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June 28, 2009

13 Days In Asia, Part 3

(If you're new to this thread, Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here. Enjoy!)

• I woke up at 6:30 AM on Tuesday morning and felt ... great. I seemed to have put the jet lag behind me. It's always a good sign when you don't wake up and feel like your eyelids have 2-lb fishline anchors attached to them.
• One of the nice side-effects of traveling so many time zones away is getting a break from Microsoft e-mail madness. By the time I get to the Beijing office at 8, it's 5 PM in Redmond and the work day is pretty much over. Thus, I can pull out my MacBook, plug in to the network, and slurp down all of the previous day's e-mail traffic in one big gulp. This is incredibly nice: rather than being randomized during the work day with the continuous ping-ping-ping of new e-mail, I can take time, read a whole thread at length, and respond (where needed) with a little more thought. Once the mail's been dealt with, the rest of my work day is free for creative work. It's heavenly.
• (The dirty little secret of e-mail, I've found, is that many problems solve themselves when you're not looking.)
• For our Tuesday night outing, we did dinner and shopping at a local touristy hutong (as a point of reference, this place is the home of Plastered, the t-shirt place where I got my "Kung Pao Chicken" tee the previous year). There was a lot of pedestrian traffic, and the place was wall-to-wall with Westerners checking out the stores and each other. Our group walked the length of the district in a slow stroll, just enjoying the evening and marveling at the spectrum of goods and people that happened by us. It made me wish that we had more of these kinds of districts in Seattle; I'd certainly frequent them.
• A note on air quality: as you've undoubtedly heard, it's not great. We take our clean air in the US (and especially Seattle) for granted, and it isn't until you visit someplace with a serious pollution problem that you see how different things can be. Nighttime brings it out, too - as the dusk rolls in and the streetlights come online, you can see the air in the light beams, all the particulate matter swirling and churning and, ultimately, winding up in your lungs.
• (By the end of the week, a few of us had an ongoing tickle/irritation in the backs of our throats from all the gunk in the atmosphere.)
• Side note: most, if not all, of the streetlights I saw on the trip are using compact fluorescent bulbs.
• One thing not to miss in Beijing: foot massage. Brooke and I went for massage on our last trip, and had raved about it enough that the group wanted to give it a go on Wednesday night. We hit this swanky, gleaming, high-tech place - think Gene Juarez, but two or three notches higher. Ten of us are shuffled into one of the rooms, plopped down in reclining wicker chairs, and summarily have our feet dunked into wooden buckets that contain scalding hot water. After about 5 minutes of oohing and aahing and teeth-gritting, the pain receptors in the foot give up the ghost and in files this squad of masseuses who take their positions on small stools next to the feet of the recliners. They then proceed to spend the next 90 minutes warping, mangling, twisting, pulling and smacking (!) our feet into a substance resembling silly-putty, at which point they dunk said feet into a second wooden bucket of semi-warm water and smile kindly at us. During this process, I found myself twisting and writhing in my recliner, trying to remember to breathe and alternating between the feeling of "wow, that's great" and the unrelated feeling of "OH MY HOLY GOD PLEASE SAVE ME"
• (In all seriousness: it's fucking awesome.)
• "Lost In Translation" moment: after our feet were pulled from the scalding water (but before the crazy massage process), the group of us are trying to figure out what kind of entertainment we want shown on the room's oversized flatscreen TV. The entertainment catalog, the remote control, the TV and the people working in the room are all Chinese. The MacBU'ers, generally, are not, with the exception of our colleague Hao. Poor Hao is doing his best to translate for us about our options, and we finally settle on watching "The Dark Knight" ... only to note, as our feet are being pulled and pinched like taffy, that there is absolutely nothing relaxing about this movie. Each one of us us is getting more and more amped up, and we agree that it's got to stop. Hao steps in, we kill the movie, and then we try to find something mellow to listen to. The music selection is mostly Chinese pop standards and some classic American tunes - think Neil Diamond - at which point the cornball appeal of the English songs overwhelms all common sense and the MacBU'ers break into a spontaneous sing-along with whatever's on the stereo. (I swear I am not making this up.). We do a couple of rounds and get a resounding round of applause from our Chinese foot masters, all of whom are bemused beyond belief at how silly we are.
• (This really did happen. And it made perfect sense at the time.)
• Thursday was an all-day meeting for the Program Management team; we spent most of the morning in conference, and then took off and caught a boat to the Summer Palace. The weather wasn't very cooperative (gray and overcast and threatening to rain), but we did get a chance to walk the grounds, drink in the vibe, and snap a bunch of photos. It's experiences like this that remind me how young the United States really is.
• As the afternoon progresses, the weather gets worse, and eventually the small drops of water we'd been feeling for 20 minutes convert into a full-blown rain-out. Our group is near the north end of the Palace, so we head out the gates and see about grabbing a taxi. There's seven of us, and we quickly learn that the taxi situation isn't promising: the rain pretty much means that everyone wants a taxi; on top of that, we're in a part of the Palace where cars are discouraged and there are no parking or waiting spaces for taxis.
• There are, however, pedicabs.
• Pedicabs (or "Cycle Rickshaws") are basically bicycles with two back wheels and a passenger seat. They're everywhere in Beijing, and are generally one-man owner-operated businesses. You tell the guy where you want to go, he pedals, you pay. Pretty simple. They're not fast, sturdy, safe, or fashionable, but, at least at the moment, there's a half-dozen of them by the Summer Palace with tarps on the tops of their passenger sections.
• A bright idea is hatched: we will use the pedicabs to get to the nearest subway station ("very close", we're assured), at which point we will be able to easily meet up with the rest of MacBU for the evening's entertainment. Our Chinese colleagues quickly negotiate a deal with the pedicab guys, Yuan changes hands, and we're all split up into different vehicles. I have my own; other folks are doubled up. There's a lot of back-and-forth chatter that I don't understand, and then, suddenly, we're under way in the downpour.
• Things start off well enough - the pedicab moves at a fairly constant rate, and the guy pedaling clearly has Quads Of Steel to do this job all day long. We're hugging the right-hand side of the (narrow) road, and the occasional car zooms by with just a few inches of clearance. It occurs to me that I have zero protection in this thing - the cab is basically a cheap metal frame that's been attached to the bike, the rain protection is some tarps and plastic sheets that have been attached to the frame with twine, I'm sitting on a small bamboo mat that rests on the bare metal of the cab, and there's no gearing or anything to help the driver scoot out of danger if need be. It's about as bare-bones as it gets.
• The rain gets worse. It's coming down in sheets and buckets, and I'm watching the pedicab's wheels get increasingly covered in the water that's flowing down the street in a wide, flat river. I can no longer see or hear anyone else from MacBU; I send a couple of text messages to different colleagues, hear nothing. It's just me, the pedicab guy, the rain, and the roar of the now-increasing traffic next to us.
• The ride continues. It seems to be taking forever to get to the "nearby" subway and it suddenly dawns on me that I'm in the middle of some random part of Beijing, all alone, and completely incapable of communicating with the one guy who ostensibly knows where I need to be. I begin to wonder how this is going to end, and if I'm going to possess both my kidneys when it does.
• The pedicab makes an unexpected left, then a right, and suddenly we're thick in the middle of some very heavy traffic ... and I realize, in a flash, that we have a) entered a freeway of some kind, b) are going the wrong way down the one-way road, and c) because we're hugging the right curb, we are facing the fast lane. Trucks and buses are whooshing by us at 100km/hr, horns are honking like crazy, the displaced wind from oncoming traffic is shaking the pedicab, the rain is hammering us, the pedicab driver is as serene as a Hindu cow and meanwhile I'm about to have a full-on panic attack before, suddenly, it all becomes incredibly funny. (I think, at one point, actually giggled.)
• We bike this way for a good five minutes and then the driver decides to make a left-hand turn - across all five lanes of traffic - to get off at an exit. More horns, more crazy-fast drivers swerving around us. I'm so beyond caring at this point that I just try to snap good shots with my iPhone that I can share with Elaine, should I make it home.
• Two minutes later, we arrive. I've never been so happy to see a subway station in my entire life. A few of my team are already there, assure me that they, too, have seen their lives nearly end several times in the last half-hour, and the group of us huddles together under the subway shelter and keep vigil for the rest of our party, who arrive in dribs and drabs over the next ten minutes.
• It might be the stress talking, but the Beijing 10 line is the nicest, cleanest, sleekest, most modern, gorgeous subway on the planet. Really. I can't recommend you ride it more highly.
• The entertainment for the night is karaoke, and we're at a hip joint called Cashbox Party World. Beer is on the table when we arrive, and, after getting some food and a few pulls on the beer, we settle in for some serious (and seriously stress-relieving) singing. Everybody sang, and it didn't matter what - ABBA, Simom & Garfunkel, "Flashdance," Queen, you name it.
• And not that you asked, but: "Bizarre Love Triangle", "Mr. Brightside", "Hungry Like The Wolf", "1985" ... and Schwieb and I closed with "We Didn't Start The Fire".

All told, it was a hell of a day.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at June 28, 2009 4:56 PM. Posted to MSFT | Travel.

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