And finally, on to Bush’s convention speech.

Naturally, he opens with references to the bravery of others, on 9/11 and in the invasion of Iraq; in essence, he is saying, if you honor them, then you honor me. An easy sell, but dishonest as well; their honor is not his, their actions are divorced from his, not representative.

But then, he lapses into a strange metaphor of hills and valleys. 9/11 was a hill? And how is now a valley? Not exactly “morning in America” or even “the shining city on the hill.” Anyway, he goes on to praise Dick Cheney, his wife, his father, and then name-drops Ronald Reagan. But he quickly ventured into policy; according to some observers, the idea was that if anyone happened to flip through and momentarily watch the speech, they’d hear at least a few policy point.

In education, he claims progress–but there is no evidence that progress is being made. Bush continues to massively underfund NCLB, and those students who do attend Bush’s “magic bullet” charter schools have scored worse than students at public schools (probably exactly because Bush has failed to fund them). And instead of trying to fix the system, Bush is simply getting his Department of Education to stop collecting information on charter schools so no one will be the wiser, and instead hopes people will simply buy his unsupported line about how education is “improving.”

He then spoke of strengthening Medicare, but he has only done a spectacular job of destroying it. He lied to Congress and the people about the costs of the program he pushed through Congress. He illegally used government funds to create a Bush campaign commercial under the guise of “educating the public” about his plan. He cornered seniors into committing to a single plan for buying drugs, which the pharmaceutical companies can renegotiate whenever they like; he blocked the government from negotiating better prices for drugs, like many countries do to great affect; and now, we find out that Bush’s medicare prices are jumping by 17%, the greatest rise in premiums ever for medicare. In short, he’s done an abysmal job, and yet crows about how he’s some kind of Medicare Savior.

He goes on about his tax cuts, claiming that it benefitted “America’s workers, entrepreneurs, farmers, and ranchers.” Bull. He only shifted the tax burden onto the middle class while dangling a plastic carrot “tax cut” for the middle class that was nothing more than a tax hike in disguise, while slashing taxes for the rich. “Farmers and ranchers” are a suggestion that his plan to eliminate the estate tax saves farms, when nothing of the sort is true–the individual farmer and rancher already have protections; the Bush changes only benefit the wealthy. And after three years, his magic solution to the weak economy is still ineffectual; the economy is still anemic, and the job market is destitute.

He recycles “compassionate conservatism,” with the term being just as ambiguous and without real meaning as it was four years ago. He claims that “government should help people improve their lives, not try to run their lives,” while at the same time spending money like a madman, tearing down our civil liberties, forcing fundamentalist religious policy into national laws, while refusing to be accountable to the people, veiling his administration in secrecy, thus giving Americans less power over government and our lives than ever before. He lied about Iraq to get Americans to agree to go to war, and now we find we’ve been suckered, and our young men are killed every day. That’s putting us in control of what happens to us? And yet he has the gall to speak of “expanding liberty,” whilst giving no clue as to what that supposedly means.

He even spoke of today’s economic woes of having multiple jobs and being laid off frequently as “a time of great opportunity for all Americans.” Incredible. He uses this as a prelude about how he wants to change government systems to “take the side” of the American people, when he has shown every intention of doing the opposite. Is stiffing seniors while giving huge benefits to pharmaceutical corporations “taking your side”? Is stiffing you at the gas pump while letting Big Oil write the nation’s energy policy “taking your side”? I don’t think so.

After four years of horrifically bad performance in jobs–the worst since Hoover and the Great Depression–he claims that his policies will get you more and better jobs. His performance so far, with the freedom to do practically anything he wants with minimal opposition, has resulted not only in massive losses of jobs, but also has resulted in what jobs we do have being worse than ever before, with salaries low, workload high, and very little job security–except for those at the top of the ladder, Bush protects them. But for you? Remember, this is the administration that wanted to redefine “manufacturing jobs” to include burger-flipping.

But Bush claims that his plan will “encourage investment and expansion by restraining federal spending, reducing regulation, and making tax relief permanent.” Good lord. “Restraining federal spending”? Bush has been on an unprecedented four-year spending spree. “Reducing regulation”? Where has he done that, except to allow for oil drilling in national parks or to remove roadblocks to corporate corruption? And making “tax relief” permanent? We’ve had this “relief” for close to four years now, and it’s only driven us deeper into the hole.

He goes on to say that he “will make our country less dependent on foreign sources of energy.” Really? How? What’s he done so far? He’s given good lip service, but the only way he’s tried to act to accomplish this goal is to drill in ANWAR, which, even if successful, will hardly solve any energy dependency problems–it would be 10 years before the oil would really start running, and would hardly be enough to make us oil-independent. Hey, maybe if he told Dick Cheney to let the public see how the Gas, Oil and Coal lobbies wrote our nation’s energy policies, maybe we’d get a better idea then!

Oy vey. That’s enough for tonight. And I’m not even halfway through the speech yet. In short, practically everything in the speech was either an outright lie, or had major elements of untruth, exaggeration, misdirection and other shades of dishonesty.

But Bush knows the drill: claim something is true long enough, strongly enough, and the American people will believe it to be true, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. 70% believed that Saddam was in on 9/11. How many believe Bush’s current load of bull?

Considering that Wakayama is about 400 km (250 miles) distant, and that I felt the tremor fairly strongly at that distance, I would not particularly want to be in Wakayama right now.

Preliminary reports put the quake at 5 on the Japanese scale. The Hi-net and Tenki quake web sites are still short on details. A tidal wave warning (up to 2 meters high) for the Pacific coast around Wakayama (near Osaka) is now being issued.

Update: Okay, the magnitude-5 reading was for land only, that was the strongest reading people had on the islands. The actual quake was out at sea, and was a 7.3 on the Richter scale, and happened right on the major continental plate boundary in the Pacific. Tidal waves up to 2 meters are due to hit in a few minutes and throughout the next hour.

Further update: Turns out there were two quakes, one at 6.8 and the other at 7.3. At least fourteen people have been reported injured, but damage and casualties are very low because the epicenter was in the ocean. So far, the tsunamis seem to be very mild. Nevertheless, more than 6,000 people in several seaside towns have been evacuated.

In the Xiang Yang-style flea markets in Shanghai, there are always watch merchants (with their aforementioned stash of fake Rolex watches), and every watch merchant had a particular watch, right up front: the Waving Mao Watch. Tacky and cheap, they were nonetheless tempting: your very own official watch from China with a picture of Mao, his hand waving back and forth with the seconds. Kind of a reverse-Mickey-Mouse watch.

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For some reason, Tang is a highly popular drink, with a variety of flavors, and local knock-offs following it.

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Here’s a photo of the nutcake that I mentioned before, sold by guys with a possible Middle-eastern origin.

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This is also something you could see quite often—people sitting out on the street in groups, day and night, talking, socializing, and sometimes just relaxing. Tables, chairs, and sometimes beds are included in the setup.

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Another interesting difference was people’s attitudes about kids. Ken and I often started talking to neighborhood kids who showed an interest in the foreigners walking around, and no one seemed to worry about it at all. In a place where theft, pick-pocketing, and other crimes are fairly commonplace, apparently assaults on children are not so much of an issue; refreshing, that.

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To finish the night, a photo of a building in Pu Dong at night, after Ken and I came down from the tower observation deck.

Former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes seems to have had a turnaround when it comes to what he did for George W. Bush during the Vietnam War. It is rumored (but not confirmed) that Barnes will appear on the CBS news show “60 Minutes,” and tell how he feels now. But for a foreshadowing of that, watch this video of Barnes in front of a crowd, explaining how he feels today about what he did for Bush then. Long story short, he got Bush into the guard because the Bush family had money and influence, and now Barnes is ashamed he helped Bush avoid going to Vietnam. Below is a transcript:

Let’s talk a minute about John Kerry and George Bush, and I know them both. And I’m not name-dropping, saying I know both…. I got, I got a young man named George W. Bush in the National Guard when I was lieutenant governor of Texas, and I’m not necessarily proud of that. But I did it, I got a lot of other people in the National Guard because I thought that’s what people should do when you’re in office, and you helped a lot of rich people. And I walked through the Vietnam memorial the other day, and I looked at the names of the people that died in Vietnam, and I became more ashamed of myself than I have ever been, because it was the worst thing I did, was help a lot of wealthy supporters, and a lot of people who had family names of importance get in the National Guard. And I’m very sorry of that, and I’m very ashamed, and I apologize to you as voters of Texas.

The source of the video is here.

The satellite installer guys are here now, and they got a really strong signal–I can get satellite after all. Four years after using the crappy local cable… I just had been told it was not possible before, so I didn’t try. Well, better late than never. Now to join SkyPerfecTV, quit the local cable, get the tuner box integrated into my maze of A/V wiring, and then maybe get that Toshiba DVR/DVD recorder…

Update: Unless…. A storm hit tonight–and the SkyPerfecTV reception fell to zero. Several times. I asked the installers specifically about this sort of thing, how much reception will be lost if there’s a storm, and they said, “just a bit.” Well, I don’t call 100% “a bit.” On the other hand, the weather service is saying that the rain hitting Tokyo now is unusually strong–and the regular cable did fizz out a few times itself. But it’s not encouraging. Anyone else out there have satellite TV, and your reception goes bad in bad weather?

The Expat is a second blog I keep up, this one collaborative; A Nagoya resident going by the handle “Yamantaka,” Sako Eaton and I all contribute there. Being a newer blog (half the age of BlogD), it doesn’t get as much traffic (about one third).

So imagine my surprise when I find CNN as the top referrer this week to The Expat. Following it back, I find myself mentioned by name in the second paragraph of their blog roundup:

Technorati’s Liberal Politics Attention Index&trade showed liberal bloggers reacting strongly to Arnold’s jabs at Democrats: Luis Poza described the speech as “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.”

Go figure.

Still, only thirty visitors through the link, I guess not to many people read that page. Google sent 20 times that many people in the same time. Still, it’s nice to be recognized.

Having abused national security on several occasions to steal the press spotlight away from Kerry, Bush has random chance steal it away from him. Just as he finishes his convention hoping to hit the trail and expand his mini-bounce into something substantial, three major stories hit simultaneously: Hurricane Frances in Florida (developing), Clinton has quadruple-bypass surgery, and the terrorist siege in Russia.

After a weak-kneed convention and a lukewarm economic report, this is not exactly good news for Bush. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Not Zell Miller and Dick Cheney, or even the Twins, but rather the two speeches considered most popular and important by Republicans: Bush and Schwarzenegger. Now, Zell Miller’s speech is fun, and even the Republicans shoved him out on the street after all was said and done, but it is important to note that even the best of the rather pathetic convention was lukewarm at best.

First, Governor Schwarzenegger, who is picking up just where his predecessor actor/California Governor Ronald Reagan left off: fictionalizing history. During his speech, Schwarzenegger said:

“When I was a boy, the Soviets occupied part of Austria. I saw their tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes.”

Well, not exactly. Soviet tanks had left Schwarzenegger’s home province of Styria two years before he was born.

“As a kid I saw the socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left.”

Again, not quite. Between 1945 and 1970 (Schwarzenegger was born in 1947 and left Austria in 1968) Austria had conservative leaders, not Socialists:

What’s more, when Schwarzenegger left in 1968, Austria was run by a conservative-only government headed by People’s Party Chancellor Josef Klaus, a staunch Roman Catholic and a sharp critic of both the Socialists as well as the Communists ruling in countries across the Iron Curtain.

Schwarzenegger “confuses a free country with a Socialist one,” said Polaschek, referring to East European Communist officials’ routine descriptions of their countries as Socialist.

Polaschek saw the moderate Republican governor’s recollections at the convention as a tactical move. Schwarzenegger, he said, was “using the old Communist enemy image for Bush’s election campaign.”

“He did not speak as a historian, after all, but as a politician,” Polaschek said.

Norbert Darabos, a ranking official of Austria’s opposition Social Democratic Party, sharply criticized Schwarzenegger’s “disdain for his former homeland.”

“The Terminator is constructing a rather bizarre Austria image,” he said. (source)

And that’s just to start. It really wasn’t hard to see that Schwarzenegger was using hype instead of facts. The whole Communist-infested-Austria move was completely irrelevant to his thesis; instead, it was intended purely for effect, trying to revive Cold-War mentality and fears.

Schwarzenegger then posed Richard Nixon as his political hero, mentioning only what Nixon talked about, and nothing of what he actually did; he then attempted to do the same thing, to tell people by talk–not by action–why they should regard themselves as Republicans. According to Schwarzenegger, you’re a Republican if:

• you believe government should be accountable to the people, and not the other way around (which begs the question why Schwarzenegger supports the least accountable administration in living history);
• you believe a person should be treated as an individual, not as a member of an interest group (like the rich? or oil companies? or the NRA? or pro-life groups? or fundamentalists?);
• you believe your family knows how to spend your money better than the government does (after spending under Bush has skyrocketed, and the table-scrap tax cut has been eaten up by hidden Bush taxes and costs?);
• you believe our educational system should be held accountable for the progress of our children (like the were in Texas, where Bush policies inspired massive fraud and broke that system down?);
• you believe this country, not the United Nations, is the best hope of democracy in the world (yeah, because look how well Bush is doing in Afghanistan and Iraq);
• you believe we must be fierce and relentless and terminate terrorism (with al Qaeda’s numbers swelling, Osama still at large, and terrorist activity soaring? Yeah, good job, George).

Schwarzenegger then tried to claim that “the other party says there are two Americas.” Excuse me? Wasn’t he listening to Barak Obama and just about every other Democrat? Schwarzenegger tried to claim that Bush’s decision to go into Iraq was an unpopular one–ha! Bush surged in the polls upon that action, and he even used it to win midterm elections–remember Andrew Card’s “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August”? It only hurt him in the polls when all of his claims about Iraq turned out to be massive lies. Bush knew Saddam didn’t have “massive stockpiles” or nuclear weapons, but he thought there would be enough sarin gas left over from a decade before that he could claim that he’d found WMD–and if he had, he would have been golden.

And then Schwarzenegger started making it sound like Bush, or possibly the Republican Party, was responsible for things that they weren’t: the Peace Corps (Kennedy), fighting AIDS in Africa (Bush has weaseled out of his promise to send $15 billion), the Berlin Wall (sorry, I forgot Reagan did that single-handedly), Tiananmen Square (Bush Sr. wimped out and did nothing except grant China favored nation trade status), and even Nelson Mandela, who gained his election victory only after sanctions, fought against tooth and nail by Republicans, succeeded in bringing down Apartheid.

In short, Schwarzenegger’s speech was little more than a corny recitation of feel-good fiction, with mangled history and hypocritical claims of Republican accomplishments that were nothing of the sort. Schwarzenegger wants you, like himself, to believe in the hype, not the facts.

Next up: Bush.

The August job market report is out, and the numbers are mixed: while the number of new jobs increased to 144,000 (and June and July got 59,000 total tacked on), the report is still lackluster, not quite achieving the modest expectations of 150,000–which, if you’ll recall, is the break-even point for job numbers keeping up with population growth.

This is a break for Bush in that it breaks the steady fall in numbers seen over the past four months, and gives him something to say is positive–but it is still anemic, and far, far behind even his most conservative (no pun intended) job predictions to date. At this rate, Bush will still be right down there at the bottom of the jobs heap with Herbert Hoover–having lost a net total of 1 million jobs and having most new jobs be minimum-wage is certainly nothing to crow about. But Bush will find a way. The question is, will the people buy it, or will they notice that they are far worse off today than they were four years ago?

Bush & Co. have an answer for that last one, too–they’re still blaming Clinton. Sorry guys, but there’s only so far you can stretch that one.

Now that I’ve been comfortably back for a few days and have been able to get some business taken care of, a wrap-up of the trip is in order. There is a lot of stuff that I couldn’t or didn’t include in blog entries before–too much for just one entry now, so I’ll do it in bunches over the next week or two.

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Taxis. I mentioned them before, being cheap and all. They have an initial charge of between one and one and a half dollars, which covers a certain distance, and then the fare increases bit by bit–but they’re really cheap in the long run. I took them quite a lot. Note in the photo below that the drive is shielded in a one-seat plexiglas semi-bubble; one can only presume robberies or something similar prompted that. A lot of the official taxis were VW vehicles, for some reason.

There were also “black taxis,” possibly so named because their backseat windows and rear windshield have black tinting on them, save for an untinted strip across the back windshield. They are smaller vehicles, unmarked, and you may wonder why they have stopped near you, waiting. The fare is negotiated, but don’t be surprised if they renegotiate later, or jack up their prices if you want them to take you to a second location from a place other taxis cannot easily be found.

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Ostentatious Signs. I wish I had more photos of these; I mostly spied them when out on the “chicken bus” in the more rural areas, and it was hard to take photos–also because they so often took me by surprise. Sometimes even the most innocuous or humble businesses would have incredibly ornate and imposing signs. You would see a sign twenty feet high, on giant concrete pillars, with gaudy and oversized lettering; reading the English version below, you would see that this magnificent entry sign belonged to something like the “Control Valve Release Mechanism Factory” or some such. It was not just limited to signs, but also the buildings themselves. I even saw one factor whose facade was a full-sized replica of the White House (as in Washington, D.C.). I noticed a building near Ken’s apartment that was giant and ornate, like a mausoleum; it turned out to be a bath house (see photo below).

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Knock-offs. Pirated and copied stuff is abundant. Of course, you have your $1-pirated-DVD salesmen everywhere, but more substantial stuff is copied as well. Below is a restaurant chain’s logo, one I saw several times; note how it is a rather obvious copy of the KFC logo. One time, Ken bought what he thought were Oreo cookies (common in China, with many flavors–I liked mint), but they turned out to be bad-tasting knock-offs. Pringles chips, Starburst candies, etc. I’m sure the copying applied to lots of other kinds of products, but I didn’t get the chance to get it all down in the time I was there.

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Traffic. I may have mentioned that once or twice. Hectic, not too organized. I saw taxis run red lights not infrequently. They blanch at doing so where cops are stationed, but elsewhere are rather fearless. Pedestrians, bicyclists, moped riders and others mix and mingle in intersections. Drivers manage to squeeze through, missing people by inches. Vehicles ram through intersections, and if you don’t watch out, they’ll come straight at you as if they’re going to run you over.

Honking horns is considered a form of communication. Cars honk at people and at other cars more than bicyclists ring their bells in warning. There is constant honking going on. Taxis are common culprits of this, and perhaps that’s the reason why they have to have their horns muffled. Many streets have a no-honking sign (pictured above right).

It all seems a dangerous setup, but somehow they manage.

I did enjoy a common form of traffic, though–the three-wheeled cart-bike. They are used by individual businesspeople, like those who set up portable selling stalls for food or pirated goods, or for people moving things from place to place. I saw (but was unable to photograph) a rig I called the “Alhambra Truck,” a three-wheeled bike laden with water cooler jugs. (By the way, don’t let the blue spigot fool you, the water is never cooled.)

I often saw these bikes laden with overwhelming cargo, like the mattress pictured below, or on my trip back to the airport, a pile of blankets about 20 feet high. You see these things everywhere.

More later.

Boy let me tell you, CNN is making me sick. Remember when, in the Democratic convention, they let Republican bigwigs have a huge amount of airtime after Democratic speeches? CNN is not doing the reverse now in the RNC. They did, technically, give air time after Cheney’s speech to a Democrat–but it was to turncoat Democrat Zell Miller, who gave the Republican keynote address, and is as much a Democrat as Bush is. After a long Zell Miller interview, and after more of their in-house coverage, finally they gave “a few moments” to a Kerry adviser, but that was it. Wolf Blitzer, on air, actually tried to excuse their paltry make-up interview with the Kerry advisor by directly mentioning that they had given ultraconservative Ralph Reed air time after Edwards’ address at the DNC–but as I recall, Reed was given the slot immediately after the speech, and it was a hell of a lot longer than they gave the Democrat tonight.

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One thing is for certain, though: if people don’t like stark, over-the-top attacks, then Zell Miller did not help Bush at all. Many are comparing his speech to the “frightening” address by Pat Buchanan in 1992 that helped get Bill Clinton elected. Miller claimed that Kerry opposed a host of weapons systems, a claim long since proved to be false, but Miller used it as a way to beat Kerry about the head (ignoring the fact that it was Dick Cheney, then defense secretary under the first President Bush, who actually cut most of those systems). He made outrageous accusations, such as:

Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide. John Kerry, who says he doesn’t like outsourcing, wants to outsource our national security. That’s the most dangerous outsourcing of all. This politician wants to be leader of the free world. Free for how long?

Pundits are already noting that the Republicans are all but giving up on winning the undecided voters, and are starkly appealing to their base while going for an all-out, balls-to-the-wall attack on John Kerry. And many believe that this is chiefly because they’ll have little else to run on: the 1,000th U.S. soldier will die in Iraq in mid-September (the casualty rate has been climbing steadily since the “handover”), and the economic report coming out in a few days is reported to be one that follows the recent trends–in other words, it will probably be bad news. With Iraq and the economy being the top key issues in this election, and with a majority of Americans seeing the country going in the wrong direction, the only hope of the Bush campaign is to smear, smear and smear some more, hoping to both galvanize their base and, they hope, turn off some of those undecideds from voting for anyone.

In the meantime, news events threaten to take away some steam from Bush’s moment in the sun: charges have been dropped against Kobe Bryant today, and Hurricane Frances is scheduled to slam into an already weather-beaten Florida this weekend, not to mention the hostage crisis in Russia.

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In addition to all that, Bush may have his own Vietnam woes rekindled soon. As the SBV lies against Kerry continue to be discredited as political smear-campaign attacks, new information about Bush and his national guard days are coming to light.

One of them is Ben Barnes, the former lieutenant governor of Texas, who has admitted in the past to using his political influence to get Bush into the Texas Air National Guard, at the request of the Bush family. Barnes will appear on 60 Minutes and reportedly will give details about how he got Bush into a champagne unit, filled with the sons of the rich and powerful, which was slated never to go to Vietnam.

Another breaking story is that of Linda Allison, widow of James Allison, former close confidant of the Bush family. According to Linda Allison, W. Bush was becoming such an embarrassment to the Bush family that they asked her late husband to take Dubya under their wing and have him assigned to the Blount campaign in Alabama, which Allison managed.

“The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy’s wing,” Allison’s widow, Linda, told me. “And Jimmy said, ‘Sure.’ He was so loyal.”

…

Allison’s account corroborates a Washington Post investigation in February that found no credible witnesses to the service in the Alabama National Guard that Bush maintains he performed, despite a lack of documentary evidence. Asked if she’d ever seen Bush in a uniform, Allison said: “Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way.” Allison also confirmed previously published accounts that Bush often showed up in the Blount campaign offices around noon, boasting about how much alcohol he had consumed the night before. (Bush has admitted that he was a heavy drinker in those years, but he has refused to say whether he also used drugs).

“After about a month I asked Jimmy what was Georgie’s job, because I couldn’t figure it out. I never saw him do anything. He told me it basically consisted of him contacting people who were impressed by his name and asking for contributions and support,” Allison said.

The Salon article goes on to lay out the relationship between the Allisons and the Bushes, and describes some of Dubya’s behavior at the time.

At the very least, this will be an embarrassment to Bush, a distraction from his message, and will bring into sharp contrast the records of Bush and Kerry–even if you believe the Swift Boat Vet lies, you still have to admit that Kerry was in combat in Vietnam, and that Dubya was using family ties to stay safe in Texas while boozing it up.

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Alan Keyes, meanwhile, has managed to stay in the spotlight, by calling Vice President Cheney’s daughter a “selfish hedonist.” In a recent interview, he stated that “If we embrace homosexuality as a proper basis for marriage, we are saying that it’s possible to have a marriage state that in principle excludes procreation and is based simply on the premise of selfish hedonism.”

When asked if that applied to Linda Cheney, Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter, he replied, “Of course she is. That goes by definition. Of course she is.” He later backed up his remarks by saying, “Dick Cheney may or many not like to hear the truth, but it can be spoken.” And later, “I have said that if you are actively engaging in homosexual relations, those relations are about selfish hedonism. If my daughter were a lesbian, I’d look at her and say, `That is a relationship that is based on selfish hedonism.’ I would also tell my daughter that it’s a sin, and she needs to pray to the Lord God to help her to deal with that sin.”

In the “Oh Really?” department, John McCain already concedes losing Illinois. But Keyes is only helping Democrats by having a national platform to show his unadulterated right-wing views. Keep on talking, Alan.

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And finally, no one, not even staunch conservatives, felt that the Bush twins did any favors for their daddy when they addressed the convention yesterday. Bill Kristol, Morton Kondracke, and Fred Barnes all felt that the twins did not belong on the podium. Many have described the twins as looking like “ditzes.”

So far, the Republican lineup has not been all that impressive.

I’ll be blogging more on the speech when a transcript becomes available, but it’s not hard to dissect the speech: full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. He praises Bush basically for being a Republican, but very little else. He talks about how He was so impressed by Richard Nixon and what Republicans say, but not on what Republicans actually do; he talks about how you’re a Republican if you’re for a better economy, without of course noting that Democrats have always been far better stewards of the economy. He brings up icons like Nelson Mandela as a reason to vote Republican, when Republicans were against the sanctions that eventually made Mandela free and president.

In short, his speech is about as empty as his facade: full of one-liners, punch lines and sentimental stories, but absolutely empty of actual meaning or substance.

The Bush twins are up now, reading a speech clearly written for them, like actors at the Academy Awards. I guess they had to appear, but they don’t really come across as any more substantial than Arnold–a lot less, in fact.

Update: I didn’t see yesterday’s CNN broadcast of the GOP convention (having been on the plane from Shanghai at the time), but I have been watching today–and CNN’s coverage is absolutely not equal to their coverage of the Democrats. At the DNC, most major speeches were followed by a noted Republican (Bob Dole, Ralph Reed, etc.) given a good amount of solo screen time to give their spin. So far, I have not seen nearly as much Democratic counterpunch after Republican speeches–none of it post-speech so far, in fact.

As I type, I am in Shanghai International Airport, sitting in front of a departure gate display, as this is the only available power socket, or so the information guy tells me. The flight leaves in about an hour and a half, and I figured that I’d get in some last-minute blogging.

This morning was a bit of an adventure. Wanting to get to the airport on time for an early departure hour, I decided that I would not hassle with the buses (have to catch the train to some place or another, identify the right bus, puzzle out the schedule, etc.), and instead would take a taxi ride.

So I woke up at 5 am, got everything packed (one camera battery pack unaccounted for, probably somewhere hidden in my luggage), got cleaned up, dressed up, and then headed out with Ken to the street to catch a taxi, by which time it was 6:15 or so.

There I hit the first snag: not many taxis seem to cruise that street in the morning. After waiting several minutes, then walking for a few more, we finally spotted a cab and flagged him down. Ken handled the translation for me, and we seemed to get across to the driver that I wanted to go to Pu Dong Airport, taking the A4, A20 and A1 expressways, and learned from the driver that it would take one hour. Ken had a bit of trouble, though, because the driver spoke with a Shanghai accent so strong that even I could hear it. But we seemed to communicate everything OK. So I got into the cab, said goodbye and thanks to Ken, and the driver sped off.

In the wrong direction.

At first, I figured that he was simply headed for a convenient cross street. After a few minutes, that possibility soon withered away and died. I tried to indicate to the driver that we were, indeed, going in the wrong direction. He seemed undeterred, and when I showed him the map and said, “Pu Dong Airport,” he nodded vigorously, and repeated, “Pu Dong!” and kept going in the exact opposite direction as the airport. I gave him a few more minutes, in case he had some miracle maneuver under his hat, but no. He kept on going the wrong way. And I also had just noticed that he had not activated his meter yet.

I insisted then that he was going the wrong way, by eloquently pointing again at the map, pointing behind us, and saying “Pu Dong Airport! That way!” a bit louder (that always works). He again tried to reassure me (I think), but this time added a bit of extra information: he slid his ID placard aside and revealed the placard of a different driver. That worried me, but perhaps explained it–that he was going off-shift, and had to pick up the other driver. The problem was, where was he going to do that? After one minute? After an hour? I got out my watch, and pointed to it, hoping to express the idea that I was on a tight schedule and had no time for detours. He tried to express the idea that it would only take a few minutes. Very upset, and considering whether to stop him, get out, and flag another taxi, I waited as he went further from my destination.

The problem with switching cabs, of course, was that it might be hard to find another, and I don’t speak Chinese–so there was a chance that things would just get worse. As I pondered this, the driver turned down a side road, a very deserted-looking country road, a dirt road in fact, and for a few seconds I feared that maybe I was going to get robbed or something. But within a few seconds, I spotted someone who looked suspiciously like another taxi driver walking toward us, and sure enough, the first driver stopped and let him in. He also did not speak English, but at least we were now turned around and headed in the right general direction.

After a mile or so, the first driver stopped, got out, and the new driver got in the driver’s seat, and we were off again, sans the first driver. The new driver confirmed via the map I had and sign language that he would take A4, A20, and A1, so I relaxed a bit–until he turned on the meter. Since we were several miles out from where I was picked up, I insisted he turn it off again until we got back to where I had flagged the cab down in the first place. And as we reached that point, there was Ken–20 minutes later, still standing there, now waving the cab down–I got the driver to stop and talked to Ken. He had seen me going off in the wrong direction and had worried, but twenty minutes? At the crack of dawn? With no guarantee that I’d be heading back this way? That’s a friend.

So Ken talked to the new (and more clearly-speaking) driver, established that everything was OK, and bade me off again, this time in the right direction. The ride then took about 45 minutes, and I got to the airport on time. But that’s as much excitement as I’d like to experience for an international trip. Let’s hope it calms down from here.

Note: It did. Got back, despite a really bad landing by the NorthWest pilot–even worse than the one to Shanghai (what, is it training week or something?), my luggage popped out almost right away, had a Frappuchino while waiting for the train (not a long wait), and was back home sooner than could’ve been hoped. Whew.

I’ve decided to relatively slack off these last few days, and get more blogging done in the U.S. The Internet connections here are just far too slow to keep up with this pace, and I’ll be back very soon in any case.

The other day, Ken and I went to a large tower in Shanghai, the Oriental Something-Or-Other Tower, the usual obligatory high vantage point of any big city you visit.

I will be posting several photos from there soon, of course, but I thought I’d post at least one now that I really like. A small girl, waiting pensively for her family to finish their viewing activities. I caught her in profile, using a zoom in relatively low light, but it came out nicely anyway.

One thing visitors quickly learn about in China is the existence of pirated DVDs. For a dollar and under, you can get DVDs of new or old movies; I mentioned this a few days ago.

What I didn’t mention is how they seem to slap together the cover art, especially for newer movies. It looks legit, but if you read carefully, sometimes the writing is strange, or even not connected to the DVD’s movie at all.

Today I saw one that was hilarious, for a movie called “Laws of Attraction.” Obviously they lifted a review of the film and put it on the back of the DVD cover. But they also obviously could not understand what the review said. See for yourself:

Just as it is in Japan, in China there are occasional misuses of English. Here are a few I’ve noted in the past week:

This sign becomes more clear when one notes that the sign below it reads “Fire Hyd Rant.”

A similar sign–they just don’t know how to refer to a fire hose correctly.

The following are not exactly language errors, but do seem a bit useless:

After all, if a person is going to throw themselves in front of a moving train, forbidding it is not exactly going to do much good. As if someone would plan to jump, see the sign, and then decide that they did not want to risk breaking the rules.

Here’s what was seen on a package of potato chips:

There are also things not linguistic in nature, but still rather amusing. For example, how Chinese males cool off in the hot and humid weather. In Japan, you rarely see a shirtless man, but here in China, they are fairly common, which makes sense; I don’t see how Japanese salarymen survive humid weather in the 90’s in full business suits.

Anyway, in China, some men will take off their shirts, but others will do something that can have a comical effect:

And that’s not just a special case you see here. That’s what I’ve seen dozens upon dozens of males in China, child and adult, do to cool down. Always the same, too–shirt rolled up to the chest, bellies exposed–just like pictured above.

The big, protruding stomachs really make the difference.

For today’s adventure, Ken and I went to a place he likes to go on some days off, a lakeside city called Hangzhou (“Hahng-zow”). We made sure to get up early so we could catch the train–it’s a two-hour ride from Shanghai (I write this as we are taking the train ride back).

On trains in China (or at least hereabouts), you can get “hard” or “soft” accommodations (seats or sleepers), the “softness” referring to the luxury of the appointments. Not exactly the difference between “first class” and “steerage,” but still, there is a difference. We’re taking the soft seats, of course.

There’s not really too much to say about Hangzhou; it’s a nice city, fewer beggars and hard-tactic salespeople, but otherwise much like Shanghai–except you’ve got the lakefront, which is very nice. I’ll let the photos below explain a lot of it. Shopping streets, a long lakefront park, that kind of thing. We walked, boiled in the heat, stopped to drink every so often, ate lunch (KFC–I can’t get popcorn chicken in Japan), ate dinner (ramen, Japanese-style). Went back to the station.

Still, another day well-spent. Tomorrow, we take a day off, sleep in, shop locally, watch videos. I have got to give my feet a rest. They’re killing me. And that’s with good shoes.

They were selling bubble guns, and this lady was kind enough to demonstrate

For some reason, the KFC clerks were dancing outside… don’t know if it was a promotion or a hobby…

Ken was able to chat with some very charming young women at the pagoda

A crowd gathered in the park around a man singing to musical accompaniment

A very nice Starbucks here

More photos later…

One of the sights to see in Shanghai is a double, Nanjing Road and the Bund. Nanjing Road is a shopping street, and the Bund is a riverfront area famous for its view. If you like upscale shopping more than downscale, then Nanjing Road will suit you better; this is not as much a place for bargaining as Xu Jia Hui market, save for some back alleys where you can do some bargaining. But some things don’t change, like the endless stream of Rolex salesmen and a good supply of beggars. One of them really hounded us, a woman with a baby, who not only followed us for a few blocks, repeating “Xie xie” (“shay-shay,” or “thank you”), but also resorted to grabbing our arms, trying to pull us back to stay and give her some money.

Down an alley way between some of the regular stores we could spy a cheap-market area, like a mini-Xu Jia Hui. We went in to get an electric plug strip, a “brick” with a surge protector. On the way out, we stopped at a DVD shop, which had the usual display of pirate DVDs. This place, however, did not just have the thin cardboard holders with the DVDs, but also had more substantial, thick cardboard holders, like fair approximations of some commercial DVD cases. We asked what the difference was between the two, and were told that the ones in the thin cases were about one dollar apiece, while the thicker ones on the wall were $4 each. Why the difference in price, we asked; the guy in the shop replied, in an eagerly sincere kind of voice, “the more expensive ones are real!” Ken and I both laughed, as it was all too obvious that the “real” ones were just as fake as the others, given that they included titles like Spiderman 2 and Catwoman, movies still out in theaters and not yet released on DVD. In fact, the “real” ones were likely of lesser quality, as new releases are theater-camcorder versions, while the older titles are direct rips from commercial DVDs.

Nanjing Road

Other than that, I don’t have much to say about Nanjing Road–for the serious shopper, maybe it has its charms, but I found little to do there. The Bund was more interesting, visually, at least. There was a beautiful view, definitely a nighttime sort of thing rather than a daytime one, for all the lights on display. There were a lot of people there, most for the light show. We enjoyed it for a while, then had some dinner at a small pasta shop on the way back, then took the train as far as it would go and finished the trip with a $5 taxi trip the rest of the way.

Views from the Bund at night

On the way back, Ken and I were finally able to ask someone–as it was, a taxi driver–what the price of gas is in China. We’d seen lots of gas stations, most of them the Sinopec brand, but they never showed a price. After much gesturing and figuring of vocabulary, we got the idea across to the driver, and he told us that the price was Y3.4 per liter, or roughly $1.60 per gallon. But the driver said that prices had gone up this year, as they probably have everywhere, and said the cause was the Bush administration and the action in Iraq. Not angrily, but just matter-of-factly.

Also in the taxi, I noticed some stores that I had not expected to see–including an Ikea store, of all things. There was also a UniQlo store, a popular clothing store chain from Japan, which Ken said is considered kind of pricey here, though in Japan it is more of a discount place. Other than that, I noticed several food store imports, including of course McDonald’s and KFC, and then there is Starbucks, Pizza Hut, and the Japanese beef-noodle chain Yoshinoya.

One other thing–when on the train into town in the early afternoon, I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before: a nuclear power plant. Not a big deal, but it was a bit surprising to see the twin towers that in the U.S. have become synonymous with nuclear plants.

Tomorrow: Ken and I visit Hangzhou, a city to the south with some lovely lakeside views.

In a day or two: how Chinese guys cool off on hot days, and some pretty funny “Engrish,” Chinese-style.

Due to a combination of matters of convenience and difficulty, I’ve decided not to take the side trip to Beijing this time around. Mainly it’s due to limited time. Though the span of this trip is ten days, the first day I got here late evening and the last day I’ll leave early morning, so it’s really eight days. Traveling to an from Beijing would take the better part of a day each way, and so in the end 10 days would get pared down to 6 and change; either I’d spend too little time in Beijing or too little in Shanghai, and the side trip would add several hundred dollars to the trip cost, seeing as how I’d have to pay for plane fares and hotels for two. So it’ll just be Shanghai this trip.

In any case, the itinerary for the second day was seeing people, dining, and shopping. First stop: Xujiahui (pronounced Shoe-jaw-hweh), where we went to Starbucks and were able to log on–though the connection was even slower than at the local Internet cafe. Then we met up with two more of Ken’s friends, girls going by the English names Kitty and Flavour (Ken tried to talk Flavour into using the name Isabella, but she really prefers Flavour). Then it was off to the Oriental Market at Xiang Yang, a maze of stalls selling stuff at very cheap prices, so long as you negotiate well.

Flavour, Ken and Kitty at Xu Jia Hui market

As you walk through the area, the level of people reaching out to you, following you around, and calling after you rises far above the normal street level of this activity. And if you should happen even to pause to look at some stall, much less show interest in a specific item, the stallkeeper will jump out and start the sales process. First lesson: never agree to the asking price. I bought some cheap-looking plastic add-on to my glasses that would flip down and cover them with dark lenses. When I asked the price, the woman said it was 120 Yuan ($15). Without consulting Ken or his friends, I countered with Y30 (about $4)–which was a mistake. Kitty and Flavour showed surprise, saying it was worth only Y5 or Y10 (I simply hadn’t expected the lady to mark up the price that much). I then haggled it down to ten (the ultimate bargaining chip is to start to leave, which is when they almost always cave in), but the lady was pissed, though trying not to show it in her expression. When I paid, she gave me back change so that she kept Y30. When I again insisted on ten, she complained that I’d said thirty, and tried to give me back only another ten so she could keep twenty, but I finally got all the change back from her. A rather inauspicious start to my haggling experience, but instructive.

It was kind of funny how some things worked. A lot of people were selling watches (including a hilarious watch with Mao waving his hand), and the hawkers would show you what was on display; when you showed non-interest in them, the hawker would look around and whisper conspiratorially, “Rolex?” and uncover a box full of Rolex knock-offs, crowing as if this were valuable treasure and as if dozens of other hawkers had not already shown you their stash.

After the market, we went to Yuyuan, am area with again, a lot of shops–but this time in an area of very nice architecture and a park in the center. This area was more expensive, so we did less shopping and more of just looking around, and stopped for a bite to eat as well. The garden area was nice–there is an apparently famous crooked bridge over the pond, but the architecture, a classic style from centuries ago (from what I could pick up, that is), was the show-stealer.

Later, Ken and I met up with another friend of his, Jasmine, who speaks amazingly good English despite never having traveled (apparently it is very hard for ordinary Chinese people to travel abroad), and we bored Ken with a lot of computer talk while we searched for a good restaurant to have dinner at. We were now in Xintiandi (Sheen-tyan-dee, or “New Century”), which is apparently kind of like Roppongi is in Tokyo, a high-priced area where all the foreigners hang out. A lot of nice places, but the prices can be easily ten times higher than local joints–and yet still, a fancy dinner for three came out to about $20 per person, the price of a low-to-midrange meal in Tokyo.

A young girl who agreed to pose quickly for me. She’s wearing a popular headdress, a lot of kids and some adults have them. The girl caught my eye by staring at me–a lot of people do because foreigners are still often uncommon–but they always respond happily when waved back to.

After the night’s festivities, we headed home-but because the outlying light rail shuts down at about 8 pm, we took the bus from Xujiahui. The bus ride, which should have taken half an hour, instead lasted more than an hour, in part because of the same aggressive salesmanship seen in most other parts of the city. On buses, there is a driver and a fare collector. The fare collector sits behind the back door of the bus, and aside from collecting the twenty-five or forty cents from passengers, he spends most of his time leaning out the window shouting at people out on the street. Apparently buses in China are less of a systematic thing and more like taxis, each bus vying to get more warm bodies through the door.

So every few minutes, we would pull aside to a stop–many times not at a stop–and wait between one and ten minutes while the conductor shouted and wheedled. The driver would help out by pulling out a little each time, as if to leave, prompting the prospective customers to hurry up and get on board–so they could wait another five minutes until we actually pulled out from the stop.

Add to this the fact that the buses seem to have no shocks, the seats are narrow and hard, and for most of the trip the malfunctioning backup beeping signal was going off in our ears, and the bus experience is not nearly as nice as it could be.

Begging is also something that you see a fair amount, often a woman and her child, with the child asking for the money. The most noticeable account was on the train into Xujiahui, when a woman led her boy, perhaps eight years old or so, through the train, the boy calling out for alms. This pair saw a great deal of success, mainly due to the fact that the boy was badly deformed. This was not too different from what I experienced in Spain, minus the kid.

But the trains are otherwise a pleasant alternative. They are cheap (usually about 40 cents), come often when they are running, have comfortable seating, and are clean. The down side is the early shutdown, added to the sparseness of train lines. In a city of millions, perhaps on par with a good part of Tokyo, Shanghai has only a handful of train lines to Tokyo’s multitudes. But more are being built; Shanghai is quickly building up and up and up. You can see this especially in the construction of housing. Massive forests of apartment/condo blocks are everywhere, and just as many seem to be under construction.

Between and among these towers ride a large number of two- and three-wheeled bikes, manually or fuel-powered. In many cases, on most large roads, they have an adjacent side road (as big as a medium-sized road in Japan all by themselves) reserved for them. But at intersections, the bikes and cars mix dangerously, each vying for control of their part of the road. Even for someone like me, now well used to traffic in Tokyo, this place seems chaotic and dangerous, taxis sweeping in and out everywhere within inches of bicyclists, pedestrians weaving between slow-moving traffic, hastily getting out of the way of taxis which seem intent to go on through despite human obstacles. Not the perfect traffic environment, but survivable (hopefully) for another six days.

I got on at Starbucks–from downtown Shanghai today.

Qingpu (pronounced “Ching-pu”) is a town near a small historical village on the banks of a river in the northwest area of Shanghai, and where Ken and I went today, guided by Ken’s student Fanny and her friend Sally (not their real names, but nicknames assumed for our convenience), who are native to that part of town.

Before going out to the village, we ate lunch at a nice place in town, a good number of medium-sized dishes that we all shared, and didn’t quite finish–apparently that’s not uncommon, maybe a slight show of prosperity, ordering more than you can eat. There was one dish, a spicy chicken, that was very attractive visually–but not quite so great to eat. Served in a basket, it had as many cooked peppers as chicken, but the chicken itself came in small pieces, and each one contained a small bone. A bit too much trouble.

After lunch, we headed out for the historic site. The village itself, named Zhu Jia Jiao, is supposed to be about 300 years old, and consists of a network of canals (with Venetian-style gondolas and their rowers) and small streets laden with tiny shops where their keepers beckon you endlessly to take a look at their wares. A lot of special region-specific pork dishes and other foods for take-home were available, but there were a wide variety of other shops, many with items for sale at $1~$3, including items that appeared like jade and ivory but obviously had to be fakes. Any number of tourist trinkets were available, but we were able to avoid purchasing–even with hawkers as persistent as those we found.

To give you an idea, as we entered the village, we approached the river and saw a sign that indicated that people would release fish into the river, probably for good luck. And several women approached, trying to sell us baggies filled with small fish, including goldfish. They followed us down a longish street–perhaps more persistent than usual because we were foreigners, a group that usually splurges more. They kept getting in front of us, practically insisting we buy some fish to release into the river. You just have to avoid eye contact and not make any moves to your wallet–these people tend to key in on any move that could indicate a sale.

One place we did indulge ourselves was a small archery room, where primitive bows and ten extremely primitive arrows were available for 5 Yuan. I took five shots, and Ken and Fanny shared the other five. Kind of fun, but the equipment was far from accurate, and most of the shots missed. But it was fun. We also indulged in a gondola ride for half an hour through the canals and under the main bridge on the river, and went into a temple which is supposed to bring good luck to those wishing to have children–not going for that purpose, of course.

On the way back, Ken and I took a “chicken bus,” as he’s come to call them. They’re buses that go along rural routes, which we needed as Qingpu is a few hours away from Ken’s place by bus. One time, when Ken took the bus, a passenger next to him had a bag on the floor, which soon began moving around of its own accord. The other passenger soon kicked the bag–and upon doing so, a loud squawk came from it, and Ken realized that there were chickens–plural–inside. Ergo, the “chicken bus.”

I didn’t see any chickens when we rode it back from Qingpu, but the ride was considerably slow, long and bumpy as hell–not the kind of ride I’d prefer to take every day. In theory, we were supposed to transfer to another bus midway, but neither Ken nor I felt like continuing that ride, and so we got another taxi (this time just 60 Yuan, or $7.50) to go back to Ming Hang, this time to midtown where we ate some McDonald’s (I wanted some predictability), and then walked back.

By this time, it was about 8:00 pm. On the way, we not only cruised by a lot of shops, but a ton of street vendors, selling, mainly, pirated DVDs and music CDs (a dollar apiece), jewelry, wallets, small pictures, and–for some reason–remote controls, like for your TV or VCR. A few strange stalls, like one run by a fellow who looked like he came from a Middle Eastern country, governing a huge mountain of nutcake of some sort–a salty mix of pieces of nuts in a gummy matrix, topped by candied walnuts, sweets, and dried fruit. A bizarre-looking concoction, probably popular somewhere in the world, but not quite our cup of tea.

An interesting day for the first full day in China, but not all that happened–a few more observations I’ll fill out in future posts, like the scrawling of spray-painted ads all over the place, a wealth of demolished buildings and uncleared rubble in many places, endless housing projects, ostentatious entrance signs, and a preponderance of bicyclists, scooter riders and three-wheeled bike barges on streets where traffic is more of a struggle than a flow.