Our Own Personal Typhoon

Last week, Shanghai was in a panic about a 'Super Typhoon' that was supposed to be the biggest typhoon that had hit Shanghai in decades. School was cancelled for two days, and some offices were closed (unfortunately, our companies decided to take the risk and remain open). We also received lots of emails from concerned friends, as apparently the Super Typhoon was front page news around the world. While Tuesday and Wednesday did bring bouts of torrential rain, the whole experience was nothing close to a natural disaster.

Unfortunately, we had our own typhoon to deal with on Thursday. I was at work when I received a call from our apartment building management office telling me to 'come home immediately, a water pipe has eruptus'. That last word is not a typo, it was the official diagnosis of the property agent. I rushed home and was met with a flooded lobby and a waterfall coming out of the elevator bank, not a good sign considering we're on the 16th floor. Since the elevator was out of commission, I walked up 16 flights of stairs (not an easy feat in heels and a suit). The water that was pouring down the steps made me feel like I was in some terribly bad horror movie. I finally got to my apartment and was met by 10 people waiting for me to open the door. As soon as we entered, they found the busted hot water pipe and shut it off, leaving all of us up to our ankles in water and the apartment full of hot steam. The rest of the crew spent a good 5 hours squeegee-ing our now buckled wood floors as Zach and I tried to salvage our floating belongings. On a side note, the 10-person emergency crew working in steam bath conditions for 5 hours only cost us $25!

Zach and I immediately fled to the nearest hotel and spent the weekend consoling each other over buffet meals. The real hero of the weekend was our ayi (housekeeper). After arriving on her usual Friday cleaning day only to find a sopping aftermath with no electricity or running water in our apartment, she sprung into action. She spent the day yelling on the phone, and then left, only to return Saturday. I returned home to check out the situation and found her screaming at someone on the phone. Five minutes later an extemely cowed electrician arrived to turn on the electricity, and ayi assured me that running water was soon to follow. The moral of the story is "Do not unleash the wrath of ayi." She had an apartment to clean and you'd best not get in her way!

After 3 days of hotel living, we've got our electricity and cold water turned back on. We're hoping for hot water by tomorrow, but you never know in China. Thankfully, with ayi on our side, we are in good hands!

Comings and Goings

September has been quite busy at the Chan/Tomaszewski household in terms of guests. We had the privilege of hosting one of our best friends here in China, Meredith, during her last few weeks in China. We had a lot of fun with our extra roommate, and even though she's only been gone a few days, we miss her already!



She's now making her way back west to start her new life in NYC, and is taking the long route home and stopping in India, Dubai, Turkey, and Croatia.

Earlier in the month, we were also happy to meet up with our China friends, Ting (Rachel) and Stacey. Ting is currently going to school and working in Manchester. and continues to be baffled by the fact that people pay to get tan, since whitened, pale skin is so envied in the East. She is also living with a group of Muslim guys, and had plenty of entertaining cross-cultural stories to share. She has a new appreciation for the utter confusion Zach and I felt when first arriving in China, and we had a good laugh about being the 'clueless foreigners' and discussed how humbling and challenging living abroad can be, regardless of where you're from.

And we finally had our first non-family, repeat guest, Superstar Deb Heydel! Deb is a Georgetown friend, and made the trip to visit us in June, 2006. She was back in Asia this month for a meeting in Japan, and was sweet enough to skip over to Shanghai for a few days to catch up with us. We had a great time reminiscing about DC days, ahh grad school....

We're guest-free for October (as far as we know), but look forward to more visitors in November!

A Day in the Life of Zach

A quick "day in the life" entry. Here I am heading out the subway escalator in the morning. It takes me about 30-40 minutes door to door in the morning. Not bad, I just had to get used to the crush of bodies on the subway. And honestly, I have noticed it getting more crowded over the last year. It's been like literally watching China grow.

Speaking of which, the most visible sign of growth has been the new construction of high rise buildings going on. Here is where I emerge from the subway, and straight in front of me is the ongoing construction of the World Financial Centre, or WFC building. To the right is an elementary school. I was just walking by today and realized the entire school had been razed to the ground. Literally I think they did it over the weekend or something.

Walking to the Credit Suisse office every morning, I pass the Jin Mao Building, which was the highest office building in Shanghai. Right next to it is a construction site for the World Financial Centre, which will be about 60 feet taller, and the highest building in the world. At least for a month or so. I think Dubai is building a tower right now as well that will be even taller. WFC, as it is known, is on the right and looks like a giant bottle opener. The opening at the top used to be designed as a circle, but the developer is a Japanese firm called Mori, and so the circle was supposed to symbolize the sun from the Japanese flag, and that caused a huge political uproar. So Mori was forced to change the design to a more square, bottle opener looking top.

This is the view of WFC on my way to work. This was back in about May. You can see Jin Mao to the right of it, which was still taller at the time. Pretty much all hours of the day and night you can see welding torches sparkling on the upper floors. It is absolutely amazing to think that this entire structure was built during our time in China. I think none of it was there when I first started work in Feb 2006.

Here's a shot of the WFC today. It has been "topped out" at this point, which means the structure is complete. Now all that remains is to finish the glass wall exterior, and all the interior stuff. It should be done around June of next year I think. We are hoping to move our office there, but they are asking about 5 times the rent we are paying now. Then again, our current office is a run down old circa 1996 building, which is ancient by Shanghai standards!

Here is my current office building, the Shanghai Stock Exchange, where every day people stand around the big stock index board and watch their fortunes rise. I think the index rose 130% last year and is up about 98% this year. Unfortunately you have to be a Chinese citizen to invest :(

This is the lobby of the building. Every time a new company lists on the stock exchange (about once a week it seems), the lobby fills up with celebratory flowers and signs and there are big signing ceremonies, balloons and such.

And here is my humble, Class B office. Our space is getting a bit tight, so they took the corner office and tore it down, replacing it with smaller desks that hold another 5 people!

Oh, and the bathrooms reek of cigarette smoke. Ever since they banned smoking in the hallways (God forbid I know), the boys have reverted to their high school ways and created an opaque, nicotine fog in the bathroom, as if the pollution outside our office wasn't bad enough!

And here is my cubicle. The cubicle walls and even my chair are the exact same color, brand and size as my cube in New York from 10 YEARS AGO. I don't know what was creepier, seeing the same replica office furniture as New York but in China, or realizing that I started working ten years ago... which, by the way, my summer intern asked me the other day what kind of music I listened to, whether it was "stuff from my era" or not. "Era?!?" I screamed. Then I made him run laps around the building in the 95 degree sticky heat for the rest of the afternoon in his bare feet. At least in my head.

And here is Fanny. No that is not her real name, she has a Chinese name. Ok, yes, she did choose Fanny as her English name... Fanny, in this picture, is about 7 months pregnant I think. Notice she is wearing her navy blue pregnancy smock. It is a very trendy and popular accessory for pregnant ladies to keep the pregnancy cover-up on every day during the pregnancy. Can you guess why? It is because it protects the baby from all the dangerous electromagnetic waves, invisible, but flying around recklessly through the atmosphere. You know, cell phones, Xerox machines, computers, you name it. At first I thought it must be a lead jacket then, but no, it feels just like cotton. But it is "special" fabric they tell me. It seems to be one of those crazy things that everyone just started doing and so you better do it too, just in case, you know.

Anyway, that is a quick day in the life of Zach and Credit Suisse!

We've Come A Long Way Baby!

September 2nd marked our two year anniversary in China. To recap, over the past two years we:

- have gotten used to seeing people in the street who are wearing pj's at 3PM, spitting pretty much everywhere (including right in front of us), and parents cradling their children over plastic shopping bags and encouraging them to "take care of their business".

- realized that Chinese traffic laws actually make sense. Bigger is better: trucks before cars before motorcycles before bikes. Pedestrians, of course, rank last, and always have to make way.

- made it through hundreds and hundreds of DVD's of old movies, new movies, bad movies, and all manner of television series.

- started out at internships making $2-3/hr and then made like the Jeffersons and "moved it on up", not exactly to the East side, but we managed to get real jobs with companies that didn't consider using Google as "consulting". Oh, and we now have air conditioning and heating that actually works!

-wrote 154 blog entries.

- visited 9 different countries and territories (China, Japan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, plus Hong Kong and Macau).

-ate many strange foods: animal parts ranging from pig ear to stomach, intestine, duck neck, "smelly" tofu (why anyone would eat a food with a name like that we have no idea), and durian, possibly one of the worst smelling and tasting fruits of all time, to the point where it is restricted from being eaten in many public places.

-had 34 different visitors.

-undergone 1 major surgery performed by a local Chinese doctor.

- spent many more hours at the "Fabmo", or fabric market, than we care to remember, ordering over 16 suits, countless shirts, costumes, jackets, pashminas and a mountain of silk products. And of course we may have supplemented our wardrobes with a few knockoff brand name items here and there. Zach in particular couldn't resist the $65 Armani suits!

- had our bodies pounded and massaged for somewhere in the range of 150 hours.

-seen more Broadway musicals in Shanghai than Zach saw during his 5 years living in NYC.

It's been a wild ride, and we've enjoyed every minute of it. We hope you've enjoyed reading about all of our adventures, and we look forward to recording plenty more as we enter our third year in the 'Middle Kingdom'.

Thanks to all of you for reading!!!