Invisible Orange: Shanghaied 2010--08--30

Yesterday our flights weren’t supposed to leave until later in the day so we essentially had a “free day.” Mine began by having to run all over the hotel trying to find out where my pre-paid breakfast was at. The hotel had 3 restaurants, and the lady at reception kept getting me mixed up with this tour group from Poland who had ordered their breakfast at the Western-style restaurant. Our group, of course, had ordered Chinese breakfast. Things got sorted out almost an hour later and I happily enjoyed my meal.

I got bored hanging around the hotel so I decided to go ahead and check out, storing my luggage with the hotel staff. Then I went for a morning walk around Guilin. I found yet another equivalent of the Dollar Store: The 2 yuan store:

I also found some signs with helpful information. If you’re ever in Mainland China and you have an emergency, call this number: 110. It’s 999 in Hong Kong.

This little discovery might amuse some folks. Can you say “Hallo hallo, copy brand?”

Here are some photos from my stroll down Main Street:

Around lunchtime I was pretty hungry and, realizing that I still hadn’t tried one of Guilin’s local specialties, I decided to stop by a noodle shop and order rice noodle with horse meat in spicy soup:

The horse meat was tough, but pretty good. It tasted like really well-done steak. Of course, my noodles had about 2 small bites worth of meat. That’s OK, though, because they loaded me up on the good stuff like green onions, Chinese cabbage, and tomatoes. Oh, and the spicy soup had some serious spice to it…very tasty. My meal cost a grand total of 5 yuan—and I ordered the expensive noodles. That’s well under US $1.

After horsing around at lunch (sorry, I can’t resist a bad pun), I resumed my exploration of Guilin:

I came back to the hotel lobby around 2:00pm because I’d run out of things to do. We weren’t supposed to take the tour bus to the airport until 3:40pm, but it seemed like everyone else had the same idea I did. For the next hour and a half or so we just sat around, mostly talking about politics. I find it amazing that almost everyone who studies business starts off (like the majority of college students) as a democrat, but turns republican within just a year or 2. I started off republican, as many of you are well-aware, but now almost everyone in IBCE is either republican or highly anti-democrat. I love business.

Anyway, at 3:40pm we left for the airport. It took an hour to get there, and it was the saddest, smallest little airport I’ve ever seen. The Guilin airport made Columbia’s look like JFK. So we got there a little before 5:00pm and the first flight left at 6:40pm. Unfortunately, I wasn’t on the first flight. I was on the second and last flight along with 7 other poor souls. Our plane wasn’t scheduled to leave until 9:40pm. We waited until 7:00pm, checked our bags, and then went through all the necessary metal detectors and what not. Afterwards, we ate an overpriced dinner (airport prices seem to be atrocious all over the world), but to be fair, it still came out to well under US $10. This is China, though, so usually you’d pay practically nothing. The waiting itself was awful because I had already finished my book and it was way too loud to listen to music. I just sat there watching some funny kids chase each other around for a couple hours. What’s worse is that our flight got delayed an hour. We finally took off at almost 11:00pm, reaching Shanghai Pudong Airport (there are 2 Shanghai airports) at around 1:15am. We got our luggage and got out of the building by around 1:30am, catching a taxi, and trying to cram 4 people plus luggage into one car. I ended up sitting in an extremely uncomfortable position with my luggage halfway underneath me, but a Chinese police officer who was checking all the taxis made me move a little until he was certain I was safe. I was even more uncomfortable in that position, but I suppose you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

I had written the hotel name, address, and phone number on a sheet of paper in both English and Chinese, which I gave to the taxi driver. We rode for about an hour before reaching Xikang Street in the Jing’An District of Shanghai. By the time we checked in and I took a quick shower, it was already around 3:30am. That bed felt so good, and it felt so bad getting out of it at 6:30am this morning! What’s worse is that, even though those of us who got in super late the night before made it to the meeting point on time, some of the folks with no good excuse made us all late. I literally could have slept another hour, which means a lot when you’ve had so few.

We all piled onto the bus, though, and travelled to the Shanghai branch of Want Want Group, the world’s largest producer of rice crackers. Want Want is really huge all over China and other Southeast Asian countries. They also produce milk-based drinks, crackers for babies and toddlers, candy, ball cakes, and all different kinds of snacks (my favorites are the crispy fried green peas). When we arrived, we got greeted with this sight:

You could almost see the professors on the trip rolling their eyes. We are not GLOBE. We are IBCE. I repeat: GLOBE and IBCE are not the same program. GLOBE is also an International Business program, but it involves UNC-Chapel Hill, a university in Copenhagen and CUHK. It’s also not as vigorous as our program. Still, we didn’t say anything about it (more like we were forbidden to say anything). Some of the staff showed us to a conference room where we saw the financial statistics for the company, some of the marketing data, etc. That was followed by a Q&A session which, thankfully, never had long periods of awkward silence. Plenty of questions were asked and people (including me) took several notes. They gave us some free samples of the products, but I only took a little packet of the green peas because I wasn’t really hungry.

Here’s the screen before the beginning of the presentation:

This one’s a scene from the product show-room. The plastic figure is the company mascot. He occasionally blurts out “Wang wang!” which is the Chinese name of the company. Behind him are the crackers for babies and toddlers which, right now, are the only Want Want products being tested out in the USA.

When we finished up at Want Want Group, we came back to the hotel so people could change clothes and so the CUHK kids could register online for classes. Margaret didn’t have a laptop so I let her use mine to register for classes. We ate a Chinese lunch, and then took the tour bus to Yuyuan Market. If I had just gotten off the plane from the US for the first time, I would have thought this place was fantastic. However, after living in Hong Kong for about 3 months and having travelled to more rural places in China, all I could see at the Yuyuan Market was a huge tourist trap rip-off. There were Starbucks and McDonalds as far as the eye could see, as well as way overpriced factory-made cheapo “handicrafts” for sale everywhere. I’ve gotten way higher quality stuff for much less in other markets—even in Hong Kong (which is supposedly a lot more expensive than Mainland China). Sometimes I miss my rose-tinted glasses, but then I think about how full my wallet stays. It’s definitely better to be enlightened.

Absolute worst thing about this “market:” no bargaining! According to my book, any market where you can’t bargain isn’t really a market. It’s a tourist trap! You can even bargain at the stores in the mall (although you’d better be a little less ferocious). I really have no use for a place like that. The only thing this Yuyuan Market had going for it was the scenery:

We did, however, find Haibao, who is the mascot for the Shanghai World Expo. I think Mike put it best when he said Haibao “looked like a squirt of toothpaste.” I think he’s kind of cute, but it seems that, right now, there are more picture of Haibao in China than there are of Mao Zedong.

More pictures of the “Hallo Hallo Copy Market!”

Watching some chefs make the local Shanghai specialty: xiaolongbao. They look like dumplings, but they aren’t. They’re actually classified as buns because of the kind of dough used to make the wrapping. In English, people just call them “soup dumplings.”