WORLD VIEW: Shanghai

For some hilarious and fascinating morsels about daily life in Shanghai, check out the recent posts at:

http://www.banterist.com/

Here are some excerpts:

TOURS
Asian tour guides all use bullhorns to address their groups, turning any tourist spot into a cacophony of different dialects competing to tell you about the vase or tree you're looking at. A guide told me they don't use them for Western tourists because we're averse to having someone with a bullhorn talking to them from one foot away. Not so for the various Asian visitors who are perfectly content to have a 90 decibel lecture on the Qing dynasty delivered to their face. Even if the group numbers two, as I witnessed.

SPITTING
Phlegm here is the by-product of a serious pollution problem and a national love of smoking. Spitting it all over the place is the by-product of Mao's Cultural Revolution which embraced "peasant" behavior. The government is aware that hawking phlegm everywhere is freakish to Western tourists and is making an effort to stop it. In the meantime however, watch where you're walking - or turn it into a fun game.

LANGUAGE
The language is fairly impossible to speak, in part because of the tonal aspect. There are four tones: high, rising, falling-rising, falling. That means you'll enjoy many exchanges like "Shizou? Shizou? Shizou?" until they realize you meant "ShiZOU." Depending on how you use tones when saying "tang" you are either saying "soup", "sugar", "to lie down" or "boiling hot." So when you thought you were ordering Hot & Sour soup you were actually telling the waiter you were taking a nap.

GREEN TEA AND TAXIS
Most interesting among his factoids was that green tea improves vision and alertness. He told us taxi drivers here carry a thermos of it which is something I've seen myself. I have no doubt at all about the magical properties of green tea, because its ability to improve the vision and alertness of Shanghai's taxi drivers explains why everyone here isn't dead.

At the very least, to take a taxi in Shanghai is to put your fate in the hands of a man who does not speak your language and will not drop you off where you had intended. At the worst, it's Death Cab 2006. They put New York cabbies to shame.