'Back in the saddle' as they say....

 

Dumplings? Is she crazy? I know, I know... after getting sick on Chinese food Tuesday night, how could I post pictures of dumplings? Well, I got 'back in the saddle' today and that's what was for lunch. My co-worker, Jessy, took me to one of her favorite Shanghai-style Chinese restaurants for lunch today with her friend, Gloria, who works on the Crest account. They promised to go easy on my delicate stomach... I felt 100% better today, but still not quite ready for anything adventurous. 

These were crabs in a refrigerator as we walked into the restaurant (click to enlarge if you need more detail). Crabs definitely reminded me of Tuesday night, so thankfully they stayed in the fridge and off of our table!

This was a giant plate of egg whites with a yolk in the center. Though it sounded simple enough, I decided to pass on this and the brown bean curd on the other plate. I stuck to a tofu and vegetable dish with broth, a dumpling, and some tea. That was about 10 hours ago and I'm still feeling ok ;)  

Later on, back at the office, the Account Managers shared presentations on Gen Y in China. They were divided into two teams and it was a competition to see who could gather the best insights on Gen Y. It was pretty fascinating to hear the presentations, because strangely enough, we seem to say some of the same things about Gen Y in the States! They are known for being "generation me" - raised on the internet, raised to be rewarded/praised for all that they do, and now that they are in the workforce, they are a group that is reported to be hard to please/satisfy. I would have thought we'd see more differences, but surprisingly not. 

Kenny, Pain, and Queenie - Team 1

A key finding in China that is also true in the States - 30 seems to be a defining year where young people think they should have their lives all figured out. Sounds easy enough..!!

Team 2: Virginia, Winnie, and Cathy

After work tonight, Jessy was my dinner companion, too! She took me to Shamian Island which is an old Colonial area. It's where British settlers lived in the early 1900s when they came to Guangzhou. It is such a contrast from the rest of the city .... this felt like an old colonial part of a Caribbean Island in a way. There is a big hotel in the area called the White Swan (where apparently many of the Chinese adoptions take place), a bunch of restaurants, some shops, small streets and lots of room for walking. 

Jessy took me to an Italian restaurant for dinner. It was absolutely great to have pizza and wine for dinner and not have to worry about what was in the dumpling or if the crab that would arrive at the table would be alive!! ;) Below are some pictures of Shamian Island... Because some buildings are abandoned and most are quite old, there were some cool pictures to be had. 

This is where we had dinner...

This resembled Savannah more than China!! China's version of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"....

I wouldn't want to be in this building alone! 

Under the weather...

I figured this day would come - my first 'sick' day in Guangzhou. If you read my post from yesterday, you'll see I had a great dinner with Phoebe and Patty last night. Unfortunately, I think I was just a bit too adventurous for my weak American stomach. I was up sick last night but thought I felt well enough this morning to go into work. By the afternoon, I still felt a bit weak from not eating and generally kind of bad, so now I'm home in my apartment with my computer in bed - it's 4pm. Too bad I can't watch Oprah :) At the very least, I am hoping I can watch the inauguration online... but you never know what gets censored here! I should be back in action tomorrow with photos and all once I rest up today.

Never a dull moment

Lately I've been thinking about how strange it is to not know what is going on around me a lot of the time here. I'll see a hundreds of people waiting outside of a kiosk and wonder "are they waiting to get concert tickets?" "is it a great sale?" "could they be playing the lotto and it's a big jackpot?" Literally, I have no clue and it makes me laugh sometimes.

For example, this morning I arrived at the office to see mobs of people holding signs written in Chinese, police on the curb, a crowd of people watching, and about twenty men in military fatigues guarding the entrance to my office. I had no idea what was going on. So, I whipped out my camera and starting to try to take a few pictures. You can see the man at the right of the shot above.... he then started taking pictures of me! I very quickly put the camera away and went inside the office a bit bewildered. Later I found out that it was a group of people protesting the fact that they had not been paid for work they had done. These labor disputes are quite common in China. It definitely made for good AM theater for me on my way into the office.

Following the warm Military welcome this morning, I entered my office to find a new addition (see above photo)! Each year prior to Chinese New Year, the Saatchi Guangzhou office meets with their Feng Shui consultant. Apparently the consultant said that my side of the office building needed some Feng Shui help, so he prescribed putting a water/light fixture into a few offices. So, throughout the day this water/light fixture changes color and enhances the Feng Shui of the office. I'm quite enjoying it actually....

Above: Phoebe Liu

Finally, to round out my day I met up with Patty Tsang (P&G design) and Phoebe Lu (LPK Guangzhou) for dinner. Patty and I met last summer at P&G in Cincinnati, so she has been helpful to me as I prepared for my switch. Phoebe is a friend of Patty's and works at one of our partner agencies. She is originally from Guangzhou, so she knows a lot of the local spots. She took us to her favorite very local (yet "very clean" as she said) Chinese food spot. We had a lot of traditional Cantonese food which is apparently light on spices and known for really letting the flavors of the food shine through. Once Phoebe ordered, the waitress arrived at the table with a small dish and presented it to Phoebe like one would present a bottle of wine. Well, the thing on the plate MOVED. It was a live crab that the woman was presenting to us before she cooked it. A bit shocking. She ordered a whole spread of food including soup, bean curd (a little like tofu) and green veggies, a whole fish, squid with garlic sauce, and rice with salty egg yolk. The food was a bit scary at first, but I really enjoyed most of it.

Above: Patty Tsang

Outside of the restaurant where we had dinner tonight.

There you have it: there is never a dull moment here. Hope everyone is enjoying the long weekend back in the States!

My Sunday in Shanghai

I've just returned to Guangzhou after my first weekend trip to Shanghai. I had been debating if I should go, and I'm really happy I did. In two days, I feel like I really got to see a lot! Overall, the city is a lot more Westernized than Guangzhou.... a lot of great restaurants, stores, etc. catering to the ex-pats living there. At the same time, it definitely feels very Chinese!

The one thing I was taken aback by was the pollution... a gray haze hung over the city the entire time I was there even though the sun was shining. Before I arrived in China, I had been warned that GZ was very polluted, but during my time here, I have been lucky to see many blue sky days. The haze hanging over Shanghai was a sight to see. I feel very thankful to live in the US. 

In addition to the pollution, the amount of smoking in Shanghai was incredible. Everyone seemed to be smoking.... in restaurants, the airport, the lobby of the hotel, and most noticeably as they walked by me on the street and exhaled! 

But I digress...

After Jason showed me around yesterday and we went to dinner Saturday night with a bunch of his friends at a very cool Japanese restaurant (Shintori in the French Concession area), I was on my own today to venture out into the city. I decided to head to an area called Taikang Lu (an artist's street with little cafes) in the French Concession.

I started with lunch at an organic/healthy food restaurant which was a dream come true. Pictured above is my delicious freshly squeezed carrot, pear, celery juice that preceded my absolutely delicious grilled vegetable sandwich. I haven't had a lot of great vegetables on this whole journey, so this put a big smile on my face. The one problem was that there was a table full of smokers sitting behind me! It just didn't seem to be right to smoke in a place like this... call me crazy.

After that, I continued exploring through the little crooked streets of shops/galleries and stumbled upon a "wet market." I've been reading about these, but as yet, had not experienced it. These are markets that sell everything from veggies to live animals. I've only posted the veggie pictures in this blog entry just in case there are people who don't want to see the "other" pics. Those are below in the next post for those who are interested. It was crazy. And there were actually chefs in there buying all their food.... not sure why that was so surprising to me. 

I then headed back to my hotel where a Saatchi Shanghai van was waiting to take me back to the airport. Saatchi has been great to me in that sense, as well.... they had someone waiting for me when I landed in Shanghai and someone waiting for me tonight when I landed in Guangzhou. It makes traveling on my own a lot easier!

As a side note, I noticed in Shanghai it was a bit harder to get good pictures because a lot of people there would wave me away or say "no no no"repeatedly. I'm told that this is pretty normal for Shanghai. Unlike Guangzhou that does not have a lot of Westerners or tourists, Shanghai has been filled with Westerners for a long time and the locals sometimes get fed up with it. 

More pictures from the Wet Market in Shanghai's French Concession neighborhood

If you are at all squeamish or a hard core vegetarian, you may not want to look at the pictures below. All of these were taken in the same building: a warehouse of sorts that housed the "wet market." Vendors inside were selling everything from gorgeous, vibrant-colored vegetables, to fresh and dried fish, spices, to eggs, to crabs to eels, to live chickens. It was intense. I sort of just stumbled in here and was blown away. The vendors were not big fans of my camera, so I couldn't get great shots, but this will give you a sense anyway.....

The fish vendor. All of these fish were not alive. 

A chef purchases her veggies from this merchant.

Asleep on the job! No joke - it is not that I just caught them briefly with their eyes closed. They were fully sleeping. 

In contrast to the fish above, these were all VERY MUCH alive. I got close at one point to take a picture and a fish started splashing around. FREAKED me out. I am not into creepy crawly things and there were crabs (she is handling one above), eels/snakes, live fish......

A shot of the market so you can see the overall look. The floor was pretty wet, especially near the live fish, so I was terrified the whole time of slipping and falling into a stall of who knows what!??! I was very careful.....

These are cages of live Chickens...

And I'll leave you with that.... my day in Shanghai. 

Shanghai hen hao

The skyline of the Pudong area and the smog! It was a sunny day today, but you'd never know it.

View from where we had lunch on the Bund, "New Heights"

A boat that looked like a house floating along the Huangpu River. The skyline of Pudong (the newer business district) is in the background. 

Times Square on steroids - Nanjing Lu pedestrian street. Woops, I just noticed the woman over my shoulder .... 

In the title is the one bit of Mandarin I have managed to pick up: "hen hao" means "very good." I'm back at my hotel having some tea off of the lobby after a great afternoon of sight-seeing in Shanghai. My feet are tired and I need to rest up for dinner. 

Jason met me at about 11 this morning and we began our afternoon of seeing the sights in Shanghai. Shanghai is definitely more cosmopolitan and Westernized than Guangzhou, though it still feels very Chinese. You pretty much know when you are in a Western/ex-pat area and when you are smack in the middle of a very Chinese part of town. 

First, we walked through Old Shanghai and got a glimpse of the daily weekend life: street-side restaurants open to the outside, dead chickens hanging above doorways to restaurants, laundry hanging everywhere and sometimes dripping wet over the sidewalk, and best of all: a couple strolling the streets in their pajamas. I SOOOO wish I could have whipped out my camera, but it felt very inappropriate. Jason let me know that it's the thing to do here on the weekends, especially in the summer in the late afternoon. It signals "this is my neighborhood" - sort of "I own this place, so I can just wear my PJs if I want to."

After Old Shanghai, we went down to the Bund - the area on the Huangpu River that has a lot of old Colonial Shanghai buildings, a large promenade, and an amazing view of the skyline of the Pudong area across the river. We had lunch on the top floor of a building with a wraparound view of the skyline and the boats going up and down the river. It was so cool. It's very polluted here (it might even seem more polluted than GZ), so you'll notice my pics are very hazy. That's just how it is even though it is a bright sunny day. 

From there, we walked down Nanjing Lu, primarily a pedestrian street. I have never seen more people in one place in my entire life. I tried to capture it in photos, but it was impossible. This was the first time I've had people coming up to me in China trying to sell me things. One person pulled Jason aside and offered him "bags, watch, friend?" I think I know what that meant! NO THANK YOU, PLEASE. Jason taught me to say "bu yao, xie xie ni" which is sort of a nice way of saying "please leave me alone." Anyway, it was a sight to see. 

Our final stop was the new Nike flagship store on Nanjing Lu. Jason works at Weiden & Kennedy Shanghai running the Nike account, so he had to pay a visit to the new store and buy a new pair of shoes. The store was mobbed - it definitely did not feel like a recession in there!!

Tonight we're having dinner with a group of Jason's friends, including another guy I know from Saatchi NY, Kevin. Kevin's now here working on the Gillette account at BBDO Shanghai. Should be a fun night. In the meantime... tea & a nice hot bath. I love this hotel. 

PS - FINALLY it seems I have figured out how to caption my pictures. It only took me about 2 weeks and it's as simple as typing below the picture!!!

Very niiiiice

So I made it! I'm here in Shanghai. My flight was pretty good. I arrived at the airport waaaay too early and starving only to find out that the local terminal in GZ (for travel within China) is just a bit different than the international terminal I was in when I flew from HK to GZ two weeks ago.... No Starbucks, no names that were remotely recognizable. I ventured into a spot that had an English & Chinese menu and ordered the one thing that seemed safe: noodles. Unfortunately, the restaurant was incredibly smoky, 100% full of men who appeared to be staring at the lone American girl, and my noodles arrived cold with hot soup on them. Oh well - my bad for not thinking to eat ahead of time! 

But don't feel too bad for me.... I'm definitely not roughing it right now.

I just checked into my cute little boutique hotel in Shanghai (pics above). My flight was delayed about two hours, so I just ordered some soup (really delicious minestrone) and a glass of wine and will soon head to bed. The hotel is called "JIA," which means "home." So far, feels pretty nice!! It's in a central area of Shanghai.... close to Ferragamo, Prada, etc. So I am guessing I'm in the Fifth Avenue type area. I'll venture out in the morning to explore and meet up with my friend Jason who has been living in Shanghai for about 3 years. Always nice to have a local tour guide! I also have a list of tips/places to see from my S&S Guangzhou co-workers and some of the girls from LPK, the design agency that we work with on Olay. I'll be excited to share some pics soon. 

Miss everyone - keep writing. It is so great to get your emails ;) STAY WARM.