Shanghai Beginnings - Health & Safety

Our next day in Shanghai focused on our health and safety, literally! We were told that we needed a full body health check done at a hospital locally. We'd just gotten a premium health check done in India as part of our visa requirements for China. Surely, we didn't need another one so soon? Apparently, a clean bill of health from your homeland ( HIV test included) was not enough once you get into the country. They needed to see it for themselves. Jan took us to this hospital somewhere far far away from the city ( for all you Curious Cats, this is where it is: Shanghai Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine Bureau, 15 Jinbang Road, Shanghai, China) - we figured out why this location was best for what we had to get done. Once there, the personnel at the front desk spoke to us in English (yay!), at least...tried to! One look around revealed the eerie truth about the hospital - it was full of fellow foreigners, going from one room to the next - getting tested inside out! It was a like a quarantine center for all non Chinese..sorry, IS a quarantine center ( upon close inspection of their name!).! I wonder what happened when they found out that one of us foreigners got a unfavorable test result..given the remoteness of the location and the specific mix of people, I shudder to think of the consequences! Luckily, we were fit and fat...phew!

A brief snack later, our next stop was at the nearest police station. No, we hadn't committed any crime...yet( thank god!). They just wanted to make sure they got our faces right so they would recognize us when the time comes. Their excuse for our presence there, you need our OK for your residency permit - ya right! The interiors of the place could easily pass off as the lobby of a 3-4 star hotel. The only giveaway were the grumpy ( i mean, stern, err..sincere!) looking police folk sitting at the counter. We had absolutely no communication with them. Jan spoke on our behalf and we didn't dare smile or even look up at them directly. While waiting for our papers, I had a sit down with Jan and in my most cheery tone, briefed her about the previous day's grocery shopping disaster! She tried to be polite and smile, but I am sure she was laughing till she fell off the imaginary chair in her head. I asked and wrote down a list of words that would help us with any future shopping trips.( also the word for "police" and "help me" - since we were in the midst of cops anyway).

Hi/Hello - Ni hao

How are you? - Ni hao ma?

Bread - Mian Bao

Milk - Nio nai

Egg - Ji Dan ( chicken egg)

Police - Jingcha

Help me - Jiu Ming ( life or death) , Bang Bang Wo ( general help with stuff) 

Goodbye - Bye ( I was sincerely writing this down when I realized this is the same word in English!)

She helped me pronounce my very first Chinese words over and over, bless her heart, till I got close to the correct way of saying it. At the end of it, even the stern cops chuckled! We successfully got our permits, got out and on our way dear Jan got us mobile phone sim cards. She also helped us bargain ( meaning, she did all the bargaining..we just stood there and grinned!) at a roadside store for our international calling cards or as they call it, IP phone cards. Calling India from Shanghai was not cheap, we soon realized.

Operation ET phone home: 
1. Buy the calling card for whatever denomination you wish to spend.
2. Take a coin and scratch the shiny part at the back of the card. Initially, there was this air of about-to-win-the-lottery during the scratching process.
3. Key in the access code. This can take a while, since you will be punching in a LOT of numbers. I swear. 4. Talk to your family...and call your friends too, if you feel like splurging!

By the end of our stay, we realized we bought a lot of these bank-card-shaped-money-eaters! The hoarder in me made us save all of our cards and now they are somewhere, safely locked away! Will post a picture here as soon as I get my hands on our treasure!

We took a taxi back home. At least that's what we wanted to do after that long day of being probed! 

Taxi 1 - got in and attempted to tell him where we wanted to go. After many futile attempts, he just shook his head and we were forced to get out. 

Taxi 2 - we decided to change our strategy. Smiled at him first and quickly handed him Jan's business card. He nodded, handed it over and off we went. We looked at each other triumphantly! Once we reached the office, we asked the folks there to help us. They wrote down our address in Chinese and helped me write down the Pinyin version too, so I could literally read it out in somewhat sounding Chinese! 

Taxi 3 - we got in and just showed him our address, no energy left to talk it out anymore! House..home..here we come!

FAQ:
1. What on earth is Pinyin?
For those of us that know, please stop rolling your eyes. Yes, you and you and you! For the rest of us, Pinyin is a system where English letters of the alphabet are used to represent the pronunciation of Chinese characters. It is an official system and was developed and adopted in the 1950s apparently, and has been used since to help us, non Chinese speaking folk, to speak it with a fair amount of accuracy. This was needed, since Chinese characters( all 5000 of them!) use visual symbols to represent objects and words.
2. Did you make up the names of things, places and roads?
I solemnly swear I'm up to no good yet did not come up with any of the super duper names - Jinbang is really  the name of a road and fact is, their cops are called jingcha ( my tamilian friends would associate this with  manja coloru jingucha, paccha coloru jingucha).

Moonshine goes to China..Nihao!

Has it ever happened to you, that you talk about something and someone goes, " well, you should write about it"? After many such moments, I relented...So, here I am...to err.."tell" my story (*yawn* such a cliche!). Read on!

A and I lived in Bangalore for 5 years and would have continued to live there longer, at least that's what we thought. A suddenly came up with an alternative to driving for hours in Bangalore traffic, let's get out of here, he says! You wish, I thought...get out, indeed! Turns out, he did have a plan and when I heard it, at first I thought he might be joking! In all his random what's-out-there-in-the-market job searches, he found one in a start-up...all well and good,you know, that's what people did these days..but he found one in China..yes, CHINA! After much deliberation, the adventurers we were, we said yes to the job offer. Nov 2008 ~ Our home packed into 50 cartons, farewells bid to current employers and our friends, off we went! Our logic - we love Chinese food..sure, it will be fun!

Our journey started with us marveling at the new Bangalore international airport - definitely bigger than the old airport and a big step for us...of course, we were a little nervous! China here we come! After a brief stop over at the Hong Kong airport ( a cloudy view of the runways with some planes parked is all we got to see...sadly...yeah, that's life sometimes, but hey, our destination was yet to come!)...the Shanghai airport was superb! We had to walk and walk to get out...and said goodbye to beautiful stores on our way out! *sigh* Armed with some suitcases(2 cartons shipped to shanghai through a popular international courier co...more about what happens when they get to us!) and our curiosity, we charged ahead to meet our driver! There he was, among an ocean of Chinese faces, a plaque with A's name misspelt and the N written like it was traced from a mirror image!

We'd never thought of China as a "foreign" country and boy, were we stunned!! Once outside the airport and in our big van, we tried to make conversation with our driver companion and he kept nodding his head and smiling! Poor chap, we discovered, couldn't speak a word of English!!! Our first views of the city shocked us....all we saw on television were bicyclists and farmers (India is showcased to the outside world like this too, sadly but with the addition of snake charmers and elephants..grr!!)...but here they were ~ big buildings, wide roads, super cars..and to onlookers, we were just two children, looking outside the window, excitedly!

So, we finally reached A's office. We had to stop by to meet the office folks and get the HR person to show us to our apartment. They were all friendly folks at the office, all smiles and doing their best to welcome us (and, in English!). After our friendly stop at the workplace, Jan ( the face of HR) took us to our apartment. Man, jaw dropping was the only option when we saw the apartment. Huge community with tall buildings, Porsche and Rolls Royce driving away, beautiful gardens and all of this at the intersection of main roads - easy accessibility! We were on the 13th floor (yup..tell me about it!) and the buildings don't have floor numbers with the number 4 in them ( 4, 14, 24, etc) since the chinese word for 4 sounded similar to their word for death..hence considered unlucky. Amazing, when the whole world considers 13 to be unlucky, these guys had no issues with it, but what it added up to! (time for some Math, 1+3 = 4, whew, ok, i'm done!) Once in, we looked at each other wide eyed...what a house!! It was straight out of one of those magazines...superbly furnished ( thanks to our landlord - a pianist couple) with elegant furniture, wooden floors, centrally air conditioned! Just two apartments in a floor and with balconies that gave you views of both sides of the building and the adjoining roads...sigh! A thought struck both of us as soon as we stepped in - these Chinese were not only stylish, they were also particular about a clean home! Jan wore a pair of shoe covers over her shoes, to walk inside the house..pretty thoughtful..me like! I remember all the maintenance folks as well as the landlord and any other guests doing that too!They also had fresh pair of bedroom slip on footwear for both of us...thanks, guys! Those came in handy on cold days! Interestingly, hotels also had the slip ons (comfisoles, i'll call them!) placed next to the beds...bless them!

Jan had stocked our kitchen with some basics and gave us directions to the nearest grocery store. Shock waves passed through us when we got there...everything was written in chinese ( sadly,no eng subtitles LOL!). We were surrounded by lots of food stuff that we'd never seen before and that weird smell, what in the world was that?! Without looking around too much, we quickly turned to the nearest human and asked for bread,butter,milk,eggs..you know, the usual! He shook his head motioning a "no" and kept saying a word ( later, figured it was "shen ma" - pronounced shama with a questioning tone, meaning what?!). The guy huddled together with the other employees, laughing, talking and most importantly, pointing at us and shaking their head in disbelief, i think! Ok maybe the guys there didn't speak English all that well, so we wrote down what we wanted, more laughs and nods...hand signals? some more laughs and nods! We decided to check aisle by aisle and after three rounds, we finally found what we needed. On our rounds, we found fascinating sections in the store, dried meat and fish, funny looking mushroom like things ( fungus, we found out later - yes, they EAT fungus!), lots of instant noodles ( Maggi?! - nope, don't look so happy and hopeful - it tasted oily and ughhh!)  and both of us agreed on our favorite section - eggs - yup, you heard/read me right....a whole section just for eggs ~ duck, quail, goose, chicken ( white, brown, country) and even, wait for it, 1000 year old eggs! Yes, we didn't know which one was which...a fellow customer that knew some English decided to educate us! When he said 1000 year old, we wondered how they got hold of a prehistoric egg and why anyone would want to eat it...hmm, yes, there is no shame in admitting our ignorance! For all of you Curious Cats, here's what it looks and tastes like - consider yourself sufficiently warned!

After that shocking grocery store experience, we got back, ate a little and looked out of our 13th floor balcony. What a beautiful view! The Chinese are artsy and aesthetic folks that love to surround themselves with beauty, I mean, look at all their building tops, they had lovely lit structures and it seemed like Christmas already, sigh! Not once since then, did we see the stars in the sky, at least for as long as we were in Shanghai. For a first day, it was a mixture of emotions ~ excitement, delight, amusement, fear, shock and horror, to mention a few! We fell asleep wondering if we made the right decision coming here!