My Block

We’ve been here three weeks, as of today. I’ve been wanting to write something for a week now, but unlike when I’m traveling, living abroad means that my day is consumed with just working and surviving, not so much meandering and pondering. Quantitatively, we have been here twenty-one days but only had three good ones to explore. I’ll write about those three eventually, but for now, let me tell you about what we’ve seen on the other eighteen.

Turning out of my building sets you in the midst of a row of restaurants, ranging from laughable to excellent. Laughable is a “bistro” that interprets gourmet American food the way we interpret Chinese food, ---turnabout is fair play, but I’ll cook my own Cesar salad from here out, without the bacon. Excellent is a Taiwanese noodle shop with supremely delicious beef broth. Many of the signs are in Japanese, as the area caters to the Japanese expatriate community. This causes no end of trouble, as most of the wait-staff recognize that I’m a foreigner and speak to me in Japanese, the language they’ve been trained to speak to foreigners. I respond in Japanese and they just look confused. Twice now, we’ve wound up with an actual Japanese server. It was like seeing blue sky, but that’s only happened once.

As we walk down the block we pass the last of the foreign restaurants and thus begins Taxi Alley. At about 6PM on any given day, no fewer than a hundred taxis line the street. They come for the half-dozen cheap Chinese restaurants and fill them to the brim. The shops are simply teeming with drivers, dressed in their white-collared shirt and black pants. Consequently, we have yet to enter a cab where the driver didn’t know almost instantly where we lived.

In between the cheap Chinese restaurants is an array of small shops and an utterly incongruous fancy pet hospital. We walk past an auto mechanic and car wash, a fresh produce shop, an office supply and stationary store, a DVD shop, a carpenter, and an animal seller. The other side of the block holds a convenience store, a sheet glass shop, a welding house, a clothes store selling only undergarments, a tiny arcade, another restaurant or two, and a water delivery service. Each storefront is no more than ten to fifteen feet wide and appear scarcely twenty feet deep. The sidewalks are lined with a further litany, recyclers sorting through their trash-picked wares, produce micro-stands offering hardly enough food to feed a single family, and men standing about bicycle carts presumably waiting to be employed in deliveries. There are cigarette and phone card hawkers, a man selling only the use of his bicycle pump, and children incessantly chasing down littler children. I am always amazed that these people can eke out a living in such a minute commercial niche.

Across the street from this mayhem there is no one on the sidewalk. There is nothing there but a wall, blocking off an empty stretch of land that sits awaiting its chance to be developed into chaos or an apartment complex. A little section has been turned into a parking lot and another piece holds some cinder block and sheet metal housing. The rest is the usual urban wild-land of tall leafy, prickly plants and rough grass. Directly across the street from our apartment, the corner of the empty block is being turned into a park. From street level, the park is veiled behind blue sheet metal. From our apartment, several dozen feet up, we watch the progress of the construction each morning and evening.

Before we arrived, the park workers cleared and leveled the land, a small square maybe fifty yards a side. Then they built a small hill, where a large concrete gazebo is appearing inside of steel scaffolding. Over the last few weeks, they have laid layer after layer of stone tile paths, first in dull gray sheets and now lovely white. The paths form a grid and we wonder during meals what will occupy the interstitial spaces. Memorials? Shops? Flower gardens? Late one evening, as we walked home from dinner, a large truck pulled up and delivered trees, planted the next day on the border of the park. There are stone pillars now and sheets of pink that lay ready for incorporation.

Some of the men building the park appear to live in a small shack made of the same blue sheet metal that wraps their work place. Every week, their laundry appears on a line hung from the shack and at night, a small light peeks out from various gaps in the shelter.
I’ve heard and seen that construction workers often live in their work place while it is in process. A number of restaurants near us are being renovated and we’ve often seen groups of workers and whole families eating dinner together on the unfinished floors.

Further down our street, at its intersection with a major boulevard, is going to be a new metro station. This requires the transport of serious amounts of materiel and machinery along our road. Between the restaurants’ renovation, the park’s landscaping, and this station’s construction, our corner apartment takes in the full urban symphony of horns, rumbles and hammers.

I could sit for hours noticing the details of the construction of the park and watching the passersby try to peek in between or over the fencing. I could hover over the intersection in our office’s bay windows or ponder our neighbors’ lives as seen from my balcony to theirs. But I’m living, not traveling, here, so it’s time to go help my wife with dinner. We need lunches for tomorrow.

Shanghai Arrival!

Jets make travel far too quick and easy. Our bodies aren’t alone in struggling to adjust to the inhumanly rapid change wrought by plane travel, ---our minds are right alongside in confusion! A blog entry, a movie, and two hours of picture sorting and I was out of Malaysia and in China. But that’s not what it felt like; it felt like I was just in another big airport and another big city.

I’ve always thought boat travel was ideal for getting a sense of arrival. Day after day of endless blue, then distant specks of land, then powering past landmarks into port, and finally you pull up to a dock and you know you are really there. Maybe when I retire I can travel by boat. Maybe when I’ve seen enough of the world that I can afford a week or two spent en route. For now, I know I’m stuck with planes and their various lags.

We arrived and breezed through immigration and customs with hardly a word. We were met by people from our school and whisked to our apartment, conversing all the while in English. Then we unpacked for a little bit and went out for some dinner.

Like a rumbling of distant thunder, we heard it coming when we couldn’t read the signs. But we could still tell the relative class of the restaurant and make a guess at its quality by its busy-ness. When we walked through the door, however, the skies opened and confusion rained down. Every thought was translated into charades; every communication became painfully slow and awkward. There’s a dreamlike quality to being unable to speak the language, it’s the only other time we can so suddenly have all our capabilities taken away. Just like a dream, the frustration echoes in my head: Why can’t I talk? Why don’t they understand?

Then the answer and the feeling came loud and clear: You’re in China now.

The last week has been spent in remarkable inversion to the way we spent our days before we left. Instead of selling and packing, we are buying and unpacking. Every day features a trip to a store to find a different necessity of life. Much to my irritation, we are also cleaning up another apartment, as apparently “furnished” does not mean clean.

We love our apartment, minus the mess. It is huge: two bedrooms and bathrooms, an office, a large living room and dining space, a reasonable kitchen and plenty of storage. How ironic that we moved to China and got more living space. We’re on the fifth floor of a large building in a large complex. Hongqiao is full of massive complexes, often called Gardens, as they are somewhat centered on a courtyard. Ours has about 20 buildings. People talk about how this city built out and that city built up. Shanghai builds out and up; I suspect they’d built in and down too, if there were a way. Our walk to school takes us past row after row of these complexes, clusters of buildings twenty stories tall and teeming with signs of occupancy, ---satellite dishes, drying clothes, barbecues, patio furniture. There can be no doubt: There are a lot of people here. China doesn’t need to brag about being the most populous nation on earth. Step into Shanghai and it's an inescapable conclusion.

Malaysia

If there is a microcosm for the world growing without "US", it is Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  Funded by oil, influenced by colonialism and Islam, run by the emigrated Chinese, and worked by the emigrated Southeast Asians and emigrated Indians, KL is hyper-reality to Dubai's sur-reality.  It is a spectacular and gritty place, with towering luxury condos and scrap metal roofed shanties only a few meters apart.  Legions of motorbikers whiz around lanes clogged with status-symbol cars, their drivers each looking at the other with both disdain and envy.  Its people are polyglottal, often speaking Malay, reading Chinese or Arabic, and working in English.  On our second day, we spent the morning walking past the National Mosque and touring the excellent Museum of Islamic Arts, and the afternoon climbing 272 stairs to the Batu caves, a geological marvel converted into Hindu temple.  At both holy sites, we saw tourists faithful to the other.  For our three dinners, we ate satays, shawerma, and sushi.  (and not for the alliterative convenience) 

Our hotel was right in the shadow of the iconic Petronas Towers, connected to a massive supremely upscale mall.  I have little interest in shopping but in a country where neither temperature nor humidity ever dip below eighty, a regular and convenient respite from the heat was irresistibly appealing.  On Saturday night, it seemed that a good half the city's three million residents had arrived.  Women completely concealed in burkas glided past trios of girls undressed for the club.  Tourists and single men lined the rails and just took it all in.  Hesitant to go out again after a long day, we tried to acquire a local dinner in the food court, but eventually found ourselves almost dizzy with confusion and frustration at the size of the crowds and the lack of queues.   We retreated to a small Japanese supermarket, part of the Isetan department store, and bought reasonable sushi and Kettle Chips, which were hands down the best US export in KL.

On Friday, we toured the sites of the city using the Hop-On/Hop-Off bus, which was irregular, slow and too big for the city.  Once we had paid $12 for our day-long ticket, however, we were reluctant to give up and try the taxis and trains.  KL, I should note, also has a monorail that seems purely for entertainment value.  I am still looking for an exception.

We particularly enjoyed the Bird and Butterfly parks, which allowed us to see some of the exotic fauna native to Southeast Asia.  A walk through the insect hall convinced my wife and I that we would probably not need to schedule a trip to the Cameron Highlands, home of the sort of creepy crawlies best left to the Discovery Channel.  The insects weren't the only menacing animalia, however.  We were amazed by the sight of the Great Hornbill, which seemed to be a toucan with its beak turned inside-out and terrifying.  We also visited the pen of the Southern Cassowary, whose head bore a disturbing resemblance to that of a velociraptor.

We toured the Central Market and Chinatown, where the contrast to the mega-mall next to our hotel was tremendous.  The mega-mall featured brands from everywhere not Malaysia, the Central Market featured the Indian, Chinese and Southeast Asian products typical of this country's particular blend.  Saris and batik sarongs, Zodiac statuary and video games, stone chess sets and tourist kitsch all had their place.  Instead of the mega-mall's perfume and disinfectant, the Central Market featured incense and sizzling spices.  The people here looked much the same as those in the mega-mall, but there they walked while they watched and were watched, here they were busy shopping and selling.

Leaving KL meant an hour-long ride on its new super-highways, past enormous new sub-divisions, around the new centers for federal government (Putrajaya) and multi-national technology corporations (Cyberjaya), then out through groves of palm trees and finally out through the jungle itself.  I asked our cabbie why the airport was so far from the city and he said, "We want room for expansion.  To grow."

Adelaide's Market and Aborigines

The unquestioned highlight of our time in Adelaide was the Central Market. We made a point of getting back to Adelaide early our last night in South Australia, so that we might make a second visit. Open four or five days a week, the market offers everything from premium meats and cheeses to coffee and crafts. I found it very similar to some of the markets I saw in Italy last year, but vastly less intimidating in English and dollars.

Our party sampled an array of olives, tapenades, cheeses, and sweet yoghurt. It made a marvelous picnic meal and helped me through my grief for giving up such delicacies in China. On our return, we grabbed a chicken and vegetable pie (and more olives) to eat at our hotel. I found myself more than a little sad that the market experience is not one available in the U.S.

The glory of the market is that each item can be purchased from a specialist. In the States, buying premium meat, artisanal cheese, organic produce, and fresh bread might require a visit to three or four different shops and a prohibitive amount of driving. Consequently, we settle for the supermarket ---or Whole Foods, such as we can afford it. In the market, I visited four different stores in ten minutes, none were cheap but all tasted fantastic.

Throughout my visit to Adelaide, I noticed an unusual flag, red and black with a yellow circle in the middle, the flag of Australia’s Aboriginal people. Also, quite common on public signs and markers is a small note that the local organization recognizes their site as the traditional homeland of a particular tribe. Apparently, similar reflections are frequently offered as preface to public ceremonies and celebrations. While these hardly restore to the Aborigines a specter of what they have lost, the common belief that such sentiments are worth expressing regularly speaks well of the Australian people.

On my tour of the Rocks in Sydney, our guide reflected on the Aboriginal plight through the lens of Bennalong, one of the first Aborigines to learn English and participate in Australian civic life. Kidnapped from his tribe, he served as an adviser to one of the early English governors. Eventually, after many years and travels around the world, he earned his freedom and tried to return to his tribe. He found it impossible and asked the governor to build him a small house, on the spot now home to Sydney’s Opera House. He died there. Our guide explained that Australian children are now taught a history that includes the primacy of the Aborigines on the land, but they are also taught that, given the biology and mindset of the times, the decimation and conquest of the Aborigines was the only practical possibility. Remembering their history, honestly, providing them a place to live, and including them as they desire in today’s Australia, is the only recourse.

I don’t know that any of these are the right response to the terrors wrought on native peoples, but I know that, in the US, our response to the past is still a blank page. I taught about the Native Americans extensively in fifth grade but every unit ended with a big “Huh.” Few sentiments are stronger in a child’s mind than fairness, and they always wanted to know how we could make it fair for the Indians. I never had an answer. Nothing we can do can make amends, but that doesn’t mean we should do nothing.

The Outback!

An intrepid traveler could certainly get further from civilization than the East Whydown Sheep Station but they’d just be showing off. Sure, on the massive continent-island of Australia one could drive ten or twenty hours into utter distance and desolation. But who has that kind of time or patience? We chose to travel only about six hours from Adelaide, in South Australia, and it was plenty distant and desolate enough.

Joan, our hostess at this farmstay bed and breakfast claims that they’re “more of a suburban station.” This is primarily because they are only a few minutes drive off the bituminized Great Barrier Highway and “only” 20km from the nearest town of Yunta. Yunta, mind you, has a population of 50. The nearest city of any real size is Broken Hill, two hours away. Joan does the family shopping in Peterborough, a town of a few hundred, only about forty five minutes to the south.

As guests on their homestead, we stayed in rustic quarters built and still used for the sheep shearers who migrate through two weeks out of the year. This meant trips to an outdoor “dunny” in the bitter cold of a winter night, but it was all part of the experience. 20km from Yunta also means that energy is supplied by a combination of solar, gas and generator power. There’s none to spare for heating guest rooms, which use wood fires if you’re lucky or hot water bottles if you’re not. Water is heated by an ancient wood-burning stove, which still does it quite well.

Joan, whose family has owned portions of the station since 1882, and her husband Chris, are the best hosts one could hope for in the midst of the Outback. And that’s not including Joan’s pavlova. We arrived full of questions about Outback life and sheep station operations and found our hosts prepared with tours and answers. Anticipating our arrival, Chris had left a little of the afternoon’s work undone, facilitating a tour of the woolshed. We first saw a tremendous pile of fleece sitting a top a table, and were stunned to learn that it was all from one sheep. We also got to meet a few sheep he had kept back for us. Cute animals, but their penchant for urinating at the slightest spook reduces the charm a bit. Meals and tea, shared with our hosts, let us hear of everything from the price of fuel (soaring) to the Open Air College (distance learning for Outback kids.)

Our second day was spent entirely touring the property. As we set out, Chris joked “Living out here, I like to call myself the King of Tonga.” I took the bait and asked, “Is that because the property is as big as Tonga?” “No,” he quipped, “Because it’s bigger.” Chris kept up a lively lecture on station history and the sheepherding business throughout most of the day. Nicknamed “Decimals” by his friends and neighbors, Chris’ discussion took quite a numerical turn at times, leaving our heads spinning. Twenty microns thick, double the price of ear tags, nine hundred dollars a bale at sixty percent yield times how many sheep per bale…yikes! I bet Outback kids do well on their maths.

We explored the ruins of older homesteads, built in the Thirties and left vacant for the last half century. The buildings had been pieced apart, their roofs and walls recycled into other structures by Joan’s father. The Outback climate seems to blow rust directly onto any metal surface, leaving the whole scene picturesque in its destruction. At times, our tour took on the guise of an Australian safari, as Chris and Joan radioed the locations of emus and kangaroos. We were treated several sightings of different kangaroo species, and stunned to find them racing along parallel to us at 40km an hour. On another occasion, the trip turned into a working adventure as Chris raced around the bush trying to muster some wayward sheep with his truck. He apologized for the distraction, but we were delighted by the “real life” sheep herding experience. When else would we get to speed 60km an hour, backwards, in hot pursuit of a sheep?

Beyond any singular highlight, I found the most enjoyable aspect of the tour just the opportunity to tour the landscape. There is no comparison or analogy for the Outback. It is unlike any other desert or plain I’ve seen. I knew any attempt to capture the view would be utterly in vain. The barren red expanses, wrapped with hills that always seemed so far away, speckled lightly with scrub brush and trees, created a tremendous sense of majesty. Riding along in a light rain, I found myself feeling simply blessed to take in such a sight.

Clare Valley

It is a real testament to the charm of the Old Stanley Grammar School Country House that three teachers were willing to spend two nights of their vacation there. Most of us educators find an almost physical aversion to even the sight of a schoolhouse, historic or not. Built in 1857, Stanley Grammar was a boarding school for country boys for many years. Afterwards, it fell into disuse and then disrepair. Its current owners Frank and Denise, are restoring it to former heights of beauty and hospitality. Original wood is coming to the surface and appropriate furniture is being sought out. Frank and Denise aren’t opposed to a little reality, however, and if they can obtain the agreement of the Heritage Council, they plan to modernize the bathrooms.

Beyond the charm, we stayed here to enjoy South Australia’s Clare Valley wine region. While the grape vines looked barren, the surrounding lushness and lack of crowds made us appreciate the idea of off-season travel. We envisioned a day of biking and tasting along the Riesling Trail, a marvelously located train easement converted to bicycle and foot path. We hired some bikes and made reservations for lunch at posh Skilogallee winery and off we went. The trail itself was lovely, complete with the Aussie-exclusive sight of kangaroos lounging among the vines. Unfortunately, our itinerary also included a turn on Horrocks Loop. The Riesling Trail is flat and comfortable. Horrocks Loop was not. After several steep hills, we found ourselves arriving at our lovely lunch sweaty and late. It took three or four servings of water before any of us even started to have the palate for wine.

After a lazy lunch of recuperation, we finished our loop and returned to the Sevenhills Monastery and winery where we had rented our bikes. The return journey was a little easier and we were able to enjoy several tastings at Sevenhills. While the winery used to be run by the monks, the last brother-winemaker retired recently. Now, as the woman at the counter put it, they are waiting for a winemaker to turn Jesuit or a Jesuit to learn winemaking.

Our first night in tiny Watervale we enjoyed a local restaurant but on our second night we only felt we needed some of the cheeses and snacks generously provided by Frank and Denise. This also gave us the chance to retire to the fire with our hosts, some other guests and an amazing port Frank buys by the keg. He told me it’s only available for locals and for export to Europe, which is probably for the better. Conversation varied from politics to economics, before Denise and another guest suddenly disappeared. Frank explained that Denise had taken her off to read tarot cards. Then he continued to tell us that Denise had a sense for such things and had, on their initial visit to the country house, seen the spirit of a nun surveying prospective buyers. We didn’t take the whole discussion too seriously until a week later, on driving back from the Outback, a transplant from Watervale asked us if we had “seen anything” during our stay!

We would have loved another day in the Clare Valley, perhaps even the chance to visit some wineries by a more comfortable car ride, but we had limited time and the Outback awaited!

Sydney -> Adelaide

These postings have been a bit delayed by a lack of time and Internet access once we left Sydney. Now we're in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but I'm going to try and set my blog to post an entry a day to catch up.

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Our bodies still in a bit of “travel wazz,” the post-jet lag but pre-acclimation phase that can haunt travelers for weeks, it was remarkably easy to get up at 5:45 and head out to a cab in the cold Sydney dawn. Staying awake the rest of the day was the hard part.

We were up so early to start a tour of Sydney’s fish market an hour later. Fortunately, a free cup of coffee came with the price of admission. As a big sushi fan, the chance to see my hamachi and amaebi in freshest form was very appealing. While, again, I don’t like tours and their demand that you stick with the group, I also recognize that there’s sometimes no other way behind the scenes. The fish market tour took us through the variety of different aspects of the marine bazaar. Most engaging was the auctions, for large quantities a Dutch auction with LCD projectors and digital bidding, for sashimi-grade fish, close inspection and old-fashioned voice auction. We also reviewed a few of the many different species that often appear in local menus, seeing them when they still resembled fish and not just filets, as we walked around the market floor. Then we strolled through some retail shops and out onto the wharf. Unfortunately, by the time the tour ended it was still too early for a fish breakfast.

Amusingly, we were joined on our tour by some visitors from Japan. Tsukiji, Tokyo’s fish market, is literally ten-times the size of its Sydney counterpart. Further, a big fish in Sydney might fetch a two or three thousand dollars, while in Japan a price in the tens of thousands is quite common. At first, the Japanese were simply unimpressed, but when they started to understand how much cheaper the fish was, they were flabbergasted. Tuna for $9.50 a kilo? Tsugoi!

We spent the middle part of our day flying from Sydney to Adelaide, capital of South Australia, to start the second part of our trip. It was an unremarkable journey, save that the pilot reported a delay because of 300 kilometer per hour head winds. That’s 188 miles per hour, for those of you still living in the standard-measure dark ages.

We drove and walked around Adelaide for a few hours in the afternoon. I love random walks in a new city, as lacking a destination or focus frees me to look around. Adelaide’s architecture is intriguing, a tremendous mix of medium skyscrapers with their expected variations on the glass-and-metal modernist theme, as well as the ubiquitous sandstone of older Aussie government buildings, and finally a smattering of frontier-infused streets with covered walkways, iron lattice-work accents, and older or remodeled stone facades now affixed with wooden balconies.

The next day, before getting on the road, we toured Adelaide’s botanical garden. Though diminished in winter and a sudden hailstorm, a chance to see the immense Amazonian lily pads, housed in a remarkable pavilion, made the visit worthwhile. We also stopped in the Haigh’s Chocolate factory for a free tour. Fortunately, a filling lunch kept us from making any indulgent purchases. After that, I took a spin behind the wheel, as we drove out of Adelaide and up to the Clare Valley, it was my first time driving on the left!