Shanghai Snapshots

The Hotel :
The hotel is great. It's the Park Hotel, otherwise known as the International Hotel right on the People's Square in downtown Shanghai and only a 5 minute walk from the theatre. There are a couple of quirky things in the hotel, as you might expect. The beds are rock hard, so that rumor at least was correct. But the hotel keys are where it's at. In your room you slide your key in this little slot by the door which turns your lights on and activates a little sign outside your door letting housekeeping know that you are in your room.

For theatre people on tour, this is perfect because it ensures that A. you always know where your hotel key is and B. housekeeping won't wake you up crazy early trying to clean your room. The hotel key is also necessary in the elevator. You have to slide the key into an internal slot before you can punch your hotel floor button. I guess this is an extra security precaution but it's hilarious to watch a bunch of people get on the elevator all at once and fumble for their keys and get to the key pad and move back to let the ones in the back get forward before the elevator passes their floor. I'm on 3 so I have to be extra quick.

Breakfast is free at the hotel and is an interesting experience. You can get “western” food, like decent croissants, bread with a cardboard texture and a fresh omelette made to order or “Eastern” food like fried noodles and bok choy as well as fresh fruit, a selection of salamis, dumpling soup and spring rolls filled with a sweet red bean paste. I do some mixture of East and West and my favorite discovery is Chinese yogurt that comes in tiny little containers with a foil top. You punch it with a straw and drink it. Delicious!

The Show:
Our dressers have done well but there's one translator in our department, three on our wardrobe crew and 6 dressers. You can do the math and figure at any given point in the show two people are having a conversation in two different languages. Even though both of you KNOW the other person don't understand what you are saying you still have to talk but augment it with pointing and charades. This means that certain things have been done differently than we would prefer, but the task of trying to communicate in nuances is exhausting and after a while you are just grateful it's getting done at all. I'm curious to see this done all over again in Beijing...

The Food:
A few quirky things about eating in China. Two people sit down and get one menu. You have to ask for a second menu and that's a word I still don't have down in Chinese so we just share. The waitress will also hand you your menu and then wait to take your order so you are looking through a 14 page menu trying to decipher the pictures and weird translations to find something that isn't internal organs while the waitress stands at your shoulder and watches you. You don't want her to go away either because we found out the hard way that if they go away they don't like to come back and you have to search for them and use some combination of all your Chinese words “hi, please, thank you, iron pants, etc.” to ask them to come back and take your order. Try conveying that by charades some time and you will feel my pain...

You will rarely get napkins and a couple of times eating noodles with chopsticks will teach you to carry your own.

Hot tea is brought automatically whether or not it's 110 degrees outside.

Eating in China with a vegetarian (i.e. Kirsten) under all of the above conditions makes for extra special fun. There are two things the Chinese don't have a firm grip on, one is pure vegetarianism (fish and chicken find their way into most things one way or another) and the other is decaf. By this point I would no longer be a vegetarian were I her. It's too much work.

Some of the best street food is on the corner by the theatre. Grilled lamb skewers sprinkled with a spicy powder, little fried dough balls covered in sauce and dried seaweed flakes and a bubble tea will cost you less than a dollar.

The Toilets:

It does eliminate the ickiness of sitting on a public toilet seat but raises the ante of adding balance and clothing arrangement to your bathroom experience. We are told to expect more of these in Beijing.

The Subway:
In addition to taking you places, the underground subway is a huge shopping mall and food court. And it's air conditioned and clean. Of course the subway doesn't take you many places so that's the tradeoff. In the same way that if you want, say, a surge protector/power strip you have to go to a grocery store and look in the food aisles with the cookware if you want cheap designer bags (Channel and Prava) and Rollex watches or Hong Kong tarts you go to the subway.

The Bars:
Barbarosa: beautiful Turkish themed bar in a small pond covered with lotus blossoms and accessed by a bridge with a free hookah pipe when you buy a bottle of wine on Tuesdays.

Face bar: another beautiful bar set way back off the road behind several other buildings and restaurants. Outdoor seating with big trees hung with lanterns covered in white drapes. I ordered a mojito and sat outside with that tall glass in very international company and felt like an Out of Africa expat.

Radisson Sky Bar: Set in the glass done of the Radisson hotel and presided over by Stardust the Filipino cover band. In rapid succession they covered Dido, Guns and Roses, Bob Marley and Men at Work and said they would take requests for Japanese or Korean pop songs as well as anything in Chinese. The girls that front the band are cute and funny and sexy and the guys in the back look like Cheech Marin and someone who used to be in Fleetwood Mac. The drinks are outrageously expensive but the atmosphere is worth a visit.

Go-Karts: you get to drive! And drink beer! Until 2AM! How can you pass it up???

There's so much more but it's late and I'm out.

Xoxo
k