Terminal Disease

Terminal 2, Pudong Airport, Shanghai

Terminal disease (not a terminal disease, thankfully) is currently an affliction of mine, not something exhibited in anyway at all by Shanghai airport's terminal 2.

While I'm seeing way too many different kinds for my tastes - quite to the point where I am indeed sick of them - I would nevertheless have to congratulate the Chinese authorities for the design and implementation of the new terminal 2. It's broad, light, spacious, well laid out and quite frankly yet another testament to the skills of Richard Rogers the architect they brought in to create a new gateway to China's most prosperous area.

From the upstairs lounge, you can see that the main runway runs parallel to the terminal building, affording a great view of the aircraft taking off and landing. Beyond that, you get a similar vista, this time though of ships entering and leaving Shanghai's immensely busy seaport. Most entertaining.

Since the airport was built to offer a lot of headroom for future passenger growth it means that today the typical traffic load is way below capacity, leading to a very pleasant sense of not being crowded or harried anywhere at all in the process of going from check-in to departure.

This contrasts sharply with the Heathrow experience at T5 which already felt cramped, hot and fatiguing the last time I was there, an experience I'll get to re-asses in about, oh shall we say, 24 hours .... ?

Round 2 begins.

Bare Essentials For A Thrusting Economy

Hotel Amenity Kit, Chinese Style

Clearly, hotels in China have very quickly come to understand what their clients really need after a hard days work: drinks, gambling and sex, and quite possibly in that specific order.

Where we stayed, the first of those was available in copious quantities. However, the other two seemed to be in shorter supply, at least within the hotel's direct precincts. But having said all that, from our table in the ground floor restaurant we could see a continual progression of young women, all dressed in short skirts and tight tops, heading into the lobby of the building next door, starting around 6:30 pm and lasting certainly as long as we were sitting there. No idea what this place was but we could see a large Japanese restaurant on the second floor if that's any clue. We were planning to go over and take a look, but we never got round to it and so this will have to remain a mystery for now.

However you look at it, China has come a very long way, very quickly, from the old boiler-suit and bicycles image we used to have of the country; at a quick glance, we could just have easily been in Sapporo as Shenzhen. Just to paint the picture one additional way, imagine how dominant Japan could become if it had 20x the people and was seeing GDP growing at a steady clip of 10% per annum.

Make no mistake, China is already a major world power and growing stronger by the day. With the rest of the world slipping into recession, the World Bank and the Economist both think it's likely to only dent their growth by a couple of percentage points or so. The net result will be that, relatively speaking, they will now start to grow even quicker than before.

Wonder what Mandarin is for "we're number 1"?

Chinese Smog & Hairy Crabs

Chinese pollution? Best in the world, no doubt about it! Actually, the smog in Shenzhen today isn't too bad as a breeze has kicked-in to move the air around. However, taking just a short foray outside yesterday afternoon meant that I came back with my eyes already starting to sting. Clearly, the Olympics brought only the slightest of pauses in the gradual poisoning of the atmosphere in key industrial centres in China.

And it's fair to say that Shenzhen is one of those key industrial cities. Its location - right over the water from Hong Kong - was the basic ingredient that allowed rapid economic growth to develophere , with Shenzhen benefiting greatly from the prodigious influx of foreign money into the area from the 1970s onwards. Indeed, Wikipedia reports that Shenzhen is reputed to be the fastest growing city in the world, and looking out of the hotel window it's a claim that's easy to believe.

However, according to the hotel at least, all of the economic prowess has to take second place to the culinary allure of the local seasonal delicacy, hairy crabs. Now personally, I'm not that fond of crabs be they of the hirsute or clean-shaven variety so I cannot comment one way or the other on how they taste. But make no mistake, these things are definitely a big deal down here and, perhaps unsurprisingly, suffer the same fate as many consumer (literally) items that are popular and pricey: they get faked.

To help combat this outrage, real hairy crabs can have ID rings attached or even get their shells laser engraved in order to try and prove their authenticity. Of course, such things are easy to fake, which is precisely what apparently happens. Cunningly enough, unscrupulous vendors can also dip crabs from other locations into the specific lake they are supposed to come from and voila, the price just jumped ten-fold or more, and it's a deception that's hard to prove unless you catch them red-handed (the criminals, not the crabs).

Still, if you manage to find the genuine article then it seems there is still one hazard yet to overcome: the damned things might poison you just as surely as the local smog will. There was a scandal with Taiwan a couple of years ago around crabs reported to be loaded with a known carcinogen being exported their way.

But perhaps that's just what makes them hairy?

War Is Hell

Alas, can't include it directly into this posting but take a look at this YouTube offering.

Done that? Right. Things you might conclude from this, and by the numbers:

1. Allah is not Chinese, or if He is then He's not playing for the home-team's arms industry.

2. The power of prayer does not, apparently, extend to precluding weapon malfunctions.

3. If Al Quaeda offers you a job, don't check the box for "Artillery Division" or, for that matter, "Videography".

4. Ballistics 101 must be optional at terrorist school, or at the least these happy-campers missed the bit about laying down a repeatable pattern. Repeat after me, "mortars are not hand-guided weapons."

5. When videoing dangerous military operations, splash out for the really long telephoto lens. Your softer, fleshier parts will thank you later-on.

6. If Iran really is supplying these weapons to Iraqi insurgents then we should do everything we can to encourage the expansion of this trade.

Peace out.

No Wiley Coyote Cartoons In China, I Guess?

OK, listen, I know you can all keep a secret so hear me out: I have a perfect plan to make millions, cash out and escape scot free. And I know it works, because I just did a dry run.

Here's how it goes. Since we all work for the bank, managing the safe etc., we have access to the keys right? The bank only audits the actual cash levels in there on an irregular basis, so for some period of time they only think they know how much money is in there, the actual amount could be different and they'd be none the wiser

Last weekend, I took 25 Gs home in a sack and then blew the lot on - well, guess what? No, not drugs and hookers, but now you mention it .... No really, I put the whole shebang - and this is so brilliant I can only smile each time I think of it - on the LOTTERY! Easily won enough to put back the money I took before anyone noticed, and there was a tidy sum left over for yours truly in the process. It's foolproof I tell you! The Acme Corporation would love to get their hands on this idea.

So here's what we're going to do. Let's up the ante. We'll walk out of here over the next month with a cool six or seven mill so there's absolutely no chance we won't win the big payout, right? We'll clear more than enough to put it all back and then call in rich on Monday morning! We'll be laughing all the way to the bank and back out again.

Wiley Coyote, you little genius you ....... or maybe not?

New B&W digital printing process from China

Late last year, I was in Beijing and had the chance to visit the Forbidden City. The business contact who was showing me around took us into a small central courtyard where this gentleman was creating some very delicate but infinitely varied ink-based prints. Taken with the work, it took me a while to notice how these were being produced. With nothing more than an ink pad, the edge of his hand, a sharpened finger nail and his index finger, the artist was producing some beautiful graphic art showing rural scenes, canyon views etc.. Not sure the picture I've posted here does him justice, but if you ever have the chance then seek this guy out. (Prints were around $12 if memory serves me.)