Shanghai

Today was our city tour day. We wandered down the Bund to the Peace Hotel. It was originally the Sassoon House, built by one of Shanghai’s legendary immigrants (Victor Sassoon from Baghdad) It was built in 1930 and has an air of old world elegance. Unfortunately, they only had a buffet breakfast, so we walked down the main shopping avenue and found a McDonalds and pigged out on Big Macs.
The heat was insufferable, so we decided to make it a museum day. We walked to the Shanghai Museum and found a great exhibition on Inner Mongolia and the minority people. The rest of the museum was a bit tedious- Chinese coins, painting, caligraphy, furniture… But, it was A/C and worth a few hours.
Then we headed for the Bund and found the Bund Museum.
With temperatures of 100+ and 100% humidity, we decided to try our luck at O’Malley’s Irish Pub. We had a great time meeting the expats of Shanghai. One gentleman, an investment banker/venture capitalist, gave us some great restaurant recommendations. Then, we talked with the Irish entertainers and with Harv, a Canadian/Honduran who had been in Shanghai for 3 years in a joint venture building ships. He entertained us for quite some time with stories of working with the Chinese. After his years of dealing with issues of saving face and quality control, he had some wonderful tales. One of the Chinese said to him, “I’m not saying you’re stupid, you just think differently”. He had also worked with the Korean and Japanese and found the Japanese were more like polite Koreans (they get drunk at night and tell you what’s going on”). The Koreans were more hard core, but produced a quality product on time. The Chinese don’t care about on-time or quality. They get paid whether they work or not and he found that he had come to accept “good- enough” in his quality control . Interestingly, he said that the older workers were more flexible and that the younger generation were more like the Koreans. He also said that you always have to ask for more than what you want- and keep a few negotiating points ready to give away.
After Harv left, we headed to JJ Mariachis (next to Tandoor) and had some of the best Mexican food ever. The manager, from LA, was wonderful and his staff was trained to deal with Westerners.