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amethyst73 Before I begin, I apologize to my non-LJ readers for the delay between the last China post and this one. I've been dealing with a semi-feral cat that we're trying to socialize and getting ready to start a new job. Those have taken up a lot of time recently!
NEXT: Chinatown in China, the Jade Garden, Tea, and Laundry
The next day was gray and very wet. We had elected to get up earlier than was technically required: our guide had told us the night before that we had the option the next morning of going to The Pearl Factory, where we would learn about pearl farming and how to tell real pearls from fake ones. Intrigued, we piled ourselves and our umbrellas onto a bus and drove off.
The pearl factory didn't look like much of our idea of a Western-style factory. Small, clean, white, and completely unimposing on the outside. Inside, it still didn't look like a factory. There was a very small, pleasant reception area and a spiral staircase, which our guide led us up.
In a kind of hall area on the second floor, we were met by a factory representative. She invited a member of our group to take a small net over to a nearby basin of water and fish out one of the fairly large shellfish within. She explained that this was a freshwater oyster, and told us that these animals almost always produced simultaneous multiple pearls. She solicited guesses from group members as to how many pearls there would be inside this particular oyster. Guesses ranged from one to thirteen.
Here's the factory rep with the freshly opened oyster. That tray underneath is to catch the pearls.
Most of the lumps you see in this picture are mother-of-pearl deposits on the inside of the shell...
.. but when all was said and done, there were a grand total of seventeen tiny pearls inside the animal. (It's difficult to pick them out in this photo, and a lot of them have fallen out already.)
While vaguely interesting, this presentation was quite short, lasting no more than five minutes or so. When it was over, we were directed within to... a Western-style jewelery store, specializing in pearl jewelery and other pearl products. We were told about the various colors that freshwater pearls are found in (white, pink, blue/black, and the rarest: gold) and how to tell whether a string of pearls is genuine or not (rub the pearls against each other; if they feel a little rough and if powder is produced by the friction, they're real). Many of the other tour group members were pleased by the opportunity to purchase freshwater pearls at what might have been bargain prices - I don't really know how the prices compared to what you would find in a Western jewelery store. But as far as the huz and I were concerned, we could browse in a jewelery store any day of the week back at home, so the trip to the pearl "factory" was essentially a bust.
(The pearl factory was not the only "factory" that we visited while in China. We also visited the Silk Factory and some members of the tour went to the Jade Factory in Beijing. These were all government-run shops that foreign tours were, shall we say, strongly encouraged to visit - and spend money in. The Silk Factory and Jade Factory will be discussed in detail in later entries.)
After the pearl factory, we went to the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. This is a tremendous tower that you've already seen a shot or two of from the night cruise on the Wangpu River entry. Including the broadcasting antenna on top, it's a remarkable 468 meters (1535 feet) tall, and was the tallest building in Shanghai for part of the 90's. Even on a rainy day, it's quite a sight looking straight up at it:
The lower part of it has a kind of neat pyramidal structure:
We weren't the only ones to visit the tower, even on a day when it was pouring rain:
You can get a sense of how hard it was raining from the water gushing down the steps here:
Outside the tower was a large sign, proclaiming in somewhat broken English the strictures and limitations on what was and was not allowed inside the tower. I'll write them out here for ease of reading, but feel free to click on the small pictures below the list of rules to verify that I am not making any of this up.
1. The ragamuffin, drunken people and psychotics are forbidden to enter the Tower.
2. No smoking at non-appointed spot.
3. Prohibit carrying tinder and exploder (banger, match, lighter), restricted cutter (kitchen knife, scissors, fruit knife, sword and so on) and metal-made electric appliance.
4. Prohibit carrying animals and the articles which disturb common sanitation (including the peculiar smell of effluvium)
5. Prohibit carrying the articles which can destroy and pollute inner environment of the Tower.
6. Prohibit carrying dangerous germs, pests and other baleful biology. Forbid any articles from epidemic areas.
7. Prohibit hanging streamer, slogan and any other prints in the Tower, including commerce, politics, religion and so on.
8. The cubage of liquid article which the tourist carries can't exceed 100 milliliter. And the liquid article must be put in the appointed spot to accept examination. After confirmed, it can be carried into the Tower. The interloper carrying contraband will be punished seriously by the police.
Thank you for your understanding and support. We will do our best to provide security for you.
In addition to the multitudinous counters selling snacks and miniature models of the tower (in several sizes, of several materials - the ones of gold-painted metal with little crystal spheres were actually kind of nice), there was a pretty neat carving of a lion in the lobby for us to look at as we waited for the elevator.
Our tickets took us up to the Sightseeing Floor, 263 meters (863 feet) off the ground. As we rode the elevator, most people were chatting moderately loudly. We realized about three seconds before the door opened that the elevator operator, a tiny Chinese girl who looked like she was probably just out of college, was reciting a very quiet monologue in English about the tower. We felt very sorry for her, and for the other elevator operators who had similar monologues: it must be tremendously dull, and we have no idea how much of their own monologues these folks even understand.
You know where you are and what you see on a rainy day when you're 800+ feet up?
Yup! You're in the clouds, and you see... white! We laughed, and took photos anyway.
The floor directly below this was actually more interesting, because the windows weren't sealed with glass as they had been in the level above. Instead, there were just iron bars between the tourists and the open air. It was incredibly windy up there, and we could see the cloud/mist blowing around. It was very impressive in its own way.
On our way back to the hotel, our tour guide told us about the spiffy new high-rise apartments that we were driving past. Shanghai has what is possibly the most expensive real estate in the world at $10,000 (yes, that's American dollars!) per square foot. All these new buildings, of course, mean that the old neighborhoods that used to be there are being knocked down. The government, apparently, is buying out the residents at a very generous rate and giving them new, larger apartments/houses a bit removed from the city. Virtually everywhere in Shanghai, we saw scenes like the one below, where the old neighborhood dies as ultra-modern skyscrapers rise behind them. (We took this picture on a different day, but thought it fit well here.)
The other thing that the tour guide told us about on the ride back to the hotel was about a phenomenon called the 'silent protest'. As you're well aware, political dissent at the national level is, shall we say, frowned upon. But at the local level, it's sometimes tolerated. As I wrote about earlier, the maglev was originally intended to traverse a greater distance than it does. The planned route was through a residential area, and the residents were unhappy about it. One morning, the local government workers were surprised to find a thousand citizens walking back and forth in front of their offices. There were no signs or placards, no chanting, no fist-waving. When the citizens were asked what they were doing, to a person they replied that they were just taking a walk. As it's a little implausible for 1000 people to all decide off the cuff to walk back and forth along a single block, the local government quickly figured out the real stimulus. The planned extension of the maglev was canceled due to lack of funding... and just maybe because of the silent protest.
We returned to the hotel around lunchtime, still in a torrent of rain. We had a relatively short time to get lunch before the afternoon's rehearsal and the evening's performance, so we ducked across the street with a friend to a place that had intrigued us ever since we arrived. The sign out front proudly proclaimed:
It was a tiny little place with perhaps a dozen tables. The menu had English subtitles to the dishes, allowing us to confidently order a dish each of pork dumplings, stir-fry chicken, and sauteed prawns. The waitress did not speak English, causing us mild consternation when we realized that the dishes did not come with rice. Our companion initially tried to indicate our desire by gesture, but the huz's Chinese vocabulary saved us. "Fan?" he said. The waitress smiled and brought us bowls of rice. Everything tasted great - even the prawns, which had initially put me off because they were served whole. But the shells were tender enough to consume, and I quickly followed our friend's lead of inserting the animal into one's mouth with the head and tail sticking out, then biting down to separate the ends from the meaty body. We finished our meal with just enough time to duck back to the hotel, grab our music and concert clothes, and load onto the buses bound for the Shanghai Oriental Art Center for our afternoon rehearsal and evening performance.
Rehearsal... well. We wish someone had thought beforehand about how much time rehearsing with the orchestra alone would take and what time the chorus would actually be needed for rehearsal. The adult chorus members amused themselves quietly for well over an hour; the kids' chorus went out and did touristy things somewhere nearby. I filled the time by scribbling in the small notebook in which I was recording our travels; if we hadn't had this enforced dead time, I would have had difficulty keeping the journal up to date, actually. Once our part of the rehearsal started, everything went smoothly.
Between rehearsal and performance, we had what was billed as "Tea time." Tea time consisted of small cardboard boxes holding a savory potato turnover, a sponge roll, and some cookies, but no tea. One could purchase tea from the concert hall snack bar if one wanted it.
We had been told back in April that the Shanghai concerts were sold out, so we were a little surprised when the hall was only 2/3 full as the concert started that night! Apparently in Shanghai, large corporations buy blocks of tickets to concerts and stuff and hand these tickets to their junior managers. Often, the managers are not particularly interested in the entertainment, and will only show up if they think their own manager is also likely to be there! The audience was largely in fairly casual dress (polo shirts and khakis were common), and we're sure there were at least a couple of school groups in attendance. The performance went well, and the audience that was there appeared to enjoy it a great deal. We changed out of concert wear and boarded the buses for dinner at about 10 PM.
Dinner this night was at a fancy seafood restaurant that we'd seen from a distance the night of the cruise. The food was... fine, I suppose. But it was much later in the evening than we were used to eating, and a frighteningly large fraction of the dishes were entirely recognizable as the animals they'd once been: what we think was boiled whole chicken (we weren't sure of the cooking method, not the dish!), roast duck, whole steamed fish, whole shrimp. The huz stuck largely to dishes which were less immediately recognizable: a stir-fried pork dish and a tasty spicy tofu dish.
We realized that we were starting to get homesick for certain items, foodstuffs, and practices that were common in the states, but much less so in China. Here are some of the things we missed that night:
• Salads. We'd been warned by virtually everyone back home not to eat fruits or vegetables that had been washed in local water and then either not peeled or not cooked. This meant no salads and no fresh fruit, except for the watermelon which signaled the end of virtually every meal. I started making a point of having some of the canned fruit available at breakfast whenever I could.
• Peanut butter. As many of you know, we generally make and bring PB&J sandwiches for our lunches. Peanut butter is a virtually unknown substance in China.
• Cloth table napkins. These were often present at the big dinners we had, but when we went to restaurants on our own, we either had tiny little paper napkins or a damp washcloth. Being able to put an honest-to-gosh napkin in my lap had the satisfaction of scratching an irritating itch.
There were also certain things that we were tired of:
• Soups thickened with cornstarch. Every soup we had in Shanghai had the same 'thick' feel that hot and sour soup does, whether it was actual hot and sour soup or the much more common sweet corn soup that we had the first night.
• Deep-fried dishes. These were initially quite common (remember the french fries?), and later moderately so. We generally consume a rather more low-fat diet at home - I'm quite certain I gained weight during the course of the trip.
• European-style coverings on the beds. Instead of the American multilayer arrangement of sheets and one or more blankets, the hotels in both Beijing and Shanghai had a single sheet-covered quilt that one pulled up over oneself at night. This was somewhat problematic in both places: the air conditioner in Shanghai often failed to recognize that the room temperature was above the comfort point we had set it at, and as far as we could tell the Beijing air conditioner didn't have an actual comfort setpoint, but merely worked its best, which was unfortunately not all that wonderfully. We had a choice of roasting or freezing and missed having an intermediate point.
• Being moderately tired a great deal of the time, even though we still had fun.
---------------
The pearl factory didn't look like much of our idea of a Western-style factory. Small, clean, white, and completely unimposing on the outside. Inside, it still didn't look like a factory. There was a very small, pleasant reception area and a spiral staircase, which our guide led us up.
In a kind of hall area on the second floor, we were met by a factory representative. She invited a member of our group to take a small net over to a nearby basin of water and fish out one of the fairly large shellfish within. She explained that this was a freshwater oyster, and told us that these animals almost always produced simultaneous multiple pearls. She solicited guesses from group members as to how many pearls there would be inside this particular oyster. Guesses ranged from one to thirteen.
Here's the factory rep with the freshly opened oyster. That tray underneath is to catch the pearls.
Most of the lumps you see in this picture are mother-of-pearl deposits on the inside of the shell...
.. but when all was said and done, there were a grand total of seventeen tiny pearls inside the animal. (It's difficult to pick them out in this photo, and a lot of them have fallen out already.)
While vaguely interesting, this presentation was quite short, lasting no more than five minutes or so. When it was over, we were directed within to... a Western-style jewelery store, specializing in pearl jewelery and other pearl products. We were told about the various colors that freshwater pearls are found in (white, pink, blue/black, and the rarest: gold) and how to tell whether a string of pearls is genuine or not (rub the pearls against each other; if they feel a little rough and if powder is produced by the friction, they're real). Many of the other tour group members were pleased by the opportunity to purchase freshwater pearls at what might have been bargain prices - I don't really know how the prices compared to what you would find in a Western jewelery store. But as far as the huz and I were concerned, we could browse in a jewelery store any day of the week back at home, so the trip to the pearl "factory" was essentially a bust.
(The pearl factory was not the only "factory" that we visited while in China. We also visited the Silk Factory and some members of the tour went to the Jade Factory in Beijing. These were all government-run shops that foreign tours were, shall we say, strongly encouraged to visit - and spend money in. The Silk Factory and Jade Factory will be discussed in detail in later entries.)
After the pearl factory, we went to the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. This is a tremendous tower that you've already seen a shot or two of from the night cruise on the Wangpu River entry. Including the broadcasting antenna on top, it's a remarkable 468 meters (1535 feet) tall, and was the tallest building in Shanghai for part of the 90's. Even on a rainy day, it's quite a sight looking straight up at it:
The lower part of it has a kind of neat pyramidal structure:
We weren't the only ones to visit the tower, even on a day when it was pouring rain:
You can get a sense of how hard it was raining from the water gushing down the steps here:
Outside the tower was a large sign, proclaiming in somewhat broken English the strictures and limitations on what was and was not allowed inside the tower. I'll write them out here for ease of reading, but feel free to click on the small pictures below the list of rules to verify that I am not making any of this up.
------
Notes for Entering the tower1. The ragamuffin, drunken people and psychotics are forbidden to enter the Tower.
2. No smoking at non-appointed spot.
3. Prohibit carrying tinder and exploder (banger, match, lighter), restricted cutter (kitchen knife, scissors, fruit knife, sword and so on) and metal-made electric appliance.
4. Prohibit carrying animals and the articles which disturb common sanitation (including the peculiar smell of effluvium)
5. Prohibit carrying the articles which can destroy and pollute inner environment of the Tower.
6. Prohibit carrying dangerous germs, pests and other baleful biology. Forbid any articles from epidemic areas.
7. Prohibit hanging streamer, slogan and any other prints in the Tower, including commerce, politics, religion and so on.
8. The cubage of liquid article which the tourist carries can't exceed 100 milliliter. And the liquid article must be put in the appointed spot to accept examination. After confirmed, it can be carried into the Tower. The interloper carrying contraband will be punished seriously by the police.
Thank you for your understanding and support. We will do our best to provide security for you.
------
As we later found out was fairly common practice at indoor tourist venues in China, we and our belongings were X-rayed as we entered. It felt very odd, though another tour member assured us that it's been moderately standard practice in America ever since 9/11. We apparently didn't set off their ragamuffin detection system, and were allowed to ascend the tower.In addition to the multitudinous counters selling snacks and miniature models of the tower (in several sizes, of several materials - the ones of gold-painted metal with little crystal spheres were actually kind of nice), there was a pretty neat carving of a lion in the lobby for us to look at as we waited for the elevator.
Our tickets took us up to the Sightseeing Floor, 263 meters (863 feet) off the ground. As we rode the elevator, most people were chatting moderately loudly. We realized about three seconds before the door opened that the elevator operator, a tiny Chinese girl who looked like she was probably just out of college, was reciting a very quiet monologue in English about the tower. We felt very sorry for her, and for the other elevator operators who had similar monologues: it must be tremendously dull, and we have no idea how much of their own monologues these folks even understand.
You know where you are and what you see on a rainy day when you're 800+ feet up?
Yup! You're in the clouds, and you see... white! We laughed, and took photos anyway.
The floor directly below this was actually more interesting, because the windows weren't sealed with glass as they had been in the level above. Instead, there were just iron bars between the tourists and the open air. It was incredibly windy up there, and we could see the cloud/mist blowing around. It was very impressive in its own way.
On our way back to the hotel, our tour guide told us about the spiffy new high-rise apartments that we were driving past. Shanghai has what is possibly the most expensive real estate in the world at $10,000 (yes, that's American dollars!) per square foot. All these new buildings, of course, mean that the old neighborhoods that used to be there are being knocked down. The government, apparently, is buying out the residents at a very generous rate and giving them new, larger apartments/houses a bit removed from the city. Virtually everywhere in Shanghai, we saw scenes like the one below, where the old neighborhood dies as ultra-modern skyscrapers rise behind them. (We took this picture on a different day, but thought it fit well here.)
The other thing that the tour guide told us about on the ride back to the hotel was about a phenomenon called the 'silent protest'. As you're well aware, political dissent at the national level is, shall we say, frowned upon. But at the local level, it's sometimes tolerated. As I wrote about earlier, the maglev was originally intended to traverse a greater distance than it does. The planned route was through a residential area, and the residents were unhappy about it. One morning, the local government workers were surprised to find a thousand citizens walking back and forth in front of their offices. There were no signs or placards, no chanting, no fist-waving. When the citizens were asked what they were doing, to a person they replied that they were just taking a walk. As it's a little implausible for 1000 people to all decide off the cuff to walk back and forth along a single block, the local government quickly figured out the real stimulus. The planned extension of the maglev was canceled due to lack of funding... and just maybe because of the silent protest.
We returned to the hotel around lunchtime, still in a torrent of rain. We had a relatively short time to get lunch before the afternoon's rehearsal and the evening's performance, so we ducked across the street with a friend to a place that had intrigued us ever since we arrived. The sign out front proudly proclaimed:
RESTA
URANT
URANT
It was a tiny little place with perhaps a dozen tables. The menu had English subtitles to the dishes, allowing us to confidently order a dish each of pork dumplings, stir-fry chicken, and sauteed prawns. The waitress did not speak English, causing us mild consternation when we realized that the dishes did not come with rice. Our companion initially tried to indicate our desire by gesture, but the huz's Chinese vocabulary saved us. "Fan?" he said. The waitress smiled and brought us bowls of rice. Everything tasted great - even the prawns, which had initially put me off because they were served whole. But the shells were tender enough to consume, and I quickly followed our friend's lead of inserting the animal into one's mouth with the head and tail sticking out, then biting down to separate the ends from the meaty body. We finished our meal with just enough time to duck back to the hotel, grab our music and concert clothes, and load onto the buses bound for the Shanghai Oriental Art Center for our afternoon rehearsal and evening performance.
Rehearsal... well. We wish someone had thought beforehand about how much time rehearsing with the orchestra alone would take and what time the chorus would actually be needed for rehearsal. The adult chorus members amused themselves quietly for well over an hour; the kids' chorus went out and did touristy things somewhere nearby. I filled the time by scribbling in the small notebook in which I was recording our travels; if we hadn't had this enforced dead time, I would have had difficulty keeping the journal up to date, actually. Once our part of the rehearsal started, everything went smoothly.
Between rehearsal and performance, we had what was billed as "Tea time." Tea time consisted of small cardboard boxes holding a savory potato turnover, a sponge roll, and some cookies, but no tea. One could purchase tea from the concert hall snack bar if one wanted it.
We had been told back in April that the Shanghai concerts were sold out, so we were a little surprised when the hall was only 2/3 full as the concert started that night! Apparently in Shanghai, large corporations buy blocks of tickets to concerts and stuff and hand these tickets to their junior managers. Often, the managers are not particularly interested in the entertainment, and will only show up if they think their own manager is also likely to be there! The audience was largely in fairly casual dress (polo shirts and khakis were common), and we're sure there were at least a couple of school groups in attendance. The performance went well, and the audience that was there appeared to enjoy it a great deal. We changed out of concert wear and boarded the buses for dinner at about 10 PM.
Dinner this night was at a fancy seafood restaurant that we'd seen from a distance the night of the cruise. The food was... fine, I suppose. But it was much later in the evening than we were used to eating, and a frighteningly large fraction of the dishes were entirely recognizable as the animals they'd once been: what we think was boiled whole chicken (we weren't sure of the cooking method, not the dish!), roast duck, whole steamed fish, whole shrimp. The huz stuck largely to dishes which were less immediately recognizable: a stir-fried pork dish and a tasty spicy tofu dish.
We realized that we were starting to get homesick for certain items, foodstuffs, and practices that were common in the states, but much less so in China. Here are some of the things we missed that night:
• Salads. We'd been warned by virtually everyone back home not to eat fruits or vegetables that had been washed in local water and then either not peeled or not cooked. This meant no salads and no fresh fruit, except for the watermelon which signaled the end of virtually every meal. I started making a point of having some of the canned fruit available at breakfast whenever I could.
• Peanut butter. As many of you know, we generally make and bring PB&J sandwiches for our lunches. Peanut butter is a virtually unknown substance in China.
• Cloth table napkins. These were often present at the big dinners we had, but when we went to restaurants on our own, we either had tiny little paper napkins or a damp washcloth. Being able to put an honest-to-gosh napkin in my lap had the satisfaction of scratching an irritating itch.
There were also certain things that we were tired of:
• Soups thickened with cornstarch. Every soup we had in Shanghai had the same 'thick' feel that hot and sour soup does, whether it was actual hot and sour soup or the much more common sweet corn soup that we had the first night.
• Deep-fried dishes. These were initially quite common (remember the french fries?), and later moderately so. We generally consume a rather more low-fat diet at home - I'm quite certain I gained weight during the course of the trip.
• European-style coverings on the beds. Instead of the American multilayer arrangement of sheets and one or more blankets, the hotels in both Beijing and Shanghai had a single sheet-covered quilt that one pulled up over oneself at night. This was somewhat problematic in both places: the air conditioner in Shanghai often failed to recognize that the room temperature was above the comfort point we had set it at, and as far as we could tell the Beijing air conditioner didn't have an actual comfort setpoint, but merely worked its best, which was unfortunately not all that wonderfully. We had a choice of roasting or freezing and missed having an intermediate point.
• Being moderately tired a great deal of the time, even though we still had fun.
---------------
NEXT: Chinatown in China, the Jade Garden, Tea, and Laundry
