Shanghai [Part 6: Presentation Day]

I gave my presentation on Tuesday.

I woke with a headache because jet lag was setting in and someone nearby in the hotel was playing dubstep until wee hours of the morning, vibrating my bed.  Also, I think was dehydrated, because it's kind of a pain not being able to drink the tap water.

I ran into someone I'd met the previous day down at breakfast and he said that after breakfast he was heading over to the mall to have some soup dumplings.  I said I had a headache, but he convinced me that dumplings would be good for me.  Sure enough, they were.  :)  And to be clear, soup dumplings are dumplings with soup inside them.  We got to Din Tai Fung (which is a chain available in Seattle and LA too) before they opened, so we killed some time in the mall.  I'd never seen a Caterpillar store before:

 

They sold boots and stuff.  We also walked through Toys R Us, where everything was the same price as in the USA...

Finally we had our delicious soup dumplings and I went to rehearse my presentation.

About an hour before I presented, I noticed that they didn't have an adapter to connect my Macbook Pro to their ancient 4:3 VGA projector.  They rushed around and finally someone came with a DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter.  Whew!  Presentation saved.  Although there was no wifi in that part of the building, so most of my demos didn't work completely.  In the future I'll record video.

By the time I decided to finally take some photos of the conference itself (which I'd walked through several times at this point), most things had been taken down.  Nonetheless, as you can see, the conference was in the hallways of the conference area of the hotel, split across three floors.

Here is a picture taken from the middle of the room I presented in.  That's Ralph giving his Unity3D presentation.

My presentation went pretty well.  I wish I'd had videos of my demos.  I always prefer live demos, but they're much riskier.  :)

I got a few questions, but the audience was certainly a lot less familiar with this subject than the audience at GDC Main Conference was.

Afterwards I spent the evening exploring the area.  I took some photos of giant buildings:

I also wondered why, late at night, the top of a building was flickering.  Sure enough, people were working!  The flashing is them welding stuff at the top of the skyscraper.



I also went through the mall to find a late dinner.  China has one time zone which screwed me up a little.  I thought I was there around dinnertime, but actually I was a couple hours late, and restaurants were closing.  KFC and McD's were open, but a friend told me not to succumb to chains.  The first place I tried, the lady at the front held up her iPhone which said to me "end, very shy."  I smiled, shrugged, and she called for someone who could speak English.  The English-speaking employee said "Sorry, we're closed."  "End, very shy." is an awesome way to say that.  :)

Finally I went to an insane Cantonese restaurant that had everything but normal food.

The first page was shark fins, the second page was birds' nests, the third page was jellyfish...  goose webs, duck tongues, pig throats...  I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Instead I had some sliced pork belly, which also happened to be the cheapest thing on the menu at $10.  The other things on the menu ranged up to $400.  Insane.

I had an awesome dessert: steamed papaya with sweeted almond milk.  You spoon out the papaya through the almond milk and eat it all together.

After dinner I wandered the mall a bit more:

And then I went across the street and found the OTHER mall.  o_O  Also, check out this Apple store.  It was one of those fancy cube Apple stores where you go down the glass spiral staircase into the ground.

Last night there!  In the morning I took the maglev train back to the airport.  I'll share that video in another post.  :)

Oh, and one more picture of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower at night:

Shanghai [Part 5: The Bund]

After attending the conference on Monday, I figured I should check out the Bund, which is a historical district that was populated by the English, French, Germans, Dutch, and so on after the Opium Wars.  I wanted to go across and check out the architecture.  Here is a video of the Bund from my side of the river:



I'd heard the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel was surreal, and the entrance was across the street from my hotel, so I figured I should check it out.  First, you have to go down about four flights of stairs until you're under the river.

At the bottom, there are plastic carts coming and going.  They are big enough to hold a dozen people, but since there weren't many people down there, I got one all to myself.

And of course, even more young Chinese employees whose job was to point at the cart door when it opened.  :)  Workers EVERYWHERE!

The tunnel itself was a surreal light show with voices, in English and Chinese, saying stuff like "Shooting stars."  "Nascent magma."  "Paradise and hell."  "Basalt in blue water." as the colors shifted all around me.  It was some combination of cool, creepy, and WHAT?!

I took a video of the experience:



It was hard to get good photos at night, but here's a photo from the Bund side of the river back to the peninsula where my hotel was.

Lots of tour and casino boats going up and down the river.

The architecture was interesting:

 

But by far the craziest part of the night was the scammers!!!  So I decided to walk down one of the side streets to see if there were any cool shops or restaurants.  A man comes up to me with good English: "Hey, how are you doing?  Do you need a massage?  Why not?  Come on, cheap massage.  Only 200 yuan.  How about 100 yuan.  Happy ending?  Young girls.  Happy ending?  Why not?  How about sex?  Massage and sex?  100 yuan."  I kept walking.  About 20 feet later, an old lady comes up to me.  "Massage?  Happy ending?  Sex?  Sex?  Young girls.  Very young girls."  I'm getting creeped out, so I walk into a retail silk store, just to be left alone for a while.

Except...  in China, you don't get left alone in stores, ESPECIALLY if you're a westerner by himself.  If you enter a retail establishment, someone will walk up behind you and just... follow you around.  They won't say anything, they will just stalk you.  So I ended up leaving there without buying anything.  On the sidewalk, an old lady rushes up to me "Cheap silk! Follow me! Don't buy stuff in that store! Follow me!" I was walking the same direction, so she assumed I was following her. Eventually she has me glance through a street stall, selling silk.  I looked around but wasn't in the mood to shop, so I waved goodbye.  The old lady says "No, cheap silk! Follow me!" and points up a dark creepy stairway.  Um, no thanks.  I keep walking.  "Massage? Sex? Young girls?"  I thought REALLY?!  Even SILK SCARF LADY wants me to get a happy ending?  What is WRONG with this place.

I said screw it, and headed back to the tunnel and my hotel.  Of course, on the way there, I was accosted by no less than three more people.

It turns out this is a scam where they convince you to get a massage, often in some unknown location, and then bring in some heavies to intimidate you into emptying your wallet or giving them your credit card.  For whatever reason, the police turn a blind eye.

Anyway, so that was my Bund experience.  If I went again, I'd go during the day.  And probably only stay on the well-traveled tourist paths.

Shanghai [Part 4]

After touring the Oriental Pearl Tower, and being covered in the sweat of hundreds of Chinese people, I sat down for a while and took a breather.

I then went to the Shanghai History Museum in the base of the tower.  I won't post all of the pictures, but it was SO COOL.  Here are a few interesting things I saw:

They looove their Buicks in China. I saw Buicks all over the place.

Check out this amazing "sedan chair" created over 10 years by a father's carpentry shop for his son's wedding.  It was insanely intricate, covered in wooden carvings.

They had some exhibits of what rural houses looked like before trade was established in Shanghai.

It was made abundantly clear that the Chinese are not happy about being forcefully opened to Western trade and civilization in the opium wars:

An art school in Shanghai teaching western painting, sculpture, stained glass, etc.

Apparently "coffee house" means alcohol and tobacco.  :)

A sculpture of the riverfront area:

The Catholic church was introduce to Shanghai after the opium wars:

Another cool model of the riverfront:

Figures singing hymns in front of a protestant church:

By the time I left the museum, it was around 1 p.m. and I was so exhausted and hungry.  The sun rose at 5:30 a.m. so this was quite a late lunch.  I did find a nice restaurant in the mall and got some soup dumplings and fried rice.  I didn't know that they were going to be soup dumplings (that is, they have soup inside of them), so I burned my mouth on the first one.  But they were delicious.  :)

Then I went to the conference to check out some talks.  A view out a conference center window:

My next post will be about the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel, which was quite the experience.  :D