Shanghai Diary: Nàgè Por Favor

There must be some kind of weird "language wiring" that happens to one's brain. I'm not dreaming in Mandarin (yet, here's hoping). However, when I grasp for words (which happens a lot), if I don't know the word in Mandarin I dip back not to English but to Spanish. This makes for some undoubtedly comic moments like when I was trying to remember the word for "and" (Hé) and kept falling back to the Spanish "y" which sounds like the Mandarin word for the number one.

Reminds me of that exchange from Casablanca:

Carl: To America!
Mr. Leuchtag: Liebchen - sweetness, what watch?
Mrs. Leuchtag: Ten watch.
Mr. Leuchtag: Such watch?
Carl: Hm. You will get along beautiful in America, mm-hmm.

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I'm in the office today. I can't say it's the first time because I was here two weeks ago and even spent a little time at my desk but this is my first day really being in the office proper. The drive on my scooter was a tiny bit adventurous insofar as trying not to hit other people who were going slower or being hit by people going faster. And then there was dodging cars and pedestrians. But, I made it without any (known) close calls.

The area where I'm at has a lot of little shops and there were people lining up at a number of them. I almost want to queue up to see what's being sold to merit such a crowd. Or maybe I'll take a picture and send it to my new Shanghai friend, Serena, and ask her to translate. Did that poor lady ever realize what kind of Pandora's box she was opening when she offered to help me? I can't imagine she did.

There's also some stores on the first floor of my work's building. We're up on the 16th and 17th floors (I'm on the 17th).

I rolled in around 8:30 or so and found that I was one of the first people on the floor but a lot of people all rolled in after me. Now I feel like the elephant in the room. A few people have acknowledged me and one guy even gave me a piece of grapefruit for breakfast. A small but very nice gesture.

Every desk in the office has a plant and there are air purifiers everywhere I turn. The air and water purification market has to be huge here. I've started drinking the water straight from the tap, without using my "Life Straw" but Serena warns me that I should boil it first.

I've been struggling with the internet in the office a lot today. The speed is pretty slow, probably because of having to run everything through a VPN.

Hoping that maybe someone will take pity on me and ask if I want to chī wǔfàn (to eat lunch) with them.

I'm also wanting to go over to the White Horse Pub tonight and try some local trivia there. Again, might be a little lonely on my own but maybe I can try to make some friends while I'm here. Or, if not, maybe I can kick some butt in trivia (fingers crossed).

Every night starting at 9PM local time the emails start pouring in from the Southfield office and I'm supposed to start getting on conference calls. That limits my ability to go out and be social. However, I'm hoping the Southfield group will recognize the need for me to go out once in a while.