• A foreigner comes out of a Starbucks.  Cops are outside and ask him to produce his passport.  He’s simply left it at home.  But instead of accompanying him home to get it, he’s hauled to the police station and has to have someone go fetch it for him.
• Two nights in a row at a dance club:  Thirty police come in, turn on all the lights, and separate the male and female foreigners and require everyone to produce passports.  Fortunately, most of these are Guangzhou locals and know the routine.  However, two new arrivals are unaware of this requirement and get hauled off to the police station.  Nice welcome for them.

They’re also super strict about having your passport when checking into a hotel.  No passport and you’re not sleeping.  It wasn’t nearly this strict when I first came here.  Even if you stayed the week or day before and are checking in again, you’re not getting a room without your passport and legal visa.

I wasn’t the victim this time, but, as I was crossing on top of one of the pedestrian bridges, I noticed a kid tip-toeing back down the stairs, almost in Bugs Bunny cartoon fashion.  Seriously, the only thing that was missing was the pizzicato violins to punctuate the tip toes.  He had his back arched, both arms extending up with wrists pointed down.  Classic caricature thief pose.  The target was a Chinese man, talking on his mobile phone, with a pouch slung over his shoulder – think of it as a man purse.  These things are popular out here.

Out of curiosity, I turned around and walked to the top of the stairs and watched the thief in pursuit.  I was waiting for the opportunity to yell out.  It almost seemed like the target had some sort of premonition, he moved his right hand on the bag and scooted it in front of him, all the while still on the phone.  At the same time, an skinny ugly man came from behind me and stood right next to me on the top of the stairs.  I looked left at him and notice he was just staring at me, almost a glare.  I didn’t realize what was going on at first and just stared back thinking, “another starer…”.  After a couple or three seconds (a long time in terms of stairs), he went down the stairs to the kid who had given up on the target.  I turned away, looking back to see them both staring back at me.  It slowly sunk in that this was a thieving team.  I’d heard of this before.  The kids do the work and there’s an adult nearby to watch and monitor them, and get them out of trouble when something goes wrong.  Should the thief be caught, the adult can jump in really quick and make up some sort of nonsense like, “Stop harassing my son!  What’s wrong with you!” and make lots of noise as to embarrass the victim into just moving on.

When it comes to these thieves, I’ve been told that most people will not say or do anything to warn or help anyone.  That all goes back to the, “best to keep your mouth shut” culture in China.  When you hear of all this nonsense like the Cultural Revolution and so on, you begin to understand why the culture unfortunately developed this way.  I’m hoping there are no nonsensical Good Samaritan laws on the books though.  I didn’t think these were real, but just looked it up on Wikipedia.  How’s that for a change of topic?

The real reason for going to Shanghai was to have another CMIC retreat with Chris.  Peter and Chris had been to Shenzhen twice before, and since Peter’s trip to the US freed up a bed, the idea to spend some time working closely with Chris was hatched.  Well, I stayed about five full days and we worked every day from morning until bedtime only breaking for meals and the World Cup match between Argentina and Germany.

Well, I can’t argue at all with the results of the trip:

• Peter and I blasted through a release of the 1.1 software the day I arrived.  Actually, he upgraded the servers with all the changes while we were asleep and I made sure the system was running as expected the next morning.  A few bugs were discovered (as well as some fraudsters), but we took care of it quickly.
• Chris and I, working side-by-side, cranked out the callback feature making it possible to initiate calls as well as send calls.  I knew we could get this done during the trip, but I was surprised that we got it working end-to-end in just two full days.
• I bumped up my bash command line skillz several notches by just sitting with Chris and asking questions.  I really hope to be able to zip around the shell soon.
• Chris took me on a survey of the Ruby on Rails development system, which looks like a real pleasure to program in.  I can’t wait to learn it inside and out.  I also spent some time alone working on some sample code and problems.

Some fun things we did:

• We worked in some great locations, notably:  1) The Park Hyatt Cafe at the millionth floor (ok, 91st) of the International Financial Center (IFC) building.  We enjoyed expensive (and decent) cappuccino and the best view in the city.  2) Mocha Cafe in People’s Square Park.  This place is hidden behind the entrance to an art museum.  It appears to be unknown to the masses because, despite its size, there were only a couple of parties there.  We enjoyed a hot lunch in the humid pre-storm afternoon, then escaped inside to AC while it poured outside.  It felt good to crank out more code while looking out onto the park in a thunderstorm.
• Watching the Germany – Argentina game in a German restaurant.  We got the best seat in the house simply by asking, “Can we put a table HERE?” From experience, I predicted that Germany would win and that if Argentina got behind, they’d fall apart.  Neither of those was incorrect.  The Germans in the restaurant were quite mean to poor ole sad-looking Maradona whenever his face was shown on the TV.
• Enjoyed the Monday special at Malone’s:  a 50 RMB colossal hamburger at Malone’s.  I hadn’t had a hamburger like that in months.  My was it tasty!  I respect Chris for eating another half of one, including the fries and the pint of beer it came with.  He said the week before he ate two.  Respect.

Some innerestin’ things:

• Shanghai felt so different this time around.  I guess the last time I was there with Robert, we frequented visited Suzhou, got scammed by tea show representatives, bought knock-off ties on the street, and witnessed rats skittering through local hole-in-the-wall restaurants.  But this time, I had to make a special effort to speak Chinese, it seemed like.  Every single restaurant was full of foreigners and most every waitress spoke fine English.  It was good to get back to Shenzhen for this reason.
• Shanghai was also quite expensive this time around, restaurants especially.  Granted, we didn’t do any street food, but even the Chinese restaurants was at least 130 per person (a little over $19 USD).  I guess the cheapest was an Indian restaurant with a lunch special.  That cost us 91 RMB.
• There were tons of foreigners.  Plenty were quite obnoxious.  ‘Nuff said.
• The Chinese were generally more behaved and urbane.  I saw no egregious violations like peeing in the street and only one spitting incident.

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