Marketplace Blog: January 2006 Archives

I've found myself completely fascinated by the receipts you get after you pay for dinner here.

Say you've just taken a few friends out for hot pot. The bill is 350 RMB, you give the waiter your cash, he gives you seven receipts. One for each 50 RMB note you've given him.

That is, admittedly, kind of ridiculous.

A few days ago I got a chance to visit a local high school class (actually called middle schools here). Of course, it turned out it wasn't just any high school - it was the best school in the greater Chongqing area - a school district that contains 8 million students and 10,000 schools according to the regional education superintendant.

First thing this morning, the phone rang.

"Are your bags packed?" It was my editors in Los Angeles. There are reports of village protests in Southern China over confiscated land. The protesters blocked a highway, and then the protests turned violent. A teenager was reportedly beaten to death. A newspaper said her parents were paid to keep silent.

Inevitably, your editor thinks it must be easy to get there. "Just a skip and jump from Hong Kong."

Well, sort of. But the closest airport is a three-hour flight away. And then it's a three-hour bus ride to a nearby city, and the village is about 30 kilometers beyond. Another detail: The village has reportedly been cordoned off by police.

I’m usually an adventurous traveler, particularly when it comes to eating. My family traveled lot when I was a kid and my sister and I were always encouraged to plunge in and experience the regional cuisine. From chicken’s blood soup in the Himalayas to raw pickled herring on the streets of Amsterdam, I’ve sampled quite a few local delicacies, some more to my liking than others.

CHINESE ETIQUETTE LESSON III: GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OF GANBEI... OR "BOTTOMS UP" IN ENGLISH

When Chinese offer you a drink, they always start with "Ganbei." It means "bottoms up," and they mean it literally. If you accept, what follows will be endless "Ganbei" until you don't know who you are!

Walking around a back alley with my American colleague in Chongqing, people were sitting outdoors doing business, playing cards, and drinking alcohol. A foreign visitor in this district is very rare, so my American colleague drew great attention. A group of old men were sitting around a table drinking alcohol from rice bowls.

As many of my colleagues have described - working on this project has often meant working long hours. During our stay in Shanghai, it meant some of us in the production team didn't leave the hotel a whole heckuva lot.

This often meant eating dumplings from just down the street - or eating at the hotel restaurant in the interest of time.

In Chongqing however, I was able to break away for a little of the famed Sichuan Hotpot...

There's a saying at Marketplace - "what happens on the overnight, stays on the overnight." The overnight is the shift the producers and hosts of the Marketplace Morning Report work to bring you that program. It starts around midnight and goes until about 8:30 in the morning.

I'm going to break that rule though and tell you a little bit about the overnight this week. See, some of the crew putting together Marketplace's afternoon show are also working the overnight. That's because the 16 hour time difference between LA and China means that our daily live broadcast of 2 PM Pacific Time/5 PM Eastern takes place at 6 AM the following day here in China. And to make the 6 AM deadline, we have to start work at 3 AM. We're preparing for a dress rehearsal of the show this morning - to test out some ideas and make sure there are no technical snafus.

So it occurs to me…as we’re wait to check in for our flight to Chongqing…that you might not be aware of who’s here actually helping the show get on the air. It’s our fault, I suppose. We’ve all been blogging, but I don’t think we’ve really introduced ourselves. Allow me…

The other night I was in a cab on the elevated highway that bisects Shanghai. It was the last night of the third and final trip I've made to the city in the last four and a half months. There are times -- most times -- when traffic in Shanghai is just extraordinary. I would say it's like L.A. traffic, except in bumper-to-bumper L.A. traffic everybody isn't trying to change lanes at once -- and none of them are (literally) going in reverse or making U-Turns.

We've been working 12- and 14-hour days, every day. It's starting to catch up, and I'm occasionally feeling like the mountain climber who forgot to turn on his oxygen tank above 20,000 feet.

But despite feeling exhausted, there's so much to see and appreciate here. And mornings especially are worth watching here. A few days ago, I got up early to go to a Chinese elementary school. On the cab ride there at 7:30 in the morning, I saw groups of people all over town practicing Tai Chi. Some were on sidewalks, some under highway overpasses. I saw parents walking their kids to school - and not one of the kids carried their own book bag. I guess they really are little emperors...

O.K. So how would YOU go about finding a Reincarnated Lama in China?

It turns out Tibetan Buddhism is enjoying a quiet boom among urban ethnic Chinese...

This morning I realized I'm actually in China. I've been here for five days, but with the final preparation for our live broadcasts, I have barely left the hotel. But today, at about 7 am, I headed out with my husband and 10-month-old baby in tow and walked along the Bund. It's the riverfront area right near our hotel, which separates the older part of Shanghai, also known as Puxi, from the newer part, as in it-didn't-even-really-exist-10-years-ago-newer part, Pudong. At night, both sides of the Huangpu river are lit up with gaudy neon signs and multi-coloured skyscrapers. In the morning, the sun rises behind the oddly-shaped Oriental Pearl TV tower and sparkles across the river.

The China team has been able to peel away a slice of time for fun too...

Here are a couple of shots of the editorial team "do-wopping" a little between MMR newscasts. It's "Kai and The Ryss Dolls!"

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Host Kai Ryssdal and Producer Deborah Clark on the mic:

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There are astoundingly striking skyscrapers in Shanghai. Beautiful, shimmering architectural wonders – I marvel at how they're able to bend the marble-like building materials in that Gehry-esque way.

Then there are hearty, earthy buildings of stone and wood.

These old-style buildings are also quite lovely and full of character.

For our broadcast location, as you may already know, we chose the Astor House Hotel - one of the old-style buildings. Again, quite lovely and full of character – but choosing such a location does present its share of issues...

So the truth of the matter is I’m not sleeping very well. Seems like every morning I wake up at 3 or 3:15, toss and turn for a couple of hours, fall back to sleep just as all the traffic is getting going outside my window, and then the alarm goes off at 7. Ugh. I get up at seven because…well…because I’m a morning person. But also because we’re trying to keep some kind of regular schedule.

It's my first visit to China. And I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Would we have government minders buzzing around us at all times? Would the mike be yanked out of my hand if we went somewhere without permission?

This is my third trip to China in four months, and if I've come to understand anything about this fascinating, enormous, staggering country, it's that I've got to take a sleeping pill on the third night.

It's the same thing every time: I get off the plane, I force myself to stay up till a realistic bedtime, I take half of my doctor-prescribed, heavily-advertised sleep aid, I sleep through the night. I feel sort of miserable all day the next day. I do the same thing the next night and I hit my stride when you wake up. I get all of my work done -- I'm a foreign-correspondence machine -- I fall in love with travelling all over again, I feel great at the end of the night and I settle in after a long day ready to sleep the sleep of the dead. And I forget to take the half a pill.

CHINESE ETIQUETTE FOR DUMMIES II

It's always embarrassing for Chinese translator (me!) to explain Chinese-style hospitality to foreign colleagues.

Let me start with a story about my former bosses at German TV Beijing Bureau. Like last time's etiquette lesson, it has to do with food and "face," as in face saving.

The technical team was first to arrive in Shanghai, for this final leg
of Marketplace’s China Project, to prepare for the broadcast next week.
We got in last night and had a pleasant (and much needed) rest at the
Pujiang Astor House Hotel.

But getting here, along with about $40,000 worth of equipment, wasn’t
short a few bumps…