OSHA? Bah!

Subtitle: You're Not in Kansas Anymore

We live in an island nation in the tropics. 

This makes for a large and hungry mosquito population.  Not necessarily larger or hungrier than, say, Coastal Louisiana or Key West, but still substantial.

We like to spend time outdoors, and we have a nice yard and pool in which to do it, so luckily our landlord provides free fogging for the mosquito problem.  Mosquitoes here don't carry malaria which is a nice change from Africa, and they don't carry West Nile which is a nice change from Houston, but they do carry Dengue and we don't really want it. 

We did our best to ensure that the fogging stuff he uses is not any more toxic than the stuff they load on the trucks and drive around neighborhoods in the U.S. and we now get fogged every first Tuesday of the month.

The guy who does it is so very nice and cheerful.

Every month he comes to the house, every month the security guard informs me he is here and asks permission to let him do his job. I haven't figured out why he needs permission every single time and abstract discussions are still beyond my language skills, so I just smile and say "Baiklah".

Anyway, he comes and puts on his 'safety equipment' and fires up his fogger, which sounds like a marine engine, out of water, with a glass pack.

Without further comment, I provide photographic documentation for your horror and amusement.

 

 Now, lest you think we trust our entire mosquito well being to Mr. Safety Fogger, think again!  

We also have Mosquito Tennis Racquets.

They plug into the wall and once they are charged up, you flip a switch and swing them randomly through the air and when they come in contact with anything solid-ish, they SNAP and fry it to bits.  

When we first got them, my Scale Model accidentally grabbed it by the business end and got SNAPPED for his trouble.  

He is more careful now.  

We got one for the security guards too, and the sound of SNAP...SNAP SNAP SNAP...SNAPPITY SNAP! can be heard from the garage at irregular intervals depending on the humidity and boredom levels out there.

 

We rarely have mosquitoes indoors, but sometimes we get a crop and then it's normal to see one of us reading or watching TV while occasionally sweeping the air around us with a charged up racquet. 

And it wouldn't be any fun without a photo of my scale model and our wiseacre kid holding two of our magic bug snappers.  

[p.s. College student for sale- take over payments.  :-)]

Lombok Idyll

Thanks to a mid week holiday, we made a long weekend in Lombok last week. 

As you, I'm sure, know by now, Indonesia is a nation of islands.  We live on Java, Sumatra is just north and west of us, Borneo is due north and Bali is due east.  


Just east of Bali is Lombok Island.  

Here's a map to help: 

You will have to click it to make it bigger.  Bali is the island east of Java where the city of Denpasar (on map) is shown.  Lombok is the island just east with no cities noted. 

Fun geography fact: Lombok is the eastern side of the Wallace line.  The Wallace line was noted by Alfred Wallace in the mid-1800s, and separates the Asiatic and Australasian ecozones.  

It's a lot more complicated than that, but the cool part for the Engineer and the English major, is that the line runs smack between Bali and Lombok which are separated by only 20 miles.   So you can vacation in Bali, then go 20 miles east and be in a whole new ecozone with all different birds and animals and even sea life.  Whoot.


And that's all the mind expanding info I have for you.  


Our purpose on this trip was to let Coop get more diving in and to sit on our ex-pat fannies and watch the sun move across the sky.  

We were successful on both counts.  

On one of our five days, we went with Coop on the dive boat to the Gili Islands to snorkle.  The Gilis are tiny little islands off the north coast of Lombok with some really nice diving sites.  Ted and I just snorkled off the beach while Coop headed out to deep water.  


Here's a few of our pictures...

Clam lips.  The clam itself is encased in the rock.

Idolfish (Gill from Finding Nemo)

 

There.  That expanded your mind a little bit, right?  Because I'm betting you didn't know what kind of fish Gill was.  I had to look it up.  :-)

Our hotel was the stuff dreams are made of.  Peaceful, relaxing, out of the way, and we are trying to keep it on the downlow.  

Lombok is, in contrast to Bali, a quiet, rural, natural place and we are hoping it stays that way. 

We had an infinity pool looking out over the ocean, and my scale model agreed to demonstrate proper use of said pool...

When the sun went down, we had front row seats of Mt. Agung in Bali.  It hasn't erupted since 1964, but like all volcanoes on these islands, the next eruption is anytime.  

So in this pic you have Mt. Agung in 2011- could be a collector's item next time it blows and the landscape changes.  

Or not.                           

  In any case, it's a nice picture.  Click it bigger for good effect.

Durian 101

What, you may ask, is this?  

It's Durian on the stem.

It's fruit.  It's from Indonesia.

People from Malaysia and the Philippines will tell you it's native to their countries.  Botanists seem to agree that it's most likely native to Borneo (part of Indonesia).  Why anyone would want to fight over ownership of this fruit is beyond me, but we're going to give it to Indonesia FTW out of loyalty to our current home.

And it's the most controversial fruit we have ever come across.

Durian (der-ee-en).  They are about as big as your head, but they come in many sizes from baby heads to watermelon size.

They grow in trees, and people who work in Durian orchards wear hard hats.  The fruit is heavy and spiky and hard, and while a falling coconut will give you a headache and a lump, a falling Durian will probably send you to the hospital.

So anyway.  We live in a city nicknamed "The Big Durian" by the expats who have lived here since the 1600s.  The meaning concerns the love/hate relationship many have to this city and the fruit.

And there's the issue.  To begin with, Durian smells.  And I'm not talking about mild halitosis, or some whiffs of stinky feet.

I'm talking pervasive, rotten-sweet, sharp, thick fruit flavored toe jam.

It's really, really bad smelling.  Really.

Durian has a season, beginning in June.  And although we have seen it in stores all year, beginning in June it shows up in all the stores sitting on ice in styrofoam trays minus its thorny skin, wrapped in plastic wrap.

Plastic wrap does nothing to slow the spread of Durian smell.  So when you walk through the produce department of local stores right now, all you can smell is ...

... well, think about the gym socks you forgot in the bottom of your bag when you went away for the holidays, but now you're home and just opened the bag again. 

Some people say it's more like rotten onions.  Others claim it's like skunk spray.  Or vomit.

My son is of the vomit school of thought.  Actually he thinks it's more like vomit on rotten gym socks.  So you can imagine the drama when we go to the grocery store and spend more than two minutes in the produce department.

He is not a fan.

So, why, you may further ask, do people eat it?

Well, the local lore says that it tastes way better than it smells. That once you taste it, you will never believe you've lived this long without it.

This is one of those times when we wonder who was the first poor slob to try it?  Must have been one starving castaway with no ship mates to slay and BBQ, because I think I would have tried just about anything on my island before giving Durian a go.

But.  We love to go new places, see new things, try new foods, and it hardly seems sporting to move to a city called the Big Durian and never try the fruit because it smells bad.

Right?

Tell it to my kid.

We stopped at the ice table full of Durian fruit trays.  We poked them (they are squishy inside the hard thorny skin and we have seen people who know what they are doing poke them).  We found the smallest package they had for RPH42,000 (about $4.75).   It's expensive- think Avocadoes in Illinois in winter. If it costs a lot it MUST be good, right?

We put the Durian in our basket.

My kid says, "I'm not eating that."

He is behind me, and I just smile.

We finish our grocery shopping and wheel our cart to the checkout.  No one within 10 feet has any doubt we are buying Durian.

We load the groceries in the car, all camouflaged in their plastic sacks.  Our driver has no doubt we have bought Durian.

We start the 45 minute ride home.

After 15 minutes, Coop and I, being closest to the groceries, are holding little cans of car deoderant in Jasmine flavor just under our chins.  It's working.  Ted says, "I can smell it a little up here."

Too bad.  We are out of car deoderant cans.

Finally we arrive home.  I go into the pantry and grab a ziploc bag with a double zip and put the Durian package, wrapped in the plastic grocery sack, inside and seal it.  Phew!  It worked.

I put the Durian in the fridge, on the theory that old gym socks taste better very cold.

Next day, the fridge is starting to smell suspicious.  So I get out the Durian and tell my guys it's time.

My kid says, "I'm not eating that."

I smile again.

I open the package, get three dessert forks, and everyone loads up a healthy forkful.  Even my kid, to whom I have given The Look, something he is powerless to resist.

We agree to eat on three.

Now remember, Durian fruit is mushy.  You could think of it as rotten, but we prefer to think of it as pudding.  So I reminded everyone to think of it as pudding.  It's even the right color for vanilla custard.

We eat, we chew, we swallow.


OMG.

Wait. It's not that bad.

Except it's most certainly not good.  Mostly it's just Not a Good Idea.

It certainly does taste better than it smells, but that's like saying a headache is better than brain surgery.  Why would you want either???

Our description: tastes like cantaloupe that was best three days ago, plus banana, plus (Ted) grass, (Cooper) tortilla, (me) egg, and a smidgen of toe jam.

We can see how some folks like it.  We can see why most folks don't.

But now we were stuck with most of a tray of Durian, a fruit you don't just toss in the trash. And we knew that Ziplocs were only a temporary solution.

So Ted and I troop out to the garage where Sanip (security) and Ivan (driver) are, telling them we tried Durian, are not big fans, and would either or both of them like some?

They both start laughing really hard and Ivan says, "Security likes Durian!" and then they crack up again.

We get the joke but we are desperate to get rid of this stuff- it's like the goo in The Cat in the Hat.

Thankfully, Ivan says he would, actually, like it.  And we gratefully put it on the table in the garage and beat a retreat into the house where we fill the air with Glade Fresh Linen scent.

We tried it, we lived to tell the tale, we will NOT be going to the Durian festival where they have Durian honey, Durian ice cream, Durian paste, and Durian crepes...

Sittin' Safari...

There is a Safari park south of Jakarta about 90 minutes away... we have looked at it repeatedly in our guide books and thought, 

"Really?  A safari park?  After actually being on safari?  After actually living in Africa for years?"

We went to the Houston Zoo once after returning from Africa and we were, to put it kindly, underwhelmed.  It was just anti-climactic and a little sad.  

Actually a lot sad, given that we had seen so many of the animals in the wild and knew how terribly different it was from their captive lives...

But, ultimately we couldn't resist, not having much opportunity to see wildlife in a city of 20 million and having an even bigger negative response to the idea of the Jakarta Zoo. 

Plus, Cooper is home for the summer and it's time to do goofy things!

So we loaded up the van and told Ivan, our driver, "Taman Safari, tolong!" and off we went into the countryside to be driven through a wildlife park where the animals would hang out and watch us as we drove slowly through their small Serengeti.  

And it was pretty cool.  

So nanny nanny boo boo on us and our safari pretensions.  

Not everything has to be 'authentic'- god knows huge chunks of our lives are not. 

The place is very large and they charge about 15 bucks to get in (as usual in Indonesia, they count the car, they count the people and they charge by nationality).  

All the way up the hill to the park we saw people selling veggies by the roadside, which isn't remarkable, 

but most of them were selling carrots by the bunch, which was.  

At one point Ivan asked if I wanted carrots. 

I said no, thinking that was a pretty dumb question, while wondering if the carrots of this area were somehow special.  I can get carrots (and everything else for sale on the roadside) in Jakarta, and that wasn't what we were on this trip for...

Then as we enter the park, I'm looking around for maybe some station that sells food for us to give the animals, and tell Ted and Coop to check too.  

They both burst out laughing and start mocking me for not buying carrots on the road- what did I think Ivan asked me if I wanted some for?  

Well, not for the animals!  Sheesh!  There were no signs, no indication that they were Safari carrots!  What am I a mind reader?  

Again they burst out laughing and mocked me worse.  What a dope!  Why on Earth did I think they had all those freakin' carrots every twenty feet?

Well, sez I, NOT for the animals.  You aren't even allowed to feed them, sez I, pointing to a sign that has just come into view:

DO NOT FEED THE WILDLIFE!...

And we glide quietly into the enclosed area behind a line of cars.

At that moment the windows of at least four cars ahead of us slide down and every one of them sprouts at least two arms waving bunches of carrots as we roll into an area full of giraffes and hippopatomusses just waiting for us and our bounty of veggies.  

Except we don't have any because I'm as dumb as a stump and my traveling companions are more interested in laughing at me than making sure we have goodies to offer our captive wild friends. 

Fine.

We won't feed the animals.  

We will be the only car in the park following the rules.  So there.  

And we will fool as many animals as we can into thinking we actually have carrots so they will come close to the car.   

At one point, Coop rolled down his window to get a photo of a hippo in the water right next to the car.  

As the window went down, the hippo opened his mouth wide to accept the expected carrots.  

Nothing.  

Hippo mouth closes, hippo gives us the hairy eyeball, and we tell Ivan to move along before we become a Jakarta Metro headline.  

The park has "airlocks" you drive through to separate the predators from the prey, and there are rules about not rolling down your window in the Prey area, for obvious reasons.  

But we have heavily tinted windows!

So I got yelled at (actually whistled at) by the guy in the zebra painted jeep stationed inside the killer animal airlock just for scofflaws like me (I wanted to tell him at least I wasn't FEEDING them!), but I still managed to snap a few good tint-less shots of the top of the food chain animals.  

It's not like the guy was gonna jump out of his jeep to come and ticket me.  There were maneaters on the loose!

Anyway, it was a hoot.  We had a good time- even at the part of the park that comes after the animals... the part where the junk stores and carnival food and carnival rides are. 

I had my scale model pose in mortal danger with a cement hippo to show you what would have happened to us if Ivan hadn't driven away after the No Carrot Episode...

What follows are representative pictures of the sorts of things we saw...

I was able to touch (probably foolishly) many of the animals.

As I took this, I hear from my brave boys: "Take it quick before he spits on us!"

Awwww. Note the smaller Indian elephant ears.

Kind of a lame picture except we were RIGHT THERE!

Tourists are boring.  But tasty.

South side of Westbound Rhino...keep moving folks...rely on his notoriously bad eyesight.

So that was the Taman Safari on Java, Indonesia.  

We aren't original, or even very special sometimes, but we do have fun!

Kebun Raya Bogor

Jakarta is such a huge sprawl of cement and buildings with tiny little parks scattered around, it's easy to forget that most of Indonesia, including our island of Java, is chock full of nature.  

About 70 miles south of Jakarta is Bogor, which the Dutch colonials discovered was cooler and cleaner than Jakarta and scurried down there to build themselves some vacation homes.  A couple hundred years haven't really been kind to a lot of the places the Dutch colonials "discovered", so Bogor feels neither cleaner nor cooler, but that's another story...

In any case, Bogor contains a really swell botanical garden, started by the aforementioned Dutch.  

It's almost 200 acres of grass, trees, water, and flowers, and we are told that it's a terrific place for botanists.  Since between the two of us we can just about tell the difference between a palm tree and a pine tree, Ted and I have just accepted that it's an even sweller place for people who know what they're looking at.

Kebun Raya is Indonesian for Botanical Garden, but the literal translation is "Great Garden", since raya can be used for many things, among them streets (Kemang Raya is a large, busy street near our house and raya translates more like "highway" although that is a spectacularly ambitious name for a two or three lane commercial roadway). But Kebun always means garden (or farm or something growing), and the words are pronounced keh-boon rye-uh. 

And now you know more Bahasa Indonesia.

We got a fairly early start on the day, for us, but circumstances conspired to keep us from spending nearly enough time in the gardens.  Traffic was a little worse than usual getting down there (we thought maybe it was holiday related, but it turns out it was Annoying Singing Twerp related- unbeknownst to us, Justin Bieber was appearing in a venue between Jakarta and Bogor that day- and it took us more than twice as long to get there and home as a result.)

Anyway, we got to Bogor about an hour after we had hoped to, and then Ivan, our driver, got lost a little bit.  We spent way too much time touring Bogor and its environs until Ivan sheepishly said "Sorry Pak, saya berbalik."  He needed to u-turn and go back a fairly long way in fairly heavy traffic.  

Oh well.  We've never been to Bogor, so we continued to enjoy the sights out of the windows, telling ourselves that if we had driven ourselves, the 200 acres of nature in the city center would have eluded us, too.  Bigger things have eluded us way too many times, so we tend to be very calm about Ivan's 'shortcuts'.  

So.  We finally get to the gardens, get in the gates, pay for all three of us plus the car, and it's already 12:30 (we left the house at 9).  Ted and I are starving, which basically means we are awake, so we wander off in search of the single restaurant located in the park.  After hiking up a driveway with a 15% incline (actually I'm sure it was more, but Ted scoffs), we plopped ourselves down at a terrace table and ordered some food and water.  

This is the view from our table...

...which was very nice.  

And a good thing it was too, since after our very pleasant waitress took our order and disappeared, she reappeared to tell Ted that his salad choice was no longer available, but she brought the menu back to help him out.  

He opened the menu to the salad page and pointed to a different salad.  

Our waitress managed a sincerely sad face and pronounced it "habis" (hah-bee-s).  

That's Indonesian for "all gone".  

She cheerfully tapped each salad entry except the fruit salad, saying "habis" each time until her silly, deluded patron agreed that perhaps he would like... the fruit salad.  Problem solved.  

Until she came back and told me that my chicken breast sandwich would come with chicken breast and sandwich bread, but no tomato, no lettuce, no nothing.  I agreed to the new sandwich description and she disappeared again.  

Some time later she arrived with our cold bottles of water, and we spent the next half hour watching the cold condense on the bottles and then run off onto the table.  

A full hour after we ordered, our food arrived.  My sandwich fairly bristled with lettuce and tomatoes.  

I just smiled and thanked her.  

And it was a delicious sandwich.  

Approximately halfway through our sandwiches, the fruit salads arrived (I had ordered one from the beginning so Ted was just catching up when he ordered his).  

Also delicious.  

And the water was still a little colder than the air...

Anyway- it was hardly the stuff of which tragic operas are made.  Lunch was a little slow- no big deal.  

Except.   

Except we left the house mid morning, we hit weird traffic thanks to the Annoying Singing Twerp, and Ivan got good and lost.  

That all added up to a very late start exploring our 200 acre natural wonderland.  But them's the breaks, so we headed down the trail, rested and ready. 

After we walked off the manicured lawn in front of the restaurant, we were on this roadway...

And it didn't take us long to find this tree,

(scale model in top right corner)

Or this tree,

(scale model lower center)

(closer shot of my scale model and his tree)

These were just two of the really cool trees we know are all over the gardens, but we didn't get to them so you will have to wait to see them, just as we do.  Our delays become your delays.  

But we did see some other good stuff.

I am fond of irises.  My Mom used to grow them, and we had spectacular purple blossoms every spring with the occasional white renegade thrown in.  But I have never seen orange and yellow, until now.  

Is that not gorgeous?  

And if you are a gardener or botanist or other smarty pants type person and decide this is not an Iris, I don't care.  The leaves look like Iris leaves, the flowers look like Iris flowers, and I don't care to be confused by stupid facts, so don't even try.  

Onward.

The Ciliwung (chill-i-woong) River runs through Bogor and the Gardens.  This is the river that runs through Jakarta and into the ocean.  It starts at Puncak (a little farther on from Bogor) and flows steadily getting filthier and more clogged with crap (both literal and figurative) as it goes.  

I had hoped that it would be a little nicer closer to the source, but no such luck.  

Just try to ignore the color (I'm sure some of it is naturally occurring mud) and don't look too closely for piles of trash and detritus caught on snags (I tried to find a shot with as little garbage in it as possible)...

I am so fond of water, and keep finding myself living in places where oceans and lakes and rivers are used as toilets and garbage disposals.  It makes me sad, especially since there is a finite amount of stuff the oceans can absorb.  But as we walk along, guests in a country not our own, do we chastise local residents when we see them unwrap an ice cream bar and blithely drop the paper over the edge of the river bank?  

I don't think it would make them stop littering, I just think it would make them dislike western tourists. 

But as Ted and I stood and bellyached to each other about the terrible condition of the river, we remembered the same problems in Africa and felt small and helpless.

It bears more thinking about, for sure. 

In any case, we did enjoy our tramp through the gardens, even when it started to sprinkle a little bit.  

We were prepared for this, because Bogor gets about 65 inches of rain a year and it rains more than 250 days a year, hence the lush botanical gardens.  

But we weren't prepared enough to dry off if we spent the afternoon slogging through puddles etc. so we started making our way back to the car as the rain steadily picked up speed and volume.  

And thunder.  

We were glad we came, but the thundery rain was kind of the last clue that perhaps we should cut our losses and live to fight another day.  

We stopped on the way out to buy two beach balls with the Kebun Raya logo and location info printed on them (for one dollar apiece), and to take pictures of the deer who populate the lawns in front of the Presidential Palace (a place you cannot visit in groups of less than ten, and never with children).  

There are literally hundreds of them, and full grown deer with spots are new for me, so that was fun.  People feed them carrots and they just live on this big fat lawn in front of the Istana (Indonesian for "palace"- again, not so much.  But it is a real nice, real big white house used as a summer home by Dutch governors and then by the first President of Indonesia.  Maybe someday if we are a group of ten with no children, we will go see it).

So we hit the road in the rain and spent almost three hours trying to get home (note to self: check concert schedule at SICC before going to Bogor again) and we figure we got around to maybe 20 acres of the Kebun Raya.  

Maybe.  

If you count the stuff we could see without actually walking to it. 

Good thing Bogor is close to home so we can try this again.

Travelogues 1.2

Finally, after nine days, a couple thousand miles and a temperature drop of 40 degrees fahrenheit, we reached Shanghai, and we said goodbye to our ship and wandered out into a country with a language we didn't speak, an alphabet we couldn't read, no idea of where we were, and nothing to help us out but a piece of paper printed with the name and address of our hotel in Chinese.

Here we are in Shanghai, China.

You are not supposed to take pictures of Red Army soldiers.

Even super bored ones who are assigned to watch the ship.

So I absolutely didn't take this picture.

But now you know what Red Army soldiers look like when they are given the boring duty of making sure no one sneaks off a ship to seek asylum in a communist country.

Our guard notwithstanding, the process was fairly well organized- all along our path from the gangway to the outside world (which was about 500 yards through a spanking new terminal with nothing in it but walls and high windows) we were greeted every 20 feet or so by a smiling Chinese girl who said either "Ni Hao" or "Welcome to China", depending on if she had gone to her English lesson or not.

We emerged into foggy white sunlight, squinting, and stopped in a line of folks waiting for a taxi.

The system went like this:

Wait your turn.

Tell the nice lady where you are going.

Wait for the nice lady to tell the next taxi in line where you are going while some other people start loading your luggage in the trunk.

Get in.

Drive away from the ship and everyone you know who speaks English.

Well.  You know us.  If there is a more interesting/scary/stupid way to do things, we'll be in the middle of it.

We got to the front of the line, handed the nice lady our paper and started to watch the loading of our things in the trunk.

But then our attention was returned to the nice lady because the cab driver was shaking his head and telling her lots of things in rapid Chinese.

She spoke back.

He started speaking loud rapid Chinese.

She told the other people to take our things out of the trunk.

The loud rapid Chinese driver pulled up about ten feet and the nice lady went to the cab behind him and showed him our paper.

While the nice lady was talking to the next cab, a big scary lady came to us and poked me in the chest while pointing to the first cab.  Ted and I both pointed to the nice lady and our paper.

Big scary lady marched back to the nice lady and they spoke in rapid Chinese.  Big scary lady took our paper, went to the first cab, grabbing Ted's arm as she passed and motioned for me and the other people to follow and bring the luggage.

When big scary lady got to the cab driver, she began their conversation by yelling at him hard enough to make a vein pop out on her forehead.  He yelled back.  She yelled louder and got right up in his face which made him stop for a second and just stare at her.

While he did this, she yelled at the other people to put our things in the trunk of the still staring cab driver.

Then he started yelling at her with little spits coming out of his mouth.

At this point, big scary lady began screeching at him in what even we could tell were epithets and swear words.  He escalated his retorts and just before they actually came to blows, two policemen showed up and grabbed them both by the arms and pulled them apart.

One policeman told the cab driver to get in his cab, and everybody else told us to get in too.

Uh.  No?

We don't want to.

Cab driver mad.

And with a final desperate look at each other (where are the grown ups when you need them????) we both obediently walked to the cab and got in the car.

Our cab driver peels out as Ted and I sit in the back seat looking at each other, quietly wondering what the hell just happened and expecting at this point to be Shanghai'ed in Shanghai.

Welcome to China!

So.  If you know anything about Asian culture, you will know that keeping harmony and saving face are two big components.  Public screeching, in full view of western visitors is really really out of character.

They lost face, they made us lose face. 

The harmony was totally shot to hell.

And now, we were in a cab with an angry man, taking us very fast to who knows where.  We quickly and quietly fastened our seat belts.

Finally, as we were weaving our way along an elevated freeway, we snapped out of it enough to realize that this guy could drive us to Beijing and we'd never know the difference.  We were already up to about 45 RMB ($7) and saw nothing resembling the Huangpo River or a hotel of any kind, let alone our hotel.

So Ted dialed the hotel on his phone and asked them to make sure our driver knew where they were located and then handed the phone to the driver.  We knew this was a little risky- it was making him lose face, but we figured he didn't care about our face and we were more interested in him knowing we had a quad band phone with international roaming if he had any kooky ideas about selling us into middle aged slavery.

He spoke to the nice hotel lady for about thirty seconds before he started yelling at HER, too!

We took the phone back and asked the nice hotel lady what to do.  She said to get his driver number.  We thanked her and hung up.

So now we have his driver number to give to the people he sells us to.

Now what?

There was a phone number on the back of the seat that said in English:

"If you have trouble communicating with your driver, please call this number."

We looked around, looked at each other, looked at the meter (which was, by now 75 RMB or about $11.50) and dialed that number.

We explained to the person who answered that we were in a cab with an angry man who had been forced to take our fare by the big scary lady and who was randomly rolling his window down and shouting to other cab drivers and that we were not sure where we were but our driver would not communicate with our local contact and our fare was approaching large numbers without any hotels or commercial areas in sight.

He asked to speak with our driver.

Our driver proceeded to speak rapidly into the phone, going slower and slower every second until we were in the middle lane of our side of a six lane highway going about 20mph.

As cars whizzed past us, honking their horns, our driver, (big surprise here) yelled at the new people on the phone.  This guy was apparently a very angry man with many issues that were made worse by his worried western passengers.

He gave us the phone back and the people on the other end said, "Get his driver number." and hung up.

Okey doke.

We had committed his driver number to memory in case we ever saw anyone again who gave a holy crap and sat back in our seats, trying to figure out how we got to this point.

Another few miles, off the freeway, some random turns, some aimless wandering, and a couple of switchbacks later, the driver seemed to suddenly get specific. 

We made two hard right turns and entered the semi-circular driveway for the Hyatt Hotel.

Final fare: 89 RMB ($14.00).  Ted gave him exact change with no tip- an absolute first in our lives.  We collected our luggage, showed him our backs, and left the taxi, even as some hapless stooge jumped into the back seat.

We still have no idea what the deal was, and no clue about why all the drama.    But welcome to freaking China.

If I was our driver, maybe I would hate tourists too.  But why a fare to a destination in tourist central (where he had a new fare as soon as we got out) would make him so angry and defiant is beyond us.  Sometimes, bridging the cultural gap is just exhausting and we decide not to.

So.  Here we are.

Things have to get better from here.

Whoever watches over drunks, small children, and us was on duty that day, because we not only get our room at 9am we get a room on the 29th floor over looking the Huangpo river - only the bar and revolving restaurant are higher than us.

We retreat to our cushy western hotel room.  Flop on the bed and marvel at the fact that we are alive and free.

Finally, I drag myself off the bed and the first thing I see on the river is this...

Now, it's worth enjoying this shot just for the uniqueness of the boat- but juxtaposed against a spectacularly modern skyline, it only hints at what we know is true of the country we suddenly find ourselves adrift in.  China is a place of ancient and modern all cobbled together, co-existing in a strange and interesting way.

The skyline out our window looks like this:

 

Again, it was foggy. But this is part of the Shanghai skyline these days.  At night this city is lit up like Las Vegas.  

 

And the river is full of boats all lit up like Christmas trees...

 

At least the tourist boats.  We saw a whole bunch of ore barges and other boats blithely sailing up the river without any running lights or navigation lights at all.  Sailor beware!

We were definitely in ABCinAFC (Another Big City in Another Foreign Country), but we wanted to get out to walk "the bund".  

The bund is a major river walkway that covers a long portion of riverfront and contains nothing really, except some river boat cruise docks.  

Here's a shot of it as we started walking...

It's really very nice.  And very well used by people from... well, China.  We were a distinct minority in our western-ness. I was wearing a Northern Michigan University sweatshirt and that combined with our faces made us the target of a lot of stares, one or two smiles, and a couple of people eager to practice their English.

A great effort is made to keep the bund clean and tidy, and they have plants and flowers in lots of places.  I was particularly tickled by this flower bed-

so I stepped up on the cement that surrounds it to get a better shot of the whole thing.

Mistake.

A Chinese policeman with a crossing guard vest and a whistle started tweeting at me and motioning to Ted to get me off the wall.

Oops.

So I guess this qualifies as a semi-illegal picture.




We kept walking down the bund, trying not to look like the scofflaws we obviously were, and enjoying the sights and sounds and people.  Here's some random shots of signs:

No clue.  It explains something on the Bund, but...

Stop.

 

Click it bigger if you want to see some chinese with translations.

Street sign. 

All in all, it was a good chance to just sample some new places and get an idea of the possibilities.

We are planning a trip on our own back to the rural parts of Vietnam, but we need to think a little harder about whether we really want to deal with China again... even just dipping our toes into China proved to be something of an ordeal, so venturing into the countryside may not be the thing of which dream vacations are made. 

In any case, there is a big fat statue of Mao on the bund, and everyone was taking their picture with it.  So I set my scale model up in front of it and told him to flash a peace sign because that is what all the Chinese were doing. 

 

 So now we have a classic Chinese photo.  

We think. 

In the airport for our plane back to Jakarta, we finally found the crap stores we had been unable to find in Shanghai- the ones with the magnets and keychains and cheap tee-shirts.  

You know- all the stuff Made in China.  

And now we could relax and enjoy our flight home, knowing that at the last moment we had obtained authentic local goods. :-)

Zàijiàn!