Staying in touch from 12 hours away

Katy started working two weeks ago today and it’s been hard for me to be bored and in a city with so few native English speakers. Besides the difficulty of ordering food, it’s lonely not having people to talk to. I have attended several social events: the program InterNations is a global community of ex-pats in cities all across the world, many were native English speakers and it was nice networking and trading stories and hearing advice about navigating Shanghai; then our building held a meet-up for non-locals staying long-term; and finally are a few people I have reached out to or met up with - friends of friend mostly. But to be honest it’s been more than a little lonely not having a network or group of people that I consider my ‘tribe.’

Luckily I have many things to keep myself busy. There are a few websites I’m working on developing, my current job with www.newyorkcraftspirits.com is completely remote, so I can do the work from anywhere if I have halfway decent internet. I have also been writing, not just this blog, but for myself and for my upcoming internet projects. Of course there is plenty of reading that I’ve been meaning to catch up on and that I’m finally putting a dent in it. I enjoy these activities, plus I’ve been working out more regularly than since I was in college. Unfortunately, these activities are solo and the prevailing sentiment this week has been boredom mixed with loneliness. That will change, starting tomorrow when Katy and I start an epic month of travel. We will be in at least three countries, half a dozen flights, and many planned adventures planned - but you’ll have to keep reading to find out what they are.

While I am using this blog post to complain, I do know how fortunate I am. Without the internet, smart phones, and international calling plans, I would feel lonelier. Plus, we probably wouldn’t have been able to plan all the amazing travel we have coming up. But, even more importantly, I have stayed connected to the people closest to me, and reached out to some I haven’t spoken to in quite some time. We may currently be 12 time-zones different from the East Coast, literally half a world away, but at least it’s easy math. My cell phone plan costs less than ten cents a minute to the US so I’ve been taking advantage of that, and I hope I continue to do so when we get back to the West Coast.

Katy had to remind me that when we moved to Oregon in August I felt isolated being on the West Coast and three time zones behind everyone I knew on the East Coast. Additionally, I didn’t know anyone living in or around Portland. I knew I could have called friends and family, but for some reason I didn’t. I felt like I needed an excuse to call, and often failed at coming up with one. Now that we’re in Shanghai, I feel like being in China and craving the English language is my excuse to call. It’s been almost eight months since we moved to Oregon, but right now it is the home that I miss, even though eight months ago I missed the East Coast. Katy calls this “shifting baseline syndrome,” and she’s right. My baselines have shifted, but I will never stop yearning for the good old U S of A.

See you all soon - but not yet.

Working? We Talking About Working?

If you’ve been paying careful attention to my blog posts, you might have noticed that I haven’t said anything about actually WORKING in Shanghai yet…  That’s because the process to get approved to work in Shanghai is quite complex and took 3 weeks before I arrived and another 2.5 weeks once I arrived in Shanghai.  One part of the process was completed before I arrived, and then once I arrived there were three more approvals needed in-country.

The first step was BY FAR the most different than anything I’ve ever experienced.  It’s called the “medical check” and is a commonly discussed topic by the foreigners working in Shanghai.  I went for my medical check the first morning I was in Shanghai.  I took a taxi about 30 minutes away from my apartment and met an immigration specialist contracted by Nike who speaks Chinese to help shepherd me through the process.  We had to check in with various people at various counters, present 2 copies of my headshot, and then I finally entered the doctor’s office part of the experience.

The first step was to get my height and weight measured.  Then I was handed a hospital gown and told to take off everything from my waist up, including my bra and jewelry.  They gave me a key to lock everything up in a locker while I was waiting, but I kept my phone with me as a sort-of security blanket just in case.  I was then escorted, by doctors and nurses speaking varying levels of English, through a variety of rooms each with a different purpose. 

One of the first rooms I passed through required me to untie my gown and receive an ultrasound of my abdomen.  In another room I entered, they asked me to lie down and untie my gown and then placed these strange suction cups on different parts of my skin so that they could do an EKG.  The doctors and nurses who work there probably have a really tough job doing the same test all day, every day for people who don’t necessarily want to be there and typically don’t speak any Chinese.  However, they almost never said anything more than “lie down”, “untie gown”, or tell me which room to go to next for the next test.  It’s a little unnerving to be in a foreign hospital setting with people taking your blood, taking chest xrays, or doing EKGs without explaining to you what’s going on.

My EKG.  My mom (cardiac rehab nurse) said I look healthy!  It's a running joke among the foreigners I know here that we all have "fatty liver" according to the medical report, which is actually a precursor to liver disease if any of us actually had it.

 The whole experience is also strange because you are going through it with a bunch of other similarly confused/culture-shocked people.  There are couches in the hallway outside each room so you end up seeing the same people in the same lines over and over again.  However, the hallway is pretty crowded so it wasn’t always clear which couch aligned with which room.  English is a common language across the foreigners who were there, but it wasn’t always easy to tell people who were about to cut the line where they should stand to wait.

The whole medical check took about an hour and a half, and I left feeling very bewildered.  I had only been in the country 18 hours at this point, hadn't eaten since the night before, and was severely jetlagged, but I wanted to do the appointment right away so that I didn’t delay my visa process.  After the actual appointment, it took a week for the government to process my results and declare me “fit for duty.” It’s not clear what they were looking for, but according to the internet they may be screening for things like tuberculosis and HIV.

Following the medical check, I next had to present myself at the Public Security Bureau (PSB) to obtain a residence permit.  This involved sitting in front of a window while a government officer looked at my passport and typed things onto her computer.  I didn't actually say anything to her or answer any questions, but maybe the immigration specialist answered some questions on my behalf.  I left my passport with her and then a week later I received an email from the immigration specialist that my residence permit was approved and that the final application for the employment license was submitted.  This meant I could go to Nike and start my new job.

The entrance to one of the two buildings at Nike's Greater China Headquarters

My first day of work was last Friday, March 17^th.  It was nice to get into the office and meet the people I’ll be working with.  My first day ended up being epically long – I had a call with Nike World Headquarters (WHQ) starting at 7a local time and then didn’t get home until after 11p because of a team dinner and visits to three Nike stores with my team to make sure everything was prepared for an upcoming visit from some WHQ Vice Presidents.  One of the coolest parts of the store visits was seeing the “Back of House”, the place where all the inventory is stored.  In one of the stores, the employees have drawn a cool mural on the walls and I loved finding this secret part of Nike culture that most customers don’t get to see.

In another store, there was a quote from Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman translated to Chinese and written on the wall.  I don't know what it says but thought it was cool that a little bit of Nike culture and heritage made it to the back of a store!

It was a great first day, and I was glad it was Friday so that I could take the weekend to recover and get ready for my first full week of work!

Craving Chinese Food

It was Sunday night and I had spent the Saturday after St. Patrick's day hung over. I was probably a little low on sodium and was craving NYC-style Chinese food (not that stuff we got in Boston). Sure we are living in the largest city in China, but in our neighborhood it's actually easier to find internationally styled eateries. Since being here I have learned that Sichuan (also spelled Szechuan) cuisine is the most globally widespread cuisine referred to as Chinese food. There are Sichuan style restaurants here, but there are also the cuisines of Hong Kong, Hunan, Fujian, Cantonese, and others. On top of that there are noodle shops, dim sum spots, seafood restaurants and many other variations of Chinese food I don't yet recognize. It's intimidating picking what restaurant to patronize, plus i'm used to eating Western cuisines five to seven nights a week. Most New Yorkers have their go-to Chinese food restaurants that deliver but I've barely even eaten Chinese food so far, despite craving it.

The only authentic Chinese food I have had has been from Din Tai Fung, a chain of restaurants specializing in soup dumplings. Overall the food was excellent, but both locations I went to were on the third or fourth floor of a large shopping mall. Adjacent to clothing retailers, atop multiple escalators, and with bathrooms located outside the eatery, Din Tai Fung is not what I had imagined as authentic Chinese dining in China. My first experience at the chain was with another husband of a Nike employee. He's Asian-American so when the food came they presented me, and not him, with a laminated and illustrated placard explaining how to eat soup dumplings in three different languages. That didn't throw me off as much as the size of the soup dumplings, way smaller with less broth than the ones I learned to love in Chinatown. The food was good, but unfamiliar enough that I left hungry for Chinese food.

The second time I went to Din Tai Fung, Katy and I were at dinner with a new co-worker of hers who told us about her past year in Shanghai. We asked a lot of questions about Nike, food, transportation and her experience in the city. She's from New Jersey and it was nice to be chin-wagging in an intimate group of East Coasters. At one point the conversation was flowing and I even forgot we were eating, or in a Chinese food restaurant, or even in Shanghai - then someone realized we hadn't received half of the dishes we'd ordered. Chinese dinner service usually involves many dishes coming out as they are prepared and then shared by the table. Dumplings come out first but then everything else comes out fairly quickly, unlike a European course-based experience. The break between eating sessions suited me, but further left me yearning for a more authentic experience (or something familiar). Where in China does an ex-pat have to go to get some authentic New York City-styled Chinese-food? At least they have really good peanut butter here. . .

To be honest I haven't done much in the way of dining-out research, so I shouldn't expect to know anything or get the experience I desire. Most of our research into food and eating here has been focused on grocery stores and the relative safety of produce. We found some good resources for ex-pats on where to shop and what types of products to be wary of. We are blessed that the closest grocery store to us, City'Super, is new, trustworthy, and has plenty of imported brands we recognize. We shop there but prefer to get produce from Hunter-Gatherer, a small chain which works directly with farms to source their produce. Their produce is good, they have some comforts not found at City'Super, plus their prepared food is fresh, healthy and somewhat familiar. It's still an experience shopping there: the other day I accidentally bought Cava Cava oranges instead of Navels, yellow kiwis instead of green ones, and a Dragon Fruit which is going bad because I am intimidated to cut it up.

We have been cooking breakfast almost every  morning as well as some nights, but buying lunch everyday and going out for dinner more than either of us is used to. Last night we picked up bagel sandwiches from a local Shanghai chain started by a Californian called Spread the bagel, whose website boasts "Authentic New York in Shanghai."  They are pretty good bagels, but they messed up our order the first time, and Katy's bagel sandwich was made with the sliced halves upside down. Good food here, but it's definitely not familiar.

Even if the food was perfectly familiar, I don't think we could just avoid cooking for ourselves altogether. It is a big city with plenty of options but it's just not who we are. Tonight, we weren't in the mood to cook, hadn't planned anything, and didn't feel like running to the grocery store to figure it out. Instead we started using the food delivery service called Sherpa. It's a great site/app like Foodler or GrubHub which you use to order and track your food delivery. There are hundreds of restaurants to order from. We used Sherpa tonight to order Thai food because it's familiar but we didn't want to dine out at our local Thai restaurant (that we've already been to twice). For now, in China, Thai is my go-to because it's more the same because it is still international cuisine. I don't want to wish away the rest of our gastronomic experience here but I am definitely looking forward to getting back to New York in a couple of months and (over)-eating Chinese food in New York City with extra soy sauce.

A New Yorker's Day of Shanghaiese Tourism

I don't remember being up there, but apparently I was once in Windows on The World atop the World Trade Center. The next time I had a sky high view of the Big Apple some of my cousins were in town and they wanted to go to the top of the Empire State Building. Being a native New Yorker who grew up about a half mile from the building I figured the top of the Empire State Building was the ultimate tourist trap, but once I was up there I changed my mind. Up on the 102nd floor the city seemed so small, orderly, and peaceful. Sure I could still hear the sirens, but they were dimmed, distant, and decibels lower than what I was used to. 

When Katy said she wanted be a tourist and go to the top of a tall building in downtown Shanghai I did not object. The Shanghai Tower is the tallest building in Shanghai, but expensive for only 30 minutes of gawking, so instead we visited the bar across the street – on the 92nd floor of the Shanghai World Financial Center. Going up in the elevator I was still convinced that I was from a big city, but once we looked out the window my mind had changed. 24 million people live here in Shanghai and even though it was a relatively smog-less day, we couldn't see the outer edge of the city.

After enjoying a cocktail and a hot chocolate, we decided to go to the opposite type of tourist experience and visited Yu Garden, City God Temple and surrounding markets. The garden and most of the architecture is over 500 years old and included a huge pond of koi, beautiful stone architecture, interesting stone tiled floors, and even a few galleries of traditional art. Every once in a while we could see a skyscraper poking up above the garden wall, but for the most part we were lost in a garden older than America. The garden was quiet and the running water inspired tranquility. Even if they didn’t need the garden when they built it, it seemed like a good idea in the modern bustling city Shanghai is today.

  

The afternoon wasn’t over, but we were getting hungry and wanted to experience modern Shanghai from ground level, so we headed over to Tianzifang. The area specializes in hookah bars, street food, and tourist shopping (including plenty of fake Yankee hats and allegedly leather bags). The entire area is only a few blocks but it is easy to get lost in the maze of tiny alleyways and even smaller shops. Finally we found a New York style pizzeria and despite my skepticism, Katy felt like some comfort food. The dough spinner had good technique, the oven was hot, the slices dripped with orange grease and the beer was cold: so we were happy as clams. Plus the graffiti was sweet.

Overall it was a great day of getting to know the city but I think we also learned just how big and diverse Shanghai really is. We know now there is no way we can become experts in only six months. If we had six years to live here I don't think we would be confident telling people we are knowledgeable Shanghaiese. That being said, it's good to know that there are millions of experiences to be had here and we have only just begun - plus now we know where to get a decent slice if we're homesick.

Escapism at Shanghai Disney

Just when we thought we were getting used to being in China, it started to overwhelm us. We could tell because we started bickering; if you know us as a couple you know that we don't bicker. But, lucky for us, Disney went ahead and opened a theme park just outside of the city last year for us to escape to! And what an escape it was.

We started the day at nine o'clock sharp, right when the park opened. We weren't the first ones in line, but we may have been the most eager and definitely some of the few attendees who knew most of the (English) words to every song being piped in through the speakers. As soon as we got in we were pumped! We downloaded the app (or A-P-P as they said over the speakers) and we were checking wait-times update in real-time and trying to maximize our ability to get on every single ride as quickly and often as possible. We started in Tomorrowland, on Tron, then did the Buzz Lightyear space shooting extravaganza (I forgot the name) and waited for a parachute ride which was largely disappointing. After those three it was only ten o'clock and there was still so much to do!

We quickly moved about the park, going on other rides, stopping for an awesome pretzel and using the Fast-Pass system to minimize our time spent in lines and not on rides. By noon we had gone on almost every ride we had to including: the Seven Dwarfs Mine Cart, Peter Pan, the Soaring Experience and many others. It was nice how many other couples about our age were there, also without kids. It kind of validated how excited we were and reminded us that we weren't acting childish - or at least that it was normal how excited we were to be there. I knew it would be an awesome experience before we went, but I didn't expect to get so giddy and silly over re-living many of our childhood's best memories. 

One ride that definitely exceeded our expectations was the Pirates of the Caribbean cruise. Both of us had been on the ride as kids (separately of course) and that was before the movies had come out. Now that there is a movie franchise, characters and a lot more technology, the ride is even more entertaining than we remembered. Featuring multiple realistic Jack Sparrows, crazy IMAX-size video screens, and many other neat tricks. Next we wandered through the Alice in Wonderland maze, which was way more 2010 Johnnie Depp than 1951 animation. There were definitely mushrooms scattered about the garden and some pretty mad hats.

By around two in the afternoon, we had spent over five hours in the park and done pretty much everything we had hoped to before closing time. It was amazing to have been there on a chilly weekday in late winter because lines were short and we got to experience so much. We stepped just outside of the park to Mickey Avenue and had a very American lunch at Wolfgang Puck's. We talked about what else we might want to do in the next five or six hours before the park closed and our escapist adventure would have to come to an end. We had originally planned on staying the whole day but we were tiring and had already done so much. 

Thankfully lunch rejuvenated us and we were ready to ride the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, get dizzy in the Hunny pots, check out the Princess's castle (all princesses, not just Cinderella's), and take a boat trip through the Crystal Grotto.  Then, after some initial hesitation, we attended the Frozen Sing-Along, which of course was in Mandarin. We sat in the back and expected to duck out if it felt too weird, but the music was the same and we were enchanted watching young children possessed by the Princess Elsa. We sang along in English to each other and enjoyed the short show tremendously. At the very end of the show the actor playing Princess Anna said "Bye-Bye Shway-Bao!", which we have searched for but cannot figure out the meaning of. We are pretty sure it is a reference to the goofy snowman Olaf, but if anyone reading this knows what this means please write us. We've been saying "Bye-Bye Shway-Bao!" to each other ever since we left the park and expect it will be in our repertoire for years to come.

With only a few hours left and both the light and our energy quickly fading, we decided to head back to Tomorrowland, where we re-fought aliens on Buzz Lightyear and then rode Tron twice more. We decided to wait so we could sit in front and Disney even snapped the above picture of our last ride of the day. We were absolutely, gloriously, exhausted by seven o'clock but had spent a magical ten hours playing childishly, telling each other about our childhoods, and watching people of all ages behave like (mostly good) children; we were sure we were being people-watched back in kind. 

While we went to escape Shanghai, we didn't leave the city boundary but it didn't matter. Of the many observations on culture we had this day we decided that Disney is for every person, of all ages and races. You can't spell the words 'child' or 'children' without an 'i', and we were thankful that Walt Disney's creations had made it to this far-side of the world, so we could revel in the magic of it all.

Single Beers in Shanghai

Sunday night, two ex-pats in Shanghai are bored and without many local friends. There’s no American football on and even if there was, we’d have had to wait until one o’clock Monday morning to watch it. SO, instead, we found Dean’s Bottle Shop, specializing in American (and Canadian) microbrews. While we walked past many Shanghaiese shops, we knew we had found our mark when we found multiple large format bottles of Rogue Brewing. Upon entering they had a refrigerator adorned with Rogue, at least five of their brews, and a nice selection of others. While they were out of Rogue’s 7 Hop IPA on tap, they did have their 8 Hop IPA, which Katy enjoyed. I enjoyed a few Barking Squirrel Lagers, from Hop City, the Canadian brewers. I was tempted to enjoy a six-pack of Moose Head Lager, reminiscent of our college days in Maine, but we haven’t seen beer sold in six-packs here yet, so I decided to go for the fancier, more refined lager.

Once we cheers’d each other and started to take in our surroundings I realized how cool a place we were in. There was an electronic dart board where some locals and/or employees were throwing darts; a large TV with the local sports station on; and the computer monitor playing American music videos and blasting them through the speakers. We heard many of our favorites, Adam Levine, Meghan Trainer, Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, and then what seemed to be a Katy Perry marathon. Sure the free peanuts were spicy and there was a creepy white cat roaming around, but we drank our fill and the cat turned out to be friendly.

We had planned on having margaritas and quesadillas that night to make ourselves feel at home, but instead Katy found the Boxing Cat Brewery close by and we went in for some more suds and some proper bar fare. I was not disappointed with USDA short ribs and sweet potato fries, we both had salads and shared a pretty decent IPA. Things were going swell and we almost could have been in America until I had to go to the bathroom. There I ran into a large, drunk, aggressive Swedish fellow who probably was hanging out in the bathroom for too long. Luckily I thought I was in America, told  him to “fuck off” and we concluded our night by walking home in the rain, buying cheap flowers, and almost forgetting that we are halfway around the world.

Our home is as much like New York’s Fifth Avenue as anywhere I’ve ever been in the world (except of course Fifth Avenue) and the stores are almost identical: we live above an Apple Store, across from Dolce & Gabbana, Victoria’s Secret just opened across the street and Burberry, Tesla and Dior are all within spitting distance from our 32^nd floor bedroom window. It’s not quite the same once you actually leave the apartment because we are definitely not in America anymore, but it’s strange how a large affluent city on the other side of the world is more similar than most things in between.

There are plenty of differences; if anything, everything is the same except with a few slight variations.  But we are learning to make this place our home, the local supermarket is beautiful and expensive, with apples from Washington State and Avocados from Mexico. We found Snyder’s pretzels and Nature Valley granola bars. On Saturday we found a grocery store called Hunter Gatherer, which specializes in farm to store produce and even has a chain back home in Portland, Oregon. It’s not our home, but we are learning to make it ours and make it work for us. We are treating ourselves tomorrow to a guilty pleasure of home, but that is for another blog post . . .

Pit Stop Down Under to Shanghai

Sometimes the adventure you find is not the adventure you sought, but the adventure you needed. When I planned on heading to Australia I was planning on getting serious hands-on experience in vineyards, travelling the country like a hard working Robert Parker and getting to know the lay of the land. I have been passionate about wine since I started working in restaurants right out of college. When I worked at Sussex Wines near Grand Central I was fortunate enough to taste almost 3,000 wines in 18 months. When my lady Katy and I moved to Oregon, just a few miles north of the Willamette Valley, I immediately applied for a job to work the harvest. My first wine harvest the Dundee Hills AVA was epic, adventurous and exhausting; I am already looking forward to the next one.

When I got to Australia I didn't quite have the drive I left America with and wine seemed inappropriate for the hot weather. I found myself staying by St. Kilda beach in Melbourne, in a hostel filled with travelers about my age, who were keen on discussing anything and everything. I made sure to steer the conversations clear of whom I voted for and what was going on in America. I repeatedly said: "if it's American news I don't want to know about it, unless they closed the border to Australia and I'm stuck here - in which case the next round is on me." After about a week or so of getting sun-burnt, drinking bad beer and speaking socialism, I was ready to move on. I did manage to visit Melbourne Botanical Gardens, attend a massive beach-side drum circle and see the world's smallest penguins, but the vineyards weren’t calling, my beautiful wife was.

I abandoned my original plans a few days ago and flew to Shanghai. Katy picked me up from the airport. We sped toward the city on the world's only maglev train - which banked surprisingly steeply for travelling at 300 kilometers per hour - then hopped a taxi to the apartment Nike is supplying Katy for the next six months. After dropping off my bag we were out on the street, looking for a bite to eat and upon sitting down I realized I wasn't in English-speaking AussieLand anymore. There was English on the menu but asking questions and understanding the answers was difficult. I haven’t traveled outside English-friendly territory before and this was a new challenge for me.

When I was a film student in college, Lost in Translation was one of my favorite films. It's based Tokyo and not Shanghai, but the idea of being somewhere incredibly modern, wealthy and fun, but having no one to speak to, has always stuck with me. While not being able to converse easily is isolating and difficult, I was surprised by how well many people speak English and how many things felt familiar. In some ways it seems that growing up in New York is good preparation for moving to Shanghai: another large, affluent city. I feel somewhat more at home than I did when we moved to Beaverton, Oregon in August. Obviously I don’t know anyone, don’t speak the language and am only here to be with my wife, but people’s lives are similar to those of New Yorkers. You know, the same, but different.

While I was nervous about not having a concrete plan when I went to Australia, I am incredibly thankful now that I did not have a plan. Had I had a plan I probably wouldn't be here right now with Katy; I might have made promises to employers, paid for housing/transportation up front, or limited myself to what I had told myself I was going to do. I knew I was up for an adventure and so instead of planning what I was going to do, I just let it happen – and now I’m here in Shanghai.

Katy will start work in about a week and then for however long I stay I will find myself with largely unstructured weeks. While in Shanghai I do hope to eat new and interesting foods, visit tea houses, learn Tai Chi, but mostly explore the city as much as possible in an adventurous way. I am halfway through reading Lonely Planet's Guide to Shanghai and hope to get to know the tourist spots and local gems as thoroughly as one might in a city of over 20 million people in only a few short months. I expect I will have plenty to keep me busy, but if you know anyone who lives (or has lived) in Shanghai please introduce us.

I know we’ll be back in Oregon by September and I expect to work the wine harvest in the Dundee Hills again, but until then stay tuned because even I don’t know where my adventures will lead me next and that’s pretty exciting.

The Amazing Race (aka Shanghai errands)

When I landed in Shanghai on Wednesday I had been up for nearly 24 hours and couldn't wait to get through customs, find the driver sent by my apartment, and into my apartment for the first time.  Thursday morning, I was up before 5a due to the time difference and eager to pick out some clean clothes to wear to a visa appointment that morning.  Because I had so much time, I ended up unpacking almost all of my suitcases and was pleasantly surprised to find that there is enough room in the apartment for everything to have it's own place.

What almost brought me to tears (in my emotionally delicate, jet-lagged state) was that the glass and frames were broken on two pieces of art near and dear to my heart.  One was a picture Simon took of us in 2009 for a photo class project to take photos that you might take "on your wedding day", and one was a drawing/painting Parissa made us as a wedding present.

Determined to keep busy and to fix the problem right away, I decided that I would find myself a frame shop where I could buy a new picture frame and restore these two pieces to their former glory.  That was when I encountered the first problem: there is no Yelp in China.  Or at least, there is no English language version.  You can't just Google "frame shop Shanghai" and come up with anything, because a) Google is not available for most Chinese citizens and b) the parts of the internet that know where the frame shops are are all in Chinese, not in English.  Undaunted, I continued searching, tried expat-oriented Shanghai websites, and was almost out of luck until I found a Google places result for "王斌相框."  I translated that back into English and it said "Wang Bin photo frame", so I figured I'd give it a shot.  

Thursday afternoon, I loaded up the walking directions on my phone and started towards the frame shop.  I got lost in a few back alleys in Shanghai and got more than a few quizzical looks from locals wondering what I was doing poking around their houses but eventually I found a large office building, with a large art store on the main floor.  I walked in and encountered problem #2: I don't speak Chinese, and the store owner didn’t speak English.  I was pretty sure I could get through this one with some creativity though, so I pulled out the broken frames from my backpack and pointed at them.  He quickly realized what I was looking for and shook his head, indicating he doesn’t make or fix frames there. 

Through some form of Google Translate and a lot of hand gestures, I managed to ask him if he knew where I could get a new frame.  He thought for a while and then remembered one, but he couldn’t tell me the name of it.  He did draw me a map, with a few roads and some Chinese characters.  It took more hand gestures to confirm which way was north on the map, and which was the start and which was the end.  Google had stopped working even for me at that point, but I figured I might as well try to follow the map and see what happened.

The treasure map... bottom right is where I drew a frame to confirm that's where I was going.  I still don't know what the characters on the left mean.

So I set off from the store and almost got lost right away due to a big wall I took for a street.  Eventually, I reached an intersection and was able to match the Chinese characters he drew to the characters on the map, so I knew I was going the right way.  A few more LONG minutes later, I reached a store smaller than my bedroom that had many frame options on the wall and three employees watching South Korean soap operas.  I said hello in Chinese (one of two words I know) and started all over again with the pointing and gesturing.  I think they thought I was a little crazy trying to do this without speaking any Chinese, and they aren’t wrong about that.  But with a little luck and patience, I was able to pick out two custom frames for ~$30.

When I left the store on Thursday, they said the frames would be ready Friday but I didn’t get a call from them to confirm.  I thought it might be because they thought I was crazy, or maybe because they couldn’t dial an international number.  I asked Stan (a Chinese colleague) to call them for me and he confirmed the frames were ready.  Today, I returned to my apartment triumphantly with two new picture frames for the artwork I brought with me.  On the way home, I stumbled into a beautiful, historic market with all types of stalls and much more traditional/authentic than the souvenir markets I’m used to in Ecuador/Colombia/Tanzania.  I picked up some sunflowers for the apartment to treat myself for a job well done.

Mission accomplished!

I'm still very new at living in Shanghai, and this small task made me feel like I was competing on the Amazing Race rather than running an everyday errand.  Still, little wins like a new picture frame or a vase of flowers are very worth celebrating I think.

Now if I could only learn the language...

-Katy