Welcoming The New Year with Hats and Rats

It's that time again, Chinese New Year. Leaving the year of the Pig and entering the year of the Rat means it's Company Annual Party time! During the previous 2 annual company parties, I've been made to do embarrassing things, like sing impromptu accapella in front of hundreds of employees or participate in games that I don't quite understand but that the Chinese seem to find hilarious. This year was no different, as our HR team made each department do some kind of performance. My marketing team (above) chose to reinact a joke onstage. The joke seemed to be on me, as I was forced to dress up as a traditional bachelor and had the most mandarin lines of the entire group.

Initially, the theme was going to be 'Roll Into the New Year' and everyone was to 'roll' into the ballroom. I'm not quite sure who came up with that idea, but it was fortunately changed to 'Hats'. I'm wearing a parrot on my head to go along with our skit, and the engineering guy next to me was creative enough to make a Rat Hat out of paper maiche, while Grace our HR director, channeled 'Pirates of the Carribean'.

One of the most entertaining things I've noticed in China is how much people love to sing. They sing all the time, walking down the street, at their desks, in the bathroom, pretty much anywhere's fair game. The kicker is they don't care if it sounds good or not. According to one of the girls on my team, she said singing makes people happy, so they love to do it even if they have terrible voices. As I mentioned before, performances were required from each department, and there was A LOT of singing. While some voices were great, a lot of them resembled bad American Idol auditions.
Dancing was also popular, and departments practiced for months with professional instructors. HR did a beautiful waltz.....

And some groups combine the singing and dancing. In order to fully focus on both, they actually tape their vocal part before the performance, and then play their voices over the speaker system so they lip synch to themselves while they dance. the funny thing is, a lot of them don't even bother to do the lipsynching part, but just dance along to their pre-recorded voices without moving their mouths.
The HR team took the performance seriously and spent a lot of time and money on their costumes....

They even taped on their shoes!
More hats....

All in all, it was another great annual party. Now Zach and I are off to Vietnam to really celebrate the Year of the Rat! Happy Chinese New Year! Xin Nian Kuai Le!

Who Is Al Gore Kidding?

Global warming took a vacation here in China, as snow blanketed the country in amounts unseen in recent years. This is the most snow Tiff and I have seen since we’ve been here. Shanghai usually never gets any snow, or if it does, it’s a few of those wet flakes that melt upon ground impact. But this week the mercury dropped, and we’ve actually gotten a slight accumulation of the white stuff, which has had mixed reactions from the locals.
On the one hand we’ve seen crowds of delighted children dancing around in the falling snow. Trying to form snowballs as it melts into mush in their hands and throwing goopy handfuls of snow slushee has not diminished their enthusiasm. Amateur photographers emerged from around the city to capture this rare event from all angles. And generally curious pedestrians bundled up and braved the elements to wander the city transformed into a grey/brownish/white winter wonderland. Umbrella sellers enjoyed record profits as couples huddled under cheap Burberry knockoff umbrellas found that sudden gusts easily snapped their snow shields and forced them to shell out another $2.50 for a replacement Gucci-branded parasol. For others, however, the snow can’t disappear fast enough. Armies of public workers received the call to duty to sweep away the snow, a task worthy of Sisyphus as each completed sweeping of a block was rewarded with a return trip to sweep away the equally messy snow pile that built up in the interim. The everyday bike peddlers and outdoor laborers were granted no respite and performed the same grueling work under colder, markedly worse conditions. And street intersections were manned by squads of traffic police, tasked with the thankless job of directing the unruly demolition derby of Shanghai drivers. I watched one particularly harried policeman (at a four way intersection that had traffic flying in eight different directions) alternately hop around to keep warm and jump aside to avoid getting run over, all the while attempting to establish some order of traffic flow. My instinct was to give him a tip, at least enough to get a mug of hot cocoa, but from the warm cocoon of our heated van, I couldn’t bear to open the door and expose myself to the cruel cold. So instead we drove on, and as I looked back through the rear window, I said a silent prayer to the weather and traffic gods instead, to keep watch over him.
Hopefully this cold front will move on soon, and in any event we leave Friday for Chinese New Year’s holiday, which we will be spending in tropical Vietnam!

Welcome to the Jungle

We got fun and games...

On the island of Bali, where Tiff and I retreated into the lush quiet of the tropical forest for some R&R following our one week, whirlwind U.S. Christmas tour, we found nothing so dramatic as a GNR concert. Instead, we found maybe our favorite hotel in Asia.

While trying to sort out the disorientation from crossing back from US to Asia time zones on New Year's Eve, we toasted the New Year on a flight from Shanghai to Bali, and arrived at Nusa Dua, which is home to Bali's luxury resorts and beaches. The first few days were a relaxing blur of falling dead asleep at 3pm, waking up starving at 5am, and generally just enjoying our task of doing nothing but readjusting in a beautiful environment.

After that, we headed deeper inland to Ubud, where much of the historic culture of Indonesia is still maintained, and less tainted by the stink of commercialization for the sake of foreigners like us. Which is not to say that it is completely untouched, for that would have meant that we would potentially have slept in huts among the rice paddies with the locals. And while Tiff may have found that adventurous, the thought of accommodation sans hot water, fresh sheets and room service is too horrific for me to contemplate ;)

Ubud turned out to be incredibly lush and green, with winding roads taking us into dense, leafy forests, which then gave way to vast open fields of flooded rice paddies packed with sprouting green stalks and then back into more forest. All along the way we spotted a colorful array of tropical flowers and plants streaked across the green backdrop. Enveloped in a blanket of warm, humid air, we also ran for cover with everyone else at least five times a day, when sheets of rain came falling out of nowhere to water the jungle.

Ubud is predominantly Hindu, although a modified "Balinese" Hindu is what we were told, meaning that beef was still on the menu. But they did make a traditional offering twice a day to the various gods, to both good gods for luck and blessing, and bad gods for appeasement and mercy.

The population in Ubud was divided into very small villages. In a brief tour driving through the countryside, we probably passed 30-40 different villages, each of which may have comprised a clump of only 10-20 families. But each village had at least two different temples, for different gods. And in front of each temple, and in front of each home, we saw the little offering dishes, usually made out of leaves and containing some rice, and a combination that seemed to comprise whatever was in the house, which ranged from flowers, to crackers, cookies and incense sticks, to cigarettes. We were told that offerings didn't have to be big (and at two times a day who can afford it?!) and it was more the thought that counted.

Also, one's responsibility ended as soon as the offering was put down. This became apparent when we watched the large number of dogs roaming around, sniffing at each offering and snacking on them at their leisure. Here you can see me getting stared down by a furry local over a collection of offerings in the doorway.

Our hotel in Ubud was an unbelievable blend of subtle comfort and Balinese culture. Each of the villas were hidden from the naked eye among the natural blend of trees, flowers and stone carvings. You can see the thatched roofs of the villas below emeshed in the trees.It felt a bit like staying in one of the temples from Tomb Raider. We stayed in a villa built into the upper part of a hill, with a large outdoor balcony that enjoyed a beautiful view across the valley. With our stack of gossip and fashion magazines from the US, we plopped ourselves on the balcony couches and alternated between reading and napping. It was the perfect antidote to jet lag!