Patrick "Trick" van Staveren

The Shanghaiese love their bright lights.  This place never sleeps.  Which is a good thing, because if they tried to close their eyes it’d still be too bright to sleep!  It’s so ridiculous that it’s fun.

Thursday was St. Patrick’s day.  We didn’t find green beer.  Instead Jason or Kevin led us to a Mexican restaurant which was quite the experience.  The food was a lot like what you’d get at a relatively cheap Mexican joint in Chicago, nothing fancy but tasty.  Interesting experience was that most of the team here had never had Mexican food before!  I think everyone enjoyed the assortment of food although they were skeptical at first :)

Best laughs of the night were:

1. Zhecui was ordering random drinks off the menu that he’d never heard of before.  When he ordered a Manhattan, he asked me if it would be radioactive!  (Think: Manhattan Project)
2. Before ordering tons of food with meat in it, Jason asked the team if anyone is vegetarian.  Kevin says, “there aren’t any Chinese vegetarians!”  Some of the guys laugh.  Kevin translates and they laugh loudly.  This isn’t America.  There are no vegetarians here.

After the team went home Kevin, Jason and myself went to an Irish pub.  Yes, they exist in every city of the world (or do they…is there one in Adrian?)  It was like walking into an alternate universe – wall to wall Westerners celebrating St. Patrick’s Day; very few locals in sight.  We had Guinness!

Friday was a busy day at work.  Being in Shanghai has given me a fair bit of mental clarity to clean up and chase all sorts of old outstanding tasks that I’ve not been getting done.  Helping out with a lot of things that are going on here in town, and going to be spending a lot of time with the development team next week.

After work went out to a Macanese restaurant led by Susan who’s the office manager here and very outgoing.  I’ve been ordering all sorts of interesting drinks this week…a few days ago I had a drink which is a combination of coffee, tea and milk; this time I had an iced coffee with red beans.  It came with ice cream too.  What a delicious combination!

Later we went for a walk down by the river over on the Pudong side where the pictures above came from.  Early night, we’re all tired.

On Saturday I finally got out for some exercise and ran about two miles.  Had a really interesting experience with the washing machine in my room, which can only be explained by a picture:

From Shanghai

That’s what I washed my clothes on today.  I don’t have a clue what the different symbols mean – the Chinese or the internationalized symbols.  For all I know I had the thing set to broil at 500F until golden brown!

Met up with Kevin and went and saw some more of the city.  The subway here is fantastic.  It’s all less than 20 years old and is clean & easy to use, and incredibly safe.  Lots of lines have glass walls with sliding doors between the platforms and the trains to stop people from getting hit.  Subway systems are always visitor friendly and this one is no exception; the machines even have an English option.  The signs have station names in both languages and since there’s signs everywhere it’s easy to figure out where you’re at and where the train will be going:

From Shanghai

(I’m at People’s Square, the train is going to Huangpi Road which is my stop.)

We got out to see some of the old city which has some iconic Chinese buildings to see:

Look, it’s me!

It’s a bit rainy (practically English rain which made Kevin happy.)  It’s difficult in Shanghai to tell if it’s foggy or if that’s just the smog.  I think it’s mostly fog today.

The lit up building there is one of two buildings which has an array of lighted, computer-driven panels on it which makes them some of the worlds largest televisions.  It’s animated and always showing different things including another spin on I<3NY.

Only in Shanghai!

It’s Thursday afternoon in sunny Shanghai, and I’ve brought the good weather with me.  It’s 13 C / 55 F and quite nice out today.  It also helps to finally feel human again after the wicked night at the bar when I first got here.

This place is amazing.  It’s grown so dramatically over the years that skyscrapers are built next to tiny houses.  Business culture right next door to local restaurants.  There’s tall buildings as far as I can see from my 32nd floor hotel room – and apparently, most of it wasn’t here four years ago when Mintel started to think about opening an office here.  My hotel room is nice – and apparently I’m the first person to ever stay in it.  When I arrived, the hotel staff couldn’t get the electronic key card to work.  Then once we got that done, the door was jammed open, and it took a grumpy staff person and his screwdriver half an hour to fix it.

From Shanghai

From Shanghai

The activity in the area is non-stop.  People are generally really nice to me and I can survive without knowing any Chinese.  There’s lots of places around here catering to Westerners who are looking for a bit of familiarity.  Yes, there’s a Starbucks.  I paid 28 Yuan for a grande latte, which is $4.10.  On the contrary, we went to a local place for lunch and paid 22 Yuan for a dish, soup and a tea.  The Western places are all several times more expensive than the local value.  Lunch was delicious. There’s a huge demand for food places around here, so they’re tucked away in every corner.  We went to a place today which apparently used to be a wedding hall.  Now they serve lunch as well.  It was delicious food – pork and sausage with steamed veggies over rice; I think the soup was pork as well, with some tofu and some sort of vegetable what I’ve never seen before.  The people here know how to eat.  The owner of the shop was a rather loud lady who gave us a bit of a hard time and scribbled the Mandarin symbol for “foreigners” on the bill after one of the guys tried to haggle with her on the price.  Good laugh :)

It’s Tie Thursday here in Shanghai.  I came in this morning looking sharp and we all had a good laugh, and I announced that next Thursday will be International Tie Thursday and I’m going to get the team to all wear ties.  Today I’m flying solo and trusting that my American colleagues don’t let me down.

Learning lots about how the team here is run.  We’re developing software as specified by Project Managers in the UK, so our process and planning has to be so much more tight and practiced.  We’re getting much better at it over time – the team here now has a bug fixing process as well, which is amazing.  I’ve tried managing developers remotely and wasn’t very successful at it.  The operation here is big enough and much more structured, and as a result we’ve made it work.  I’m impressed.  To make it more challenging, the overlap in office hours is even less between Shanghai and London vs. London and Chicago.

Team in Chicago is being amazing.  Some trouble has come up while I’m out of town, and I’ve been able to leave it all to the team there.  I owe some drinks when I get back to Chicago.

Have to go make my NCAA picks now, talk with London folks, and complain more about Cfengine.  Red Wings played the Caps today while I was eating breakfast, and they won in the end – nice way to start the day.  A Tigers win over the Twinkies would be a nice one to wake up to on Friday…get ’em, guys!  Don’t give those damn Minnesotans an inch!

Landed in Shanghai yesterday.   It’s amazing – it’s like a whole different country here!  Contrary to previous beliefs, it’s not all sticky or covered in jam.  Damn.  I’ll keep looking for that place.

The language barrier is tough.  Chinese isn’t like most languages that I’ve encountered in my travels where it’s based on Latin so I can guess what every third word is.  But it’s not hopeless; I think in a few days I’ll have picked up some basic phrases and symbols.  In the mean time, I’m being nice to people and lots of folks speak a bit of English and I’m grateful for that.  In a pinch, gesturing wildly has worked.

I got picked up by a prepaid taxi at the airport – you know all those drivers at airport arrival halls with names written on signs?  That was me.  A very nice man was stood with the following written on a sign:

Patric
k vanstaver
en

He got me to my hotel in good time and it was great.  We didn’t understand a single word we said to each other, but what I love is that humor doesn’t require language.  In the parking garage at the airport we took the elevator to the wrong floor and we had a good laugh about it together.  Nice guy, he was very polite even though I hadn’t taken the time to even remember how to say “thank you” in Chinese.  He also drove a mean stick shift.

Made it into the office at 5 PM in good spirits.  Walked right into the end of a management meeting with two guys in London on video conference.  My boss, Steve, who lives in Chicago was in London and it was a bit puzzling running into him on video conference when neither of us are at home.

I very quickly met everyone in the office here.  I like the office here; it’s rather small in comparison, probably about 25 people total.  Everyone’s friendly to a visitor, which is great.  Unfortunately my brain doesn’t do well with names, so it’s going to take me a while to get to know everyone.  And it’s hard, because I’m self-conscious about how little of the language I know and how much or little people might know.

My host here is Kevin, who’s the head of IT in the AP region and lives here in Shanghai.  Kevin earned the name The Flying Scotsman a few years back when he moved here to help open this office.  Kevin and I have a bad history of drinking too much when we’re in the same city.  Staying in Shanghai at the same time is Jason, our global head of IT, who likes to stay out as well.  We went out to dinner last night (at a rather Western style place, which wasn’t much of an experience) and stayed out much too late bar-hopping.  We’re pretty sure that the wrong turn was the absinthe.  We all lived like we were college kids, and we’re paying for it today.  Productivity is low.

The city is crazy.  There’s a highway right by the office here which has lanes both on the ground and elevated above it.  California, you pale in comparison.  There’s a sprinkling of cyclists here, which is a welcome sight.  Drivers are crazy tho, so you have to watch before you walk.  Lots of colors too – buildings and trees and everything is covered in lights.  I’ve got a great view from the 32nd floor of the hotel room and hopefully I can get a picture or two of it all.

Thursday is St. Patrick’s day, and apparently we’re all going out for drinks.  I’ll be impressed if I find some green beer!