Elephants, Tigers and Lionel

It's easy to see where Zach got his interest in international travel. His parents, Lionel and Lorraine recently took a wildlife-filled trip through Asia. They spent a few days visiting us in the urban jungle of Shanghai...




Then won the hearts of the elephants by handing out watermelons and pumpkins at the Elephant Nature Park in Chiang Mai, Thailand......


And taught some tigers how to meditate in Bangkok, Thailand.


Lionel and Lorraine have learned what we've been finding all along, the idea of 'human handling' limits is not very prevalent when it comes to wild animals in Asia. While I'm sure organized animal rights groups would protest and throw fake blood on us if they saw what we've been doing (holding penguins, feeding monkeys, etc.), we've decided to take our chances. Who knows when we'll be able to get up close and personal with such incredible animals again!

One Night In Shanghai

All of Shanghai was abuzz last Thursday with the arrival of the Most Inexplicably Famous Person in America, Paris Hilton. Apparently in town for an MTV event, Paris shunned her family's own Shanghai Hilton for the newer, recently opened Grand Hyatt on the Bund.

















In any event, Tiffany and I were too busy with our own big party -- Thanksgiving at our house! We hosted my Credit Suisse colleagues as well as Tiff's Shanghai Centre co-workers, about 15 people in all, to celebrate and give thanks. Most of our guests were native Chinese and were excited to be celebrating their first Thanksgiving.

















One of Tiffany's coworkers brought her 5 year old daughter, Yao Yao, who provided much of the entertainment for the evening. The turkeys arrived in an insulated styrofoam carrying case, and little Yao Yao was curious and scared that when I opened the case, the turkey would fly out and start sqwuaking! You can see her cowering behind her mom in the picture. She soon learned it was a little too late for the poor turkeys. Yao Yao also discovered a love for corn. After polishing off her plate, we caught her later shoveling corn directly from the serving bowl on the food table into her mouth! Luckily everyone else had already served themselves corn.


Tiffany took the opportunity to work on her cooking skills and spent Wednesday and Thursday cooking up a feast. We found an American diner to order in the turkeys (we ordered two, 14-pound birds), sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes, but Tiffany whipped up homemade cranberry dressing, corn bread, herb vegetables, brown-sugar honey coated carrots and a honey-lime-ginger coated fruit salad. She also cleaned out some leftover foods from my cousin Josh and our friend Meredith, by preparing the corn, carmel yams, baked beans and a vegetable curry that we inherited from them.



We gave thanks for something that is rare in China, our kitchen oven. Not a common item in Chinese households, we are the only people from both our works to have an oven in their home! Amazing how the Chinese make do with steamers and a few stovetop burners. But we wanted to show them what they were missing.


Tiffany bought two large cans of pumpkin pie filling and found a recipe for homemade crust using olive oil. The recipe for the pie was somewhat generous, and she ended up baking eight pumpkin pies! She also baked a blueberry and peach crumble. My contribution was my world-famous homemade cookies (I am generously assuming that if people have eaten them in both the US and China that they are now "world famous" :) I baked an assortment using chocolate chips, oatmeal, dried cranberries and macadamia nuts.

I think it is safe to say that we have now left an American footprint on the waistlines of China!





Everyone had a great dinner - most of them were tasting these traditional Thanksgiving dishes for the first time. And we explained in the other Thanksgiving tradition, everyone had to take home leftovers. Some people we even convinced to take entire pies. All in all it was a huge success.

We'd like to wish all of our family, friends and blog readers a Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Bootylicious Kimchee

Actually there are two separate recent events combined into this one entry, our trip to Korea, and the night Beyonce came to Shanghai.

We spent a beautiful weekend in Seoul, Korea, wandering around the streets, visiting palaces, and finding non-Korean foods to eat. I actually had a business dinner one night and ate possibly the worst dish I've ever tasted. Even the Koreans admitted it was pretty horrible, but said it was one of those "acquired tastes". I noticed not even they were eating it, though! Basically it was a cold fish dish that smelled and tasted like ammonia, bitter and sour, like it had been left out to rot for a few weeks before serving. Anyway, all the Koreans had a good laugh watching my eyes tear up as I struggled not to throw up on myself.

Suffice to say, Tiff and I stuck to more pedestrian fare the rest of the time. Luckily, it turned out that Seoul did have great French and Italian food readily available. And even better for Tiffany, they had Dunkin' Donuts, where we binged like Homer Simpson.

It was a perfect fall weekend and we were able to walk around a nearby mountain to enjoy the changing colors of foliage. The air was crisp and clean, and the trails remarkably quiet. A very nice change of pace from Shanghai for sure!





We toured the last Korean palace grounds, which included this "secret garden" area where the royalty could retreat to for some peace and relaxation.




Here I am in front of the main palace receiving hall, still feeling slightly hung over from the post-Dunkin Donuts sugar crash.






Tiffany found a friend in one of the local guards!

A day after returning from Seoul, we saw Beyonce in her first Shanghai concert ever. I don't know what it is, but seeing concerts in Shanghai is remarkably hassle-free. I guess it's because we can take the subway there, the concerts are exactly two hours long, there are no opening acts and the shows always start and end right on time, but we've seen way more concerts than we normally do in the US. And it's fun to watch all the Chinese singing along to "Bootylicious"...

Hiking with the Masses

It's particularly common with Chinese companies to treat their employees to an annual outing. The outing is usually a 2-3 day vacation taken with colleagues (and sometimes their spouses) and paid for by the company. This past weekend, the two of us went with Zach's company to Huangshan to see the famous Yellow Mountain area, a popular tourist destination and a place we've been wanting to visit for a while.

There are a few truths to every Chinese outing. First, there must be a flag present. And that flag is always held by a tour guide that likes to talk. Loudly. And Constantly. On all of the annual outings we've attended (this is our 4th), we usually tend to be the only foreigners, so we can't understand the tour guide, and never really know what is going on or where we're supposed to be. Fortunately, our co-workers know this, and are kind enough to let us know what time we need to get up (always before 7am) and when we're eating.

We were fortunate to have clear, crisp autumn weather for the trip.













Unfortunately we had to share it with a huge percentage of the Chinese population. We had to wait over 2 hours for the cable car just to get up to the hiking trails.

















And once we got to the hiking trails (which are really just miles of cement staircases placed up and down the mountain), it didn't seem to get any better.

A picture of Tiffany waiting patiently on the steps to get to the top of the mountain.





















Who knew you could feel even more claustrophobic outside of Shanghai?














Gorgeous mountain scene, but note the small, ant-like line of people on the staircase to get up the mountain.













So much for enjoying some peace and quiet in the mountains. These people were vicious, elbows were constantly thrown and cigarette stops put a hamper in that fresh outdoor air we were hoping to experience. Not to mention, there was a crossover of tour guides with their megaphones each giving their own individual commentaries.












Tiffany really misses her less populated, smoke-free Colorado hikes.



















What a fantastic view. And gloriously highlighted by the yellow flag!











Alone at last!












The saying 'Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute' hasn't seem to hit China yet, so there were plenty of workers around to pick up litter and sweep the steps (in between crowds, of course).




























There are a few hotels at the top of the mountain, and the only way to get there is on foot. Supplies for the hotels and restaurants must be carried up by porters like this one. Things we saw porters carrying: budles of sheets and towels, crates of beer, construction material, a flat screen tv, even canisters of propane! Luggage must be carried long distances by guests, as the hotels are at least an hour hike from the top of the cable car. Of course, you can always pay someone to carry your bags. Fortunately, we packed light!








Zach enjoying the sunset.











Regardless of crowds, the views were gorgeous.










The 2 hotels at the top leave a lot to be desired. Mr.'If it's not 5-star, I'm not staying here' Zach almost had a heart attack when he saw the door open to our neighboring room and thought we may be sharing our room with strangers. Fortunately, we had a double, unfortunately, we still had to share it with the bugs...
































After a 7 hour day of non-stop stair climbing and crowds, we spent the 2nd day in Huangshan at a small village called Hongcun. The water town was the setting for part of the film 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'. The town was lovely, but we (and our sore calves) were more relieved that it was flat and stair-free.

All in all, the trip was another eye-opening China experience, and allowed us to check off another place on our 'Must-See' List!

Our Own Personal Typhoon-The Fallout

As mentioned in a previous entry, we had a bit of a flooding problem a few weeks ago. After 4 days of hotel living, we were able to get our electricity and water turned on and moved back into our apartment. The wooden floors were quite warped, but after repeatedly voicing how grateful we were to be renters and not owners of not only the apartment, but also all the furniture, we sorted through the mess and moved on.

While on vacation, we received an email from our landlord informing us that they had found 6cm. of water between the concrete foundation and the wooden floor leftover from the flood. They had taken the liberty of moving all of our furniture and personal belongings to the balconies and covered them with a tarp (note our things under the red tarp on the balcony-not the most settling news considering it's typhoon season) so they could rip up and replace the floor. They were nice enough to put us up in an apartment within our complex for the remaining 2 weeks after we returned from vacation, and we did manage to sneak into our apartment to grab some work clothes to supplement our vacation attire.

As you can see by the pictures, our place is a mess. The workers have moved in to the apartment, and we had to laugh when we saw them smoking like chimneys as they laid down the wooden slats, drilling them into the concrete. We can only hope that the noise is irritating Tiffany's nemesis next door... The workers are leaving a healthy dose of cigarette butts between the slats, something we're sure will be left there underneath the floor providing us with kind of a built in air freshening system. We look forward to moving back in to our apartment, and again, cannot count how many times we've said 'thank goodness we're just renters'!

More Japan Pictures

If the last blog entry wasn't enough for you, check out more pictures from our trip at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiffandzach/. Enjoy!

I Think I'm Turning Japanese

Here is what Tiffany and I discovered about Japan during our Golden Week Holiday to Osaka and Kyoto:

- Japanese like wooden houses for their temples (like this Buddhist temple from the town of Nara) and homes, even when they keep burning down. The Imperial Palace in Kyoto is actually not the original palace. It is, in fact, the place where the royal family used to go when the real palace had burned down and they were waiting for it to be rebuilt. That's right, the palace burned down so many times that they had to designate a special place to stay in the interim. Our tour guide attributed this to not only the wooden construction, but the fact that all the buildings were connected, so when one went up in flames, they all went up.

- There are a lot of deer in Nara, that are not afraid of humans. It was even safe for Tiffany to be around them. She did not get hurt for once!





- We stopped in Kobe for the famous Kobe beef. It was delicious, if a bit artery-clogging. Also, a lot of fire was used in the cooking, as you can see here, where it looks like one of the chef's heads is on fire. Don't worry, no Japanese chefs were harmed in the preparing of our meals.




- In Himeji there was this huge white castle that was built a very long time ago and managed not to burn down. Tiff and I climbed to the very top and there were lots of trap doors and hiding places for samurai in case the castle came under attack. It reminded me of that arcade game Kung Fu, where you had to keep advancing up levels. Or Game of Death, the Bruce Lee movie, where at the very top was the toughest opponent of all, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Tiffany thought the hiding places were excellent napping spots...


- Japanese have a very unique appetite, for items like these, melon Fanta soda and Roots, a cold coffee drink. Basically their appetite was about 180 degrees from Tiffany's. But she was a trooper and only ate at McDonald's twice and KFC once. I had sushi as much as possible and I can tell you for certain that sushi in Japan is AWESOME! Waaaay better than anything in the US. I really couldn't believe it and I have no idea why, but it is truly fantastic.


- There are cheap tourist attractions in any country. In Japan you could hire these runners to pull you around town. But it's so hilly that most of the time you'd be better off walking.






- It is true that Japanese people are VERY quirky dressers. All the weird Hello Kitty stereotypes about Japanese? True!









- There are all the bright, neon lit streets that you could want, packed with people at night.

- These two were perfectly dressed for a day of temple touring in last night's club wear.


- There are plenty of Mr. Miyagi-type old people who look very peaceful and happy, and spend their days painting, fishing and generally living relaxing lives. But if Cobra-kan ever comes looking for trouble... watch out!






- Tiffany peeking out at the Golden Pavilion temple in Kyoto.




- Cute traditional Gion neighborhood in Kyoto. We saw a few geisha shuffling through the streets.











- View from temple overlooking Kyoto.






- Homey little Japanese diner we found in Osaka's Minami district. A great combination of kitsch and noodles!














- A family of statues in a small shrine in Kyoto.










- Kyoto Station, a modern steel construction, 11 stories high, with train station, hotel, department store and tons of restaurants. Tiffany frequented the Mr. Donut daily to supplement her rice-only Japanese meals :o












- The Japanese LOVE gardens. And they are very skilled at creating them. We saw some of the most beautiful, lush gardens of incredibly intricate design. Can you find Tiffany in this picture?














- The gardens always featured carp, however, which eagerly gaped at our hands in hopes of some fish food, and scared the bejeezus out of Tiffany. I was hoping there might be mutant fish mounted with lasers, but there were not. They did seem ill-tempered, at least.








- The sky is beautiful in Japan. We had some rain the first few days and then it cleared up into the most amazing, non-China polluted skies we had seen in a very long time.









- Here is a very interesting modern building in Osaka. There are two long escalators that go to what they called the Hanging Garden, because it feels like at the top you are suspended in air.









- And at the top we found this interesting model that didn't have anything whatsoever to do with the modern building and its hanging garden. But it sure looked neat.













- "Okonomoyaki" a classic Japanese dish which I tried for the first time. Fair tasting, but not worth its stomach space in sushi, in my book.



















- We HEART Japan!