Shanghai Interlude

Yes, just like I said, I was incommunicado for the past few weeks. There was a stretch for two weeks where I had good internet access, and could've written tons of stuff, when I was visiting my wife MaLan in Shanghai. Did I do that? Nah.

The trip was a good one, and came at a good time. The work in Afghanistan is great, and always interesting, but not exactly easy. We work every day except Friday (and we've worked the last 3 Fridays, so even that is no longer sacred), and it begins to wear on you.

Anyway, I got my flight from Dubai to Shanghai (after being couped up in the Dubai Airport for beaucoup hours -- the UN flight arrived in Dubai around 10:30 a.m., and we left for Shanghai at 1:45 a.m. the next day). I was primed. Emirates has a reputation for the best food and some of the best service of any airline. I also had an emergency exit row, so I had leg room. Cool! I'm ready to go.

Maybe Emirates is the best thing since sliced bread, but if it is, then they keep the good stuff for the beautiful people, because in coach it is a different story. A lot of my beef with the flight was with the plane. (I am not a fan of Airbus -- call me an obnoxious American, but if you put an Airbus next to a Boeing plane the same age, Boeing will win every time, hands down, in my mind.) Let's see . . . the TV did not work. The chair did not go back. The reading light did not work. The traytable would not come out (front row of a section, no backseat to which I could attach a traytable). There was no place to put anything (no seat pocket, same reason). The food was decent, but I hardly noticed it, with the constant rings for Service that popped up. This is not an exaggeration -- in the first HOUR of our 9+ hour flight, I heard someone call for an attendant over a hundred times. (I did not count the first ten minutes or so, but once they started coming in rapid fire succession, 5 or 6 at a pop, I began counting. What else could I do, since I could not read, watch TV, and can never sleep on a plane. After 50 minutes, the poor attendants had been rung up 127 times.) I am not sure if I can extrapolate that to the passengers, who were predominately Arabic in appearance. Somebody would likely call me racist or something like that for thinking this way. Many of the passengers did not look like people who traveled frequently, that much I can say for sure. The return flight was more of the same, fortunately with slightly fewer mechanical flock ups. Bottom line, if given the choice, Singapore Air or Cathay Pacific anytime, thank you very much. :)

Ok, after the Larry David-esque aggravation of the flight, I arrive in Shanghai. There I get to enjoy one of the few perks left to U.S. diplomats -- the diplomat line at immigration and customs. The Pudong International Airport (Pudong is the new, built-up side of Shanghai, on the other side of the Huangpu River) is hopping (never seen it when it isn't, honestly), and immigration can easily take you 30-45 minutes. Me? Try 3. I am going to miss this perk when I'm back in the real world!

My wife picks me up (ok, not exactly -- she and the driver were still on their way to the airport. I had no way to contact her, save to buy a phone card, but I did, and the pay phone worked fine.) Anyway, she arrives, music comes up, hugs, kisses, few more hugs, you know. Then the hour-long cab ride back to Shanghai and her place. You'll pardon if I skip details here, fellow readers. :)

Shanghai is . . . well, civilization, I guess. Nice cars, shopping malls, restaurants (including KFC, Mickey D's, and, new to me in China, Burger King). It was wonderful. All with a Chinese flavor, of course. (You won't find foot massage parlors on every other street corner in New York, and the ones you do, well, they probably do more than just massage therapy!) It was sensory overload. What's probably more surprising to me is how quickly I got back into the urban routine, and walked away from my good habits here (exercising every day, sometimes twice, avoiding junk food, by way of example). It was nice just to collapse, as it were, physically, and mentally.

My wife was working throughout the week (she's a high-powered Executive with L'Oreal), so I was largely left to my own devices, meaning, walking around the neighborhoods, doing some shopping (needing more winter clothes in a big way), eating, checking out exhibits at the local museum, eating, getting a foot massage, eating . . . see a pattern here? Shanghai has hundreds of high end restaurants. The Western restaurants were decent, although really pricey for what they offered. The Chinese food, not surprisingly, was superlative, especially the Guizhou and Hunan cuisine (the do some frog's legs and fish . . . maw? that were beyond description, and numbing hot), where everything was spicy and smoky-flavored. We skipped traditional Shanghainese cuisine, with the exception of the xiao long bao (hope I spelled that right), or soup dumplings, which have soup encased in small dough packets. My favorite Chinese food, push comes to shove, are the simple things, fresh noodles and fresh dumplings. The rest of Shanghainese cuisine is heavy, sweet, and usually involves pork. It's not a problem for me, but MaLan does not do pork. Just think what it means to be in China and you can't or don't eat the pork, or anything made with or flavored by pork.

We did have weekends to ourselves, and took a couple of short trips, one to a small village about 90 minutes outside of Shanghai, called Xitang. It is a beautiful place, reminding me of all of those lush Chinese movies about China (FYI, the rest of the country does not look like a Zhang Yi Mou film, if you have not already guessed). One older Australian lady also there said (use your worst Aussie accent here -- criky!), "Finally, Ah can see sumthin' in Chyyna that looks lak ah imagnnd it woold." We also took a weekend north to get some good Korean food, rocking Sichuan food (they do a poached white fish in chili oil that is beyond my capacity to describe), Uighyr (that's the name of the Central Asian Muslim minority in Xinjiang Province, the one that shares a border with Afghanistan) hotpot, and whatever else took our fancy. I did not eat as much, quantity-wise, as I do in Bamyan, but I bet I gained more weight. Yikes.

Arrgh, I keep trying to upload pictures, but this Blog seems deadset against them now! Sucks. :P Blogger.com was so good about that before, I am not certain what is the issue these days. Oh well, if you want to see the pictures, I guess you'll have to visit me at some point. I'll have everything on a flash drive. ;)

After almost two weeks (a fortunate confluence of events -- originally it was only supposed to be 7 or 8 days), it is time to return to reality, or at least my current version thereof. I did NOT want to leave. Guess that's a good thing, that I miss my wife more and more. If the reverse were true we would be in for some tough times or worse. At some point we are going to have to try and live together! ;) A long, slightly better flight, 5 hours stuck in no man's land, between leaving the nice, new Terminal 1 in Dubai and going to the afterthought Terminal 2 where the UN flies, 3 days in Kabul (including one stuck at the Kabul Airport, sitting on the plane, when the pilot tells me he can't fly), and it is return time to Bamyan. More on that later.