So the last couple of years I have taken the kids around trick or treating, and Steph has manned the front door and given out candy. This year she called dibs on heading out with the girls and trick or treating, whilst I do the distribution of sugar.
I always complain that she has such better material for blogging than I do – and I expect tonight will be no different, but out first trick or treaters find themselves in my latest blog – I should have mentioned it to the mother… but actually I think that would have mortified her!
So first, I have to explain that Trick or Treating is a very American thing. The local Chinese don’t do it, the closest thing they have is what loosely translates to ‘The Ogre Festival’. ‘The Ogre Festival’ is a day that there are invisible ogres running around causing trouble. So the Chinese go home early, and all stay inside with red lanterns and incense burning outside to keep the ogres away. Pretty funny and cool if you ask me. This explanation came from Steph’s Chinese tutor Jessie. She’s the same one who saw our couple of decorations and asked if we were decorating for ‘The Evil Festival’. That cracked me up.
So the reason I say that Halloween is an American thing, is that even our new British friends (Emma and Graham) say that Halloween is not celebrated in the UK either. They were walking around their complex looking at all the Halloween decorations and Graham was saying ‘this is so American, I can’t believe we are walking around to look at this’.
So if you are in an Expat compound, there is trick or treating. The complex asks you to sign up if you are going to give out candy. Then everyone who wants one, can pick up a list at the clubhouse and ‘make the rounds’. I’ll provide you some of the funnier encounters, but the first one was classic.
The doorbell rings, so I grab the bucket of candy and answer the door. I look at the kids expectantly – there are 3 of them, probably between the ages of 4 ½ and 7. They don’t really say anything and the boy (probably age 5-6 just walks right into the apartment. While he’s walking in, his mom is saying ‘what do you guys… Oscar, get out here, what are you doing’. Then Oscar walks back out of the apartment, and she explains in her British accent, ‘we’ve never done this before, I am sorry’. She finishes her initial sentence which was ‘what do you guys say’, and they responded by looking at me and saying ‘trick or treat’. Of course in the middle of this ‘what do you say’ and response, the oldest – a girl, probably about age 7 – is digging into the bucket grabbing candy. So then the mother is telling this one ‘no, don’t do that, he’ll hand it to you’, so she puts the 3 pieces of candy back in the bucket (but doesn’t return the pieces she successfully snatched while her brother distracted everyone by walking into the apartment!). So as I am handing out 3 pieces of candy (choosing not to cut off the sneak who has some of my candy already in her bag) the boy says ‘no, I want that one’… the mother starts to say something like ‘you take what you are given’, but stops short almost giving up… I bail her out with a smile and say ‘it’s OK, no problem’. Then as they are waiting on the elevator, I hear the youngest say ‘why did we only get 1 piece’. To which the exasperated British mother looks at me pleadingly saying ‘I’m sorry, thank you so much’. Poor woman, I just smiled and say no problem, good luck’. It was all I could do not to laugh.
The next two-some to show up at the door are two American girls, probably 12 or 13 years old. They say ‘trick or treat’, and I put some candy in their bags, asking them how they are doing tonight. Both respond with ‘well we are too old to be doing this’. I tell them that I would still be trick or treating if I could get away with it, so keep it up. I think they might be expat kids just clinging to some piece of home… this maybe me reading too much into it, but that’s what it seemed like to me.
Then a couple of young asian girls with a weak attempt at costumes. It was funny since when I opened the door they both said in unison, in a very sing-songy asian accent ‘trick or treat’… it was in stereo. Then when I gave them candy, they said in a the same sing-song voices ‘thank you’ – again in perfect unison.
The next funny two-some was a couple of 10-12 year old boys, with NO attempt at costumes. They said ‘trick or treat’ which was nice, since they were obviously just cruising for free candy. They had me put the candy for both of them in one of the boys hats. I realized as I dropped the candy in that this was the only attempt at a costume – it was a witches hat, which they had to use for gathering candy as they had no bag between them – I nick named them ‘the planners’.
Then there was the girl who explained to me I needed to make it quick, they had the elevator waiting. When I purposely looked at her and frowned and slowed down, she said it in Chinese, like I would understand that better? Come to think of it, I know so little Chinese, I have no idea what she said to me!
I’ll post what I have now, and update it throughout the evening if there is anything else of note that presents itself.
Take care,
Joe
Update: 7:56pm
I wonder if some of the Asian kids don't completely understand Halloween and think that costumes are optional? That maybe this odd American 'festival' is just about knowing the secret password that get you candy? I know there are many kids in the US that show up sans-costume, but I have had 5 different sets of asian kids show up with NO attempt at custumes... perfectly nice kids, 'trick or treat' and 'thank you', but no costumes?
Update: 8:04pm
As I am putting a couple of pieces of candy in a girls bag, she bends her head over and sneezes directly on my hand... wet sneeze too, required a trip to the bathroom. That has nothing to do with being in China, but WOW, GROSS.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Firsts - Trip Home, Car Accident, Golf
Tomorrow marks 3 months in China! I can’t believe it… 3 months down, and 21 left to go… OK, so I’m not really counting… just weird to put it in perspective.
So, 3 months into it and I finally accomplished some things that I did not expect would have taken this long and one that I thought I would have to wait almost a year for.
Trip Home
I was getting pretty homesick. I had gotten sick over the Chinese ‘October Holiday’ – their ‘National Holiday’. I had a rough patch at work dealing with the politics, working through the cultural issues with my new Chinese co-workers, and the high level of complexity involved in the way we have structured delivering this program. I was not sleeping well, and was really missing home. Steph said this usually happened around 3 months (she read it someplace). It hit me a little early – about 8 weeks. Then, one random Tuesday I came into the office and saw an e-mail from the GM of the product line I am working on that said ‘we are having a face to face meeting over a few days in Oregon, please come’. I literally said a little prayer right there on the spot.
Part of me felt ashamed – Steph is having to navigate China everyday, take care of the kids while I am on business trips (3 in the first 3 months, and another one next week), having to actually use the Chinese she has managed to learn so far (which far exceeds mine), grocery shopping when there is very little English available to help match up recipes from the book to ingredients in the store, keeping the family moving forward while I work 10-12 hour days (with some extra e-mail in the evenings). And here I was headed home… I felt like if anyone deserved the break from China it was her. But to her credit, she seems to be doing so well with the change. While there are sure moments of genuine frustration with being here (like the groceries), she has done an amazing job of acclimating to our new life in China.
Off I went to Oregon the 3rd week in October. And honestly, it was great. I flew in on Monday, was in F2F meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday and had more meetings on Thursday and Friday. I was able to Sherpa home a bunch of stuff for our family as well as other expat families… Although a HUGE thank you has to go out to Lisa Wing, who did all the shopping for us, since I was working all week.
I was able to do a lot of things I had been missing – eat American food, watch live college football that wasn’t grainy and small on the computer, meet with colleagues in the US face to face, drive by the house and insure the people who rented it hadn’t burned it to the ground in the 6 weeks they had been living there.
I was able to meet our good friend Karmen for dinner on Thursday night, as she was in Portland, from Seattle, for meetings at OHSU.
Probably the best part of the trip was getting to go to dinner with our old dinner club… They moved the date to accommodate my travel schedule. They even let me pick the place – Jake’s Famous Crawfish downtown… Scrummy! Everyone except one person was able to make it, which was great… good food, good wine, outstanding company.
I did miss Steph and the kids… not China but them. I was looking forward to coming ‘home’ to China. Some of my friends in Oregon mentioned how weird it was to hear me saying ‘home as in China’. It didn’t feel weird anymore. And I haven’t really been homesick since coming back… Part of it is having gotten a taste of home, part of it is being busy, part of it is being focused outside of work on our upcoming vacation to New Zealand.
Car Accident
The next ‘first’ – traffic accident. This is one of the things I was surprised took this long. On the way to work one morning last week, my driver was trying to pry our minivan into a space between a moving car (in front) and a moving truck behind. The space was probably not large enough for a Mini Cooper, let alone a minivan… but this is normal occurrence during our hour long drives to my office. Well this particular morning Daniel was looking intently at the rearview mirror to insure that the large truck behind us didn’t actually drive through us – not paying much attention to the car in front of us. Unfortunately, the car in front of us stopped sooner than Daniel expected and – you guessed it – right into the other car’s rear end we went.
The other driver got out of the car on the spot, our minivan stradding both lanes, blocking both lanes of traffic… Immediately the horns of the vehicles trapped behind us started blaring. Daniel told the guy to pull off on the next side street and we would follow him… He must have trusted us (and heard the horns of about 50 vehicles behind us) and followed Daniel’s advice. So we pull off the road behind the guy, and Daniel gets out and the 2 of them survey the damage. This was a VERY low speed impact – enough that from my seat in the 2nd row of the van, I could not see as much as a scratch on the guys rear bumper. I also can’t see much of any impact to our van. The two of them are talking in raised voices (Shanghainese are known for ‘yelling’ at each other, which is actually just the way they talk to each other here), and Daniel comes back to the van and grabs his wallet. He extracted a undisclosed number of 100 RMB notes, handed them over, and we were on our way. No exchanging insurance information, no getting estimates, just an on the spot negotiation and cash changing hands… An efficient market!
When Daniel came back to the van, I asked him ‘Everything alright?’ He responded simply, ‘yes, alright, I just pay money’. And we were on our way – as he pulled across 4 lanes of moving traffic and nearly hit, or nearly missed, the same car who was also pulling across the same 4 lanes of moving traffic.
Golf
And the other ‘first’… Golf! I was planning on playing over the October Holiday, but got really sick and could not play.
One of our neighbors (they live on the floor above us in our apartment building) is another expat couple with a daughter Olivia’s age (and 2 older kids). So Steph and the wife (Ai Chen) have struck up a friendship, and the girls are playmates. As it happens Ai Chen’s husband is a golfer, and invited me out to join him for a round of golf at a ‘nearby’ golf course. We headed out on Sunday morning for a 7:00am tee time. Now I put ‘nearby’ in quotation marks, because the course is about an hour’s drive away! So we left the apartment at 5:30am to get there in time for our tee time.
The golf club complex was huge. Large building with a restaurant and bar, huge locker rooms, and a large Pro Shop. The driving range was interesting – it was hitting into a lake with floating ‘greens’ that were small docks with Astroturf and flags to mark distances.
Since the golf courses around Shanghai are mostly all well outside of town, and the weather in the summer is so hot, most people I know who golf make a day of it. Head out to the course, put your change of clothes in your locker, hit some balls, play golf, shower and eat lunch before heading home. This is what the clubhouse is built to support.
Whye Seng is similar to me, with kids, he’s not interested in investing a whole day, so he plays early so that he can still grab a shower, maybe a snack in the restaurant or bar before heading home to try to be back to the family by 12:00p-1:00pm. So this was our plan.
We got to the course with no time to hit balls (he missed an exit on the way to the course as I was describing playing at Bandon Dunes – he’s from Vancouver, BC and is very interested in making it down to play at Bandon some time). I was concerned about not being able to hit balls since I had not played golf in almost 3 months! But off we were to the first tee shortly after checking in.
We teed off in our 2 some right around 7am. The course was nice. Decent length from the blue tees, and pretty manageable from the white tees that we played. I was definitely rusty – it only took to my second shot to know I was not looking at a round in the 70s like my last round in Oregon. The course was at least as nice (layout and conditions) as any standard public course in the Portland area. The greens were in good shape and rolled well.
Golf in China is expensive… there are 3 different fees when you play golf in China. The greens fee, the facility fee (which covers your locker, shower, towels, shower sandals, etc), and caddie fee. Caddies are required. On a weekend, most places will cost you around $120 USD to play – and these are not GREAT courses – they are like decent public courses in the US. During the week they’ll cost between $40 USD and $60 USD.
So back to the caddies – 90% of them are women – girls really. It’s a pretty weird experience, since it’s not like any caddie you’ve had elsewhere or see on TV. They push your bag around in a pushcart – which is great, by the way… it’s great to be able to just walk the golf course and not heft your bag around (this is the part where Steph asks me how you can call golf a sport). Anyhow, the oddest thing about the caddies is when you get to the green. They bring your putter and hand it to you, then they mark your ball, they clean it, they read the green, and then replace your ball… so theoretically, you don’t even have to bend over!
Unfortunately, anyone who has played golf will tell you that part of the game is muscle memory and habit. And there is something about reading the green yourself (with input from caddie or partner), placing the ball just how you are comfortable seeing it, and then hitting your putt. So after the first hole, I had to explain to her that I would mark my own ball and hand it to her, she could clean it, and hand it back to me while I read the putt, then I would retrieve my own ball from the cup. Explanation of that process in Chinglish and charades took far longer than I expected, and soon wished I would have just asked Whye Seng to explain it to her. It took her 2 more holes to really get the process down – she was just so used to how they do it for the other players – hard habit for her to break.
At the end of the day, when we tallied up the scores, I shot 45, 44 for 89. Not bad for 10 weeks off. The weather was nice, Whye Seng was a great guy to spend a round with, and the score wasn’t horrible. The club offers ‘memberships’ – which are really discount programs. You pay a couple hundred bucks for a year, and you get a discount everytime you play. Big discount if you can manage to play during the week, and a reasonable discount if you play on the weekend. I went ahead and signed up, since it would only take me playing about 4 times to pay off the ‘membership fee’ and still be getting the discount. Steph supports my playing a couple of times a month since it is one of the ways I can really relieve stress and forget about work. I am hoping to get out at least one more time before the weather gets too bad! Then play a few times in the spring.
Hope this post finds you all well and good… Cheers!
Joe
So, 3 months into it and I finally accomplished some things that I did not expect would have taken this long and one that I thought I would have to wait almost a year for.
Trip Home
I was getting pretty homesick. I had gotten sick over the Chinese ‘October Holiday’ – their ‘National Holiday’. I had a rough patch at work dealing with the politics, working through the cultural issues with my new Chinese co-workers, and the high level of complexity involved in the way we have structured delivering this program. I was not sleeping well, and was really missing home. Steph said this usually happened around 3 months (she read it someplace). It hit me a little early – about 8 weeks. Then, one random Tuesday I came into the office and saw an e-mail from the GM of the product line I am working on that said ‘we are having a face to face meeting over a few days in Oregon, please come’. I literally said a little prayer right there on the spot.
Part of me felt ashamed – Steph is having to navigate China everyday, take care of the kids while I am on business trips (3 in the first 3 months, and another one next week), having to actually use the Chinese she has managed to learn so far (which far exceeds mine), grocery shopping when there is very little English available to help match up recipes from the book to ingredients in the store, keeping the family moving forward while I work 10-12 hour days (with some extra e-mail in the evenings). And here I was headed home… I felt like if anyone deserved the break from China it was her. But to her credit, she seems to be doing so well with the change. While there are sure moments of genuine frustration with being here (like the groceries), she has done an amazing job of acclimating to our new life in China.
Off I went to Oregon the 3rd week in October. And honestly, it was great. I flew in on Monday, was in F2F meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday and had more meetings on Thursday and Friday. I was able to Sherpa home a bunch of stuff for our family as well as other expat families… Although a HUGE thank you has to go out to Lisa Wing, who did all the shopping for us, since I was working all week.
I was able to do a lot of things I had been missing – eat American food, watch live college football that wasn’t grainy and small on the computer, meet with colleagues in the US face to face, drive by the house and insure the people who rented it hadn’t burned it to the ground in the 6 weeks they had been living there.
I was able to meet our good friend Karmen for dinner on Thursday night, as she was in Portland, from Seattle, for meetings at OHSU.
Probably the best part of the trip was getting to go to dinner with our old dinner club… They moved the date to accommodate my travel schedule. They even let me pick the place – Jake’s Famous Crawfish downtown… Scrummy! Everyone except one person was able to make it, which was great… good food, good wine, outstanding company.
I did miss Steph and the kids… not China but them. I was looking forward to coming ‘home’ to China. Some of my friends in Oregon mentioned how weird it was to hear me saying ‘home as in China’. It didn’t feel weird anymore. And I haven’t really been homesick since coming back… Part of it is having gotten a taste of home, part of it is being busy, part of it is being focused outside of work on our upcoming vacation to New Zealand.
Car Accident
The next ‘first’ – traffic accident. This is one of the things I was surprised took this long. On the way to work one morning last week, my driver was trying to pry our minivan into a space between a moving car (in front) and a moving truck behind. The space was probably not large enough for a Mini Cooper, let alone a minivan… but this is normal occurrence during our hour long drives to my office. Well this particular morning Daniel was looking intently at the rearview mirror to insure that the large truck behind us didn’t actually drive through us – not paying much attention to the car in front of us. Unfortunately, the car in front of us stopped sooner than Daniel expected and – you guessed it – right into the other car’s rear end we went.
The other driver got out of the car on the spot, our minivan stradding both lanes, blocking both lanes of traffic… Immediately the horns of the vehicles trapped behind us started blaring. Daniel told the guy to pull off on the next side street and we would follow him… He must have trusted us (and heard the horns of about 50 vehicles behind us) and followed Daniel’s advice. So we pull off the road behind the guy, and Daniel gets out and the 2 of them survey the damage. This was a VERY low speed impact – enough that from my seat in the 2nd row of the van, I could not see as much as a scratch on the guys rear bumper. I also can’t see much of any impact to our van. The two of them are talking in raised voices (Shanghainese are known for ‘yelling’ at each other, which is actually just the way they talk to each other here), and Daniel comes back to the van and grabs his wallet. He extracted a undisclosed number of 100 RMB notes, handed them over, and we were on our way. No exchanging insurance information, no getting estimates, just an on the spot negotiation and cash changing hands… An efficient market!
When Daniel came back to the van, I asked him ‘Everything alright?’ He responded simply, ‘yes, alright, I just pay money’. And we were on our way – as he pulled across 4 lanes of moving traffic and nearly hit, or nearly missed, the same car who was also pulling across the same 4 lanes of moving traffic.
Golf
And the other ‘first’… Golf! I was planning on playing over the October Holiday, but got really sick and could not play.
One of our neighbors (they live on the floor above us in our apartment building) is another expat couple with a daughter Olivia’s age (and 2 older kids). So Steph and the wife (Ai Chen) have struck up a friendship, and the girls are playmates. As it happens Ai Chen’s husband is a golfer, and invited me out to join him for a round of golf at a ‘nearby’ golf course. We headed out on Sunday morning for a 7:00am tee time. Now I put ‘nearby’ in quotation marks, because the course is about an hour’s drive away! So we left the apartment at 5:30am to get there in time for our tee time.
The golf club complex was huge. Large building with a restaurant and bar, huge locker rooms, and a large Pro Shop. The driving range was interesting – it was hitting into a lake with floating ‘greens’ that were small docks with Astroturf and flags to mark distances.
Since the golf courses around Shanghai are mostly all well outside of town, and the weather in the summer is so hot, most people I know who golf make a day of it. Head out to the course, put your change of clothes in your locker, hit some balls, play golf, shower and eat lunch before heading home. This is what the clubhouse is built to support.
Whye Seng is similar to me, with kids, he’s not interested in investing a whole day, so he plays early so that he can still grab a shower, maybe a snack in the restaurant or bar before heading home to try to be back to the family by 12:00p-1:00pm. So this was our plan.
We got to the course with no time to hit balls (he missed an exit on the way to the course as I was describing playing at Bandon Dunes – he’s from Vancouver, BC and is very interested in making it down to play at Bandon some time). I was concerned about not being able to hit balls since I had not played golf in almost 3 months! But off we were to the first tee shortly after checking in.
We teed off in our 2 some right around 7am. The course was nice. Decent length from the blue tees, and pretty manageable from the white tees that we played. I was definitely rusty – it only took to my second shot to know I was not looking at a round in the 70s like my last round in Oregon. The course was at least as nice (layout and conditions) as any standard public course in the Portland area. The greens were in good shape and rolled well.
Golf in China is expensive… there are 3 different fees when you play golf in China. The greens fee, the facility fee (which covers your locker, shower, towels, shower sandals, etc), and caddie fee. Caddies are required. On a weekend, most places will cost you around $120 USD to play – and these are not GREAT courses – they are like decent public courses in the US. During the week they’ll cost between $40 USD and $60 USD.
So back to the caddies – 90% of them are women – girls really. It’s a pretty weird experience, since it’s not like any caddie you’ve had elsewhere or see on TV. They push your bag around in a pushcart – which is great, by the way… it’s great to be able to just walk the golf course and not heft your bag around (this is the part where Steph asks me how you can call golf a sport). Anyhow, the oddest thing about the caddies is when you get to the green. They bring your putter and hand it to you, then they mark your ball, they clean it, they read the green, and then replace your ball… so theoretically, you don’t even have to bend over!
Unfortunately, anyone who has played golf will tell you that part of the game is muscle memory and habit. And there is something about reading the green yourself (with input from caddie or partner), placing the ball just how you are comfortable seeing it, and then hitting your putt. So after the first hole, I had to explain to her that I would mark my own ball and hand it to her, she could clean it, and hand it back to me while I read the putt, then I would retrieve my own ball from the cup. Explanation of that process in Chinglish and charades took far longer than I expected, and soon wished I would have just asked Whye Seng to explain it to her. It took her 2 more holes to really get the process down – she was just so used to how they do it for the other players – hard habit for her to break.
At the end of the day, when we tallied up the scores, I shot 45, 44 for 89. Not bad for 10 weeks off. The weather was nice, Whye Seng was a great guy to spend a round with, and the score wasn’t horrible. The club offers ‘memberships’ – which are really discount programs. You pay a couple hundred bucks for a year, and you get a discount everytime you play. Big discount if you can manage to play during the week, and a reasonable discount if you play on the weekend. I went ahead and signed up, since it would only take me playing about 4 times to pay off the ‘membership fee’ and still be getting the discount. Steph supports my playing a couple of times a month since it is one of the ways I can really relieve stress and forget about work. I am hoping to get out at least one more time before the weather gets too bad! Then play a few times in the spring.
Hope this post finds you all well and good… Cheers!
Joe
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
