A few weeks ago, some colleagues and I attended the
Learning 2.008 tech conference in
Shanghai. It was a nice three day trip, and a few pictures can be found in the gallery below.
Shanghai is definitely a big, modern city. It's also much more bicycle-friendly than our city. On the other hand, we
almost witnessed an accident. That is to say, an accident occurred right behind us as we were walking down the sidewalk, and we turned and saw the aftermath. A motorcycle cop had run into an old lady crossing the street, and she was down for quite a while. The guy seemed genuinely sorry about it as he tried to staunch the blood flowing from her head, but he was flustered, too. He seemed to want to help her up and on her way as soon as possible. It is my observation that the police here aren't like police in the States. For one thing, I don't think they receive the same level of training or discipline. I once saw an officer who ostensibly was supposed to be standing watch on a triathlon route but was instead sitting on the curb on the side of the road with his hat off, listening to a portable music player. The yellow "Police Line: Do Not Cross" caution tape commanded zero respect from the pedestrians. Another time, I saw two officers walking hand-in-hand with a third, non-uniformed man between them (one thing about Asians in general is that they are not shy about what Westerners would consider intimate hand-holding between same-gender friends). Police here also don't seem to be taken as seriously by themselves or the general citizenry. I wonder if this isn't because most of them don't carry guns (although I have seen tasers and collapsible batons--but then again, you can buy those in the open night market for under $5). In the end, they just don't seem to command the same respect, power, or authority as officers in the States. Of course, I've never been on the wrong side of the law there or here, so a lot of this is purely conjecture.
There are many things like that here, that at first blush seem similar to what we're more familiar with, but the visual cues mislead us because the reality is something very different.
While in Shanghai one of the guys we were with decided he wanted to buy a
Wii (you know, Nintendo's ubiquitous game console?). That big glass ball you see in the picture above is actually the front of a giant mall. Inside, there were plenty of vendors with Wiis for sale. However, all of the Wiis on sale there had been "modded." That means that they'd had their hardware slightly modified to allow them to play illegally copied game discs. When my friend tried to explain to a vendor that he wanted an unmodified Wii, the man was very confused. His English was pretty good, but could this Westerner really be asking for a Wii that
couldn't play copy games? A "shackled Wii", as it were? What for? He tried to convince my friend that regular games were too expensive. Why pay that high price when he could get a copy game for 1/10th the cost? Integrity didn't even enter into it, merely economics. Finally, he said he could maybe get an unmodified Wii in a few hours, but it would cost 500 RMB
extra. My friend politely declined.
During that trip, I experienced a lot of new things. The second night there, we ate at a Japanese
Teppanaki restaurant, and that was quite possibly the single most transcendent dining experience of my entire life. I've had better individual dishes before, but the total offering was greater than the sum of its parts. I sustained epicurean delight across eight courses.
Soon, I'll have more pictures of our city and work environment, but for now it's to bed for me. It's only Tuesday after a holiday break, and I'm still missing sleep.
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