December 17, 2017

We've been helping coach four contestants for a regional English speech competition. This week began with us attending it.  40 participants from universities around the city were allowed in the event; it's the 23rd annual competition and leads to a national competition next spring.  During the morning, each student gave an impromptu speech from a topic selected by the judges.  The top 14 made it to the afternoon event, where they gave 3-minute prepared speeches and answered two questions from the judges.  One of our Tongji students made it into the final 4 and will go to the national event!!

Our four contestants, along with two teachers from the department.

The school where the event was held used to be the residence and gardens of the mayor of Shanghai, where he reportedly played chess with Chiang Kai-shek.

At the garden chess board, which is very hard to see, even in person,
as the chess board carved into the top of this concrete table.

Kathy and Kristina got our apartment decorated for Christmas! 15 years of China teachers means an abundance of things left behind from other teachers, so we had plenty of trimmings for the tree John bought from Walmart. After he bought it, we found two smaller trees hidden in the closet as well. So we had three trees.

While Kristina was here, the Roses and Ansteads made a quick trip to Hangzhou, about an hour (fast!) train ride from Shanghai. Kristina's roommate from Duke lives there. This lovely historic city, built around West Lake, hosts a show each night on the lake - music, lights, and dancing (in the water!), designed by the man who did the opening show for the Beijing Olympics. It was cold, but a wonderful show!

Another high-speed train ride.  About the same speed (308/KPH)
as the magnetic one, but this was isn't magnetic - still a smooth ride.

A great tree in the Hangzhou Wyndham Hotel

Decorated entirely with Santas in various dress.  Our brother-in-law,
Dan Reeder, would have loved it.  He was a "helper Santa" for many,
many years and brought joy to so many children at this time of year!

The customer service at the Wyndham was the best we've experienced anywhere, hands down!  There was an intern from Italy on duty the night we arrived.  She greeted us, gave us directions to the lake show, greeted us again on our return, talked to us about the area, took photos of our group, made sure our stay was good, and let us know Leonardo would be on duty in the morning to assist us.

And he was.  And just as helpful.  Leonardo arranged for late checkout, a car to take us to the places we wanted to visit, then on a tour of the hotel, including the roof (where they have a garden and grow some of the foods used in the restaurant) to see the view of the city from there.

Dancing in the water in December.  Glad we don't have THAT job!

And amazing effects, including a giant fan rising from the lake!

Including a floating grand piano!

The next day, we went to a park with hundreds of Buddhist grotto carvings, a Buddhist temple, and a pagoda before heading back to the train station to go home.

We found beautiful leaf colors and contrasts.

John's favorite - a fat, happy Buddha

Kristina found a vine seat.

And we climbed 5 floors of a pagoda (using the inside stairway).

Back in Shanghai, we went to a beautiful garden called Yuyuan.

Around the garden is a market area where there's a very popular dumpling filled with crab soup.  You drink it using a straw and then eat the dumpling.

The line to buy dumplings - on a weekday -
Saturdays are much worse!

Note the picture with a straw in
the top of the dumpling.

Later, we wend to dinner.  Sometimes it amazes us how small Shanghai seems. Next to us at dinner was a father and his two sons on vacation from Idaho - wearing "Fredette" jerseys in support of the famous player from BYU.  They were on their way to see him at a Shanghai Sharks basketball game. The next day we ran into the same people in a mall in a different part of Shanghai!

The three of us with the Shanghai Tower
in the background.  A few years ago, it was
the tallest building in the world, but has
been outdone in the last few years.

We ate dessert that night in a restaurant on the 91st floor of the
Jinmao building -- looking over buildings that are 1500 feet tall!

We also went to the Shanghai Circus:

Five people balancing on a moving bicycle.

Balancing a pot on his head

And more balancing!

In the meantime, we asked Kristina to be a guest lecturer in our Business English classes. She gave a presentation about virtual team structures and communication and answered questions about everything from her company's pregnancy leave policy to how to choose what kind of company to work for.

Tired, yet? Next we went to Beijing for the weekend on another bullet train, this time reaching 347/kph (215/mph). 750 smooth miles with only a couple of stops in 4.5 hours. We stayed in a "courtyard hotel"-not to be confused with a Marriott Courtyard-where the rooms are built around little courtyards in a style known as siheyuan.

It was a quaint little place. The room included a canopy bed and a more traditional bench/bed, with a western style restroom. The breakfast had a nice mix of foods like toast, cereal, scrambled eggs with shrimp or spinach, stir-fried vegetables, porridge, and drinkable yogurt (the yogurts in this country are great).

The canopy bed.

The traditional bench bed.  Our
room also came supplied with
pajamas.

The motel was right outside the Forbidden City (officially known as the Palace Museum) in a section of Beijing with "hutongs" or alleys.  Our place was about 1/4 mile down a dark, narrow alley  - a place one would never go in a large US city but felt safe in Beijing.

This is the front of our motel.

Down our narrow alley. Very dark at night.

We loved our stay and highly recommend the place, which was recommended to us by a former BYU China teacher.  You just need to go prepared for the experience of the location.

While in Beijing, we visited the LDS Church ex-pat branch there - where the meeting was a beautiful Christmas theme with a wonderful choir.  We also visited The Great Wall, the Palace Museum, the Ming Tombs, the Temple of Heaven, the Pearl Market, and the Great Pandas at the Beijing Zoo.

And we took the slide back down.  Fun, but VERY cold.

More to come next week, including Giant Pandas and a new grandbaby!

December 10, 2017

It's been an exciting week!

On Sunday, December 10, we went to church as usual.  1.5 hours later, we were meeting with the District President and I was called as the Elders' Quorum President, responsible for the teaching, spiritual, and temporal needs of the men in our Branch - and really all members in our Branch.  My first assignment came a couple of days later, when a sister needed help - she is moving (back to America).  Seems like things are the same everywhere in the world!

Then, Kristina came to visit us!  She had just spent 10 days in India attending a friend's wedding and now came to spend a couple of weeks with us.

After meeting her at the airport, we took her back to our apartment via
the Maglev - magnetic levitation train, one of only a handful in operation
in the world. It "floats" over the rails, making it a very smooth ride.

During rush hours, the train travels at up to 431/KPH.  As late as
we were riding, top speed was 301/KPH or 187/MPH

We found Christmas in Shanghai!  We visited a few "Christmas markets" and found an area of town that specializes in floral supplies and arrangements.  It was so fun to see so much Christmas, since that is MUCH less prevalent here, especially in our neighborhood, where there are not many foreigners.

The entrance to a housing area that has lots of expats.

Oh, and Texas BBQ?  We didn't try it, but seeing
something call "Bubba's" was a surprise

A whole store full of orchids!

Lots of wreaths

And Christmas tees...

And more trees!  You do NOT see these in stores.

We were getting hungry after so much walking and shopping, so we ducked into a restaurant that looked good.  It was a hot pot place - with everything in Chinese.  This is always a good sign (the food seems better and cheaper than when they cater to foreigners), but creates challenges.  Especially with a new experience.  John went to a table where a woman and young teenage daughter were ordering and asked for help.  The woman assigned her daughter to come help us; she spoke some English and pointed to things she liked.  We selected several of what we hoped were good choices of meat and vegetables to put in our pot (you place check marks on the menu for the things you want).  But then the waitress showed the daughter our order, discussed it with her, and the daughter came back and said "I think you ordered very too little." So we placed some more check marks on things.  They brought our food - a selection of two kinds of beef, several vegetables, etc.  You cook your own food in the boiling broth and then eat it with a concoction of sauces you can select from.  John created a killer sauce (in a good way) for his.  A Chinese man dining with his wife came over partway through his meal to make sure we put all our bamboo sprouts in the broth at once and chastised us when we tried to take them out too  soon.  Mostly he sat at his table and watched and laughed.  He didn't realize when he went out to dinner that it would include free entertainment.

Our hot pot dinner group - Ansteads and Roses

Our group with our teenage helper.  She was such a delight. She made
sure we knew our dinner included "free ice cream" and then came at the end
 to say  "I have to go now. Is there anything else you need?"

The next day we headed for the "meat market" at People's Square - a park in the middle of Shanghai.  We like to think they mean "meet market"--it's where grandparents go to do matchmaking of their unmarried grandchildren.  We didn't really know what to expect. - but it wasn't this  What we found were hundreds of umbrellas!  Each with an advertisement of the qualities of a young, unmarried Chinese person - mostly male, mostly about 30.

It's a busy place!

With open umbrellas lining both sides of the path

Each with one or more descriptions of an unmarried person,
along with birthday, height, weight, profession, and other
attributes, but rarely a picture.  Not sure if the phone number
is the person or the grandparent...

And a tree in the garden still blooming in December -
although it had lost most of its leaves.

We also went to the Shanghai Museum, which is free and has amazing art.

The museum and surrounding architecture - and gardens.

Outside the museum is a water show synchronized to music -
a real hit with the kids.

We see lots of toy vending machines - the ones where you pay to operate the crane with a hope that you can capture a prize - and usually don't.  But one day we saw a subway stop LINED with these!

Lots of vending machines with toys

Which seem to be rather popular!

And another vending machine, which we really didn't understand, but looks interesting:

We ended our week on Saturday at church, for "One Night in Bethlehem," where we got to tour a series of rooms decorated like Bethlehem in the time of Christ's birth, leading up to a live nativity.  Beautiful decorations, great costumes, and lovely music.  What a wonderful way to bring a focus on Christ into Christmas, particularly in a land where it is rare to find.  When we do happen upon any celebration of Christmas, it certainly isn't focused on Jesus Christ.  Coming to this event was truly a blessing to us to help us enjoy the spirit of the season!

December 3, 2017

We’ve discovered that some things end up on our bucket list that we never saw coming. Take freshwater Shanghai hairy crabs, (also called Chinese mitten crabs) for instance. We’ve seen bins and aquariums full of these flat crabs, usually sold with their furry legs tied up so they won’t crawl away, we assume, and we’ve wondered how people cook them.

There are small stores that sell only Mitten Crabs - three walls of this
shop are lined with tanks full of live crabs. Not sure what they do the other
months of the year when crabs are not in season.

Then we found a restaurant that seems to specialize in them. So we became very curious…and Shanghai hairy crabs appeared on our bucket list. One day we read in alarm that crab season is about over! So we went to the restaurant, pulled out our Google translate so we could attempt to read what the choices on the menu were, and ordered four: two males and two females. At least we’re pretty sure that’s what we ordered.

The crabs arrived after the salad and rice (served in a pineapple)
we ordered had been eaten.

You can't see their hairy mittens, but the pincers have a black "fur"
on them that really does look like mittens.

And they brought a couple of plates
of a cracker that looks like "Bugles"
but are much better! Crispier, less
salty, and slightly spicy.

Luckily, we had watched a couple of YouTube videos before we went to the restaurant, or we would have had no clue how to get into the little things. We certainly weren’t as graceful as the people in the videos (who actually had scissors to cut the little legs apart while we had butter knives), but we managed to get the bodies open, scrape out the gills, and eat away at the roe. Roe, it seems, can stain your face. Luckily the restaurant provided us with gloves, but gloves only protect so much. It was a good thing they seated us in a corner where no one else could see our contortions in trying to get the meat out.

The crabs have mittens - and Kathy has gloves! Which are needed, by the way,
although they don't protect from sharp pokes!

Our assessment? They were tasty but not really worth the effort (especially the legs). But we got to check the experience off our bucket list! Good thing we tried them here because it’s against the law to import, transport, or possess a live one in the United States; they’re an invasive species.

This is the meat John got in total from
all eight legs of one crab.  Fork shown
for perspective - roughly a fork full.
Oh, and we got forks and chopsticks!

Meanwhile, the Christmas season is here, but you have to look for it. We’ve been in two touristy areas where a vendor had one tinny Christmas song playing over and over and over until we could hardly wait to leave, and we’ve seen a few Christmas decorations and trees in some of the more international areas,

Roses posing in front of a tree of artificial roses in the Ritz Carlton

but our little neighborhood shows no signs of the season. Recently, though, we’ve become aware of several Christmas “markets.” We visited one called Christkindlmarkt—it’s Shanghai’s longest-running annual Christmas market, set in an area by a large German restaurant. It had 70 different vendors selling a large variety of things from nutcrackers to snow globes built in lanterns to Yak hair sweaters to bratwurst. The hot chocolate--minus the rum--was like drinking melted chocolate. It was interesting to be in an area where Chinese people were a minority, and kind of strange hear so many people speaking English (although most with a German accent). It felt good to hear “Oh, Holy Night” over the loudspeaker and join people who are all getting ready to celebrate Christ’s birth.

Sparkling lights and artificial turf created a cozy alley.

The night was lovely, so it was okay that we had a long walk to the subway. Lights and architecture along the way were wonderful. We found ourselves swimming upstream, though, the closer we got to the subway. We couldn't figure out where all the people were headed with small children until we found out that Disney On Ice was in town.

The multi-colored lighting on buildings is always so fascinating here.

And the bridges - this one changes color.

The Mercedes-Benz Arena, like many buildings
in the area, has fascinating architecture.

A little princess headed to Disney on Ice.