The strangest night out with friends...

So we met friends of our out for drinks last Saturday night. It was something we were really looking forward to. They live in the building next to ours, and the husband, Kurt, set me up with a pick up basketball game at a local International School. I don’t even hold it against him that he’s from Michigan!

We met them as they were finishing up dinner at a tapas restaurant that we are definently going to try out ourselves. After finishing up a drink there, we headed to a local German bar, called ‘Paulaner’. They have German beer on tap and, per Martha, Kurt’s wife, a great band. We got there and the place was packed with local Chinese – a good first sign. The band was decent. The strange part of the night was when I realized, we are sitting in a German bar listening to a Philippino band, playing music in Spanish (La Bamba by Richie Valens), surrounded by local Chinese in Shanghai! Just crazy.

We tried out another place – an American styled bar called ‘Malone’s’. They were also supposed to have a good band… and the band was good… just that it happened to be 50’s night at Malones, so now we are in a bar that is primarily expats, with a Philippino band dressed in poodle skirts, hair in 50’s style hairstyles, playing things like ‘Runaround Sue’. Again, just crazy.

Last stop of the evening for the Welsh family (we are always the first to leave these things, given the fact that our kids are 6:30am wake up calls) was a bar called Manhattan. This place had, what I believe was 2 Chinese gals singing… there was a good thing and a bad thing about this… the bad – they were not very good… the good – they ended early! The place played decent dance music after that, but the weird thing about this place was seeing all the working girls file into the place. Steph and I don’t go out a tremendous amount in the US (remember the 6:30am wake up call) so I can’t say for 100% certain I have ever seen a working girl… Not the case anymore. They come in, usually in packs, and congregate in one area of the bar… It’s like they want to stick out so that you know for sure where to find them… then one peels off every so often after making eye contact with a single guy at the bar by himself… or a single white guy walks up to the crowd of girls, picks one by dancing with them for a couple of songs, then – poof – they disappear. The last thing that was crazy about Manhattan was that at some point I turned around to pick up my drink off the bar, where I had set it down, and much to my surprise, there was a woman in her underwear dancing on the bar. This gal is evidently an employee of the bar. This is when we noticed the poles running from the bar to the ceiling. Looking at our friends quizzically, their response was, ‘welcome to Asia, this is normal’. Yet again, our friend Dwayne’s patented phrase rings true – ‘China, it’s just different here.’

Typhoon ‘Whimper’ and World Cup Soccer

It has been weeks, months even, since my last post… Mostly my life has become the uninteresting grind of work. Hard to post about getting up every morning, driving one hour to work, working all day, then returning the 1 hour drive to home, dinner with wife and kids, followed by a little more work, or as I have been able to accommodate recently, a couple of hours at the gym. Held up against Stephanie’s hilarious stories about everything from getting lost on her bike, to the stories of the kids and their mis-adventures in Shanghai, mine seems a pretty boring set of experiences to share!

That being said, there has been a string of interesting things over the last couple of weeks… the arrival of Typhoon Wipha (Thia for ‘woman’), and the US Women’s World Cup soccer match versus Nigeria. They are related by the fact that the typhoon and the soccer match were scheduled on the same day!

Weeks ago when we found out that the US women would be playing in Shanghai, we decided to get tickets. A little bit of home 6 weeks into our time in China seemed like a great idea… Even for me, who has never really been a fan of soccer. Tickets purchased, and babysitter lined up, we were looking forward to the match on Tuesday, September 18^th. That’s when things got a little complicated… Typhoon Wipha was headed straight towards Shanghai. The local weather services were indicating that this was likely to be the strongest storm to hit Shanghai in 10 years… So, what to do? The World Cup match was quickly approaching, and as was the typhoon. FIFA (not sure what it stands for, but it is the organizing body for World Cup soccer) was watching the weather forecasts as closely as we were, and had decided to push the Wednesday, September 19^th games out 1 day to accommodate the typhoon’s arrival. They were holding firm on the Tuesday games. At the same time that the Chinese government was evacuating between 200,000 and 1,000,000 people from costal and low lying areas, FIFA was planning on playing World Cup soccer.

Steph decided not to risk going out into the Typhoon, and I headed out to meet our friends Tom and Donna for dinner, then head to the stadium. As it turns out, the typhoon lost speed as it hit land south east of Shanghai, so the time it was expected to hit Shanghai pushed out to sometime Wednesday. The soccer match was played in front of 6,100 people (stadium capacity 35,000), in weather that ranged from classic Oregon fall and winter mist to mid-west thunderstorm (minus the thunder and lightning). The US women scored about 57 seconds into the match, and the next 89 minutes passed without another goal. The US women won 1-nil. I was actually surprised at how enjoyable a soccer match is in person, especially when you are rooting for your country’s team. The women made a point after the match of walking around the pitch to the different parts of the stadium with packs of US fans and waving and saying ‘thank you’ for the support. It was a really enjoyable evening.

The next day the scheduled arrival of 'Wipha' kept getting pushed out - it having lost speed as it hit land... Then it turns out it didn't hit Shanghai at all... It moved west of Shanghai, then perfectly around the city and back out to sea towards Korea, where it was downgraded to a tropical storm. I don't want to discount the damage it must have had on the areas it did hit, or the impact to the familes in those areas, but I couldn't help but feeling like I was back in Oregon in the winter, when the local news is dominated by 'Storm Watch 2006' explaining in detail how bad the winter snow storm is going to be... only to wake up in the morning to a sprinkling of snow, which is melted by 10:30am. One of my co-workers was on a call with me Wednesday morning asking about the typhoon, and that's when I nicknamed it 'Typhoon Wimper'. Lots of build up in the media, and no action!

Back to the 'football': Steph is the real soccer fan in the family, having played in high school, and their team having been good, usually making the state tournament. I felt bad that she didn’t get to see the match, so I made arrangements to get 2 tickets to the World Cup finals. The match is Sunday, September 30^th – just a week away. The nice thing is that the tickets are for the 3^rd/4^th place game and the championship game, so even if the US Women lose their next match, and don’t make the finals, we would still be guaranteed to see them play.

No doubt I’ll post about the match and the experience of being there in person next week… stay tuned.