Breakthrough in International Relations

9/13/06 - Hi. It's me, Eloise. I've been writing but not posting because what I wrote wasn't quite done to my liking. But I've been busy lately, and I need to jot down some notes or I'll forget, and those wonderful thoughts will fly out of my head and be gone. Here are some random observations of life - my life, mostly - in Shanghai.

I started a Chinese class about 2 weeks ago. My classmate is a Colombian woman who is married to a Spanish man and graduated from UC Berkeley. She told me that she loved Berkeley, and recently took her husband there, showed him every place she lived and visited all her favorite food spots. She wasn't in class today, but a young American whose parents live here was having a trial class to see if he wants to study at this particular school. I figure him to be just out of college, or maybe taking a break from college. He was cute, and his parents are probably younger than I am. My teacher is named Zhao Pei, Peipei to her friends, and her English name - everyone who deals with foreigners has an English name - is Pallas. Bill says that one of the guys in his office has the English name of Crystal. Most of the women from Shanghai who were part of the visiting scholar program at the CA Dept of Health Services have English names, but the men who were there earlier this year did not. I don't know why that is. I've been playing email tag with one of the women, Sarah (Fu Minjiao). I think we're going to meet on Friday.

A lot of what I do in between Chinese lessons and orientation coffees (more about that in a bit) is shopping. I don't mean shopping for cheap Chinese doodads or exquisite Chinese art, but grocery shopping and shopping for household stuff. We have broken 4 of the 8 Ikea glasses that the landlord provided (actually, our teeny little dishwasher broke most of them), and I have invited He Ping, a Chinese law professor, and her family, over for an American dinner at some later date, and we don't have enough dishes. So I have to buy stuff. Not to mention the fact that when we arrived we bought exactly 2 sets of sheets and 3 pillows, which leaves our prospective guests with nothing but sofa pillows and the teensy electric blanket. I went to Ikea once with Silvia, the real estate assistant, and I hope never to go back there again. It is EXACTLY like Ikea anywhere, and it was not appealing. We bought, or rather, the landlord bought us, a desk and 2 chairs, along with a small rug so the cheap chair wouldn't damage the lovely dark wood floor. But I also got some 39 RMB fleece blankets (I swear they were cheaper in Emeryville), that Sonic will pay for and that we will give away when we return to Berkeley. Bill's team at the office is going to have their pick of junk at New Years.

Anyway, today I had to pick Julia up, because Wednesday is chorus day and there are no buses after the extracurricular activities. So if I leave the house by 2:30 (when I take the subway - 3:00 if I take a cab) I can go to the organic store and to the upscale German deli and meat store a couple of blocks away in the Sheraton Grand Tai Ping Yang Hotel. And it is a grand hotel. When they get you a taxi, the taxi guy gives you a piece of paper on which to write down the number of the driver, in case you want to report him for malfeasance, I suppose.

Julia's vocabulary words in language arts class have the prefix "mal-" this week, but I don't believe malfeasance is among them. However, "malaria" is. Go figure.

You enter the hotel through the automatic doors and head to the fabulous marble stairway to the second floor mezzanine. There a sign directs you to Bauernstube, which is approximately opposite the stairway. But they prefer to direct traffic, just as you enter Bauernstube through one door and exit through another. This is enforced by the uniformed door-opener who holds the door for you as you leave with your goodies. You can also enter through the jewelry and gift store next door, which is what I did when I realized I had left behind my fabulous bargain sheets, bought at a branch of a New York bedding store, one I'd never heard of, in the Parkson's shopping mall across (dui mian) from O Store. So the sign to Bauernstube from the stairs points you in the direction that leads you around past the other shops. The people who work behind the meat and deli counters wear surgical masks, and everyone in the store appears to speak English or German or possibly both. Besides meat and cheese they have good bread, expensive for here, and a bakery where a bag of meringues is about $1.50. Yum. The Germans love this place. All this fabulosity is a 10 to 15-minute walk from Shanghai Community International School, Hongqiao campus, second choice school for American expatriates living in Puxi, that is, the west side of the Huangpu River. The east side, also called the new area, is Pudong. Can you guess what xi and dong mean?

The result of all this shopping is that I didn't really do much today beside saying goodbye to Bill (he's on his way to SFO as I write this), go to Chinese class, buy boring groceries (milk and banana chips), household goods, expensive cold cuts that I probably wouldn't buy at Andronico's, organic vegetables (at least twice the price of the cheap veggies, but still really cheap), meet Julia at school, flag down a taxi, come home, make dinner, eat, do dishes, help Julia with her homework. And here I am at the computer, nerding away. Meanwhile, we now have 2 extra sets of sheets, a new bag of meringues, and we're almost ready for company. Let me know when you're coming and I'll be sure to buy those dishes.