Fixin' a Hole Where the Rain Gets In...

One of the joys of living here -- or, at least, in my particular apartment -- is dealing with the various everyday problems that materialize over the course of living in the same place for an extended period of time.  The lights burn out, the AC doesn't work, the heat isn't hot enough, the hot water can't handle two showers at the same time, the gas alarms rings at 3am -- these are the run-of-the-mill problems faced by apartment-dwellers everywhere, enjoyed by no one, but basically to be expected by all.  These annoying but commonplace hurdles are made significantly more difficult to jump over here, however, because of a few basic facts:

• The language.  This one's obvious, and it's just part of living abroad.  My Chinese is passable, even "good" for a foreigner, but it's still difficult to convey to a maintenance guy that the circuit breaker keeps tripping every time I use the heating at a certain temperature in the living room.  Hand motions are key, which of course means it's even trickier to describe problems over the phone.
• The skill and training of the maintenance dudes.  There's a guy in my apartment right now, fixing light bulbs.  It's difficult to tell if he knows which way is up.  Eventually, one would hope, we will have functioning lights (the current blackout count stands at 8 bulbs), but you never know.
• Mr. Zhang, the primary maintenance dude (though not the one that's here right now) is far more interested in "hanging out" with us foreigners than he is with, you know, fixing shit.  He often looks from me to my roommates, excitedly, and asks us "你们今天晚上去酒吧喝酒吗?" ("Are you guys going out to the bar to drink tonight?").  We used to keep bottles of unwanted, foul-tasting Chinese liquor lying around, which we'd offer to him in small sake glasses.  We've learned that just encourages him, like a hungry seagull at the beach, eyeing your hot dogs.  So now we just pretend like we don't drink.
• When Mr. Zhang does decide to take a look the hood, he almost always comes up with the same answer: "我没办法！" which basically translates to "there's nothing I can do."  He sheepishly will whip out his cell phone, call the "specialist" for whatever problem we're having, and invariably reports that they're "particularly busy" and can't come for several days.  Sometimes Mr. Zhang will generate an excuse that makes no sense at all -- "oh, you see, this air conditioning unit isn't big enough to cool the room down" (it was doing a perfectly fine job three days ago!); "see, the heat isn't working because the circuit breaker is down" (right, I know, I called you because I want that to stop happening), etc. etc.
• The whole thing is almost certainly a scam.  We don't have direct contact with our landlord (we don't even know who he/she is), so all of our issues have to go through the building's real estate office.  They apply seemingly random charges to everything we ask them to do.  And what can we do about it?  Refuse to pay and live without hot water for weeks on end?  We occasionally succeed in strong-arming the maintenance dudes to fix our damn apartment for free, but most of the time we're contributing to the building's "let's fuck with the stupid foreigners" fund.  I used to notice an amused glint in the real estate people's eyes every time I'd go down to the office to pay our monthly rent.  Now I think I understand why.

Anyway, it's annoying, but ultimately just the cost of doing business.  We now have 8 spanking new light bulbs, happily installed by one of Mr. Zhang's more helpful colleagues for only 80 kuai (about 13 bucks).  One wonders when they'll burn out again.

The Beginning of the End

There's been some murmuring across the blogosphere urging me not to allow my little foray into travel blogging to expire with a whimper of "Kosher Showers."

To be fair, the thought had crossed my mind.  There wasn't really any reason for the blog's gradual decline in frequency of content.  From a September and October filled with new and funny, and outrageous experiences, to a March and April and May filled with exciting travel plans, decisions about the future, and trepidation about leaving this crazy wonderful new home and life, the notion of blogging about my day to day thoughts and observances just started to seem too...both big and trivial, simultaneously, I suppose.  As the idiosyncrasies of living in China -- the real ethos of this blog, in my opinion -- became more normal, so too did the weight of knowing that life here was inherently temporary and, to a certain extent, un-real.  I've made real friends, forged real memories, and made my mark on a small section of the Shanghai landscape -- a mark I won't ever forget, and, if I'm lucky, one that won't soon be forgotten by the Shanghai I'll leave behind in two months.  But it was the act of leaving it behind, the admitting to myself and others that this was always a temporary excursion, one that I am blessed to have had the luxury to take -- it was all of that, which I didn't know how to express in a way that would stay "bloggish".

And so I won't.  At least not yet.

Instead, I'll dive into the beginning of the end in the hopes that when I'm invariably rueing the speed with which these last few months in Asia flew by, this cyber database will help slow everything down in memory.

So here's what's been happening!

• The end of March was marked by the arrival to Shanghai of two very special redheads.  Judith and Ken, affectionately known to yours truly as Mom and Dad, eagerly (but not without some anxiety about the food, water, and air quality) made the trip around the world to visit their idiot kid, who happened to also be turning 25 years old at the same time (makes a girl think!).  From Shanghai to Beijing to Guilin to Hong Kong to Macau, I was able to share a small slice of my life here with my parents.  It was the first family vacation that I felt responsible for -- something that instilled in me equal portions of pride and anxious concern that things might not go as planned (which, in turn, provided me with a greater sense of appreciation for the myriad vacations they have planned, without anything but expectation of a good time from me and my brother).  I think it's safe to say that a good time was had by all (though you'll have to ask them...there was the whole food/water/air quality thing to contend with...)

                             

Far less sweaty than my last trip to the Great Wall

                                           

The above picture demands some explaining.  In 2008, when I visited Beijing for the first time, I took a picture of a long, narrow corridor in the Forbidden City with a small girl holding a red umbrella that matched the red of the walls.  Having very few discernable photography skills, it came as a surprise to me when that photo received widespread praise from friends and family (It's on the cover page of this blog, shrunk down to fit nicely on the page).  This picture here is my return to that long corridor in the Forbidden City, and look...well...philosophically demented.

We went on an e-bike tour of Beijing.  I think I look like a natural, if I do say so myself.

The folks on the Lijiang River in Guilin

• After the folks left for home, I pushed on to Singapore, where I discovered that 95 degree temperatures and seemingly infinite humidity indices make for difficult urban touring.  It's a very cool (not temperature-wise) cultural hodgepodge, far less dominated by Chinese than I had been led to believe.  The linguistic potpourri rivaled that of Queens, and the culinary delicacies (particularly those found in outdoor street markets) ranged from Hainanese chicken and rice, to Indian samosas and fried chickpeas, to thai noodles, to arabic halal kabobs.  The skyline at night from atop the massive (and massively ugly) Marina Sands hotel was also something to see indeed.

These two beasts are "merlions", Singapore's official national...well, not exactly an animal now is it?  National figment of collective imagination?

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore

• I went to Indonesia for a day.  Just hopped a ferry and headed to a beach on the island of Batam. Just to be able to say "I went to Indonesia for a day" is pretty cool.

• The Horde has enjoyed continued success, coincided by my continued enjoyment of the managerial role.  We're currently in the process of producing a music video for "IKEA Love Song," which can be heard here.
• I started working from home, which, as people who have been domestic employees before had forecasted, tends to lead to hardly working at all.  After a week or two of "catching up" from my vacation with the folks, my "full time" job at J.D. Power quickly faded in prominence from my daily life.  Not that I'm complaining.  I've managed to create a unique symbiosis in which the higher-ups at my company think they're getting free labor from me (they don't pay me very much) and I think I'm getting away with highway robbery at their (albeit limited) expense.
• I officially decided to enroll at Harvard Law School this coming fall.  I'm very excited indeed.  Further thoughts on said decision are fodder for a separate post.
• I went to an all-day barbecue competition on the Bund.
• I became a fan of Yongkang Lu, a bar street in a residential district near the center of town.  This wasn't a novel discovery - it's been a favorite destination for expats for over a year now, replete with a hodgepodge of watering holes and restaurants.  The future of the street is in question, however, as the residents of Yongkang have grown fed up with the nightly cacophony that permeates up from the bars below.  The street is popular primarily because everyone gathers outside to enjoy their nosh and drink, but this has led to a showdown with the locals.  Two months ago, it came to a heat, with residents angrily chucking gallons of water at the revelers below.   I wasn't there (I wish I was), but the news quickly spread through the expat scene.  Of course, Yongkang became even more popular after the incident -- one has to see what all the fuss is about, after all -- but the residents have at least mustered a small, albiet potentially pyrrhic, victory.  The bars are now forced to close at 10pm, rather than stay open into the wee witching hours of the night.  This merely intensifies the party in the hours leading up to the early closing time.
• I was told, for perhaps the 8th separate time in my life, that I remind someone of Josh Lyman from The West Wing.
• I bought an orange ukulele for Franco for his birthday.  Who knew ukuleles came in orange?
• Some exciting travel has been planned: Cambodia and Thailand with Ben and Paige for 8 days; Taiwan, in part to visit my old Chinese professor from Penn, for 5 days; South Korea with my roommate Franco and our friend Justine for 5 days; and, with a little luck, hosting the guys from Fieldston in Shanghai at the end of June, before heading out to the wilds of Yunnan province for about 10 days.  Pictures to come.
• I finally booked my flight home.  I'll be flying back to New York on July 25, connecting through Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (which should be an experience in and of itself).

And so, all things that come to end must also begin to come to an end.  I've dodged that beginning for as long as I can, urging friends along with myself to focus on the time I have left here rather than the fact that I'm leaving.  The reluctance to face the beginning of the end head on perhaps contributed more than anything else to the hiatus of the blog.  It's back now, in whatever frequency I can muster, fully committed to seeing through the final two months in this no-longer-strange land to which I am no longer a stranger.