Gman's Adventure in Inner Mongolia

October Holiday and Fossils

The Chinese celebrate their "July 4th" in October with a week-long holiday starting, technically, on October 1st. I say technically because many take off before October 1 and spend a week traveling to visit family or just vacationing. Our office, for example, is closed Tuesday through Friday this week. Some of the big cities, like Shanghai, actually see a decrease in population during the week as migrant workers and other domestic expats return to their home provinces. This would seem like a good time to tour around but with everyone else hitting the rails,highways and airports at the same time - it is best to stay home. That is unless you just love chaos and pushing people.

For a small sample of the chaos we headed for Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai yesterday to get G-man some of his favorite vegetarian buns from the Buddhist restaurant there. We arrived early but still had to wait in line for 30-minutes to get the buns. Fortunately, only a few people tried to crash the line and I did get 20 rmb worth of the coveted veggie-filled buns. But by the time we were leaving the crowds had swelled to enormous proportions. Feeling like salmon swimming upstream we fought our way into some side alleys and escaped Yuyuan.

From there we walked toward the People's Park area but stopped off at the Natural History Museum of Shanghai. It cost all of 10 rmb for the three of us to get inside what used to be the cotton exchange building in the 1930s. There were two huge dinosaur reconstructions in the main hall but since the signage was in Chinese and my knowledge of Chinese paleontological terms is non-existent we didn't know what we were seeing. One looked like a brontosaurus with horns. All of the skeletons looked like they hadn't been dusted in four decades. In fact, the entire museum looked like more of a fossil than its contents. Peeling paint, falling down display cases, fish in formaldehyde that hadn't been changed since 1972. Shanghai obviously hasn't invested much in understanding the past.

Pains, Planes and Automobiles

En route back to the US for a business trip I've thus far gotten only to the Pudong Airport in Shanghai. My United Airlines flight has been delayed for two hours (surprise!) so I'll miss my original connection in Chicago (surprise!) - I've been booked on a later flight to Washington DC but the margin on time to make the connection in Chicago is very thin. Don't know if I'll make it but I'm not going to bet on it.

I wasn't even sure I'd make it this far though. The taxi driver I had for the drive to Pudong began acting erratically about half-way through the hour-long trip - rocking back and forth in his seat, slapping himself in the head, and moaning as he weaved around on the multi-lane highway honking at everyone. I thought he was trying to stay awake so I stopped reading my Blackberry emails and watched him instead. About 5- minutes from the airport he suddenly let out a yelp and pulled to a screeching halt beside the highway. He leaped out of the car and ran around to the guardrail and took a whiz. Both of us relaxed a bit the rest of the way into the airport.

Mr. Rolex Returns from the Olympics

During August I noticed that the fake Rolex and Mont Blanc peddlers and knock-off DVD salesmen disappeared from the sidewalks of Shanghai. But I didn't really pay much attention to it until they suddenly reappeared in mass on September 1st. Now, once again, foreigners can't walk down the street without being constantly interrupted by these purveyors of ripped-off intellectual property. Then it dawned on me that the government had made them all go away during the Olympics but allowed them back on the first day of September. This just shows that the government can shut down the counterfeiters if and when they want to.

My new favorite word

In reading some zoological articles recently I came across my new favorite word - "scatophageous" to describe wolves and dogs. It means "scat-eating" where scat is literally wolf droppings. I look forward to applying this quite visual word to some politicians, news pundits and TV evangelists in the coming weeks.