Let Them Know You’re There

Before I moved to Shanghai, I was warned about the traffic. The warning was less about the congestion and more about the fact that crossing the street might result in a fatal accident. Taking it in stride, I actually wasn’t all that alarmed by Shanghai’s intersections when I first arrived; yes, it might look like people regard red lights as mere suggestions, but if you actually took a step back and observed the seemingly chaotic flow, distinct patterns emerge.

Busses, especially those attached to electric wires dangling above the street, do very little turning and as such, most cars tend to scurry out of their way. Cars, like their drivers when they’re in the metro or lining up at the supermarket, shove to the front of intersections and rarely bother with their turn signals. And bikes, both motorized and pedaled, are usually confined to a separate lane where they race in and around each other carrying loads that Westerners would usually put in a trunk. Or a car seat. Do you have the visual yet? Good. Now picture everyone honking.

When I was fifteen and a half, entirely too impatient to wait for the driver’s ed class in school to begin, I used my tip money from a job waiting tables at IHOP to pay my way through a private class. Somehow sanctioned by my parents and the State of Illinois, the class only met a handful of times in a damp office space where we would watch videos produced in the 1960s and listen to the monotonous instructor drone on about how many times we were supposed to check our mirrors before we even thought about putting the key in the ignition. One of the videos that we half-dozed through showed a man I’m pretty sure was Walt Disney driving a giant boat of a car, happily honking at pedestrians and fellow drivers. His catch phrase? “Give ‘em a honk – let ‘em know you’re there.” Now I’m not exactly sure how people drove in the 60s, but from what I can tell from watching Mad Men it didn’t involve honking as much as pounding hard alcohol behind the wheel while chain-smoking and degrading women. Regardless, in my subsequent years of driving I’ve been conditioned to only use the horn in an emergency. Or, you know, when I want to degrade women. Holler.

But from what I can tell, everyone in China has watched this instructional driving video and has taken up the cause of honking with the same zeal they’ve shown for winning Olympic gold medals. I wake up to the sound of honking. I fall asleep to the sound of honking. In fact, I’ve become so accustomed to it that it no longer has its intended startling effect; now if I see a car approach an intersection and not blast it’s horn in random, indiscriminate intervals I think less of the driver. I mean, how are we supposed to know you’re there?

So when my roommate initially offered me the use of his scooter while he was on vacation in February, I declined. I have eyes. And ears. And that mess of a traffic accident waiting to happen is nothing I wanted a part of. It wasn’t until shortly after he left for his vacation that I began to regret my decision. The weather was warming up, I felt officially settled into my neighborhood and a scooter would actually be a great way to explore Shanghai. And get to work. And see friends. And lug groceries home. And learn Mandarin. (This last excuse is something I slap onto most anything when I’m trying to convince myself of its dubious merits.) The question wasn’t whether or not I could drive in Shanghai traffic. The real question was how had I made it this far without owning a scooter.

As luck would have it, my roommate had another vacation planned for last week and this time I was going to take him up on his offer. Before he left, he took me out on a little spin to show me its controls, its quirks, and how to honk at everything that moved. After getting comfortable, I thanked him profusely and was excited to take it to work the next day, sure that my commute was going to be cut in half.

This means honk at pedestrians. Right?

Leaving the house a little earlier than normal, I headed down to the garage where he pays a little over two dollars a month to house and charge the bike. Holding the helmet (yes, mom, I wore a helmet) as I walked through my apartment’s courtyard, I admit that I might have been swaggering a little. Biker’s helmet. Riding gloves. The only thing missing was an actual motorcycle, as opposed to the white electric scooter I was about to climb on.

Any sense of cool quickly dissipated as I struggled for twenty minutes trying to get the bike’s seat unlocked so I could store my bag in the compartment below. Dropping the helmet multiple times and almost knocking over the entire row of parked bikes created such a scene that the garage administrator eventually came over to help. Apparently I needed to push down on the seat while turning the key. Got it.

Vaguely aware that bikes were not allowed on the large bridges that cross the river to the side of town where I work, I spent a brief five minutes looking at a map online before I left to see my options. From what I could see, there was a ferry terminal just underneath the bridge, which looked to only be a couple of miles from my house. After that, I just had to take one big road straight and turn left on the next big road, which dropped me right in front of work. How hard could that be?

And so I was off. The first leg of the trip, while slightly terrifying, wasn’t bad at all. I managed to find the ferry stop after only a couple of wrong turns, and barely had to wait five minutes or so for the next boat to come. I used this time to gracefully demonstrate the control I had over my bike to my fellow commuters; almost falling twice before getting off and holding it awkwardly from the side, I was unable to roll it back on its kickstand because other bikers had decided the best place to park was directly on my ankles.

As for the honking, I broke my internal promise to honk only for emergencies almost as soon as I got on. I honked at pedestrians. I honked at other bikers. I honked at other bikers honking at pedestrians. And I could definitely appreciate how easily everyone slipped into this habit: not only did it make you feel an active part of the road, it was fun. Honk to pass. Honk to get passed. I pretty much honked my entire way to work.

Eight hours later, heading home in the dark and waiting roughly twenty minutes in the cold for the ferry is when I began to question my desire to buy a bike. It was also when I started to question how much battery this particular bike had left. My roommate had quoted me a distance that it could travel before it needed recharging – a figure I quickly forgot and demonstrating my razor-sharp attention to detail, I hadn’t bothered to determine the distance between my apartment and work. And back again.

Gunning it off the ferry, I noticed the pickup start to give and thought that at least I was on the right side of the river; absolute worst case scenario, I could push it home. Block by painful block, the power drained from the battery until I found myself coasting with my lights off on the side of a busy four lane road. It finally completely died around the corner from my apartment building, and I had to resort to shoving it past the security guards and back to the garage. And the worst part? I couldn’t even honk to let them know I was there.

Jailbreak

To be clear, I’m mildly obsessed with my iPhone. Well, most Apple products, really. If Steve Jobs talks about it while wearing a black mock turtle neck and dad jeans, I want in. Which is why I decided to bring my American iPhone with me to China; if I couldn’t find a way to make it work as an actual phone, I figured I could still use it as an iPod. Or an alarm clock. Or a best friend. Whatever.

Researching online before leaving the States, I found that once the phone was “jailbroken” (a term that refers to the process of undoing all of Steve’s hard work at keeping the phone’s software exclusively under Apple’s control and which initially sounded very, very scary to me), it would be able to work on China’s cell phone network. All I had to do was find someone to jailbreak it – and from what I was reading online, that wasn’t going to be very difficult in Shanghai. In my overactive imagination, this involved some sketchy, dimly lit alley where I would meet with members of the Chinese mafia.

Back in reality, shortly after arriving our HR director pointed me to a mall in the middle of the city where he thought I could have someone jailbreak it. Climbing out of the metro with two friends from my orientation group who also needed to unlock their iPhone and Blackberrys, we headed into a shining building with a giant glass globe encapsulating its upper floors, on which various images were projected in bright neon colors to the Times Square-like intersection below; not exactly the dark alley I had envisioned.

On the third floor we found what appeared to be our destination – rows and rows of electronics counters, each branded with their company’s logo and staff members milling about, playing with their booth’s various gadgets. Cameras. Cell phones. PlayStations. Nikon. Canon. Nintendo. If it had an on switch, it was here. We decided to split up, find our respective booths and hope for the best.

I’ve never been good at haggling; mostly because I forget I’m supposed to be haggling. If someone tells me a price, that’s the price. Even when I’m traveling in countries that I know you’re supposed to bargain with sellers, I get instantly uncomfortable with the concept and usually end up paying at or above the asking price for whatever I’m buying. “$7? But I only have a $20. Here, take $25. It’s probably worth $30. No, you’re right. $35. Do you want lunch, too? Have my sandwich. And my hotel key.” This happens in outdoor markets, where it’s customary to talk the price down; I would never even consider bargaining for things when there’s a roof over my head.

I quickly found out my friend who was also unlocking his iPhone did not share this problem. At the first booth we stopped at, having been quoted 250 RMB to unlock one phone, he immediately scoffed and countered with 50.

Me: 50?
Him: It’s not even worth that much. It’s easy; all they have to do is plug it into a computer and download a program onto it.
Me: Oh. But. Um. He said it was 250. I’m pretty sure we should give him 300.
Him: Just let me handle it.

And I did. I followed him as we walked away from the first two booths, who wouldn’t go below 200 for each phone. With each interaction, I got more used to the idea of this whole bargaining thing. He was right; there was no way we should be paying so much for them to simply stand there and hook our phone up to a computer. Feeling ballsy, I ventured off on my own and sidled up to a shiny counter at the far end of the floor stocked with various Apple products.

It being my third day in China, I had yet to learn any Mandarin beyond simple greetings, however it seemed the term “jailbreak” was widely understood. Steve must be thrilled. The impossibly skinny Chinese guy behind the counter wearing what I assumed wasn’t a sanctioned Apple shirt, showed me his initial offer by punching “300” into an oversized calculator and handing it to me. Displaying my newly honed look of shock on my face, I erased his 300 and countered with 75. Boom. Let the games begin.

We went back and forth, each huffing dramatically at the other’s counter offers until we settled on 150. Victory. Scanning the crowd for my friend to tell him the good news, I spotted him a couple counters down, performing the same ritual with the calculator that I had just finished. Motioning to my guy that I would be right back, I hurried over to tell him the deal I had snagged.

His counter was filled with similarly dressed staff members, each wearing the unauthorized Apple shirts and knee deep in iPods, iPads, iPhones and cases for each. Towards the back of their small station they had set up a large flat screen TV, where friends had gathered around a PlayStation basketball game, intermittently eating noodles and fiddling with their cell phones, and generally unaware that they weren’t in someone’s living room.

The salesperson he was dealing with spoke a good deal of English, and it seemed they were only using the calculator to emphasize their various offers; when I arrived he had gotten him down to 175. I pointed at the the booth I had just come from and told him they were willing to do it for 150 – and then instantly felt guilty as the first guy saw me motion to him, obviously using him as a bargaining tool – and suddenly our new salesman was eager to take 125. Still not satisfied, my friend incredibly cajoled him down to 100 which we agreed to and paid on the spot. With that, he took our phones and handed them to a plump guy I hadn’t noticed sitting next to him, who quickly plugged them into his laptop and got to work.

Which is about the time I started to panic. My phone – my perfect, beautiful phone was now in the hands of a man who looked like a sumo wrestler, who was doing god knows what to its software. I did not know this man, and I had no reason to trust he had any idea what he was doing. Worse, after receiving only a blank look in response to my rapid fire questions about what exactly the program would do to my phone, we discovered he didn’t seem to speak a word of English. Slowly nodding, he turned his attention back to his computer where it remained for the duration.

Steve would not be happy.

Thinking the entire process would take five to ten minutes, I grew increasingly alarmed as we waited for fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes. My friend, who had apparently jailbroken phones back in the U.S., reassured me that this was completely normal. There was nothing for me to do; I nervously stared at the small pineapple that had appeared on my phone’s screen, and then at the large man who I decided looked like an apple himself, and back at my phone again. Forty-five minutes later, our English salesman returned and announced that my phone was finished, and that Apple-man would now begin working on my friend’s phone.

Him: Ok, all done. But you can’t turn off.
Me: What?
Him: It’s just beta. If you turn off, you can’t turn back on. Maybe one week you come back? Then it will be finished.

Clutching my phone, I had no idea what any of this meant and was instantly sweaty. I couldn’t turn my phone off? Ever? And I paid for this?

My friend explained that the jailbreaking program for my phone’s software was still in its initial beta form, that the hackers of the world apparently needed just a little more Mountain Dew and had not completely finished the job yet. One of the kinks that they had yet to solve was turning the phone off; in its current form, if it was turned off, it had to be plugged back into a computer with the jailbreaking software and endure the whole process all over again. Kind of a large kink, if you ask me. And one that I would have appreciated hearing about before turning my prized possession into a ticking time bomb. Writing his name out for me in English on his card, Chan Wu kept repeating that I should just come back in one week and they would install the final version for me, free of charge.

Already touchy over my phone’s battery life and used to scouting out plugs in coffee shops and restaurants if I know I’m going to be out all day, I was now tasked with never letting my phone die. This meant cutting back on Angry Birds if my battery was low. And only listening to music on the metro when I knew there was an outlet waiting for me on the other end. And awkwardly climbing under people at Starbucks to get to a plug. This was going to be a long week.

On my first day off from work a week later, I headed back to the electronics mall, excited to get my life back and hoping that Chan was there and would remember our deal. When I got to the counter, the first person I saw was my Apple-sized friend who gave me a look of faint recognition before turning back to his computer, apparently unaware that I wanted to be able to turn my phone off. No smile, no hug, nothing. And I thought we had something.

Chan, who was talking with a co-worker a couple of booths down, saw me and hurried over, definitely remembering who I was and started apologizing as soon as he got within earshot.

Chan: Sorry, sorry. Not ready yet.
Me: What? Why? It’s been a week!
Chan: I know. Not finished. Maybe one more week?
Me: Crap. Ok.

Defeated, I told him I would be back on my next day off and that he couldn’t forget me. He promised he wouldn’t, and I left after unsuccessfully trying to get a wave out of Apple-man.

Each week for the next five weeks we replayed the same scene: me trekking halfway across town on my day off, Apple-man showing me no love, and Chan apologizing, telling me the update still wasn’t out. I’m sure I could have Googled this information without showing up week after week, but a part of me was afraid that if I didn’t go, Chan would forget about me and I would end up having to pay for someone to do it all over again once the final update was released. Plus, I enjoyed trying to get a smile out of Apple-man.

Dutifully embarking on my weekly pilgrimage yesterday, Chan finally had good news. The update was out, and even Apple-man seemed happy as he took my phone and plugged it in his laptop. Not that he smiled or anything – I could just tell. Feeling part of the family, and noticing that there wasn’t anyone on the PlayStation behind the counter, I challenged Chan in the street fighting game that his friends had left in. Keeping one eye on the counter, Chan still managed to destroy me, and soon his friends returned from their smoke break to laugh as he repeatedly demolished my character, each ending bloodier than the last.

"That called Poison. It's no problem."

When my phone was done updating, I tested Apple-man’s handiwork and turned it off and on in front of him, just to make sure. Other than it now displaying a ghost-like version of the Apple logo during the start-up (“That called Poison. It’s no problem.”), Chan assured me that my phone was, at last, finished.

Still not able to get a smile, wave, or any sign of recognition from my port friend who safely shepherded my phone through this process, I shook Chan’s hand and thanked him. Fighting off my instinct to pay him an extra 100 RMB for all the trouble (He’s so nice! He wanted 250! It was worth it!), I left and got on the metro home. Realizing I was now a free man, I listened to music, played Angry Birds and started texting all at the same time. Just because I could.

Ironing Out the Kinks

Having lived in New York for most of my adult life, I’ve never experienced the luxury of having a washing machine in my apartment. Not that I spent hours at the laundromat; it ended up being almost the same price to drop my laundry off and have unseen workers wash and neatly fold my clothes. Or so I told myself. What went in as an unruly, giant blue IKEA bag of laundry magically returned a couple of hours later in an airtight plastic wrapped package, somehow reduced to a quarter of its former size. Rationally I knew this wasn’t the case, but in my head it was always more fun to imagine cheerful, singing elves hard at work. Who else could fold my shirts so efficiently?

So when I was looking for apartments in Shanghai, I was pleasantly surprised to find each and every option came with its own washing machine. In the flu-coma haze of my first visit, I didn’t notice that the apartment I ended up choosing had its machine located outside, on the balcony off the kitchen. Shortly after moving in, my new roommate showed me how it worked (“basically, you push start”) and left me to load my dirty clothes in peace. It being the middle of January and Shanghai being far colder than is ever reported on weather.com, I shoved everything in, hit the big green button and scurried back inside. Five minutes later, I glanced out the window and didn’t see much happening. Maybe it took a while to get going. Ten minutes after that, I poked my head outside and still couldn’t hear anything – no water, no churning, no elves. Nothing.

Hoping I wasn’t becoming the annoying roommate who asked 87 questions to complete a simple task (“so then I just close the fridge? Like this? Can we go over that one more time?”) I nervously interrupted my roommate in the middle of watching How I Met Your Mother on his laptop to tell him I might have broken the washing machine. After standing in the cold and pushing a couple buttons, all of which are labeled solely in Mandarin and thus incomprehensible to me at this point, he felt the single pipe leading into the machine and announced he’d figured it out.

Him: Oh I see. It’s frozen.
Me: Huh. Um…so?
Him:  Yeah, this has never happened before. The water must have frozen in the pipe.
Me: Oh. Ok. But my clothes are in there, covered in soap.
Him: It’s no big deal. You can just bring hot water out.

Handing me an oversized bucket, he showed me that our kitchen sink actually dispensed boiling hot water after running for a couple of seconds, and as soon as I filled up the machine to the appropriate level, it would start automatically. He hoped. And so I began hauling buckets of water out to the balcony, sloshing each into the machine and wondering what exactly I would do if it didn’t turn on as promised. Somewhere between the fourth and fifth bucket, as I was debating an attempt to fashion an old-school washing board in the kitchen sink and just complete the nineteenth century motif I had going, the machine gurgled to life. Victory was mine.

Retrieving my clothes a little under an hour later, I realized that while the compact machine had actually done a great job cleaning everything, it left every item with deeply ingrained wrinkles that only an iron could get out. Bugging my roommate again, he informed me that the house didn’t have an iron – apparently there is a dry cleaners downstairs he uses to press his dress shirts. Normally, this would be fine, however I had my first day of work the following afternoon, and I needed to wear one of the pairs of khakis that now looked like I had kept balled up with rubber bands for the last month. Not quite the first impression I wanted to make with my new coworkers. Not a problem – I would simply go buy an iron from the giant E-Mart located directly beside my apartment complex before work the next day. Crisis averted.

I had been to E-Marts and their uniquely Korean equivalent, Lotte Marte, when I was living in South Korea a couple of years ago. They’re basically Target, Walmart, and a giant grocery store all rolled into one. In fact, one of the selling points for my apartment was that we had one right downstairs. Heading in shortly after 10:00 a.m., I figured there would be far less people than on my previous visits, where I basically had to crowd surf my way around the place.

I was wrong. I’m not sure if it’s because we’re in the run-up to the Chinese New Year, or if it’s the only large shopping center around, but there were hordes of people in every section of the store, seemingly whipped into a frenzy by workers shouting into headset microphones (think Britney Spears, the early years), ostensibly announcing various specials and deals. Standing next to the biggest pile of tofu I’ve ever seen, a woman cheerfully screeched non-stop to the line forming in front of her counter, while a man towards the back of the line absent-mindedly slapped the giant brick of tofu in front of him that he may or may not have ended up purchasing. Less than ten feet away, another worker with a competing sound system energetically held up an entire chicken carcass by its feet, swinging it casually over a box of similar chickens stacked waist high.

Making a mental note to bring my camera on my next visit, I pushed through to the home goods section and selected the cheapest iron I could find, which apparently only came in bright pink. Secure in my manhood, I motioned for the nearest worker to pick it out of the locked case for me and headed for the registers.

Back in my apartment with only a half hour before I had to leave, I quickly showered and took the iron out of the box, which is when I discovered I had been sold what appeared to be a very used and very broken iron. The pink casing was dented and scratched, and the steel bottom was unattached at the top end, dangling loosely from an exposed screw. This was not good. I plugged it in regardless, hoping it would somehow work enough to do its job without sparking into flames or otherwise injuring me and my roommate, who was now convinced I was completely inept at most all daily tasks.

Him: Yeah, that’s broken.
Me: Yes. Yes, it is.
Him: Where’d you get it?
Me: E-Mart! How could they sell me a broken iron?
Him: No worries. You have the receipt, right?

Of course I didn’t. Having saved almost every single, unimportant receipt since arriving, my wallet was so overcrowded that when the cashier handed me the iron’s receipt, I had her just toss it – it’s not like I would be returning an iron, right? I now had to go to my first day of work looking like a hot, sloppy wrinkled mess and then attempt to pantomime my way through returning my broken, Fisher-Price looking piece of destroyed pink plastic on my next morning off, which wasn’t until a couple days later.

Scene of the Crime

Trying to strike a balance between indignant rage at having paid close to $30 for someone’s trash and a guilty, aw-shucks demeanor for not having saved the receipt, I approached the customer service desk and handed a very nice looking girl the box with the destroyed iron inside. She quickly looked at it and then watched my carefully crafted performance; me pointing at my credit card, then pointing in the direction of the scene of the crime just past the registers, and then back at the iron again with a look of surprised disappointment, then bobbing my head (clearly designed to illustrate me returning the damaged goods) and finally motioning through what I thought was a very understandable desire to receive a new iron at no extra cost. Slightly out of breath, I smiled politely and for a second thought my interpretive dance piece was going to work. I nailed it.

She simply smiled, held up an example of a receipt that she had on her desk and gave me the “do you have this?” face. No, no I did not. Shrugging her shoulders, she handed me back the box and motioned for me to step aside, she had actual customers to attend to. Feeling defeated, I motioned for her to place the iron into the garbage, hoping she’d take pity on me and give me store credit. Nope. She barely glanced as she tossed it over her shoulder into the large garbage can where it landed with a loud thud and went back to the guy behind me, who was returning a large stereo system with his receipt neatly taped to the top of the box. Rub it in.

When I returned to my apartment later that day, my roommate told me he had great news; the new girl moving into the third bedroom was brining an iron with her! Which was great – all I was missing now was a couple of elves.

In Search of a Panda

In one of our first orientation sessions designed to give us a brief outline and very generic list of the do’s and don’t of life in China, we were told that whistling is viewed as bad luck and generally considered rude; apparently it’s how you call spirits up in China. Which I’m sure for most people isn’t that big of a deal – who whistles constantly, anyway? Apparently, I do.

Never wanting to be the foreigner who walks around offending the people nice enough to give me a job and put up with my bald head for the foreseeable future, I took this particular orientation lesson to heart.  Other tidbits? Don’t put your fingers in your mouth. Check. Don’t show people the soles of your shoes. No problem. Don’t point using just one finger. Gotcha. Don’t get too close to someone when interacting with them. Deal.

But shortly after breaking for lunch, I realized my default state of being when I’m walking somewhere by myself is apparently to whistle non-stop like a lunatic. In the bathroom. On the sidewalk. In restaurants. If I have a moment to myself, I’m whistling. I now get twelve notes into whatever pops into my head before I realize it, stop, and wait for the demons to come for me.

The other guidelines shouldn’t be that hard to follow, right? Until after class, when I was carried onto the metro by a swarm of people, unable to lift either arm in self-defense. The “not getting too close to people” rule evidently does not apply on public transportation, where I’m routinely pressed closer to my fellow commuters than I’ve been to past boyfriends. Next, I noticed halfway into our orientation session with our health insurance representative, in which I was seated in the front row, that I was sitting with my legs crossed, North-American-male-style. Right foot resting directly on my left knee. Casual. Yet engaged. And inadvertently placing the entire sole of my right foot directly in the presenter’s face. Good, Travis. Why don’t you just stick your fingers in your mouth while pointing at her ancestors’ graves?

As I’m busy trampling over ingrained cultural customs, I’ve remained determined to start learning Mandarin; this is, after all, the entire point of my being here. I’ve never considered myself one of those travelers that is constantly surprised when people don’t speak English, and cringe every time I see my fellow countrymen just speak louder and louder at innocent bystanders, as if the volume of their voice was the issue. “Oh! Thanks for shouting – now I understand! The Starbucks is on your first right, just past the Burger King. You’re welcome!”

That said, every time I would mention to someone that I was planning on moving to Shanghai to learn Mandarin, they would let me know that Shanghai wasn’t really China, and that I could go an entire year without learning a word. Undeterred, and slightly comforted by the fact that I wouldn’t be totally lost my first couple of weeks, I figured that even if there was a large ex-pat community, there was an even larger Chinese community and I would just stay focused on the task at hand. Simple. Just, you know, become fluent in Mandarin.

After being here for about two weeks, I’m motivated to begin my courses less by my desire to acquire another language and unlock one of the world’s oldest civilizations and more by my very basic desire to eat. Yes, I could spend my year hunting down restaurants with pictures on their menus, pointing (with more than one finger) at what I would like, and mumbling what I’m sure is a butchered version of “thank you” to a waiter with whom I’m otherwise completely unable to communicate with. But I’m almost positive the best restaurants in the city don’t have pictures in their menus, and at some point I want to be able to understand what everyone is talking about so loudly in my gym locker room. So today, having wrapped up orientation and with a day off before I officially start work tomorrow, I hit the streets in search of Mandarin classes.

My first stop was Panda Chinese Language Institute, recommended to me by my roommate for having reasonably priced courses. Using Google’s trusty directions, I arrived at a dusty looking office building in the center of the city with a tired looking security guard, who sat in the lobby’s corner smoking and eyeing me with amusement. Staring at the board which listed the building’s tenants, I didn’t see a speck of English or a picture of a panda. This was not a great start. Receiving a blank look from the guard when I asked if he knew where the school was, I considered pantomiming a panda for a second, and then decided to move on to my second destination.

Miracle Mandarin, a school with five “campuses” spread throughout the city, had a location around the corner from where I thought the Panda school should have been, and when I arrived I found a brightly colored sign in the lobby, directing me to the twenty-first floor. Feeling proud of myself, I got out of the elevator and pulled on the glass door to the school’s waiting room, where a smiling receptionist was waving me in. When the door didn’t budge, I figured it was locked with the same system my school employs, and looked to the right for a buzzer switch. Trying again, the door banged louder and the receptionist, now with a concerned look on her face, came around the desk and opened the door. “You just have to push it.” Their star pupil had arrived.

Twenty minutes later, I left very impressed with their course offerings (five days a week for three hours a day) and a fat folder of information to review. The next school, Easy Mandarin, had a lot to live up to.

Located in the roughly the same neighborhood as the first two, and again in a tired looking office building, I was met by a smiling American from New York, who took me into a conference room and told me how his school would make Mandarin easy for me. And not a miracle. While it was a great sounding program, their presentation and materials I reviewed didn’t look as nice as Miracle’s. For roughly the same price, I — completely irrationally and based almost solely on the production value of their promotional materials — had more confidence that I would learn the language quicker over at Miracle Mandarin. The deal was sealed when towards the end of our meeting, the school’s power went out, and he had to laugh nervously while showing me to the elevator.

Still feeling like I should have a third option to compare, I returned to scene of the Panda crime and poked around the lobby some more, acknowledging to the security guard that I knew how ridiculous I looked. “I was told there was a Panda school here. No? No pandas? What about other white people learning Mandarin? Anything?” Which is about the time I remembered the school had a website, and I was able to pull it up on my phone and call their help number. A perky girl Chinese girl who answered informed me that they were located in the office building behind the one I was standing in, and yes, she would be glad to sit down with me and explain their course offerings and why they didn’t have a picture of a panda with an arrow on it in this lobby.

My New Teacher

It turns out that the Panda school’s courses were far cheaper than their rivals, and while their materials were not as nicely produced as Miracle’s, for about $600 less their teachers would travel to my apartment to give me an hour and forty minute lessons five days a week. And, to top it all off, they offer a free “demo” lesson for me to try, no strings attached. Done and done. After arranging for a teacher to come to my apartment on Monday morning before work, I figured that if for whatever reason this doesn’t work out, I can always go back to the pricey but well-produced Miracle Mandarin. Until then, I’m only half-expecting a man in a Panda suit to arrive Monday morning.

The First Week

As a week in was when I started my Korea blog, I figured it was as good a time as any to start the Chinese version. Also, this is the first day I’ve felt like myself since I got off the plane last Thursday afternoon. So, there’s that. But I’ll get there in a second.

The flight from Chicago to Shanghai was relatively uneventful, if you don’t count the mother who somehow got past security to our gate in order to see her daughter board the flight and then spent the next twenty minutes sobbing to the United attendant taking tickets and the line of unsuspecting passengers. As we ushered by her, she turned to the guy in front of me and asked if he was going to Shanghai as well, and if he could make sure she got there ok.

The guy in front of me: What?
Hysterical Mother: Can you just, um, make sure she gets to her seat ok?
Guy: Uh, sure.
Hysterical Mother: And then, you know, that she gets to Shanghai ok?
Guy: (already putting his headphones back on) Yeah. Ok. Right.

Knowing my mom wouldn’t have thought twice about such a request a couple of years ago, I smiled to myself, imagining this woman’s shred of reassurance that she had secured a complete stranger’s promise to escort her daughter off the plane in the scary and faraway land we were all heading to. Because, you know, he didn’t have any other plans. As we walked to our seats, he relayed the mom’s wishes to her very embarrassed daughter, who just sighed and sunk into her chair.

Close to fifteen hours later, we dropped out of the sky and into Shanghai’s sparkling airport on the outskirts of the city. Greeted by smiling representatives from the school I would be working at, I met a handful of my new (and very jetlagged) colleagues, and we were taken in a van to our hotel, around the corner from where we would be training for the next two weeks. Alone in my room, I collapsed onto my comfy-looking bed, which is about the time I learned mattresses in China have roughly the same give as a slab of concrete. Off to a great start.

The next day we were supposed to meet in the lobby at 9:00 a.m. to set up our cell phones, bank accounts, and generally get some HR paperwork out of the way. As I had been wide awake since 3:30, I spent the early morning hours emailing about potential apartments, and then decided around 5:00 to explore the hotel and see if there was a gym and possibly grab a cup of coffee. Wandering down a very long hallway where I thought someone had mentioned a potential site for breakfast, after about ten minutes I came to a dead end without having found anything. Although, as there was absolutely no English on any of the placards outside the closed doors, unless there was a treadmill and coffee pot sitting in the middle of the hallway, I probably would have missed it. Turning around, I started to walk back to the lobby and after a couple of seconds I heard footsteps start behind me. It being 5:00 in the morning, I really didn’t want to hang out with any of the teachers I just met, so I kept walking, pretending not to hear whoever it was. Until they started yelling at me. Apparently, I had wandered too far or I was out of bounds or maybe he was trying to be helpful – I have no idea – but I was now being barked at in Mandarin by an elderly security guard. All I could do was mumble “sorry” a thousand times, scurry into the lobby and pray he didn’t wake up the entire floor.

Returning to my room with a questionable looking canned “caffee latte” from the convenience store on the nearest corner, I smelled what I thought I had noticed when I woke up earlier: sewage. Not used to my room smelling like an open septic tank, at first I thought it was coming from outside, or my imagination, but after leaving and coming back I couldn’t deny it; my room smelled like a cesspool. Stepping into the shower to get ready for the day, it only got worse, but the thought of asking my new coworkers if they were having a similar problem didn’t exactly seem like the best idea. “Does anyone else’s room smell like raw sewage? No? Just me? Oh, I’m Travis, by the way.” I just held my breath and decided I needed to find an apartment soon.

After we finished with the small, introductory bit of orientation on Friday morning, we had the rest of the weekend to ourselves to explore the city. Which I did with a vengeance, until I started to get sick on Sunday afternoon. It seems my body decided to have the culture shock my brain wasn’t going through, and it was not amused. What started as a simple runny nose, quickly morphed into a fever coupled with a hacking cough. And because training started bright and early Monday morning and I couldn’t really stay in my hotel room, I managed to spread what I’m pretty sure is the bird flu to almost every person in our small group of new teachers. By the end of the session today, we were one giant coughing, sneezing, hacking mess, and one girl had to remove herself to go to a doctor. So, you know, I’m making quite an impression.

But as we have to be out of the hotel in the next two weeks, and at this point I’ve been living out of a suitcase for the better part of almost two months, and also because my room still smells like downtown Calcutta, I’ve remained determined to find an apartment. In between dying and my company’s orientation, I’ve been emailing and calling people from various agencies and housing websites, and if the place sounded interesting enough, me and my raging fever went apartment hunting.

The first place I saw was a room in an apartment with a French guy and a German girl, and while the apartment was nice enough, the neighborhood was kind of desolate and far from the school where I’d be working. And I figured I shouldn’t take the first place I stumbled into, right? Next up was a place with a Chinese guy in the center of the city. What better way to learn Mandarin than to live with a real, live Chinese person? So I headed out with visions of being completely fluent in a matter of months, knee-deep in Chinese friends and beloved by millions.

Sadly, this was the grossest apartment I have ever seen. And I’ve seen some messed up apartments in my day. There were holes in the wall and floors, it was roughly the size of a port-o-potty and smelled like the inside of a week-old egg roll. Bad. Just really, really bad. And the worst part was he had a cat that an old American roommate had told him to name Douchebag, and he apparently had never bothered to look up what that meant. So he proudly introduced me to Douchebag, showed me where Douchebag slept (to the left of the stove, in the middle of the “kitchen” counter) and assured me Douchebag wasn’t too much of a pain. Or, you know, a douchebag.

Then there was a place with on the seventh floor, no elevator. Then there was a place with a married couple who worked from home and refused to turn on the heat, answering the door in full winter coats, hats, and gloves and who explained to me very indignantly that oh no, they didn’t think it was that cold in their place. I could see their breath. After five or six more equally disappointing and slightly alarming apartment visits, I began to seriously regret passing up the French guy’s place. And then I found it.

It was the last place I dragged myself to last night, on the 25^th floor of a sprawling new high-rise apartment complex, literally on top of the metro station complete with a giant mall, gym, and swimming pool. The apartment itself is nice, new and clean and shared with two German students studying Mandarin at a local university. Not a douchebag, or cat, anywhere in sight.

After I settled all the paperwork and set up my move on Friday, I instantly started to feel better. Knowing I can finally unpack – and maybe the constant supply of cough drops I’ve been popping – has made my cold abate and I’m finally starting to feel like myself again. Now if only my coworkers would stop coughing all over me.