China - Day 59 - The Expo and my best weekend yet

This was a positively fantastic weekend, the most fun and most entertaining weekend I've had in China. This weekend perfectly encapsulated the travelling/expat experience I wanted to have this summer; I'm very happy that I got to and very thankful to those that helped make it happen. Now, on to a more detailed recap.

August 13
Picking up from my last post, I got into Shanghai fairly late by my standards (around 10:30PM. The difference between my standards of time and Shanghai's standard of time would be a recurring theme of my time here), but thankfully the metro was still working. As much as I love the Shanghai Metro system (I think it might be my favorite in the world), the one thing that I absolutely can't stand about it is that it shuts down so early; external lines start closing around 9PM, central lines stay open until 10:30-11PM. This means that anyone trying to have any semblance of a nightlife has to take cabs everywhere (not that it's an issue to find cabs, but I'm a huge believer in the use of subways and subways are much easier to use when you don't really speak the language). While I was on the train I spoke to my friends Alex and Chris about our accommodations for the weekend; apparently their friends Rachel and Cindy were staying in a huge apartment in Shanghai and Alex and Chris suggested that we cancel our hostel reservation to stay with the girls. When I got to the apartment (an adventure in and of itself, as no cabbie had apparently ever heard of the street it's located on) we realized that "huge" was a relative term and that it was time for us to grovel our way back into the hostel (which we did, thankfully). As much as I appreciated Rachel and Cindy's hospitality, one of us would have had to sleep on the dining room table and another in the bathtub, which was just not happening.

After getting settled at the hostel, we headed out to begin our nightlife at 12:15AM. I'm used to seeing things begin to wind down around this time, but the energy of the group was infectious and I just went with it. After a few false starts (at clubs that were rejected for one reason or another) and one very tense argument with a cabbie, we ended up at a club called Muse where we proceeded to party and dance until 3:30, which is when things apparently begin to wind down in Shanghai. Either way, I was just thankful for sleep at that point.

The beds in our hostel room. It's a good thing none of us suffer from night terrors because I very well could have punched Chris in the face as we slept.	The bathroom in our room. While it was a very efficient use of space it was a complete and utter design disaster. I ended up locking myself in there by placing my backpack in the wrong place and blocking the sliding glass door.

China - Day 51 - Machismo is Alive and Well

The theme of this week seems to be battle the laowai; I've had Chinese guys trying to show me up all week. The biggest place they've been battling me has been on the basketball court. I've started playing pick-up games 3 or 4 times a week (it's a lot more fun than running) at my apartment complex and the games are very much the same as they are in America; however, there always seem to be match-up issues, despite the fact that most of the guys here are around the same size. It seems to always end up with me guarding the other team's best player (because he will inevitably guard me, because I'm an American I must be good), which usually ends up with me (a natural 5, but I can play a 4) guarding a 2/3 and being blown past on the dribble with some frequency. Unfortunately, this match-up continues to be frustrating on offense because they abuse me inside and I usually draw a double team. I'm pretty dominant inside, especially on the boards, but battling inside gets tiring and unfortunately I can't rely on the outside shooting of my teammates. Such is the reality of pick-up games.

Elsewhere on the machismo front, drinking is treated very differently in China. My experience so far has been "Let's get the laowai drunk" every time I'm within 10 feet of a beer. The first time I experienced this, after my company's basketball practice a few weeks ago, I went with it because I wanted to give a good first impression and I ended up drinking 6 beers (600mL, 3%ABV). After that performance (and a misinterpreted claim that I could drink 12 beers over the course of an evening, which they thought I said I could drink in one sitting), Chinese guys try to force me to drink 12 bottles every time I eat with them. They don't seem to grasp the notion of drinking in moderation, despite my protests. I think they are trying to haze me, to prove that they are the drinkers that they think they are, but I am not going to play that game. Last night it got so bad that I just left the table when they wouldn't stop (I had drunk about 2L of beer and eaten 3 medium sized dishes at dinner, I felt like I was about to explode). I understand the concept of not causing them to lose face, but I'm not going to force this upon myself to save their egos.

Work has been somewhat slow lately. I've been trying to learn AutoCAD, but the program is in Chinese and I can't get it set to English, which is making it exceedingly difficult as I have to rely solely on the toolbar icons. I'm sort of getting the hang of it, but I still think I prefer Unigraphics and Pro/E. It is nice to have learned to use 3 CAD programs; however, I'm a little disappointed that I only really learned to use 1 of them in depth. Right now, Michael has me working on a project to assemble an Excel spreadsheet/database of tools used in various machining programs and the spindle speed/feedrate used for each one in each program instance. It requires a lot of data mining from machine code, which is tedious but not terribly difficult. I have conflicting opinions about this project because it's a rather basic task, but probably the most useful project I've worked on so far. I'm looking forward to the next couple of weeks when the engineers from Husky come to Allied from America/Canada to teach the company how to use the new automated machining line.

China - Day 36 - A (basketball) star is born

Work was not terribly interesting today, but after work was a lot of fun. The Allied basketball team had a practice today before our game against the police and apparently people have been talking up my basketball skills. I didn't want to disappoint, and in this crowd, I didn't. Even though I'm a mediocre at best basketball player at home, I'm pretty good here, definitely good enough to start on the company team. I tried to keep my own stats, but lost track around halfway through. If I had to guess, I think I ended up with about 24 points, 15 rebounds, 5 blocks and a steal in 90 minutes. I think I represented American basketball quite well; I was able to play a power game and run over guys all night. Baseline dribble penetration worked really well for me and I surprised them by hitting a few from the elbow after dominating the glass for the better part of the game. It's somewhat strange, the Chinese are positively obsessed with the NBA, but they don't play particularly good basketball, at least at the rec league level. I think the reason for that is that they grow up watching the NBA and try to emulate the things they see NBA players do without working on the fundamentals, which underlie American youth basketball. For the most part, the guys I played with were very sloppy. There were tons of dropped passes, fumbled hand offs and chasing the ball on the floor; I felt like Tim Duncan (The Big Fundamental) out there. However, what the Chinese lack in fundamentals, they make up for in energy. I've never seen the fast break run so many times in my life. I had to sub myself halfway through the first quarter to catch my breath and to let some of the other guys get in the game. I noticed that the Chinese guys would only go off when they were about to pass out tired which said two things to me: 1) These guys are very committed to the game 2) They hate to be on the bench even if it means half-assing it on the court.

After the game we went out to dinner with the team, which is actually the first time I've been taken out to dinner by the company. I've been told to expect a few things when being taken out to a dinner by your coworkers: strange food, lots of drinking and fascination with me, the laowai. All of these expectations came true. Strange food got off to an impressive start with chicken feet, the classic weird Chinese dish. Following my policy of trying everything, I had it and I was disappointed. It was basically chicken skin over very small bones and had no taste whatsoever. The Hundred Year Egg was a bit more off-putting, it looked and smelled like death, but it tasted and still had the texture of a boiled egg (not my favorite). I tried to follow the conversation, but it mostly went right past me, although I did pick up on a few words that I think they were using to describe me (meiguo, laowai). One of the things they were curious about that my mentor translated for me was a question of how many beers I could drink (note: in China, beer is generally served in 600mL bottles (about 22 oz) and is 3.1 percent ABV) and I said twelve, which I could probably drink over the course of an evening. I don't think that last part translated well and it seemed that everyone at the table took that to mean that I would have twelve of those bottle by the end of the meal and they accepted that challenge by toasting me every 5 minutes (ganbei - empty the cup). I ended up going through five and half bottles by the end of the meal and was still able to walk out not drunk (tipsy, sure, but not drunk). I think I did a good job representing American basketball and drinking today.