Category Archives: China

You can probably imagine how excited I was to get in several good games of ping pong, my favorite sport, while I’m in China. But I haven’t seen a SINGLE PERSON playing. Apparently it’s only big in universities.

With only a couple more days left here, I resolved to find a game. In my hotel there’s a ping pong table but, alas, I have no one to play with and no one was around. So I headed over to a gym that was recommend to me. Sure enough, there was a table and paddles. First I did my workout (bike, treadmill, weights, elliptical) and then I resolved to find a playing mate.

No obvious candidates in the sparsely populated gym. There were of course 15 staff / trainers standing around doing nothing. I went up to one of the trainers and told him I wanted to play ping pong.

Six of them gathered and talked to decide how to fulfill my request. They said, “You want ping-pong?” I said I wanted ping pong, yes. The English speaking trainer came back and said, unfortunately, their boss won’t let them play ping pong with me because they’re supposed to be working.

I would have fought harder but I had already used my negotiating power to lower the daily fee from 98 to 50 yuan (my first successful negotiation in China).

Then, oddly, she came back and handed me two rackets and a ball. I walked over the table and waited awkwardly for five minutes. WTF is going on? Why can’t one of them just take a break for 10 minutes and give me their best stuff? Finally a woman came over and said “I’m very sorry, we’re not allowed to play since we must work.” I said, “Couldn’t you ‘train’ me on how to hold the racket?” She didn’t understand. I gave her back the paddles, embarrassed, and left the gym.

I feel like that kid who goes around and says “Will you be my friend?”

I’m sure if i was 5 inches shorter and 30 lbs lighter i would have had an opponent within minutes. What some call “our boss won’t let us” I call “the intimidation factor.” 🙂

I’m in Kunming, China in Yunnan Province, about a 2.5 hr flight west of Shanghai. Yunnan Province borders Southeast Asia and is a quick flight from Thailand, Vietnam, etc. I’m happy I’m here because, while Kunming is still a big city (6 million people and growing), it’s small and more remote when compared to Beijing, Shanghai, Guanghzo, and Hong Kong.

The best part about Kunming is its ethnic minorities. About 50% of the city is the majority Chinese race (Han Chinese) and 50% minorities. Most of the minorities have dark skin but some, near Russia, have pale white skin.

My contact Alan, who’s lived in Kunming his whole life and is the husband of a friend of a friend, met me at the Kunming Airport this morning and drove me to my hotel. I dropped off my stuff (I’m glad I upgraded hotels from the piece of shit place I had a reservation at….Dalian taught me to pay more and get English speaking front desk staff) and then headed back out with Alan. I didn’t really know what Alan had in mind for me or how much time he was going to spend with me.

Our first stop was to a local, authentic Yunnan restaurant (Yunnan cuisine is famous). While eating we watched the big stage in front of us while various ethnic minority dancers performed. Amazing stuff. All the dancing is built into the restaurant. "Now THIS is different," I told myself while slurping noodles and meats out of this big bowl of steaming soup which cooks the meat. The dancers from Tibet and all over China were dressed in stunning clothes with bright red and orange colors.

Next we headed to Alan’s office so he could show me his work. He works with Kunming Municipal Government, so given my experience working with dozens and dozens of local governments we could chat about Chinese vs. American styles. He works in import/export, trying to get people in other countries to buy Kunming company products or set up manufacturing in Kunming. This place is growing like mad and there are tons of investment and development opportunities.

Then we drove to a beautiful, lakeside park and wandered through an art gallery. It’s all by this one famous local artist. The second floor is a tribute to America. Yep, a tribute to American troops who helped Kunming fight back against the Japanese during WWII. Pictures of American troops and Air Force planes.

We then took three cable cars up this huge mountain to get a birds eye view of Kunming. Beautiful! We hiked around in this mountain where paths and steps are carved out of rock. Nestled into the rock are various Buddhist and Taoist shrines. Kunming is already at a high altitude and going into the mountains made the air even thinner.

All this brought us to dinner time where we dined at another local Yunan restaurant. Unfortunately I couldn’t enjoy the food because I had to go to the bathroom so badly. I tried to go to the bathroom but found it without toilets. It was the squat method. Having not done my homework, I freaked out and decided to hold it until back at the hotel. Oops. I did manage to hold it, but I was uncomfortable throughout our dinner.

Kunming day 1 proved adventurous thanks to the generous hospitality of Alan. I’m here two more nights and will probably work on my book some, since cookie cutter tourism opps are scarce, but I will try to wander around a bit and try to get my head around western China.

My Mom freaked me out when she told me I should expect to see a lot of live chickens running around in China.

It hasn’t been the case but in Shanghai I did, for the first time, see a guy biking with about 10 chickens on his back. A cop was giving him a ticket so it was probably illegal. I mean, they were hardly covered and if I wasn’t careful I could have been given a good peck and probably would have picked up some disease. Click the picture to enlarge.

Welcome to the East.

My five nights in Shanghai was the longest I stayed in one city.

I’m glad I did. I met some tremendous people and had a lunch and/or dinner every day during my stay. I will summarize all that I learned from these A+ people in a later post.

Outside of meetings, I walked along the Bund, the #1 tourist spot. The Bund is a walking area along the main river which separates the Pudong part of the city from the Puxi part. Most tourism is in Puxi and that’s where my apartment was too. I did go to Pudong for one meeting in the Citigroup building but there’s not much to see there other than amazing skyscrappers, which are better seen from across the shore.

The Bund was good but not great. I don’t think it’s worth the hype. It’s certainly a beautiful skyline though.

I also wandered through Old Town and a couple gardens. People’s Square is a nice bamboo enclave from the traffic. I finally checked out the Shanghai Museum, highly recommended by my Lonely Planet guide. Good stuff. Lots of good Chinese landscape paintings, which I like, and some jade and bronze sculpture. The English audio guide is worth the investment.

Not once in Shanghai did i use public transit — taxi everywhere. It’s so cheap. To flag a cab costs about a $1.50 and it stays at that rate for the first several minutes. Plus, they’re omnipresent.

The food scene in Shanghai is solid and cosmopolitan. With locals I ate authentic Shanghai dumplings and noodles and tried as hard as I could to stay away from spicy stuff, which I don’t like. On my own I patronized Pizza Hut, which was fantastic, and the place across from my apartment at least three times. "Steak King" serves Western food and Chinese food. I often got both: some dim sum plus a steak, for example. And who knew kiwi juice could taste so good? One night I ate with Eisen’s family in their apartment, sans Eisen since he was traveling. The Mom is so nice and so Taiwanese. I love how every Chinese family has a massive rice cooker which seems bottomless.

Two of my days were punctuated by lengthy workouts at Fitness First in Plaza 66. It’s a huge facility and one time I got lucky and watched "Meet the Parents" while on the elliptical. So many great lines in that movie.

The one frustration with my apartment was the lack of breakfast. Each morning I trekked out and tried to find breakfast. (I also searched in grocery stores for cereal to stock the fridge but with no success). Until I found a hole in the wall buffet style Chinese breakfast, this caused daily morning stress. I also had to eat a LOT of food because I now know my malaria medicine only works on a really full stomach and lots of water (I take my pills in morning).

All in all, Shanghai is the business and financial center of China boasts tons of tourist infrastructure, and is relatively easy to navigate. This doesn’t mean it’s exempt from all the troubles which plague China (more on that later), but I can see why many expats choose to live and work in Shanghai. As i’ve said before, some cities are good to visit, some good to live, some both. Beijing has more slam dunk tourist attractions, Shanghai may be a better living destination.