of Germany's remarkable four to zero goal victory over Argentina, a strong soccer nation. July 3 also marked the birthday of my dad. I'm sure the 4:0 outcome of the match was the most unique gift he got today (and let the flowers I sent him look like goat feed).

But, my dad's birthday was not the only add-on event. Two very good friends of mine got married that day as well! Being the cord sponsor, the priority for this date was clear: attending the wedding and celebrating with the newlyweds after (even if that meant to sacrifice cheering for the German team that night). Luckily, there are cell phones and friends in front of the TV elsewhere; keeping me posted via text messages.

And, for the first time the time difference was to our favor! After having been the last guests to leave the wedding reception we stumbled across a shady bar, which showed the match. Without a second thought, we pulled in, ordered a bucket of beer and some greasy calamari, and watched the second half of the match. All dolled up in our wedding outfits, sitting on plastic chairs. One simply cannot disguise a real fan!