Even though you should never write about why you’re not writing (unless you’re writing to say that some significant thing has happened, in which case I think it counts as just plain writing), but it’s a decent introduction to this entry so screw right and wrong. I don’t write much because my personal time is so limited that I can either go about my life or I can write about the things I’m not doing. So I work, and then I spend some time with my husband and animals so that I can continue having a husband and animals.
Inside my head, I’m maybe 22 years old. I’ve got a college education but little else in the way of experience or anything. I don’t know what I’m doing, I couldn’t possibly be given any responsibility other than grunt work, and older people run the show and make decisions. I often feel like a fraud, like I’m getting away with something.
Then, every once in a while, I find myself in a big meeting like I did two weeks ago, organizing a timeline for our biggest selling season of the year (which is just a few weeks long), and I looked around the room. Most of the people there were younger than me. I had the same experience last week at our Shanghai office, which kind of feels like the punchline. Somebody spent a chunk of change to send me here to do some work, which would suggest a certain amount of competence and responsibility.
Business travel is kind of sucky, obviously, since much of your time is not your own and many of the logistical decisions are for business reasons and possibly not what you’d choose to do yourself.
Unless the trip is an emergency, we generally leave Texas mid-morning Saturday. That gets us in out hotel rooms by 9pm Sunday night so we can be at the office at 9 Monday morning, so you don’t lose any workdays. If I had my druthers, I’d leave on Friday, get in Saturday night, spend Sunday struggling to stay awake all day (this is why the usual arrangements really are better, because you have no choice but to stay upright your first day here), and get some decent sleep before going to work. I managed to make the whole process worse by coming down with a cold on the plane. I coped on Monday, and then on Tuesday I had a fever and could barely stay upright, and ended up staying in my hotel room all day. I’ve been so low on energy that it’s all gone to work, so I’ve done even less than I would have been able to otherwise. Staying here over a weekend should have afforded me ample fun time, but nothing’s really all that fun when you wilt in the heat and humidity nearly instantly, and I’ve got work to make up from Tuesday.
Also, I’m dizzy all the time. Not severely, but I feel it anytime I stand up or turn my head too quickly. That’s the beauty of spending 16 hours at 38,000 feet with a cold.
It hasn’t been all bad. The hotel I stayed in during the week near the office was very nice, quietly posh, and tiny yet very comfortable except for the bed, which was rock hard. Unfortunately, there was nearly nothing of interest nearby, not even a restaurant open in the evenings, and being too sick and lagged to want to take a taxi to other parts of the city I was largely hotel-bound. I spent maybe $15 of my cash all week, including cab rides to the office ($1.25 each way), sodas and snacks in the office building convenience store, and tips for the bellman who carried my bags up and room service delivery.
For the weekend and the rest of my workweek (I go home Wednesday morning), I’ve been moved to a very nice hotel in the Huaihai road, which is where you shop. Actually, I think you also shop on the Bund, which is a holdover from the time when Shanghai was the European outpost of mainland China, and it’s likely that the more exclusive shops are on the Bund, but you can certainly shake a stick at the boutiques and department stores here on Huaihai. Out in the High Tech Business district, my presence was largely ignored, and I had assumed that the days of Westerners being stared at in the streets were over. But here, I do get stared at, and I find myself staring at other Westerners, and trying to get close enough to hear what language they’re speaking. German is what I hear the most. The staring is weird and makes me a little shy, and I had a truly surreal meal yesterday where a (young, fashionably-dressed) woman spent at last half her meal turned around backwards watching me eat until one of her friends told her to cut it out. Oh my god, it can eat without a fork, call the papers! I hear often from my coworkers that I’m very good with chopsticks, but I do have a noodle handicap: I can’t slurp properly. I tried it on the planes a couple of times, as that seems to be the ideal place to make you handle a small cup of boiling hot broth, but was spattering myself in the face.
I was taken out yesterday to do some shopping in the markets, which was a special kind of hell. It’s the same thing I find least pleasant about Mexico: the constant badgering, “lady lady lady!” “bag, watch, dvd!” “water? cold water?” (it is very cold water; one woman came up behind me during an excruciating haggling process and put a bottle against my arm and then laughed when I jumped). 200 stalls, all selling the exact same crap. Not that none of it is worth buying; I got a silk tablecloth I intend to use as a wall hanging, some small gifts, and my laptop bag was gasping its last and needed to be replaced. My host did all my haggling for me, which often took up to 30 minutes for each purchase and I expect was less than fun for her.
I am really not the target demographic here anyway. I don’t care about designer labels, and regardless of how many times you tell me it really is “real” Louis Vuiton, only it’s made at a different factory, and this is somehow entirely different from fakes, which you can also buy, I don’t care. I’m not freshly in from Hanover looking for a new Louis to dangle from my elbow. My new laptop bag ($25) is purportedly a Prada, and in my head I snicker and refer to it as my Pravda bag, which is only funny if you were politically aware in the 80s. I would also rather not buy pirated DVDs, and I don’t want a Bulgari watch, though I am awfully tempted to buy a couple of Chairman Mao watches with his hand waving back and forth, if only because the guy who tried to sell me one was so cute, “See Chairman Mao watch? He say ‘Ni hao!’ [hi]” I have a love for souvenir watches, and was pleased when the (most assuredly fake) KGB pocket watch I got my grandfather in Berlin was passed on to B. I’m always on the lookout for easily haulable things to collect from my travels, and I have started getting things I can use as wall hangings, but maybe watches are a good backup.
I’ve just gotten a call to go to the office to go out to lunch with whoever’s there working today, so I have to go get decent.