Chadams World Travel Blog

Interesting China article from today

2009-08-04T13:04:00.000-07:00

This article from Marketwatch touches on some of the distortions in economic data coming out of China's economy. Clearly the Chinese economy is growing and growing at much faster rates than the US, but it is hard to know exactly how rapidly. Some people do not trust official data at all and think they can get a better view of China's GDP growth rates by plotting the change in electricity usage instead of GDP (electricity growth has historically correlated very strongly with GDP growth).

Twin views of China's economic growth don't quite add up

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) -- China's gross domestic product as reported by the nation's 31 provinces and municipalities for the first-half came out significantly higher than the national figure reported by the central government, state media said.

The chasm between the two sets of numbers underscores the tendency of regional officials to file data that paint an overly rosy picture of the pace of growth.

The gap between the national and local figures ballooned to 1.4 trillion yuan ($205 billion) for the six months through June, according to the China Daily, which cited figures reported by the Beijing Times.

The size of the economy in the first half, according to figures provided by local governments, totaled 15.38 trillion yuan, while the National Bureau of Statistics reported a figure of 13.99 trillion yuan.

Mainland Chinese media reports said the discrepancy may be related to the tendency of local governments to double count the economic value of subsidiaries of large companies.

The error, according to reports citing Ye Qing, a professor with Zhongnan University of Economics and Law and a deputy chief of the Hubei Bureau of Statistics, arises when local governments count income from company branches along with the income figures reported by company headquarters. Often these company headquarters' figures already incorporate branch-level income.

Another explanation put forward is that regional government officials deliberately inflate the figures to exaggerate achievement in economic development. Often, officials' performance appraisals are related to how well the economy is doing.

Economists say the two sets of figures have failed to add up for the past five or six years.

Ma Jiantang, head of the Statistics Bureau, was cited in Chinese media reports last month as saying his agency was aware of the discrepancy and had proposed the central government directly calculate provincial GDP instead of relying on figures provided by regional officials.

Economists who monitor China generally disregard the regionally reported GDP figures and look instead at local export and import data, power generation data and other quantifiable statistics when trying to gain insight into the nation's regional economies, Credit Suisse's Dong Tao was cited as saying Tuesday in a South China Morning Post report.

Dubai collapse - revisited

2009-02-23T18:19:00.000-08:00

While as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, almost all of Dubai's construction remains stopped, Dubai has made some progress at tackling its massive debtload.

Yesterday, Abu Dhabi announced it would provide $10 billion to its sister emirate to help it make some of the $15 billion in interest and principal payments that comes due for Dubai in 2009. Neither side has announced what if anything Dubai has offered Abu Dhabi in exchange for this, but at the very least, Dubai will have to tame some of the social liberties and urban excesses that have emerged over the past few years.

While this bond offering will help provide some short term cash and reduces the chance of a bankruptcy, Dubai is by no means in the clear. The cost of insuring Dubai's debt has surged over the past few weeks, and most estimates I have seen showed the cost of insuring Dubai's debt to have reached nearly 10% over the weekend. That was the world's highest rate.

The stock market, which declined 72% in 2008, rallied nearly 8% today. The cost of debt insurance declined to ~7.5% today on the news.

We'll see what happens next...

Brazil

2009-02-18T16:04:00.000-08:00

I have spent a fair amount of time in Brazil but have yet to write about it so I decided it was time to post some impressions.

I spent a couple months living in Sao Paulo in 2002. I traveled around the country some at that time, and then traveled around again in 2007 – I spent a total of a few weeks in Rio de Janeiro, a few days in Iguacu Falls (at the border of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil) and another week in the Northeast, primarily in a chilled out beach town called Jericoacoara. I also spent another week of work in Sao Paulo in December 2008.

Overall, I am a big fan of Brazil.

It has a very unique, fun vibe. It feels quite different to me than the rest of South America – the Spanish speaking portions of the continent have much more in common with each other than Brazil for sure.

The culture of Rio is amazing. The beach culture was fun and the festive atmosphere was contagious. The physical beauty of Rio is spectacular as well. Rio is a dense city intertwined with crazy mountains, rock formations in the ocean, and stunning white sands beaches. The views from the top of the Sugarloaf Mountain just off the shore (Pao de Acucar) and the Christo statue overlooking downtown are amazing.

I loved the juice shops on every corner (crushing lots of crazy fruits I had never even heard of into amazing juices). The ubiquitous cheesy bread (Pao de Queijo) is amazing. The coffee is world’s better (and stronger) than American coffee. I’ve also had a ton of fantastic (and fun) meals at churrascarias where the meat is served on swords by waiters who season and serve their own cuts of beef (quite similar to the Fogo de Chao chain here in the US).

Soccer in Brazil is worth an entire post in itself, but suffice it to say that seeing a game at Maracana stadium in Rio (which holds 100,000+ screaming dancing firework shooting fans) is an experience in itself. While I went to two relatively unimportant games, both had more than 50,000 people I’d guess, and the fans of each team were separated from each other by big fences and from the field by a huge moat surrounding the playing area.

The few off-the-beaten-path places that I have visited have also been great. Jericoacoara is as remote feeling of a place as I have ever been. You access the town by taking a 4x4 until the highway ends, then drive literally along the beach for an hour until you reach the little town. From there, you can walk the sandy “streets” from restaurant to bar to surf shop or explore the surrounding area by dune buggy. (Locals are happy to ferry you and your dune buggy across various little streams and rivers). There are also great dunes for hiking up, hanging out on, and sand boarding down. Amazing.

Iguacu Falls can also be very cool. I went during a good rainy season and it was fantastic. The falls are set right in the middle of the jungle and have these rickety metal catwalks that you can climb on right over these massive crashing falls. You would never be allowed to get this close to Niagara Falls, and in my opinion the falls are more spectacular than Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. I do think the experience is very weather dependent though – I have heard that in a very dry season things can slow to a trickle.

There are also a ton of other places I want to go to which I have not made it to. Salvador – an Afro-Brazilian cultural and musical hub in the center of the coast, the Pantanal region deep inland, and some of the white sand beaches in the south of the country are atop my list.

On the downside, however, Brazil definitely feels much more dangerous than probably any other place I have traveled. I generally avoided Copacabana which is the famous beachfront area of Rio which overflows with prostitutes and generally shady characters who cater to American and European partiers. Fortaleza (city in the Northeast) did not seem particularly pleasant or safe. Most of Sao Paulo is not safe to walk around in alone after dark. While I don’t think these safety concerns make Brazil a place to avoid entirely, it is definitely worth having your wits about you at all times and only going out in groups at night.

Also, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, there is a massive disparity between the very rich and very poor. The urban poor have built favelas or basically ghetto communities that support as many as 1 million people, and generally have their own justice systems, utilities, political organization, and (often gang-controlled) industries. Unlike a lot of the cities in Africa where the poor are relegated to the fringes of town, these favelas are built right into the fabric of the city. In both Sao Paulo and Rio, you can walk across the street from some of the cities nicest most modern skyscrapers and be in the heart of an extremely poor community.

Despite the raging poverty in many parts, Brazil has improved its economic situation over the past 10 years nearly as dramatically as India or China, though with much less press coverage (it is definitely the least talked about “BRIC” country). While corruption and the rich/poor gap remain major issues, the outlook (at least until the past few months) is brighter than it has been in decades. Brazil has become a clean fuel leader, and most cars run on sugar cane ethanol which is 8 times more efficient than the corn-based ethanol that has failed here in the US. There are still other, very serious environmental problems, perhaps the largest being significant deforestation in the Amazon, but this is one of the world’s biggest green success stories.

It is not yet clear how the economic downturn will affect Brazil, but in my view it is an under-appreciated economic and tourist destination, and I hope it will continue to prosper. And I hope to go back and spend even more time there.

China's stock exchange - revisited (updated 2/13)

2009-02-13T13:47:00.000-08:00

It has clearly been a very difficult past 18 months for the Chinese stock market. While this is not entirely surprising given the bubble that I discussed in 2007 and the massive overall decline in world stock markets, the correction in China has been particularly harsh.

The chart below shows the SSE over the last two years. The index today is down 62% from its high and at its peak had declined 71%.

Further recent news shows that Chinese exports declined 17.5% YoY through January and imports declined a whopping 43%. While the China Daily calculates that about 1/3 of that import decline is due to the timing of Chinese New Year, the decline is still massive.

Given the decline in world demand for China's good and the rising job losses and deteriorating economy in China, is now the time to get out or get in to the stock market?

While I have less conviction that I would like, over the past month I have started to slowly dollar-cost-average into China's indexes. While I think it may be rough going for the short-term, I think now could be an attractive time to invest. I think a) China's government is much more likely to successfully implement a stimulus than the US government, b) although I don't have this data, I think the higher savings rates of Chinese middle-class consumers vs. American middle-class consumers will help buffer their internal consumption crunch somewhat, and c) the PE multiples of the SSE have declined to a much more reasonable level and at the last data I saw were actually below PE multiples of the US.

I also recently came across this quote from one of the leading global venture capital funds - again, no real data - but captures my sentiment well:

"Our investments in

China

are better positioned to survive a very prolonged downturn than companies in the

U.S.

Not only are the cost structures far lower, but the cultural familiarity with the challenge of survival makes the managements of most of these companies more resilient. (Bear in mind that even in good times the average savings rate in

China

's urban areas for high income earners has been close to 30%). Despite the many challenges that come with operating in different countries, we are relieved that we decided to reduce our overall dependence on the

U.S.

and can invest in markets that are growing more quickly and where there is a greater thirst for success"

Given the high likelihood that China's long term growth rate is substantially higher than the US, I am hopeful this will prove over the medium term to be an attractive buying opportunity.

Dubai collapse

2009-02-11T13:38:00.000-08:00

Not entirely surprising but Dubai has collapsed and spiraled out of control.

Friends who have recently visited told me that the cranes which dotted the tops of nearly every building a year ago still are there, but all of them are stopped. Overpasses and infrastructure development have been halted in process with partially complete projects everywhere.

Finally, since in the UAE, people who are unable to pay their bills can go to Debtor's Prison, expat's whose real estate holdings have plummeted in value are abandoning their cars at the airport and fleeing the country.

This depressing story below is from the Times in London.

"For many expatriate workers in Dubai it was the ultimate symbol of their tax-free wealth: a luxurious car that few could have afforded on the money they earned at home.

Now, faced with crippling debts as a result of their high living and Dubai’s fading fortunes, many expatriates are abandoning their cars at the airport and fleeing home rather than risk jail for defaulting on loans.

Police have found more than 3,000 cars outside Dubai’s international airport in recent months. Most of the cars – four-wheel drives, saloons and “a few” Mercedes – had keys left in the ignition.

Some had used-to-the-limit credit cards in the glove box. Others had notes of apology attached t

“Every day we find more and more cars,” said one senior airport security official, who did not want to be named. “Christmas was the worst – we found more than two dozen on a single day.”

When the market collapsed and the emirate’s once-booming economy started to slow down, many expatriates were left owning several homes and unable to pay the mortgages without credit.

“There were a lot of people living the high life, investing in real estate and a lifestyle they couldn’t afford,” one senior banker said.

Under Sharia, which prevails in Dubai, the punishment for defaulting on a debt is severe. Bouncing a check, for example, is punishable with jail. Those who flee the emirate are known as skips.

The abandoned cars underscore a worrying trend. Five years ago the Emir, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, embarked on an ambitious plan to transform Dubai into a hub for business and tourism. A building boom fuelled double-digit growth, with thousands of Westerners arriving every day, eager to cash in on the emirate’s promise of easy living and wealth.

Many Westerners invested in Dubai’s skyrocketing real estate market, buying and reselling homes before building was even complete. But, as the recession took effect, property and financial companies made thousands of workers redundant and banks tightened lending. Construction companies have delayed or cancelled projects and tourism is slowing.

There are increasing signs that the foreigners who once flocked to Dubai are leaving. “There is no way of tracking actual numbers, but the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. Dubai is emptying out,” said a Western diplomat.

International schools are having to be flexible on fees as expatriate parents run out of cash. Louise, a single mother from Britain, said that her son’s school had allowed her to pay a partial fee until she found a new job after her redundancy in December. “According to the headmaster, a lot of people had come into the school saying they had lost their jobs so the school was trying to be a bit more flexible,” she said.

Most of the emirate’s banks are not affiliated with British financial institutions, so those who flee do not have to worry about creditors. Their abandoned cars are eventually sold off by the banks at weekly auctions. Those recently advertised include BMWs, Porsches and Mercedes.

Simon Goldsmith, a spokesman for the British Embassy in Dubai, said that that there were approximately 100,000 Britons living in Dubai last year. However, the embassy has no way of tracking how many have fled back to the UK. “We’ve heard stories, but when somebody makes that kind of decision, they generally keep it to themselves,” he said.

Police have issued warrants against owners of the deserted cars. Those who return risk arrest at the airport.

Heading home

3.62 million expatriates in Dubai

864,000 nationals

8% population decline predicted this year, as expatriates leave

1,500 visas cancelled every day in Dubai

62% of homes occupied by expatriates 60% fall in property values predicted

50% slump in the price of luxury apartments on Palm Jumeirah

25% reduction in luxury spending among UAE expatriates"

Egypt - really, really old news

2008-08-06T22:43:00.000-07:00

About 8 months late, I realized that I did not finish writing about the rest of my study trip to Egypt in January.

Cairo is a crazy big city that is impossible to get around. Most of my memories of Cairo are of being stuck in traffic in a cramped, hot bus in a suit. We had some cool meetings though in addition to the one with Orascom that I have already written about - a few government ministers, a non-profit, some energy companies, and a tech startup. But the cultural sites were what really stood out in Egypt.

The pyramids, though their size was impressive, were a bit of a disappointment. We saw them once during the day and once at a hoky light and laser show at night.

Luxor, a few hundred miles south of Cairo along the Nile, was really amazing though. We took a sunrise hot air balloon ride over the valley, and had amazing views of all of the temples, tombs, and ruins. I also found the Nile really interesting. While I guess I learned this in high school, the entire country of Egypt is desert, except for a stretch about 1-2 miles wide on either side of the Nile, which stretches all the way from its delta in the north of the country to southern Egypt. While this makes sense, it was still shocking to see firsthand how green the area around the Nile is, and how it instantly drops off to extreme desert just a few minutes walk away from the river.

During my travels through 33 countries over the past two years, I have seen a lot of really old stuff. But the sights in Egypt are staggeringly old. Many of the ruins that we saw were 4,000 to 4,500 years old! All of the ancient ruins that I saw in South America, India, China, Thailand, Japan, the Middle East, and Europe - none of them were more than 2,500 years old. And the Egyptian ruins including King Tut's tomb, Hatshepshut's tomb, the pyramids, and the many statues of pharoahs and sphinxes were as impressive as any of them. It puts the rest of the historical sights I have seen around the world in a different perspective, and also really challenges the American worldview where remembering things from 40 years ago seems like ancient history.

So while Cairo is not high on my list of places that I would go back to, I would love to spend more time exploring more of Luxor and Aswan, and explore the rest of the areas along along the Nile south of Cairo. Here are a number of Egyptian photo highlights.

Street market - Cairo

Boy carrying flatbread

Camels and pyramids

More Great Pyramids, Giza

Old building facade, Cairo

Hot air ballooning in desert over Luxor
Mosque in Egyptian desert Hot Air ballooning, fields by the Nile quickly become desert
Sphinxes, Luxor

Massive ancient columns
Hatshepset's tomb
Google satellite map showing the green by the Nile and the surrounding desert

Sapa - northwestern Vietnam

2008-08-06T21:22:00.000-07:00

After spending a few days in Hanoi, we took a surprisingly pleasant overnight train to Sapa, near the Chinese border in the mountains in Northwestern Vietnam.

While Sapa was an ok little town in its own right, we spent most of our time hiking around and exploring the surrounding areas. The countryside around Sapa is the gorgeous lush green valleys and terraced rice paddies that you see in photo books. Little children played in the river with their water buffalos and local women sold the vegetables that their husbands farmed in town.

The area around Sapa is also home to a number of "minority tribes", with the Black Hmong and the Dzay being the two we spent the most time around. While the tribes have in many ways converted from their traditional way of life to surviving via tourism, they have retained their langauge, dress, and a lot of their social customs. We spent one day hiking on our own down into the valley from Sapa town to Cat Cat village, a Hmong village about 3 km from Sapa. It was a really cool hike, down a long winding path towards the town which was built by the river that runs through the Sapa valley.

Our second day in Sapa we joined a small group and hired a Hmong tour guide to show us around her town and lead us on a day trip through the rice paddies and bamboo forests. Ironically, my second weekend after quitting work in 2006, I spent three days and two nights hiking through northern Thailand and staying in Hmong villages. Now, in my second to last weekend of b-school travel, this hiking adventure made the Hmongs a surprising bookend to my past two years of travels.

Our Hmong guide - Cha - was a really smart 20 year old girl who spoke Hmong, Vietnamese, and pretty good English too. And, since Lizzle speaks Vietnamese, we got some extra insight into Cha's life. She met her husband at the "Love Market" in Sapa town at age 15. He is also Hmong, but from a neighboring village. They were married after two months, she moved in with his family, and they had a daughter when she was 16. Now, at age 20, she works guiding tourists while her husband farms part-time and finishes school. I am not sure how much of this was a sob story designed to elicit tourist dollars (I actually think it's not, but you never know) but she complained to us that her husband drinks and gambles away all their money. She wants to leave him, but she is so old now (almost all Hmongs marry in their early teens) that nobody else will marry him. And since he paid a dowry to marry her, she would have to pay a fee of 5 million dong (~US$300), 40 pigs, and 80 liters of alcohol to his family if she wanted to divorce him. She was also eager for her daughter to start school. Almost all Hmong boys go to schoool but many Hmong girls do not. And most Hmong girls who do go to school are not taught to read or write, they are just taught to speak Hmong and Vietnamese.

While her story was really sad, it was an interesting backdrop on the villages and countryside that we walked through which were stunningly beautiful. We hiked for a few hours in the morning, had lunch in a Hmong town (sandwiches, not Hmong food unfortunately), and then hiked for a few hours in the pouring rain in the afternoon. The trails became super muddy and by the end of the hike I had slid down countless slick patches and was absolutely covered in mud. Still though, I was not complaining - it was a really cool adventure.

Hmong women by old French church in Sapa town

Girl drying some corn on the side of the dirt road

water wheel by river in cat cat

children bathing and playing with water buffaloes

Green valley and terraced rice paddies
Dzay women resting by the side of the road
flowers
Me and our Hmong guide Cha by waterfall

Hoi An - welcome to Vietnam

2008-08-06T20:21:00.000-07:00

After an amazing six weeks in Europe, it was time for one last trip of business school - a long trip back to Southeast Asia. In fact, I would guess nobody in the world has ever flown from Tarifa Spain to Hoi An Vietnam before. It's not easy to do - I had to drive two hours to Malaga Spain, fly to London, change airports, then connect in Singapore and Hanoi, arrive in Da Nang, then drive an hour to Hoi An. Phew. But, still I was really excited to see Vietnam - the last Asian country high on my list of places to visit.

Hoi An was a great start to seeing the country. It is a small town located in the central portion of Vietnam, a couple miles from the coast and a few miles south of the 17th parallel, so technically part of South Vietnam from the perspective of the American War (I guess not surprisingly, but still unusual to hear, the Vietnam War is known here as the American War. And the Vietnamese justifiably have a lot of pride about how they were able to expel first the French colonists in the 1950s then the Americans in the 1970s).

Hoi An is now primarily a tourist destination, for Westerners, Vietnamese, and Chinese alike. It has a really nice, very walkable old town (cars are forbidden though bikes and motorcycles, known here as xe om, are everywhere). Our first day we rented bicycles (Asian biking again!) and rode from our hotel on the riverfront a few miles outside town into the downtown. I luckily did not hit anyone. We explored the various temples, the sprawling market, the numerous tailors and art galleries that have exploded to suck in tourist dollars, and walked throughout the old town, trying to adjust to the heat, humidity, aromas, and chaos that were a stark contrast from Europe. The town was really pleasant though, and, despite the madness when compared to Spain, was definitely one of the calmest places I have been in SE Asia.

Hoi An was a trading center for thousands of years, and there are a number of Chinese style buildings and temples. Here are a few photos of temples in the old town.

We also enjoyed the markets which sold everything from dried fish to fruits and vegetables to clothes and furniture.

We also spent part of our long weekend enjoying the beaches around Hoi An. The 30km long white sand beach that stretches from Hoi An to Da Nang was a famous relaxation spot for American soldiers. The northern stretch of the beach is also known from a tv show as "China Beach". We were only 1km from the southern portion of the beach, so we took full advantage of the 80+ degree ocean water, beautiful clean beaches, and gorgeous palm tree and island views. Yet another amazing beach.

Our last day in Hoi An, we hired a car and drove to My Son, a really interesting and beautiful set of Hindu ruins about an hour into the countryside that were built by the Champas culture from around the 3rd century to the 14th century. This is the same culture most famous for its largest ruins, Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The collection of temples, buildings, and ruins partially overrun by jungle was quite stunning and fascinating. We really enjoyed the drive from Hoi An, through some very small towns and countryside, then hiking (briefly) through the jungle to get to the ruins.

Impressions of Spain

2008-08-03T23:16:00.000-07:00

The rest of the two weeks that I spent in Spain was amazing. It is such an interesting, relaxed, and enjoyable place to travel. The atmosphere is so fun and relaxing, and having pinchos (Basque for tapas) and a some wine at a tapas bar is always a great way to end a day. We drove all the way from the Northeast corner of San Sebastian to the southeastern tip of Tarifa and I enjoyed every minute of it. Definitely one of my favorite countries I have ever visited, and even though I have already been twice, it's at the top of my list of places to visit again.

My online photo album and captions will describe the trip in more detail but a few stream-of-consciousness highlights were:

Barcelona-amazing vibe and awesome Gaudi architecture all around...staying at Sancho's family's house in the countryside around Bilbao was really interesting - the tiny village does not see 25 American tourists very often!...The Guggenheim Bilbao was crazy and cool...Saw Guernica in Madrid again. Still super impactful...San Sebastian was a beautiful and really fun town on the Northeastern coast. Amazing food...Grenada was highlighted by the Alhambra which was not quite as cool as I had hoped but still very much worth seeing. Terrible audio guides though...Gibraltar was a weird escape...Tarifa was an amazingly fun and chill beach town

All in all, a great trip and a great finish to Europe. Next up, a long trip to Vietnam!

Gibraltar - a weird but cool British outpost in southern Spain

2008-07-31T20:54:00.001-07:00

We spent a day visiting Gibraltar, a 30 minute drive from the house we rented in Tarifa, at the southern tip of Spain. In fact, Gibraltar is a 2.5 square mile rock outcropping at the southern tip of Europe. It's also oddly British - a fact that still causes some tension between Britain and Spain. At the rock of Gibraltar, Morocco is only 10 km away and is clearly visible across the Strait of Gibraltar, an obviously important and highly trafficked shipping channel for any boats leaving the Mediterranean and heading eastwards.

Gibraltar had three major highlights.

The first was the British atmosphere. While Spain has been fantastic, it was fun having a day long escape. We spent much of it eating amazing fish and chips and watching the final round of the British Open in an English pub. We also walked around a little bit down the small but British feeling town, complete with classic red English phone booths. Finally, there were tons of red-faced Brits speaking the Queen's English.

The second highlight were the macaques - the only wild primates in Europe. About 300 macaques, basically tailless apes that look like monkeys, roam in five tribes around the rock of Gibraltar. They are very used to human tourists though, and enjoyed running all around and over our cars, grabbing anything they could find (including a bathing suit out of the trunk), and generally entertaining us.

Finally, the rock of Gibraltar and the views were pretty cool. Most people know the rock from the Prudential advertisements. It is both imposing in itself and also has really cool views back towards Spain and also across the water towards Morocco. It feels a lot like the Cape of Good Hope to me, with a long high rock outcropping in a narrow peninsula out into the water. We finished the day with a tricky scramble up the rock to the highest point in Gibraltar, which would have been much easier in shoes instead of flimsy flip-flops.

Pamplona

2008-07-30T05:57:00.000-07:00

The San Fermin festival in Pamplona was definitely my most memorable experience from the summer in Spain. Commonly known as “the running of the bulls”, San Fermin is one of the craziest things I have ever witnessed. Tens of thousands of tourists descend on Pamplona for a week every July for an incredible 24/7 party. Every morning at 8am, 12 bulls are released and hundreds of runners chase (and are chased) by the bulls through town on the way to the stadium. The race was much faster than I expected (bulls are fast – the race only lasts like 3 minutes!) but the surrounding fiesta goes on non-stop.

I went with 7 friends for a day and a night in Pamplona. We arrived just in time for the afternoon bullfight. The bullfight was a mix of enchanting and disgusting, with matadors elegantly performing an ancient ritualistic dance with the bulls, but also killing them in a gory mess that concludes with a stab to the head and horses dragging a dead bull covered in blood out of the ring. The packed crowd of Spaniards loved it though. An interesting tradition is the cutting of the ear. If the crowd thinks that the matador did a particularly good job, they call for him to receive the ear of the bull as a reward. A member of the royal family (of what family, I’m not sure) sits in the royal box. Like a scene straight out of Gladiator, he listens to the roar of the crowd after the fight, and raises his handkerchief if he determines the matador should receive the ear. We saw one granted in the six bullfights of the night.

After the bullfight, we reveled in the streets, parading around, snacking on tapas, and popping in and out of little bars. The scene was smelly, wine-soaked, and energetic, as a number of tourists come to town for the week and just nap in the park whenever they must before jumping back into the fiesta. The fiesta itself is aided by two surprisingly good Spanish drinks – the callemocho and tinto de verano – which are red wine mixed with coca-cola and red wine mixed with a Spanish drink kind of like 7-up.

The actual running of the bulls was quite a scene as well. Part or our group ran and part watched from balconies or wherever they could find a view. I was torn between running and watching but after a twenty-something Californian was gored and needed extensive surgery the day before we arrived, I opted for the balcony. I think it turned out to be a good choice. To run, you really need to scout out the section of the run you want to do ahead of time and prepare some escape options. Having seen it once, I am sure that I could do it. But running on your first day there is a huge mistake, according to both my Spanish friends who have been and having seen the race I would agree. The biggest risk in the race is not really the bulls but that you fall and get trampled, first by the crowd of runners (who will NOT stop to help you up) and then by some angry running bulls.

The runners are a mix of young European and American travelers who want to have an adventure and generally don’t know what they are doing and a bunch of experienced locals who not only want to say they ran with the bulls but who actually want to run as close to the bulls as they can for as long as they can. In my photo below from taken from our balcony, you can actually see one of the runners reaching out and touching a bull. Crazy. But an amazingly fun couple days.

Bullfight

Running with the bulls
The running begins
Fellow spectators
Even we got in the bullfighting act

Montenegro - Croatia for Russians

2008-07-30T05:27:00.000-07:00

Montenegro felt a lot like a Russian version of Croatia. Slightly different food, different writing on the signs, and all the tourists clearly came from the East, not Western Europe. It all combined to give it a bit of a more rugged feel. The country's slogan is "Montenegro - Wild Beauty" and it seems pretty accurate to me.

We spent a few days at the beach near Budva. Budva had yet another cool Stari Grad. It was one of the smaller and cozier ones we had been too, but after 3 old cities in Croatia we didn't spend too much time there. We spent a lot of time on the beach. But the highlight of the trip was definitely the day we spent in and around Kotor.

Kotor is a beautiful town set on the edge of Europe's southernmost fjord (see below). It was a really cool natural setting, with mountain walls rising up over a crystal blue inlet of water. We hiked up for a few hours and found our way to the top of an old fort that overlooked the whole scene and spent some time chilling with a couple bird, surveying the bay.

Montenegro concluded our excellent adventures in the Balkans. And after waiting through an endlessly long customs customs that nearly made us miss our flight, we headed off to Spain for the second leg of the summer.

View of Kotor

Sun peeks through city (not my underwear drying on the clothesline)

Kotor old town

Kotor bay

Croatian beach time

2008-07-08T08:33:00.000-07:00

Hvar was amazing. It was an idyllic, beautiful paradise of an island. Amazing scenery, buildings, and everything else. We also had no less than 4 of the best meals I have ever had - amazing italian seafood mostly - and took a few hikes to remote beach/coves, including one that culminated in a beautiful one man restaurant called Robinsons that was amazing.

But much like people do not like to hear stories about how cute other peoples pets are, I will not spend much time describing our awesome island beach vacation. I will just say that it was fantastic and the photos barely capture it.

After 3 days in Hvar, we took a boat back to the mainland and a bus all the way to the southern tip of Croatia to Dubrovnik. This old walled city was really cool, but a little over-run with tourists. The old town had really cool walls all around it which you could climb up then hike around to get great views of the city.

Instead of getting a hotel in Dubrovnik we ended up renting a Sobe, or private accommodation, from a nice Croatian couple Bozo and Rada. We rented an apartment in a 400 year old building that had been in their family for generations. Their kids had grown up though, so Bozo and Rada had just finished renovating their apartment for renters. It was really cool being able to stay in a unique place in the heart of the old town.

Despite the daytime crowds (nothing like Venice, but after Hvar almost anything would have seemed too crowded), Dubrovnik was pretty great. And while we have now definitely seen a number of Stari Grads (old town) this trip, Dubrovnik was probably my favorite. We watched an outdoor movie that was projected on the old city wall right across the street from our house. We went to Lokrum island (about 10 minutes away) for some more beach time, and generally enjoyed wandering around, stopping in shops and cafes, and taking in the views from the city walls.

Then, after two great days in Dubrovnik, we headed even further south into Montenegro.

Update after Hvar

2008-07-03T12:19:00.001-07:00

Croatia continues to amaze. Hvar was incredibly beautiful and one of the most fun and interesting beach towns I have ever seen. We left by ferry this morning and got to Dubrovnik in southern Croatia earlier today. It is also incredibly scenic. In lieu of a further update, here are some photo highlights from the past few weeks.

Croatia - the real Little Italy

2008-06-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning we said goodbye to Sarajevo and took a bus 3 hours south through some cool mountains and rivers to Mostar, a town in southern Bosnia. Mostar is most famous for its old stone arch bridge which was built in the 1300s. Sadly the bridge was destroyed in 1993. But a few years ago the restored/replaced it with a new version, and a nice downtown area of shops and cafes have sprouted out along it and the river front.

After a few hours exploring town, we hoped on another (hot!) bus and headed to Split, Croatia.

Croatia is tough to write about. It is just amazingly beautiful and hard to capture in words. Green hills, craggy mountains, amazing beaches, beautiful blue coastlines. It is gorgeous.

Split was founded around 200AD by the Roman Emperor Diocletian who built it to be his retirement palace. (Italy is only a few hours west of Croatia by boat across the Adriatic Sea). While the "palace" still stands, it would best be described as a small complex, complete with city walls. Amazingly, not only is the palace still largely intact, there are over 3,000 people who still live in apartments and houses in the various alleyways and rooms of the palace! The whole area feels like a clean, largely undiscovered Venice.

We spent a pleasant night and day just walking around the Old Town, hanging out on the Promenade, admiring the nearly 2,000 year old columns, walls, archways, and art (including some Egyptian Sphinx sculptures that Diocletian imported for decoration). We also watched the Euro Cup final in a huge crowd outside and were ecstatic when Spain - who we've been cheering for throughout the tournament - pulled out a 1-0 victory.

We also spent a relaxing day and a half playing in the sea. We stayed at a nice hotel just outside town so we had a sweet pool and beach access right outside the door. Really pretty, though the rocky (not sand) beaches took a little getting used to. Still though, it was great.

Next stop - the island of Hvar. We are taking a big catamaran out to this increasingly popular Croatian island for 3 days of fun and sun.

Note: Uploading pictures so far has proven difficult. But, finally, I got a couple photos uploaded for the previous posts.

Bridge in Mostar

Cheesy B&W picture of tower in Split

Street corner, Split

Sarajevo - Minarets and Cappaccinos

2008-06-30T06:30:00.000-07:00

Sarajevo is gorgeous. It has a unique feel to it due to the cool mix of cultures that formed it. The city was founded by the Ottomans in the 1500s but was always an east-west crossroads. There is a cool old turkish quarter with tons of old shops and kebab stands. There are a number of old (and new) mosques whose minarets populate the skyline. But there are also a number of churches and synagogues and a massive cathedral in the town center. And the city is in a beautiful setting. There are cool hills and mountains rising up above the town which sits in a valley with a nice river running through town.

Sarajevo is also extremely energetic at night. The central downtown area is all pedestrian-only and walkable. During the two Euro Cup games there had to be 3,000 people in all the bars and cafes that had set up outdoor tables chairs and tvs for watching the games.

We also ate really good food. Two favorites of mine were the doner kebabs from street vendors and the local dish of czevapi which was like a very onion-y hamburger in a grilled pita. Excellent.

The city seems very safe and pleasant too. Something I read here quoted a resident as saying, While we have war criminals hidden throughout the city, you will never feel unsafe wandering the streets. So there's that.

During the day, the biggest past-time in Sarajevo must be cafe sitting. Bosnians are big fans of the "Cafe-Bar" which serves alcohol, coffee, and sometimes ice cream. Everywhere you look around town, people are sitting. Sometimes sitting and smoking. Sometimes sitting and sipping. Sometimes having some ice cream. No one is eating though, and most cafes don't serve real food.
Coffee drinking seems to be a bigger part of Bosnian life even than elsewhere in Europe. There are even three different Bosnian words for coffee - one for the 1st coffee of the day, one for daytime coffee taken with friends or colleagues, and one for coffee served at the end of a meal or gathering intended as a polite way to tell guests that it's time to leave.

Still though, the rocky last century's worth of history are barely beneath the surface. Tour maps highlight the bridge where Franz Ferdinand was assassinated (starting WWI), the Holiday Inn where journalists hid out during the 1992-95 siege of the city, and the Sarajevo roses (when particularly deadly mortar attacks hit town, the sidewalk holes were repaved with red cement) which are all over town, including right in front of our hotel. And finally, this may just be in my head, but people here, especially the older people, seem to look like they are somewhat weary and distant below the surface. There also seem to be more than the average number of beggars missing limbs and many people seem to be shopping but nobody seems to be buying anything. While this NYT article gives a darker perspective we generally experienced the city as very happy, lively, and energetic.

I would definitely recommend Sarajevo. It was culturally unique, felt authentic (almost no Western tourists), really energetic, and very scenic.

View of downtown and mountains from our hotel

Old mosque

China's stock exchange

2008-06-27T01:37:00.000-07:00

It's been a rough year since I last wrote about the Shanghai Stock Exchange. After peaking just over 6,000 in September, the SSE is down about 56% to around 2,700 today.

Pecs, Hungary

2008-06-25T09:10:00.002-07:00

We had our first encounter with Soviet-era infrastructure on the train ride from Budapest to Pecs. Unsurprisingly running late (due to unforeseen broken ticket machines on the Metro) we arrived at the train station hot and sweaty and barely in time to catch the final train of the day to Pecs. We hopped on the train and were immediately faced with brutally hot and cramped conditions on a train that was far older than me. Needless to say we were eager to disembark 4 hours later in Pecs.

While I had never heard of Pecs until stumbling across it a few weeks ago in a guidebook, it turned out to be a fantastic stop on our journey towards the Adriatic coast. Recently named as Europe's Cultural Capital for 2010, Pecs oozed charm. It also showcased the multicultural legacy of southwestern Hungary. Our hotel was next to a beautiful and massive old synagogue, the main square was dominated by the 'Mosque Church' whose steeple features a cross atop a crescent moon, and rising above the city is the massive Basilica of St Peter.

In addition to wandering around, sampling gelato and coffee at various cafes, touring some of the old churches and museums, and hiking up and around the turrets of the old city walls, we were also lucky to experience Pecs' Gastronomy Festival! We had a great night full of sampling Hungarian wines (deservedly not famous), amazing food (lots of fried stuff in red sauces and some amazing grilled sugared donuts, like round Hungarian churros), and live music and dance. It was another great night.

Main Square, Pecs

Train to Bosnia

2008-06-25T09:10:00.001-07:00

After four days in Hungary, we hopped on another train, this time for a long, winding trip to Sarajevo. We traveled briefly south through Hungarian countryside to the Croatian border, spent a few hours traveling through Croatia's interior rolling hills and cornfields to the Bosnian border, and then rolled through Bosnia to Sarajevo. While there is only one 2-car train per day that makes the trip from Hungary to Bosnia, we had a relatively new, though still AC-less, empty cabin to ourselves. Much like US airlines, we have a 9 hour ride with no food service. So we packed a lunch/dinner of clifbars, and salami, mustard, and cheese sandwiches from the grocery store and set out on our way.

I am excited and lucky to report that Bosnia is the 50th country that I have visited in my 20s (I just turned 29). More than once in the past few years, I've though I would only probably make it to 10 or so more countries in my life. But the more I travel, the more I keep finding places I am eager to see! And I have continued to be lucky enough to find time and opportunities to experience them. Like a number of places I have visited in the last 9 years, Bosnia was not really on my travel radar screen until just a few weeks ago. And yet somehow, here I am. So we will see - I once again am at a stage where I suspect that I will not visit too many more new countries. But I am really lucky and surprised to have made it to 50 so far! And, more immediately, I am excited and a bit nervously anticipating this next country, which is supposedly fascinating, lively, and recovering well from the wars that have ravaged it for most of the past century.

Budapest, Hungary - Summer Adventures begin!

2008-06-25T08:55:00.004-07:00

Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria. Give up? The countries that border Hungary.

We arrived for our summer tour through the Balkans in Budapest on Saturday afternoon. After a quick trip to the ATM for some Hungarian Forint (Hungary is EU but not Euro, though equally expensive it turns out) we quickly settled into life in strikingly beautiful central Budapest. We were fortunate enough to land here on Midsummers Eve and found festivals celebrating the longest day of the year. After a quick nap, we ventured out and found some numerous awesome sidewalk cafes full of Euro Cup fans, fantastic goulash, and not enough air-conditioning. For Midsummer, Budapest was holding a MuseumFest and kept all its museums open until 2am. So after some drinks, festive soccer, and a great dinner at a restaurant called Mensa we found ourselves venturing through the Hungarian National Gallery at 1 in the morning, contemplating our good fortune on our first day of summer.

As the frequent comparisons suggest, Budapest reminds me a lot of Prague. The Danube winds through the middle of town, dividing the two halves of Buda and Pest which merged in 1000 to found the current capital. Buda is dominated by Castle Hill, which rises quickly up from the riverbanks. It has beautiful old churches, winding streets, and views of town. We stayed in Pest which had more hotels, restaurants, cafes, and pedestrian shopping streets.

In addition to just wandering and running around town (a summer of health has begun to try to remove some of the excesses of business school), some of my highlights of Budapest were nightly viewings of Euro Cup games with avid fans, great Hungarian food - sausages, salami, goulash, mustard, sauerkraut, pork, and paprika everything, and a trip to the baths. Budapest has a huge bathing tradition, and we spent one evening in the huge public baths in the city's main park, rotating between pools to cool down and warm up, and all the while playing in the bubbling jets.

For a while in the early 20th century, Budapest was called Paris of the East. While I expected to see more signs of the country's occupied past (the new republic is less then 20 years old and for a number of years received less attention and investment than its central European peers), Budapest today was a booming, clean, expensive, culturally and visually impressive metropolis. It was an awesome place to begin our summer adventures.

Hungarian Parliament

View across the Danube

Bangalore

2008-05-21T22:26:00.001-07:00

Bangalore's abysmal infrastructure is back in the news. The new airport is scheduled to partially open this weekend...

El Gouna

2008-05-20T20:02:00.000-07:00

The most exceptional meeting we had in the entire study trip was with Naguib Sawiris, the CEO of Orascom Telecom.

Orascom Telecom is the largest telecom operator in a number of emerging markets including Pakistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Zimbabwe, Tunisia, and Bangladesh. Naguib is a famously high risk businessman, and has just bid to become the first mobile operator in North Korea.

Since Naguib was on the vacation at the beach town his family created, he flew our group of 40 people from Cairo to El Gouna (a beach town his family has created) for the day.

He was one of the most interesting speakers I have heard over the past two years. His father was one of the wealthiest Egyptians until his construction business was nationalized in the 1960s. The family was reduced to poverty. Then Naguib's father, later with the help of his three sons, built the current business up to its $30B total valuation. It seems to me like watching his father's rise and fall and rise inspired Naguib's determination to seize opportunities and to take risks against the advice of all others.

I have been meaning to write more about this for the past five months, so I just decided to post what I have now and to add a few pictures.

Dubai

2008-02-26T20:18:00.000-08:00

An email series of pictures showing all the new construction in Dubai has been floating around so I decided to share it. I am including two of the most surreal below.

Dubai is absolutely crazy. Supposedly 20% of all the world's cranes are in Dubai. There is construction everywhere. But so far, demand still seems to be outstripping supply. We talked to a few ex-pats who were renting homes in Dubai. They said that for a nice, 3br/2ba place they were paying us$20,000 per month in rent!!

Everyone we talked to on the commercial side said they were sold out as well as so many multinational companies are moving their Middle Eastern headquarters (or global headquarters, like Halliburton!) to Dubai and need real estate.

More to come.

Dubai in 1990
Dubai in 2008

Surprise! It's Israel

2008-01-27T14:32:00.000-08:00

After a nice couple days at the beach, we left Dahab to take the boat back across the Red Sea to Aqaba to catch our flight to Dubai. We thought the boat left at 3pm, so we got to the ferry terminal at 2:00. But, after several confusing arguments in Arabic/broken English, it turned out the boat was either sold out or had left or wasn't running. What was clear though, was that we had a flight out of Jordan at 9am the next morning and we weren't getting on a boat to get there.

One of the quirks of travel in the Middle East is that since many countries do not recognize Israel, they do not allow Israeli citizens to enter their country. While this is not surprising, what was surprising to me was that they also do not allow foreigners who have visited Israel (and who have an Israeli stamp in their passport) to enter their country. The UAE is one such country.

The natural solution to getting to Jordan was to go by road, through Israel. The problem was, we needed to get into the UAE the next day.

We had read on the Internet and heard informally that most of the time that, as an American, if you explain to the Israeli customs agents that you would prefer that they do not stamp your passport so you can travel more in the Middle East they will stamp a piece of paper instead. Though our guidebook described rogue customs agents who will "accidentally" stamp passports anyway. If this happened to us, we would be stuck and not able to join the first half of our study trip. Still, we saw no alternative, so we headed for Israel.

We took a cab, a little nervously, for about an hour from the ferry terminal to the Israel border. There, we went through the Egyptian exit procedures, and walked across the no-man's land into Israel. There, we went through some pretty intense security screening and made it up to the customs agent. There, I asked her not to stamp our passport. It was a little trickier than I expected - she asked a number of questions about why we didn't want our passport stamped, where we were going in Israel (we had no idea, so we said the Holiday Inn at the first town, Eilat, across the border). Then she called her supervisor. By this point, we were getting pretty nervous, but in the end, they stamped a piece of paper and let us through.

Since we successfully made it into Israel and had already spent some time in Aqaba, we decided to spend the night there. We actually did go to the Holiday Inn in downtown, which had some open rooms. We walked all around downtown Eilat - it was really nice, much wealthier than the similar towns on the Jordanian and Egyptian side of the gulf. We went into a big nice mall (with extensive security screening) where I bought some clean socks, some outdoor shopping areas with some decorated cows and pigs, to a great Israeli diner - to fill a somewhat humorous stereotype, we saw no less than 4 old Jewish women send their dinners back for being undercooked - and then to a nice Irish Pub to watch some soccer. Pretty sharp contrast from the rest of the Middle East, but pretty fun.

The next morning we got up early, took a cab to the Israeli/Jordanian border, avoided an exit stamp, walked through an even bigger No-Man's Land, then took a cab to the Aqaba airport for our flight to Dubai. A fun, though definitely unexpected side trip.

Dahab

2008-01-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

Dahab was a really cool little beach town on the Red Sea. While it was a little touristy, it was mostly European and backpacker touristy. There were not a lot of Americans there at all (which is not surprising, given that Americans rarely venture out of North America and sometimes Europe).

But anyway, Dahab has a nice promenade along the Red Sea waterfront with tons of restaurants built right into the sand. The floors of the restaurants are basically blankets and pillows and you can just crawl into a spot at a low table for a drink, a shisha (the Arab hookah, quite popular among locals since many Muslims do not drink alcohol), or great seafood.

There is also fantastic snorkeling with a beautiful coral reef that you can just walk into right off the coast.

We spent a pleasant and relaxing two days hanging out along the water, snorkeling, and recuperating after a pretty intense two weeks of travel. Jason and Rob left to go home and Owen and I met up with two other friends, Alex and Huiting who were also in Dahab scuba diving. A pretty fun few days.

Restaurant, Dahab

Red Sea sunset

Sinai Peninsula - Mt. Sinai

2008-01-23T17:29:00.000-08:00

After a day in Aqaba in southern Jordan we decided to venture across the Red Sea onto the Sinai Peninsula. Given the politics and geography of the area, which will come into play later, we took a ferry to get there. It is remarkable how physically close together so many different countries are in the Middle East. Sitting at the beach in front of our hostel in Aqaba, Jordan (Al Aqabah in the top right corner of the map below), we could easily see across the water to Egypt, up the road to the right to the buildings and hotels of the city of Eilat in Israel, and down the road to the left at the mosques at the Saudi Arabian border.

The ferry was an experience in itself. It was scheduled to leave at noon, so we arrived at the terminal to buy our tickets at 10:30. After two treks up and down two flights of stairs with our luggage (up to buy tickets, down to pay the departure tax, up to get our passports stamped, down to get on the rickety old bus to go the 100 yards to the boat), we finally made it on to the boat an hour later. Then, since our journey was a few days after the Hajj concluded, our boat was packed with a ton of people who were returning from their pilgrimage to Mecca. As a result, it was extremely crowded and more than a little aromatic. After the hour long boat ride, and a 2 hour disembarkment process we finally made it to Egypt.

Egypt was definitely cheaper than Jordan and tremendously cheaper than the Gulf. Our first move was to hire a driver to take us to lunch and then an hour up the coast to the beach town we were staying. Total cost - $20. As we were starving, our first destination was Dr. Kebab, where we had some pretty good chicken shwarma and lamb kebabs. We then continued on to Dahab, a pretty cool beach town right along the Red Sea.

The main reason for the trip to the Sinai Peninsula was Mt. Sinai. Mt. Sinai is about 2.5 hours inland from Dahab, in the south central Sinai Peninsula. Reputedly where God delivered the 10 Commandments to Moses and appeared as the Burning Bush, Mt. Sinai attracts hundreds of pilgrims a day. While it is a fairly difficult trek to the top, we decided it would be a memorable way to spend Christmas Day, so we decided to hike to the summit for Christmas sunrise.

After arriving in Dahab on Christmas Eve, our first order of business was to hire a driver to take us to Mt. Sinai. Without too much effort, we found a cab driver who would pick us up at 2am, drive us to the mountain, wait for us to summit the mountain, and then take us back to Dahab afterwards for about US$25 each.

I have a few distinct impressions of Mt. Sinai. The first is COLD! The wind-chill was in the high teens during our trek from 4:00am to 6:30am where we reached the top to coincide with sunrise.

Second, it was isolated. We drove through hours worth of isolated desert to get to Mt. Sinai that were broken basically only by security checkpoints every 15 minutes or so. I cannot even imagine what how alone and isolated fleeing Jews, pilgrims, and other historical migrants in the Sinai must have felt in the frigid hostile environment without access to a heated 4x4 vehicle.

My third impression of Mt. Sinai is that it was beautiful. The actual hike up the mountain took a little over 2 hours. We walked with two headlamps but were able to see quite well thanks to the largely full moon. We were largely alone during most of the hike, with only the occasional Bedouin offering early morning Mint Tea or a camel to ride to the top to break the stillness.

We did stop once for a tea break and talked to some really nice Bedouin guys. They were very curious about our mobile phones and spent a long time playing with Owen’s blackberry. They desperately wanted to trade something for the blackberry and we negotiated to the point where they were going to trade one of their camels for the phone but in the end, Owen decided to pass.

While the hike to the top was both pretty and memorable, the view at sunrise was spectacular. We rented a blanket near the top from a little shop for the expensive (but well worth it) price of US$10 and watched for the sunrise. By around 7:30 a few hundred other pilgrims had joined us at the summit to watch the Christmas sunrise. While we were not given any new commandments, it was still an incredible experience.

Wadi Rum and other Jordan photos

2008-01-15T19:56:00.000-08:00

After Petra we spent a day in the Wadi Rum desert. Wadi Rum is where Lawrence of Arabia fought in WWI and also where the movie of the same name was filmed.

We took a pretty exciting 4x4 ride out into the desert and rode up and down the sand dunes. We stopped on top of a dune and had some tea and watched the sunset, then proceeded to our Bedouin camp to spend the night.

We had a great night in the camp, eating some good food, playing cards, and hanging out around the fire with our Egyptian and Bedouin hosts (and the half dozen other tourists who were foolish enough to brave the desert in winter with us) who were really nice. We also walked around outside the camp (partially because moving kept us warm) and had the really humbling experience of being quite alone in the middle of the desert.

Finally, the fire died down and I headed to sleep under 5 blankets and wearing every piece of clothing I brought to the middle east. It was probably the coldest night I have ever experienced in my life, but it was still a really amazing night in the desert.

4x4 ride through the desert

Camels roaming in the desert canyons

Sunset at Wadi Rum

And some other Jordan highlights:

We had hummus for almost every meal - here, the hummus, at Hashem restaurant in Amman may have been the best of all

View of the Sea of Galilee, Israel, Syria, and Lebanon from Umm Qais Jordan

Roman amphitheater, Jerash

Two thousand year old Roman columns, Jerash

More Roman ruins, Jerash

View from hill in central Amman, largest flagpole in the world

Petra

2008-01-15T19:07:00.000-08:00

One of the highlights of Jordan definitely - and probably of my whole trip to the Middle East - was our visit to Petra.

Petra is an ancient Nabatean city in southern Jordan famously described as "a rose-red city half as old as time". It is deservedly one of the (new) 7 Wonders of the World. While many may not know the name Petra (I did not until recently), it was prominently featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and other movies so often people at least recognize its likeness.

Petra's origin is still somewhat unclear, though evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other sources suggest it was founded around 300 B.C. and was at its height from around AD50 to 300. While the Nabateans were a distinct culture, Petra served as a trading crossroads at a key juncture for traders coming across the Sinai from Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, and to the prominent Greek and Roman lands to the north. As a result, Petra became extremely wealthy, which can be seen today in the intricate carvings of amazing magnitude. The architectural influence of each of these cultures (Greek and Roman columns, Egpytian pyramidal designs, etc) are also visible.

The primary attractions today are the amazingly preserved ruins of buildings which due to the high quality construction and arid desert conditions are still almost perfectly preserved. The city is literally carved into canyon walls, and runs for several miles through the desert. There are hundreds of tombs, statues, buildings, an amphitheater, temples, and more carved out of the wall.

Like Machu Picchu (probably the only place in the world I have been that is comparable to Petra), the interplay of the beautiful natural setting and the ancient cityscape is absolutely incredible.

The major ruins of Petra are approached through a long narrow canyon known as the Siq. This 900km hike is pretty spectacular in itself.

We did the Siq hike once at night (while the candlelit walk was pretty spectacular, the freezing rain took a little away from the atmosphere) and again during the morning. As Petra is in a flood plain, the Nabateans built a system of dams to prevent flash floods from filling the canyon and also carved piping / drainage systems into the canyon walls to fill the village. At the end of the Siq stands the Treasury, the most famous and best preserved landmark.

Full view of the Treasury - massive and beautiful

Tombs and temples lined the incredibly colorful pink canyon walls

More intricately carved massive ruins

An overview shot of one tiny portion of Petra to show the massive area it covers

The gang in some cave/tombs

We also hiked up to the "Monastery", an area overlooking the ruins on one side and the canyons on the other. A pretty long hike, but the view was spectacular.

Finally, a much needed rest with the Jordanian flag in the background

Some photos from Oman

2008-01-15T18:42:00.001-08:00

A random collection of photo highlights from Oman (click any to enlarge):

Mountain Goat at the Grand Canyon of Oman

Owen and I in the desert after climbing dunes by a Bedouin village

Camel crossing

Fort on island on way out to Survivor Island snorkeling

Sunrise on the beach

Sur, beach town with beautiful promenade and packed games of beach soccer

Inside a souk (market) in Muscat

The group in front of the Presidential Palace (home of Sultan Qaboos)

Fort protecting the Sultan's palace

It should be clear what this is

Wild Wadi waterpark (Dubai)

Shanghai update - new photos

2008-01-15T14:19:00.000-08:00

Check out some of the recent photos Jian Shuo posted of the Jinmao Tower in Pudong. Really cool views of some of the crazy development that is continuing in Shanghai.

Dead Sea

2008-01-15T07:16:00.000-08:00

We spent a day at the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth at 1,000 feet below sea level and the saltiest body of water on the planet.

Floating in the Dead Sea was a really bizarre experience that is hard to describe. The water is around 6 times more dense than normal salt water, and as a result it is impossible to sink. As you can see in the pictures below, it's possible to float without any effort - as Jason and I both have both our arms and legs out of the water. It's also possible to sit Indian style in the water and to just float. Very strange but cool feeling. The water is also so salty that if you have any open cuts or wounds, or if you have recently shaved, the salt will cause painful burning.

We visited the Dead Sea on the Jordan side. The opposite side of the Dead Sea is Israel (under the sunset below). There are many more resorts on the Israeli side, but the view from the less crowded Jordan side was quite nice.

We also did some sightseeing in the Dead Sea area. We headed to the top of Mt. Nebo, where Moses died after looking out over the Promised Land.

The view was cool and you could see a number of ancient towns including Jericho, Bethlehem and Ramallah.The terrain on the Jordanian side was quite isolated and was primarily desert canyon.
Finally, we played around an ancient castle, Kerak, that overlooked a crossroads on ancient trading routes for the past two thousand years.

Very cool castle, but tough to capture its size and antiquity.

Different countries are different*

2007-12-20T09:21:00.000-08:00

We spent a day in Amman, the capital of Jordan and a city of 2 million people. Some highlights included a trip to the Citadel on a hilltop overlooking the city and a Roman amphitheater still almost entirely intact that could seat 3,000 people, just on a random street in the middle of the city surrounded by shops, restaurants and city folk going about their normal lives. We also met up with two other classmates who are traveling in the region at a really cool nightclub that had fresh all you can eat sushi.

We also went to two really interesting sets of Roman ruins at Jerash and Umm Qais. Both were built around the 3rd century BC. Not only were they huge and largely still intact (desert air good for protection - many of the stone streets still have the wheel indentations from where Roman chariots wore them down still visible) but they also have so much history. An area might have a wall built by the Greeks protecting a Roman fountain that had a Byzantine church built on it that was turned into an Islamic mosque that became an Ottoman fort.

Jordan seems very different than Oman.

First, it is noticeably poorer. Jordan does not have any significant oil, so it is forced to rely on tourism and standard trade and industry to sustain the economy. And tourism has been slow over the last 6 years as the conflict in the middle east has worsened and after there were a few bombings in Amman a few years ago.

Secondly, the refugee situation in Jordan is much more immediately visible. Jordan has ~6 million Jordanian residents. It also has ~2 million Palestinian refugees and ~500k Iraqi refugees. While Jordan is one of only a few Arab countries who recognize Israel, the number of refugees we have met who refer to their home as being in territory occupied by Israel is a little unsettling. The two countries do have generally peaceful relations though.

Third, while both countries have a generally arid landscape, Oman has a large stretch of coastline where most of the people live. Jordan has only a few dozen kilometers of sea access, and most of the population lives inland along the north-south stretch running along the Jordanian Valley down to the Dead Sea, then south along the border with Israel to the coast. The need to secure water and lack of good land for farming are clearly evident.

Jordan, maybe more than any other place I have been, has an incredibly dense past. Jordan was controlled at various times by Mongols, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, Byzantines, Jews, Christian crusaders, Islamic caliphates, Ottomans and the British before finally becoming its own kingdom in 1948.

We went to lunch by one of he historical sights in Umm Qais. We had an incredibly beautiful panorama from our table. Not only that, it hammered home how close together everything is. Sitting in Jordan, we could also see the West Bank (Palestinian territory), Israel, the Golon Heights (Israel / Syria dispute), Lebanon, and Syria. Our guide then showed us the border in 1948, the path the Israeli tanks took through Jordan to Syria in the 1967 war, and the current borders. It really hammered home how Israeli/Palestinian conflict is such a common fact of day to day life here. In Dubai and Oman, it felt much more removed, even though those countries do
not even officially recognize Israel as a country. Looking around the intersection of all these countries, you can start to see why...

Actual bullet point on key takeaways slide in global business class at Stanford

Middle East Fashion Update

2007-12-20T09:14:00.000-08:00

The clothing choices here are worth noting.

In Dubai and Oman, almost universally, local men wore long white full length robes called dishdashas. In Dubai, men also wore a white headdress held in place by a black rope thing like a crown. In Oman, men also wore a headdress but it was tied a little differently and typically had a multicolor design.

Women in Dubai and Oman wore full length black robes, usually with a burqa covering the face completely.

In Jordan, most people wore western clothes. Many women wore head scarves though and many men wore headdresses. There are 3 primarily headdresses in Jordan - white, black checked, and red checked. We asked one of our tour guides if the colors had any significance. She said that historically white was worn by Arabs from the gulf, or by Jordanian Arabs in the summer due to the heat. The black and white checked was a historically Palestinian design and the red and white checked was a historically Bedouin design.

Today though the colors don't mean as much as all the headdresses are made in China anyway.

Oman - oh, man!

2007-12-17T09:55:00.000-08:00

We had an awesome time in Oman, a tiny country of only 3 million people that gets very few American tourists but should get many more. It's an interesting example of a wealthy, friendly, peaceful Middle Eastern country that still has very conservative Islamic values.

In addition to the adventures I highlighted in the other posts, we had a lot of fun in Oman.

Our first day we spent driving up to the Jebel Shams, the highest mountain in Oman at 10,000 ft. It gave us some great views of the Grand Canyon of Oman - much like the Grand Canyon of the US but a little more narrow and with a few more goats and a lot less people. We spent the night in Nizwa, the traditional cultural capital of Oman.

Our second day was spent at a really nice beach resort, snorkeling and then relaxing. Nearby this beach, apparently a large portion of the economy comes from smuggling. Iranian pirates bring goats across the Gulf of Oman in speedboats and trade them for American cigarettes from the Omanis. The Omanis accept this arrangement both because it nets them goats and because (according to the guide book) "piracy is ingrained in the region's cultural heritage and the local people do not want to frown upon the past". I do not know the current goat-cigarette exchange rate though.

Our third day we drove through the desert sand dunes to an Omani beach where we saw nesting sea turtles. This was surprisingly cool. These huge sea turtles swim away as far as India, southern Africa and Australia during the year, but come back to nest in the same beach they were born at in Oman. During the peak season, there can be hundreds of turtles nesting on the beach every night. We saw about a dozen, but it was very cool. Once they got to the beach, they would let you come up and watch them dig a big hole, lay their eggs, and then bury them. Most nights baby turtles hatch and then swim off into the ocean, but we couldn't see any. We did have a guide who was exactly like Borat though. Niiice...

Our last day in Oman we drove along the scenic coastal road back up to Muscat, the capital city. We stopped for an hour and played in a huge limestone hole in the ground called the Demon's Crater. In Muscat, we toured the Sultan's Palace, mosque, and surrounding grounds which were beautiful. We then shopped in a cool market, or souq and got some Omani souvenirs. Finally, we went to a great Indian restaurant on a hill overlooking the city. We topped this all off with an M&M Blizzard from the Dairy Queen by the waterfront near our hotel.

After a week in Oman, I was quite impressed. It was amazing how quickly we got used to sheiks driving around speeding on desert roads in the saloon cars (non 4x4 vehicles, or sedans), the eerie but majestic sound of the call to prayer from the mosques five times a day, or the sight of women in burqas crossing the street as we listened to hip hop music on our ipods in our Hertz rental car. It was also amazing how culturally fascinating, scenic, and extremely friendly Oman and the Omani people were. While it was unbelievably expensive to visit, I still look forward to visiting again some day.

Bedouin sand dune adventure

2007-12-17T09:49:00.000-08:00

Today we drove from the beach north of Muscat through the Arabian desert into the center of the country. We drove through beautiful craggy mountains, rocky desert, some blowing sand and quite empty countryside into a place called the Wahiba Sands.

These huge sand dunes rise up out of an area of otherwise flat and rocky countryside. The wind continuously blows them around so they are always in different shapes. In fact, the Omani border with Saudi Arabia is legally undefined in a large section because the shifting sands make recognizing exact locations difficult (and the area is only occupied by tribal nomads).

We had a great time hiking up and running around the dunes. And, as everyone advised us, just when you think you are in the middle of nowhere in Oman, some Bedouins will find you. And sure enough, a family of 3 kids and a teenager did. While only one of them spoke any English, we were able to learn that his favorite soccer team was Real Madrid which he watched from the satellite dish at his house in the desert.

And we scrambled up and then sprinted and jumped down the dunes with the little kids, which is fun in Arabic, English, or any other language.

Survivor Island Oman

2007-12-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

Today we got up bright and early, just after the morning call to prayer, to drive to the beach. We then hopped on a beat up old fishing boat Jason had arranged with a captain and a guide and set out into the Arabian sea.

About a half hour in we arrived at a tiny little island part way between Oman and Iran. Surprisingly the boat just dropped us off with some towels and snorkeling gear and told us they would be back for us in a few hours. While our island was quite beautiful with a white sandy beach surrounded by a brown rocky cliff, being left alone in the middle of nowhere Arabia was a bit unsettling. So we jokingly named our little island adventure Survivor Island Oman.

The snorkeling turned out to be absolutely incredible though. We had beautiful clear blue water and the most colorful coral I've ever seen. Tons of cool fish, a red shark, a few rays, and a pair of cuttlefish (like squid) mating which was incredible. There were also a number of sea turtles swimming around. My favorite, who I nicknamed Tommy the turtle, let me just swim around with him for like 30 minutes. Super cool.

In the end, the boat did come back for us and eventually brought us back to the mainland. We spent the rest of the afternoons and evening at a nice beach resort hanging out by the pool, playing ping pong, and relaxing. For dinner, they brought a grill and food to the patio outside our room and we barbecued some chicken tikka, lamb kebabs and jumbo prawns. A great dinner, but no cuttlefish.

Dubai - Welcome to Middle East Mayhem

2007-12-17T09:37:00.000-08:00

My Middle East trip began with a day in Dubai, the most liberal city on the Arabian peninsula and the largest city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

I am traveling with three friends from Stanford - two of my roommates, Rob and Jason, and another friend Owen. We spent our first day of the trip in Dubai basically to all meet up from our various flights in and to catch a flight to Oman.

The first thing we did upon arriving in the Middle East was, of course, go to the best water park in the Middle East. The Wild Wadi Waterpark (www.wildwadi.com) was awesome. It featured the pitch-black Tunnel of Doom, the Jumeirah Scairah (at 80 km/h the fastest waterslide outside North America), and several pretty cool water slides called blasters that shot you up the slide before you slid down it. But the best parts were the views of the Arabian Sea and the Burj al-Arab hotel right next door. The sail-shaped Burj is both the signature landmark of Dubai and reputedly the nicest hotel in the world.

Since I am coming back to Dubai for a week later this trip, I will save most of my commentary on Dubai until then.

But here are a few first impressions:

Despite the occasional English mistranslation or knockoff (like Safestway grocery store, TGI Thursdays restaurant) Dubai was impressively first world.
Dubai is under incredible construction. 20% of the cranes in the world are currently in Dubai which is even more amazing since there are only just over 1 million Emiratis who live there (and about 3 million expats, largely poor Indian workers and rich Western expats)
Dubai is incredibly rich. The city just exudes wealth - in fact the biggest contrast I felt with China was that while China just feels like growth, Dubai feels like money

Winter travel plans

2007-12-02T20:53:00.000-08:00

After an intense but awesome quarter at Stanford, I am preparing now for another month exploring a new part of the world. This trip will be a mix of business and pleasure that will take me to four countries in the Middle East which are new to me. Here's the rough itinerary.

Dec 11-12 - Dubai (fun)
Dec 13-17 - Oman (fun)
Dec 18-26 - Jordan (fun)
Dec 27-Jan 1 - United Arab Emirates (mix of cultural and work meetings)
Jan 1-6 - Egypt (mix of cultural and work meetings)

The work meetings are part of a Stanford study trip to the Middle East. We are planning on meeting real estate developers, hedge fund and private equity fund managers, government ministers, energy companies, and more. I'm really looking forward to seeing the crazy growth in Dubai first-hand and to compare it to my impressions of China and India this summer.

Like this summer, I hope to update this blog regularly. Stay tuned.

Summer Ends

2007-09-04T02:38:00.000-07:00

I have literally gone around the world in the past 85 days. My haphazard journey (excluding some side trips along the way) was:

San Francisco-Beijing-Shanghai on Air China

Shanghai-Kunming-Hong Kong on China Eastern

Hong Kong-Delhi on Air India

Delhi-Bangalore on Kingfisher Air

Bangalore-Mumbai-Brussels-New York on Jet Airways

New York-Atlanta on Continental

Atlanta-San Francisco probably by car

In between all these flights, I saw two of the world’s Wonders at the Great Wall and the Taj Mahal. I camped in the Himalayas and swam in the Arabian Sea. I sat with pilgrims in the mosques of Delhi and the monasteries of Tibet. I ate fine meals at world-class restaurants and subsisted on mystery kebabs from tiny street markets. I traveled by camel in Rajasthan and bicycled through crowded streets in Hangzhou. I saw the ancient town of Lijiang and the modern neon of Pudong. I took a commuter train into the world's largest city and chartered a bus in a village without a single car. I celebrated the Dragon Boat Festival in Shanghai and the Snake Boat Festival in Kerala. I boarded in a tiny village house and stayed in five-star hotels in huge mega-cities. I commuted by rickshaw and rode the world's fastest train. I saw the enormous potential and daunting challenges of doing business in the world’s two largest countries and fastest growing economies.

I'd like to conclude (or at least to slow down my daily pace of postings for a little while) with this somewhat cheesy analogy that came to me while picking through a pile of counterfeit DVDs: Soaring Dragon, Hidden Tiger.

Before the summer began, I believed that pundits were over-exaggerating the China opportunity and that India was underappreciated as a potential market. I thought it would be an order of magnitude easier to work in India than China. I was also more excited about living in India than China. But after 3 months here, it turns out I was exactly wrong. Despite the language difficulty in China, it was probably as easy to work in China as it was to work in India. I loved living in Shanghai, and Bangalore was barely tolerable. And I think the India opportunity/threat is much smaller than I expected, while the Chinese consumer market is an even bigger opportunity than most people think.

China today really gives visitors the feeling that you are seeing a powerful dragon that has just torn loose from its chains and is taking off. It is a bit of a strange beast, and there is definitely the risk that if you stand in the wrong spot, you can get burned by a breath of fire. But at the same time, it's awe-inspiring and powerful. Just walking around, you can feel the energy in the air. The hope, the new prosperity, the confidence in the future that is gripping China today is nearly tangible. China was the greatest and most advanced civilization in the world for most of the past 2,500 years. While no one thinks it will be the smoothest ride, most Chinese believe they will again have the world's greatest civilization in the near future. After catching its energy, ex-pats are doing whatever they can to get hired or extend their stays in Shanghai. Chinese-Americans are returning home to try to ride the wave of new prosperity. This summer, I just tried to hold on to the dragon and hope for the best on the wild ride.

India, on the other hand, is a tough, tough place. It's theoretically one of the biggest and fastest growing economies, but Indian life remains incredibly hard, even for rich Westerners. In the awesome book Maximum City, Seketu Mehta calls India "The Land of the No". This is so true. I received dozens of answers of "No" or "Not possible" in India every day. Sometimes, you can get a glimpse of the power of the Indian economy, like getting a glimpse of a tiger on a jungle safari. It looks sleek and strong. But it is still hard to see all its features through the dense foliage. Its power remains mostly hidden behind the dangerous jungle. Like a tiger hunter faces threats of attack and disease, living and working in India is full of difficult challenges - from power outages to omnipresent poverty to terror. Most ex-pats here just try to survive their stays - few truly enjoy Indian life. India's market potential is still elusive and hard to capture. Maybe some day the Indian tiger will come out of hiding. But that day looks far away.

Mumbai

2007-08-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

It seems appropriate that the last place that I visited this summer was Mumbai, the biggest city/mass of humanity on the planet.

Mumbai was known as Bombay until the Indian naming movement around 5 years ago led to name changes across the country (Madras became Chennai, Calcutta became Kolkata, etc.) And its "vibrant community" of 19 million people encapsulates everything I have seen in India in one swarming mob.

Over 60% of the city lives in slums that are among the worst in the world. Heading in to town you can see countless children picking through awful smelling fields of garbage, trying to find scraps of food. Mobsters control huge swathes of the city, and many are elected into local government to protect their territories. Hindus and Muslims live side-by-side, despite numerous targeted bombings and religious riots over the last 15 years. Many people live literally on the sidewalk, and carving out a space to sleep at night on the sidewalk is a huge battle.

At the same time, Mumbai is home to the dabbawalla (the lunch deliverer), 5-star fusion restaurants, and South Asia's most expensive real estate. It was also the largest British stronghold during their occupation of India and remains home to Victoria Terminus, the Gateway to India arch, and countless Victorian buildings and roundabouts.

Mumbai is also the biggest commuter city in the world, with millions of people commuting from suburbs and villages 2-3 hours each way literally hanging off the sides of Mumbai's commuter trains. So naturally I started my stay here by taking one of these famous trains. The guidebook generally advises against this, and I was the only white person at the station or on the train. But it has been important to me throughout the summer to see how "real people" live day-to-day, so I was definitely going to take the train.

After I landed, I took a rickshaw from the airport to the nearest train station, though the confused driver asked me three times to make sure that was really where I wanted to go. My stay at the station started with a 45 minute wait to buy a ticket, under a corrugated tin hangar with about 2,000 people in 6 different "lines" and 7 slowly moving electric fans. Finally, I fought my way to the front, shoved my money at the ticket counter, and got a ticket to Victoria Terminus. Then, it took me about 15 minutes to find platform 6, which was conveniently placed down a side path from platform 1 instead of being next to platform 5. Since I missed my train, I had to wait about 25 minutes for the next one. Finally, I boarded my "first class" carriage. Even the first class car was the worst train car I have ever been on, by far. A few fans sat idle on the ceiling, despite the midday heat, and people stood side by side all the way to the few who were hanging literally out the "door" (which obviously does not close) as we rattled slowly into town. After the huge line, my ticket was never checked.

South Mumbai was a pleasant surprise however. Mumbai is a long skinny peninsula, so near the south tip it's possible to walk from one side (the bay) across the peninsula to the Arabian Sea side, and there are fairly pretty walks down both sides of the shore. The whole downtown area was very enjoyable to walk around, with lots of very nice buildings (for India), relatively quaint streets, a huge cricket green/park in the middle of town, a really nice University with lots of Victorian buildings, lots of cool shops and cafes, and a really fun and enjoyable vibe. Maybe India has just grown on me, but even the pushy street vendors seemed a little bit friendly. I walked all around, took photos, had some coffee and ice cream, ate some North Indian food, and all-in-all had a great time.

After leaving Bangalore, I had no real intention of returning to India unless I was re-incarnated on the sub-continent. But, after today in Mumbai, maybe I should say "never say never".

Hyderabad

2007-08-27T00:31:00.000-07:00

For my last weekend in India, I went to Hyderabad to visit some friends from Stanford and to see the city. Hyderabad is about 350 miles northeast of Bangalore, in Andara Pradesh state. It's known locally as "Cyberabad" and by many accounts has taken the mantle of India's Silicon Valley from Bangalore. Bangalore and Hyderabad are similar in many ways, so I will describe Hyderabad mostly in contrast to Bangalore.

Hyderabad was actually one of the nicer cities that I have been to in India. It was pretty similar to Bangalore in appearance, but a little nicer and better organized. The downtown was more substantial than Bangalore. There were many nice looking shops and a few nice looking parks. The roads were fairly well paved. Traffic was terrible, but did not seem quite as bad as Bangalore.

A quick history note. Bangalore is basically a British town. It was just a small village when the British came in the mid-1800s and used it as a hub to monitor south central India. Hyderabad on the other hand was ruled by a strong maharajah. It was one of the few regions of India to never be ruled by the British, and it only joined with the rest of the country some time after Indian independence. As a result, Hyderabad has an interesting culture and unique feel to it where Bangalore largely does not. This NYT article describes the rocks that give Hyderabad some of its character. Perhaps another sign of Hyderabad's position versus Bangalore - I have 5 Stanford classmates who are working in Hyderabad this summer while I am the only one in Bangalore now.

But, Hyderabad's heavy Stanford presence made this weekend a good opportunity to catch up with some friends from school. On Saturday, my friends Jim and Anu picked me up at the airport for a day of sightseeing. We saw the Chaminar (a 16th century monument to the ending of a plague), the Mecca Mosque (a big mosque whose arch contains soil from Mecca), and ate some great biryani (like Indian paella). We also went to the big Fort which overlooks the town, which was pretty cool. Unfortunately at the fort the South Indian monsoon brought the noise. We got completely soaked, and eventually opted to cut our fort visit short. We headed home and skipped viewing Hyderabad's famous Buddha Statue (which sits on a pedestal in the lake in the center of town).

It turned out that the rain was fortunate, as Saturday evening tragedy stuck Hyderabad. Two bombs exploded Saturday night in the city, one at the park by the Buddha Statue, and one at a local restaurant. Over 40 people were killed and dozens more were injured. 19 other bombs were found unexploded around Hyderabad Saturday night and Sunday, as security was stepped up.

Hyderabad's population is about a 50/50 Hindu/Muslim mix, which makes its Muslim population much higher than most Indian cities. It is not clear if this is why Hyderabad was targeted, if it was targeted because of its growing high-tech presence, or even who was behind the attacks. The local government immediately pointed to Pakistan or Bangladeshi terror groups, but it is not clear whether there is any evidence to justify that connection.

I heard of the bombings on Saturday evening at dinner with Jim and Anu. Jim works for Google, and one of his coworkers called him to let us know and to tell us to come back to Google's campus. We finished dinner pretty quickly and headed home. I stayed there with Jim and another GSB guy, Stephen, who was out of town until late Sunday night. Sunday, Google did not allow us to go into town, which was probably wise. Instead, we stayed around Google's campus in Hi-Tec City (Google employees here have an awesome setup incidentally, with unlimited food and drink, access to 24 hr car service, a nice gym, etc), went to the nearby Novotel hotel for a great Sunday brunch with another classmate Ohad and his wife, and crashed the Novotel pool. A bit of a surreal day, spent mostly trying to relax and settle back into a normal life.

The bombings really brought home India's terrorism problem, of which I had largely been blissfully ignorant. I now at least understand why the airports and public buildings have such extensive (if amazingly poorly implemented) security measures. Since 2004, India has had more deaths from terrorism than all of North America, South America, Europe, and Eurasia COMBINED. Over 3,674 people have died over the past 3 years and 3 months, making India the country with the 2nd most terrorist deaths (less than Iraq but more than Afghanistan).

All in all, I still have a favorable impression of Hyderabad as an Indian city. If I were ever to be forced to return to India for work, I would likely prefer Hyderabad to Bangalore. But I am sure it will forever be connected in my mind with the dark cloud of terror.

India vs. China

2007-08-24T23:52:00.000-07:00

This summer I have had the amazing opportunity to work back-to-back in the world's two fastest growing economies. Here are some comparisons and observations.

Facts and Figures:

China is the world's biggest country with ~1.32 billion people. India is the world's second biggest country with ~1.10 billion people.
China is almost exactly the same size as the US in land area. India is about 1/3 of the size of the US in land area.
China's 2006 GDP was $2,720B, which is $2,069 per capita. India's 2006 GDP was $923B, which is $842 per capita.
On a purchasing power basis, China's GDP is $7,539 per capita. On a purchasing power basis, India's GDP is $3,920 per capita.
China's five year GDP growth rate has been 10.1%. India's five year GDP growth rate has been 7.8%.
China's economy is the 4th largest in the world on a nominal US dollar basis but 2nd on a purchasing power basis. India's economy is the 12th largest in the world on a nominal US dollar basis but 3rd on a purchasing power basis.
21% of Chinese exports go to the US. 17% of Indian exports go to the US.
~350 million Indians speak English (more English speakers than any other country). Estimates of Chinese English speakers range from 50-275 million. (Though in practice, I have had no trouble getting by in English in India but in China it was often impossible)

Impressions:
It's hard not to think that China is going to take over the world when walking around Shanghai. The economic growth and energy is palpable. In India, however, walking around any city you definitely do NOT get that impression. Poverty is everywhere, and the palpable feeling is that of walking around an "emerging" economy.

It seems quite true that China has grown because of its government and India has grown in spite of its.

The Indian government cannot handle the simplest issue. Being a democracy with so many diverse viewpoints effectively paralyzes the government. It is true that India makes fewer mistakes as a result, but it is a clear economic disadvantage. The Chinese government on the other hand, is not at all afraid of crushing a few (or few million) individuals or individual liberties in the name of progress. I am nobody to judge which approach is better, but they could not be more different.

What will happen next?
Currently, both countries face a number of similar and significant challenges.

Both countries are trying to move beyond their core strengths (and into the other's territory). India is expanding its manufacturing capabilities - for example, Dell and Nokia have recently opened large plants here. China is also trying to capture more of the IT market. It's IT revenues are currently about 40% of the size of India's. But China's IT market grew at 22% a year and with greater English adoption may grow even faster. Currently, 80% of India's technology exports go to the US or UK. 60% of China's go to Japan or Korea. Both are trying to become more balanced.

Both countries have major political risks that are discounted in the west. India has both Kashmir and the Northeast Provinces with large separatist movements. In addition to Taiwan, China faces problems in Tibet and Southern China, which is increasingly overrun with crime. Both countries face uprisings and riots from farmers on a daily basis. Both have major issues with water and energy shortages and pollution problems (all probably worse in China).

Both countries also face major economic risks. Japan and the other "Asian Tigers" all had significant depressions after growing for approximately as long as China and India in the most recent expansion. China's stockmarket has also gotten to extremely high valuations which are bound to come down in the near-term.

Both also will face major challenges as currency appreciation hurts their cost competitiveness. The rupee has risen nearly 15% this year vs. the dollar. Economists estimate that the yuan is between 10 and 50% undervalued because it is not allowed to freely float.

And both face competition from other emerging Asian economies. The NYT has recently written about the Japan/India partnership that is emerging to combat China. And many global companies and venture capital firms are looking to Vietnam, the Philippines, and elsewhere to provide the next source for cheap labor.

Still though, I think both countries are largely poised for a strong future and while it may not be a smooth ride, I think they will overcome these hurdles. China, particularly, has already become so large and economically powerful that it's rising consumer class should help it continue to grow even if its exports begin to suffer.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think over the next 10-15 years the US will grow at 3-5%, India will probably grow at 5-7%, and China will probably grow at 7-9%. But I think India' growth should be pretty stable, barring a major war. I think China's growth faces some significant risks and volatility in the near-term. As a result, I don't think China will catch up to the US as quickly as some people have projected (this recent NYT article seems to agree).

Which would I choose?
If I had to choose to be a farmer in either country, I would probably choose China (though it would be very close, I'd probably be slightly richer and more educated in China but would have less freedom).

If I were to be Me but born in one of the countries, I would definitely choose China because of the huge potential for great wealth (even though I would probably have to live with a permanent face mask to survive the pollution).

Still though, if I could choose to be born anywhere, while it may change in 50 years, today I would almost certainly still pick the US. Hmmm...or maybe Sydney.

Last Day of Work

2007-08-24T13:23:00.000-07:00

Today is my last day of work for the summer!

Over the next week, I have an appropriately complicated journey home. I will be traveling Bangalore-Hyderabad-Mumbai-Brussels-New York-Philadelphia-Atlanta. I wonder if anyone has ever visited those seven cities in a week before.

I will still write a few more posts in the next week or so, but for now, here are 8 (the luckiest number in China) end-of-summer takeaways on varying subjects and of varying levels of seriousness:

Both China and India are much more economically, politically, socially, and culturally diverse than I ever imagined
China (well, Shanghai at least) was much easier to work in than I thought. India was harder than expected. I expected working in India to be easy and working in China to be difficult
China's middle class is already bigger than I expected. India's is much smaller than I expected
China's pollution is not a future problem, it is a problem today. And it is a big problem
"Real" Indian food is quite good. "Real" Chinese food is hit or miss. Neither even resemble American-Chinese or American-Indian food
I could live in Shanghai (or Hong Kong, though I would not particularly want to) if I needed to for a few years. I don't know that there is anywhere else in India or China I could move for an extended period
I think someday I will work for a start-up. I think I would really like to run Business Development for a growing technology company. In the meantime, I think I am likely to return to investing directly after school. VC investing though is too early stage for me. I prefer working with companies that are real today rather than just future plans
It may not always be easy to communicate with people in China and India, but they are invariably extremely generous hosts and great friends

Today's Top Stories

2007-08-22T23:10:00.000-07:00

I make a point to read the Times of India every morning. Almost every day there are some priceless gems that come out of the Indian news. Here are today’s top 5 stories as chosen by me.

5. A group of dabbawallas in Mumbai just received the Six Sigma Excellence award from IIT. Dabbawalla loosely translates to “lunch driver”. Basically, this is an organization of men who go around to the homes of office employees who live too far from work to come home from lunch. They pick up lunches that were home cooked and transport them by bicycle to people’s offices. People can then have fresh hot lunches prepared by their loving wives. Mumbai's 5,000 dabbawallas deliver move than 200,000 meals per day and have an error rate of around 1 in 6 million! This is even more impressive when you consider that few of the wallas can read, so they use a system of colored ribbons and easy to memorize letter combinations to find their destinations. The New York Times also recently profiled these dabbawallas.

4. Page 2 of the Bangalore section details where the power outages will be in the next few days. Today, from noon to 2pm, almost all neighborhoods that I recognized would be without power. From Friday to Monday, an even bigger list of neighborhoods was told to expect “intermittent power”.

3. The Sanjay Dutt saga continues. Sanjay has been in jail for just over 3 weeks. Indian law states that convicted criminals must be furnished with a written copy of the judgment against them so they can read the verdict and determine whether they should appeal. In the Sanjay Dutt case, this judgment is expected to be quite long, around 600 pages. Due to the length of the judgment and the backlog in the justice system, they expect that it will take 2 months before a copy of the judgment can be given to Sanjay. Since they do not have a copy of the judgment and therefore can not properly consider his appeal, his defense team applied for bail. Bail has been granted, so Sanjay will go free until the court can give him a written copy of his verdict. But, since the bail processing paperwork takes some time, he remains in jail. His bail was approved on Monday but he will probably not be actually freed until Friday. He will have to return to jail as soon as he receives his copy of the verdict. Can you imagine if this happened in the Michael Vick case!?

2. There was a long article about the “reverse brain drain” that the US is facing. It is becoming more and more difficult for professionals to get visas to work in the US. At the same time, India and China are becoming more attractive places to live and work. Many smart and talented immigrant Americans that in the past would have gotten visas in the US are returning home. Over the past ten years, 1 in 4 new businesses was stated by an immigrant entrepreneur. Chinese or Indian visa holders filed over 40% of new patents in the US in the last 10 years. And, as the US is making it harder for smart scientists and engineers to stay in the states, we are not just hurting our businesses but we are helping start competitors in China, India, and elsewhere.

1. A Member of Parliament introduced a new bill yesterday that would require married male Indians to bring with them a signed permission slip from their wife to travel outside India. To pass through immigration, an Indian married man would have to show his passport, any needed visas, and this signed permission slip. This is intended to cut down on Indian men leaving the country to travel on business and not returning, leaving their wives and families estranged. The Times did not opine on whether the bill would pass.

Impressions of Venture Capital

2007-08-22T12:53:00.000-07:00

During my time here at Softbank, I have gotten to work on a few pretty cool deals. I have looked at a company that sells POS and ERP software to retailers here in India. I have worked on a start-up that is looking to sell financial services to India's middle class consumers. I have also looked into the online search market here in India. It has all been pretty interesting.

Here are a few of my impressions, both of VC generally and in India specifically:

Venture Capital firms generally look at a very small business and provide capital to hopefully make a very large business 3-7 years later. In the US, the major considerations are market risk (how big will this market be in 5 years), competitive risk (what other firms can capture substantial share of this market), and management risk (is this a team that can successfully build this business). There are also financial/valuation considerations, though this is substantially less important in venture investments than later stage investments.

In India, however, there are two major complications. First, the market risk is much bigger, because almost all markets are very small today, and any investment needs huge market growth to succeed. Secondly, the emerging economy risk is very significant also. This involves government decisions largely out of control of the firm, macroeconomic risks, and political risks that are largely non-existant in the US.

As a result, Indian Venture Capital is still a tiny industry. There are only 6-8 funds who are doing early stage venture deals in India. There are more private equity firms providing growth capital to larger companies, but really very few providing true venture money to emerging businesses or entrepreneurs.

The companies that VC's look at in India are also incredibly small. This is probably true in the US as well, but lots of the companies that we look at have 0-$100K in annual revenues. But in India, you can still have a mid-sized workforce at this size.

There are also a lot of foreign investors who don't really understand the Indian market but who will pay any price to enter. For example, the third largest coffee chain in India just sold for US$120MM to an Italian chain. They have about 30 stores, so the chain paid about$2.5MM per site, an amazing price for a small chain of Indian coffee shops. (For comparison, Starbucks which is obviously a substantially bigger brand trades for $1.7M per site). Lastly, a few other VC's I have talked to here tell stories of how many entrepreneurs just "add a zero" at the end of their actual cash flow projections so that the VC's who want to invest meaningful dollar amounts by US standards will talk to them.

While working as a VC has been interesting, my three biggest complaints about the venture business are:

Much of the VC business is just networking. Tons of time is spent going to conferences, trying to meet entrepreneurs, and trying to find experts who know what the next big thing is. I don't think I am a bad networker, but it's not my favorite thing.

VC investing is often a herd mentality play. This is sometimes well justified, as any fund who did not get into google underperformed the last VC bull market. But mostly, it just plays out as everyone is looking for the next big social networking site, everyone is looking for the next big mobile media company, but everyone is really just doing the same thing without really knowing what's going to work.

I think VC economics are not that compelling. From a fund standpoint, with the exception of the few top VC funds whose brand names give them real proprietary deal flow, VC funds generally underperform the general market. They also do not scale. VC funds simply cannot make enough seed investments to deploy a few billion dollars of capital like LBO funds can. As such, funds stay small and carry is small.

All that said, there are a lot of things that are very cool about being a VC. You get to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how new markets are going to emerge and how you can invest capital to affect and capture a share of that growth. You also get to meet a lot of smart and interesting entrepreneurs with cool ideas for new businesses. But I'm still just not sure it's my number 1 career choice.

Traffic

2007-08-21T00:31:00.003-07:00

In Bangalore it is basically impossible to average more than 10 mph on the roads. It takes me 30-45 minutes to go the 3 miles from work to home. Or, if I want to go to the main shopping/business district, it takes at least 45 minutes to go 2 miles, even on the weekends.

I will admit that traffic is a problem many places in the world (Atlanta is a world-class traffic city for sure) but I think Bangalore traffic is exceptional for a few reasons.

The crowding
I almost always get around in an auto-rickshaw (an "auto"). Autos are open air on the sides, which is not unpleasant when the auto is moving, but when sitting in traffic is less ideal. It is also a little unsettling that I can almost always stretch out both my arms and touch a person (even inside their vehicle) on each side of me. My auto will brush up against at least one other person's auto or bike almost every time I go anywhere. Here, you aren't just in traffic in your air-conditioned car, you can actually feel the traffic all around you.

The noise
There are relatively few 4-wheelers (known outside India as cars) here. The traffic is a mishmash of bikes, motorbikes, rickshaws, horse and carts, animals, pedestrians, and cars. Lanes do not matter. Even the center lane rarely matters, as big trucks will often take over a lane from oncoming traffic and a herd of other vehicles will follow along beside. Since lanes don't matter, and since many vehicles do not have rear-view mirrors, whenever one vehicle approaches another, they honk to let them know they are coming. In traffic, this means that there is almost constant honking. Loud, cacophonous honking. The noise is inescapable, even at home or in my office I hear a background of continuous honking. I am sure that I will return from India partially deaf.

The disorganization
Few intersections have lights. I can only think of 3 in Bangalore but there must be more. Those that do have lights also have counters where they count down the time until you get a green light. These counters often start at 180 seconds, which is a long time. Some of the intersections have traffic police, though they are largely ineffective against the over-aggressive drivers. So most intersections people just try to force their way through to wherever they want to go.

The lack of alternatives
Bus service here exists but buses are extremely overcrowded and do not ever seem to go in a direction that can help me. There has been talk of a subway being built, but it has been in the works for five years and is still probably 10 years away. Northeast of the city there are some looming concrete pillars that stand idle, waiting for more of the subway to be built.

The roads
The roads are terrible. Potholes are everywhere. Roads have random bumps, gravel patches, and massive puddles. They make for a bumpy ride.

The danger
I checked the paper this morning and 5 people died in traffic accidents in Bangalore yesterday (including one whose car had "turtled" in an intersection, whatever that means). In Delhi, there are three major bus lines. The Blueline is known as the worst, and a bus on average runs over and kills someone every other day. I am sure many more accidents go unreported.

The smells
Many streets, including mine, have open air sewers lining them. People often stop to use the bathroom in these sewers. Sitting still can be quite pungent. So when a big truck rattles by inches away and spews diesel exhaust all over you, it sometimes improves the smell.

And the best part, when it rains, you are soaking wet and sitting in traffic.

How flat is the world really?

2007-08-18T04:48:00.000-07:00

To start, two animal updates.

First, I can't believe I forgot to mention this but on the drive from Cochin to the Snake Boat Race in Kerala, we passed 5 elephants on the "highway". First, one elephant alone. Then a group of 3. Then a final lone elephant.

Second, the big news in the paper yesterday was that a leopard had come out of the forest in the Bangalore suburb of Hosur and had gotten into the big shopping mall there. It terrorized crowds of people and injured 8 people before being tranquilized and returned to the forest.

Friday I went on a tour of Infosys's campus. Profiled in The World is Flat (the new version of which also starts with a big section on Georgia Tech), Infosys is the largest technology consulting/outsourcing firm in India. Infosys had its first high profile success implementing solutions to Y2K. Now, it is a large technology consulting conglomorate. Much of their work is quite similar to the work I did at PwC implementing SAP at Delta.

Infosys has just over 70,000 employees, about 3/4 of which are in India. They have three massive campuses in India (Bangalore, Mysore, Pune) and a number of smaller locations. The Bangalore campus is the 2nd biggest and is often described as a Corporate Disneyland. There are 18,000 workers spread around a massive enclosed area that looks like a college campus. People take golf carts and ride bicycles around campus. There are five huge food courts, a number of putting and chipping greens, volleyball courts, basketball courts, and several gyms. There is also a huge modern conference room with the largest flat screen tv in Asia. And since Indian infrastructure is so unreliable, the campus is completely self sufficient in terms of power, water, waste processing, etc. Finally, the campus has its own 3.5 star hotel with over 300 rooms. All summer interns live on campus in the hotel, and most corporate guests stay there as well.

Infosys is the "most admired company" in India, they get over 1 million job applications per year. They still have a significant turnover problem though, as qualified labor is difficult to find and keep. Their annual turnover rate is in the 15-20% range, which they say is lower than Tata, Wipro, Accenture India and other competitors, but still is quite high on an absolute basis.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Indian firms like Infosys. I am less bullish on outsourcing to India than I was before I arrived here. I don't think the Indian offshoring market is going away, or even that growth will stop, but I think it will grow at closer to 10% rates than 50%.

Talent is becoming more expensive to find and keep, and while software engineers do not make US salaries, they are getting closer. While a Chinese manufacturer may have a ~20-40x cost advantage in its labor force (I am ballpark estiamting hourly 50 cent - $1 Chinese labor vs $20 US labor), these firms have only a 2-3x cost advantage. This cost advantage has also been hit hard by recent appreciation of the rupee. Additionally, Infosys's clients are more and more demanding their consultants come work on site. This neutralizes Infosys's cost advantage. It also hurts the Infosys culture - especially since many of their employees are drawn to Infosys because of the opportunity to work on one of the massive campuses.

Finally, the overall outsourcing market is much smaller than I expected. Most people talk about how India is a "service" economy, and how ~40% of its GDP comes from services. While that is true, "services" largely does not mean services provided to Western countries. The entire Indian Technology (consulting/outsourcing/KPO/BPO) industry is only about US$10B today. By contrast, the US bought $290B worth of goods from China in 2006.

In their most aggressive case, Forrester Research estimates that by 2015 a total of 7.5 million jobs could be sent offshore by all western economies. Even if you assume 100% of those jobs went to India, India's workforce in 2015 will be at least 300 million people (and could be much more). So at most, only 2.5% of Indian jobs could come from the offshoring industry.

While a $10B outsourcing market is not tiny, I am less afraid that my job will be sent to India than I was three months ago. If I had a job, that is.

Kerala - La Casa de Madhu

2007-08-17T12:12:00.000-07:00

When I was working in Shanghai, one of my GSB classmates, Bret, was also working there. We hung out a few times, and he introduced me to his coworker Seph. Seph goes to MIT b-school and has been in Bangalore for the past few weeks. A couple weekends ago, one of Seph's classmates, Dave, came to Bangalore for the weekend. So I met Dave, who is working in Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala. Dave's classmate Ashesh is from Cochin, Kerala. Ashesh emailed his cousin, Madhu, to say that Dave and I were going to the Snake Boat Races. And, for some reason, Madhu insisted on organizing our trip to Kerala, driving us around, and playing host for the weekend.

Given our not-exactly-direct connection, I was not entirely sure what to expect. But sure enough, when I got off the airplane Friday night, Madhu was there to pick me up. He was an absolutely amazing host (especially since he had no idea who I was!) He had arranged a hotel for me, so he drove us into town to check in. Then we went out to dinner and to a bar where we hung out until about midnight. Saturday morning he drove us down to the backwaters where we had lunch, met Dave, and headed to the races. After the races, he drove Dave and I back to Cochin where we went out to dinner. Sunday morning, he came and picked us up and drove us around for a full day of sightseeing. We then dropped Dave off at the train station to go home, but my flight was not until 8pm. So we went to Madhu's house, where I met his wife and children. We drove his daughter to her boarding school (about an hour away), before finally he took me to the airport.

In addition to his unbelievably amazing hospitality, Madhu is a really interesting guy. He is 42 years old and has an 11 year old daughter and a 5 year old son. His father started a seafood business which is now and run by Madhu and his brother. His brother runs the operations side, and Madhu runs sales and marketing. This involves extensive travel, particularly to Europe which is apparently a big buyer of Indian shellfish. In the past two decades, he has lived in Spain, Portugal and England, as well as all over India. He speaks Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Malayam, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. We listened to his Shakira cds on the way to the race and joked in Spanish about the Fiesta de los Barcos. What a great guy.

Me and Madhu at the race:

It was awesome getting the chance to spend 20+ hours talking with a knowledgeable local about anything and everything Indian. I learned a lot about Cochin and Kerala, which is a really interesting place.

Some facts and findings:

Cochin is one of the oldest port cities in India, and it was the first burial site of Vasco de Gama. The old town has Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, and English cultural and architectural influences.

The oldest church and oldest synagogue in India are both in Cochin. A slight majority of Cochin's residents today are Indian Catholics. There are also a few Indian Jewish residents as well. They live in a part of town subtly called "Jew Town," mostly on "Jew Street".

Cochin has the world's only Spice Exchange, where cinnamon, cardamom, pepper, etc are actively bought and sold on the trading floor.

Kerala is known for its seafood, and we had some amazing fish. We had several fish curries, a few different varieties of fried fish, and a great local dish that was like fried anchovies (surprisingly good bar snack).

Locals fish with these Chinese fishing nets that were supposedly introduced by Kublai Khan. The huge nets are operated by four men who raise and lower them with a rock and pulley system. They do not use bait, but the rising tides trap fish in the nets, which are lowered for about 2 hours at a time.
Cochin has the nicest airport in India. It was built by a public/private partnership, and now has international flights to five countries even though Cochin has only 1 million people.

Most men in Kerala wear dress shirts, dhotis, and flip-flops. Dhotis are basically a sheet that is wrapped around your legs like a towel, then tucked in the front. It looks a bit like a big diaper, but is supposedly quite comfortable. I hope this someday becomes acceptable business casual wear in the US.Even though Kerala is a Communist state, Cochin has a new and booming IT industry. Investors from Dubai are in the middle of constructing one of the largest IT parks in India just outside Cochin. Despite the government's best efforts to slow things down, investment is booming and real estate prices are soaring.

Finally, like everywhere in India, cricket is the most popular sport. A local pickup game.

The Office

2007-08-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Today, two fortune tellers came to the office.

Softbank India is located in a pretty typical office building near Bangalore's main commercial district. Our building is 5 stories tall, and we are on the second floor. The office itself is fairly small - maybe 1,500 square ft - but big enough to comfortably fit the six people that work here.

It is not entirely unusual for people to come into our office selling strange goods and services. The other day, a man came in the front door of the office, and asked if I wanted a shave. Though I was curious to see how this would work at my desk, I declined.

Today's visitors came in, and both looked a little strange. One appeared to be a Sikh with a large red turban. He stood a step behind another gentlemen with bloodshot eyes and western clothes highlighted with a huge Levi's brass belt buckle.

These two men came in the front door, each holding a notebook. They quickly started chanting (in Hindi? Kannada?) and walking around the office. Then, they started staring intensely in people's faces and chanting to them.

Apparently, both men were face readers who, naturally, used people's faces to tell their fortune. The women who sits next to me was told that a bald man would soon be coming to assist her with a financial problem.

The face readers walked around for about five minutes (unfortunately skipping me, the openly staring Westerner) and told some more fortunes. Then, they invited us to their temple down the road for some sort of a ceremony this evening. Then, they turned and left.

Just another day at the office.

Snake boat races

2007-08-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

I spent Saturday at the immensely cool annual Nehru Trophy Snake Boat Races in Alappuzha, Kerala.

A little bit like a once-a-year NASCAR race, the Snake Boat race is a big annual party. Keralites from all over the state come to watch the race. And it's quite a spectacle.

Snake boats are really long, really skinny boats that people paddle like canoes. The biggest snake boats carry up to 135 people at a time (about 125 paddlers and 10 people clapping and banging drums to set the pace). Participants spend 4 to 5 months training for the race. Races are about 2 km long, with 4 boats racing at a time in each heat with the winners advancing.

I spent the weekend with my friend Dave from Sloan Business School, his roommate, and my new friend Madhu. Madhu arranged a boat for us to watch the race which was definitely the way to go. Since we were running late we had a bit of adventure and had to take a canoe to get out to our big boat just in time for the race. But we ended up making it without a problem.

People lined all along one side of the lake watching along the shore or in places in basic grandstands. Along the other side of the course, everyone who could get on a boat lined up and watched the races from the water, and generally sang and swam and had a festive time.

Here are a number of photos.

Rowing out to our main boat just in time for the start of the races

Snake boats in actionThe official umpires did nothing but occasionally wave a white flag

The crowd was extremely festive. Actually, the boat next to us tried to start a fight with the next boat and a few people started throwing 2x4s. Nearly a disaster

Sometimes coordinating 135 people doesn't work well. If people get off rhythm, the boat starts to fill with water and ends up sinking. This boat was stuck half under-water for about 15 minutes

The final race was the closest

Finally, the sun went down on a long, tough day of snake boat spectating

Women's role in Indian society

2007-08-13T13:21:00.000-07:00

There is probably nobody less qualified to write about women than me. But Indian culture has some interesting and unusual aspects which I will try to briefly describe here.

India in some ways is a quite advanced in terms of women's rights. There is currently a woman president, there was a woman prime minister in the early 1980s, and there have been women in high government jobs throughout the 60 years of Indian independence.

Yet at the same time, everyday interactions between men and women are far different than they are in the West. They are also changing incredibly rapidly and a subject of much tension and debate in India.

I will ignore here the complicated issue of fundamental Islamic women who wear burkhas and do not speak to men, though this group makes up a meaningful portion of society here.

Employment
One of the things that I noticed upon arriving here was that men often work in jobs that would typically be filled by women in many other countries. For example, men typically clean rooms at hotels, do laundry, and perform housekeeping tasks. This was strikingly apparent at my hotel in Jaipur. Everyone who worked at any job inside the hotel was a man. Yet outside, there was some construction being done. This was being done by female workers, who carried bricks on their heads from one area of the hotel to the other.

I have talked with a few people about this issue. They attribute this to a few factors. First, female literacy significant trails male literacy here. This makes it hard for women to do jobs like wait tables. Second, even in most lower-middle class families, most women do not work but instead manage the household and raise the children. Finally, social norms often do not allow women and men to interact entirely freely, as noted above.

Conversation
In my experience, men rarely will address women who are accompanied by other men directly in conversation. At meals with women, the waiter typically addresses them men to see what the women would like. Buses have Ladies Compartments, and there are male and female lines at most ticket booths, security lines, and entrance gates. When Brittany and I went to a travel agent to book our trip in Leh, I needed to walk down the street to get a copy of my passport made. The male travel agent was not comfortable being alone in his store with a female, so he stood outside while I was gone.

Family Life
India has always struggled with run-away population growth. I have written about China's approach to the problem. Being a democracy, it is impossible for India to enforce something like a one-child, one-family policy. But the government has recently announced a new plan to curb population growth. The state has committed to pay R5,000 (US$250) for a "second honeymoon" to any couple who does not have a child in their first two years of marriage. They will pay R7,500 for any couple who does not have a child in their first three years of marriage. Over 85% of married couples have a child in their first two years of marriage, so the government hopes it can reduce the birth rate by encouraging people to wait longer to have children.

There are also massive problems with parents aborting female children (especially in rural areas). While this is somewhat similar to the problem in rural China, the dowry factor here makes the problem even worse.

Customarily in India, single men and women live with their parents until they get married. After marrying, the woman moves in with the man in his parents' house. At marriage, the bride's family pays a large dowry to the family of the groom.

This dowry can be a huge financial commitment for the bride's family, one that takes years of savings. As such, having female children in India is thought of by some as a financial burden. And tragically, as a result the ratio of males/females in rural India is now around 57/43.

The Karantaka government has recently announced a new plan to combat this. They are literally paying families to have female children. Girl children will receive free health insurance until they are 18 and a scholarship to pay for elementary schooling. They also become the beneficiaries of a life insurance policy that the state takes out on their parents. Finally, the parents will receive a lump sum payment of R30,000 when their daughter turns 18.

Finally, I learned a lot from my new friend Madhu this weekend about his family, including how he met his wife. They had a marriage arranged by their parents, as is common in traditional Indian culture. But this process is more complicated than I realized. When Madhu decided that he was ready to get married, his parents sent the details of his life (name, exact date and time of birth, etc) to an astrologer. She then compared those details with those of the women she had in her database, then recommended some matches to Madhu's parents. Madhu's parents then interviewed the parents of the potential matches, and chose one. Madhu met her once and they talked for a few hours. They then got engaged, and were married a few months later. They have been happily married for the past 15 years. And, only 1% of Indian marriages ends in divorce, so maybe there is something to be said for the zodiac!

Weekend plans

2007-08-10T10:16:00.000-07:00

Bangalore is not the most happening town. There are some good shops and restaurants. Lots of movie theaters. A few bars that stay open until 11:30. But that's about it.

Last weekend, I had a nice, relaxing weekend. I went out to a couple great restaurants with some MIT business-school guys I have become friends with. We played golf at the "#1 golf course in India". I made a clutch birdie to win two Kingfisher beers (don't worry though, I still had 4 or 5 three-putts). I walked around town some, saw a movie, and did some shopping. But I think I have seen what there is to see in Bangalore.

I decided yesterday that I am going to Kerala for the weekend. This region in the southwest corner of India is known for its "backwaters". This weekend they are having the annual Snake Boat Race and Festival on one of the lakes. My first question, of course, was, "Does a snake boat race involve actual snakes?" Luckily, the answer is no, much like Chinese Dragon Boats do not involve actual dragons. So I decided to go check it out.

I do not know much about the backwaters, Kerala, or snake boats, but I am sure by the end of the weekend I will.

Bollywood

2007-08-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

Bollywood is a big deal.

And going to the movies here is quite an event.

In Jaipur, I went to one of the biggest and best theaters in the country. The lobby was amazingly decorated and an attraction in itself. Seats were purchased and assigned ahead of time. There were three tiers - much like going to a theater on Broadway. I bought box seats for R91 (~$2.25), and had a luxury box avoiding some of the chaos. Even though this theater only had one screen, it probably held 2,500 people. Here is a photo of the lobby.

The movie we saw was called Partner. Not uncommon for Bollywood films, it was based on an American film - in this cash Hitch. Same plot, similar jokes, even down to the fact that the main characters worked for a newspaper.

What was different though was the song and dance routines. Every 20 minutes or so, there was a huge song and dance routine, with elaborate costumes and choreography. These routines are quite common, and most movies feature around 8 major song-dance routines. Popular songs often show up on MTV India as videos, taken largely directly from the movies.

And the crowd gets into it. Whenever a star appears on screen, everyone yells. People sing and clap along with the songs. They scream and laugh and talk throughout and are as much of the entertainment as the movie itself.

This NYT article discusses Hollywood's latest efforts to capture some of the Indian cinema pie.

I also saw the Simpsons movie in Bangalore. Another very nice theater, though this was a 10 screen multiplex that could just as easily have been in suburban America (except for the assigned seats and talkative crowd). This theater was much smaller than Jaipur though, maybe since the movie was in english (ticket prices are also higher for english movies).

Finally, the story of Sanjay Dutt, arguably India's biggest movie star is quite amazing and quite current.

India just went through its equivalent of the OJ trial. Sanjay is one of Bollywood's biggest stars. He was arrested after the 1993 Mumbai bombings and charged (along with a few hundred others) with arms trafficking. He spent a year and a half in prison from 1994-95 but was then released on bond while awaiting trial.

His trial just concluded, 14 years later (Indian courts don't move fast). He was found guilty and (quite surprisingly to the public and the Bollywood community) sentenced to six years in prison. The three movies that he is in the middle of filming right now have all been shelved. The "Bollywood fraternity is mourning" (though public reaction seems mixed). But the Sanjay story is definitely all over the news. We know everything from Sanjay's prison sleeping schedule to what type food he is served to the cleanliness of the toilets in his cell block.

Nobody though seems to discuss whether he actually committed a crime. Maybe this was settled long ago, I am not sure. I have asked a few people about it but nobody seemed comfortable talking about it - I think (understandably) the bombings are still a sensitive topic. He is currently appealing to the Supreme Court but will remain in prison at least until it decides whether they will consider his case and allow him out on bail again. I will post further updates as new developments unfold.

Photo Hunt

2007-08-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

I have finally gotten around to uploading a bunch of photos from my travels between Shanghai and Bangalore. Here are some highlights in random order.

Karoake in Shanghai

A taste of America in Hong Kong
Sign in Yunnan
Sign in Macau Lotus temple, Delhi

Me, sad Tibetan woman, Yak

Monastary, near Shangri-La

Ferryman's house, somewhere near Tiger Leaping Gorge

Yak tea with Tibetan monk, Shangri-La

Mountains near Shangri-La

Main Square, Shangri-La

New friends, Shangri-La

Random temple on bike trip, somewhere near Shangri-La

Field of flowers (poppies?), near Shangri-La

Much needed rest, near Shangri-La

Monastary view, near Shangri-La

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Tso Moriri, Ladakh

View from teahouse, Lijiang

Riverfront cafe, Lijiang

Main square, Macau

Winding mountain roads, Ladakh

Well-decorated truck ("Fruit King"), Ladakh

View from airplane, Leh

Tso Kar, Ladakh

Runaway camel, Rajasthan

Finding some shade, Taj Mahal

Ruins, Jaipur

Fort, overlooking Jaipur

Sunset with Tibetan prayer flags, Ladakh

Indian airport security

2007-08-07T04:58:00.000-07:00

India is often thought of in the US as a great place to outsource business processes. Some of the processes here though are absolutely ridiculous. I will describe the process for boarding a plane, which I have now been through 4 times and am just starting to understand.

First, to enter the airport you have to show your ticket to a military policeman at the airport door. If you only have an e-ticket, you have to go to a little stand that is setup for this purpose outside the airport and print a copy of your itinerary from the internet. Then you can show the guy at the airport door a ticket and enter the airport.

Upon passing the guard at the door, men have to go through a metal detector (#1). Women do not. To go through this metal detector, you do not need to take your bags off, you just walk through it, set off the alarm (luggage almost always has metal), get patted down and move on.

After entering the airport, you walk through the lobby towards the check-in counters. But to get to the check-in counters, you must have all your checked baggage x-rayed. To get your bags x-rayed, you need to put a bag-tag on them. Then you walk through the metal detectors again (#2) - both men and women this time, though there is a separate Ladies Line - get patted down and go to pick up check-in baggage. Check-in bags need to get stamped on the bag-tag by security or they won't be accepted for check-in.

Then you check-in. This process is not particularly unusual, except you need to get bag-tags for carry-on bags.

After checking-in, you need to go through security to get to the gates. To do this, you need
to go through a metal detector (#3), get patted down, and get the bag-tags on the carry-on bags stamped.

Once you find your gates, then you have the check-in baggage identification. All bags that are going to be checked for the flight get piled up by the gate for that flight. Before boarding, you need to go to the pile of bags and point to your bags. Then your boarding pass gets a mark written on it and your bag gets marked.

Here is my backpack with destination Jaipur (JAI) marked in chalk.
Finally, to board the plane, there is a final wanding with a metal detector (#4), a final x-ray of the carry-on bags, and an inspection of the boarding pass markings and the bag-tag stamps on the carry-on bags. If all is successful, you are allowed onto the bus that takes you to the plane.

Why 4 (or 3 for women) metal detector screenings and numerous stamps are needed to board a plane is not clear. I guess labor is cheap and plentiful but not especially trustworthy. Still, most foreign travelers find this process more than a bit confusing.

Some travelers, however, get special exemptions from the security process. Note numbers 17 and 19 below.

Holy Cow

2007-08-06T23:18:00.000-07:00

I have alluded to India's unique cow dynamics before, but it deserves its own post.

Before coming here, I was aware that Hindus considered the cow to be sacred and did not eat beef. That however is only a tiny portion of the story.

The biggest surprise was how cows are just allowed to wander around. Goats, chickens, and other animals move around the cities, though most are clearly marked as somebody's property. Cows, however, just seem to walk around wherever they please. They wander in the middle of the street in traffic, drink out of puddles in medians, and plop down on the sidewalk. Nobody seems to watch or take care of them. They basically forage through the trash for food, though people sometimes throw them scraps of grains. But mostly, they seem independent and have their run of whatever they want to do.

I have asked a number of people about the cows and have gotten widely varied answers. The most reasonable answer I have heard is this: There are two types of cows - milk-giving cows and non-milk-giving-cows. Milk-giving cows (even though it may not seem this way) are owned by someone who milk and feed and generally watch them. But, since it is illegal to kill cows - and cows can't be eaten - when a cow stops giving milk and becomes a non-milk-giving cow, there isn't anything to be done with them. So their owners just let them go free. These cows just wander around town completely on their own.

In terms of dietary impact, since the cow is sacred to Hindus and Muslims (~175M muslims in India) are forbidden to eat pork, essentially zero pork or beef is served in India. Even McDonald's will not sell either beef or pork so as not to offend its Hindu or Muslim customers (Don't worry, the filet-o-fish is on the menu).

Many Hindus are also vegetarians, and almost all Indian restaurants have numerous "veg" and "non-veg" options. The number of vegetarians varies dramatically by state. In some places, like Gujarat state, the number of vegetarians is estimated to be 90%. But all over the country, each time you book a train or plane ticket, you have to specify veg or non-veg.

Every restaurant posts on its sign whether it is a veg or non-veg establishment and a surprisingly (to me) high number are veg only. Our office cafeteria laughed at me when I asked if they had non-veg options. So lunch is either rice with tomato sauce and yogurt or a dosa (a pancake like thing) with potatoes and sauce. Not outstanding.

The only non-veg options that are commonly available are chicken and mutton. Mutton here, however, means goat, not lamb (or dog). But many of the veg options are quite good and I have really enjoyed Indian food overall. I have definitely had many more veg-only days in the past three weeks than I have had in the rest of my life combined - some because there were no alternatives, but a few by choice.

Still though, I am getting on Atkins as soon as I get home.

Southern India

2007-08-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

I guess it should not have surprised me that Bangalore is entirely different from everywhere that I have been in Northern India. But somehow, it has.

I wrote in a previously post about how China should be thought of more like Europe than the US because the differences among provinces in China are of similar magnitude to the differences among European countries than that of US states. I also recently read an article discussing how Europe has been vastly over-emphasized by Western society and should be thought of as a sub-continent along the same lines as China, India, and the rest of Asia. This article suggested that there should be 5 traditional continents (Antartica, North and South America, Africa, and Australia) and a 6th continent of Eurasia. Eurasia would consist of 4 sub-continents - Europe, China, the Indian sub-continent, and everything else.

While I am not sure what the practical purpose of this argument is, I think it further reinforces the idea that Westerners need to remember the political, economic, cultural, geophysical, and linguistic diversity within India and China.

Yet still, when I got off the plane in Bangalore, I was surprised at how big of a change it was going from Northern to Southern India.

Here, there are palm trees instead of deserts, a wet climate, and especially noticable - a vague semblance of order in the streets (there are occasional traffic signals) and somewhat less visible poverty. This factor may be less of a North vs South difference and more because this is the "Silicon Valley of India" but the difference remains.

There is also much less livestock in the streets (though it is definitely still prevalent - this morning a cow came up and started to drink from a puddle inches away from my feet as I waited to catch an auto-rickshaw to take me to the office).

The food is different - much spicier here, and with different breads and less rice than the north.

People speak different languages. In the north, Hindi is spoken by about 200 milion people. Here in Karnataka state (where Bangalore is), the three most widely spoken languages are - you guessed it - Kannada, Urdu and Tegalu.

And while I go most days without seeing a white person, they are more common here. Or at least nobody has tried to take a photo with me yet here.

The Malls of Bangalore

2007-08-04T08:06:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest malls in India is not far from my house. Not much else interesting is near my house, so I have already made two trips there.

I wrote some about the amazing economic dichotomy in China. This is the first real place that I have found it here. In fact, in northern India, there was much less dichotomy than I expected. Maybe this was just circumstantial, but during my two weeks in northern India, I was not able to find any upper class areas. Almost everyone I met was in poverty or at most in the lower middle class. There was little dichotomy - everyone was poor.

Supporting my crude impression, McKinsey divides India today into five economic classes. The lowest two buckets - the "Deprived" and the "Aspirers" make up 94% of society. The Middle Class equivalent bucket makes up only 4%, while the top 2 buckets (upper middle, and upper class) each only make up 1% of society.

But here in Bangalore, that small middle class makes its presence felt, at least a little. And the mall by my house is one example of this. The mall has nice depatment stores, medium-high end brand stores (Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Adidas, to name a few), an Apple reseller store, and a nice bookstore. No Prada or Gucci or super-premium brands, but still some pretty nice stores. There is also a Pizza Hut, McDonalds, and a food court with lots of fast Indian food and other Asian food. I had some chicken and rice from a place called Yo!China for dinner. Not great, but it sort of satisfied my first Chinese craving in a while. I also got a US$3 gelato from a pretty good ice cream place.

The mall does have a few weird aspects though:

To enter the mall, everyone has to walk through a metal detector. This metal detector is about 3 feet wide, and everyone tries to squeeze through it as fast as possible. So there are always multiple people going through it at the same time. And you do not have to take the metal detectors out of your pockets or take metal out of your bags. But the detector never, ever beeps. So there is a huge 30ft wide glass entrance to the mall, a line of people squeezing through a tiny metal detector under the watchful eye of security, and absolutely no point to any of it.

After dinner one night, I headed to walk home. But outside, it had started pouring. I asked a guy where I could get an umbrella. He pointed to a store on the second floor. I trudged up there, and asked where the umbrellas were. The clerk said that they did not have any. I asked where in the mall I could get one. He said he did not think anyone in the mall sold umbrellas, but maybe I could go to a few blocks down the street. How does a mall not sell umbrellas in a city where they have a monsoon season?

Also, for a while I got stuck behind three women trying to get on the escalator. They were stopped at the bottom of an up-moving escalator, giggling and not moving. A little confused, I tried first to get around them, couldn't, then stepped back to watch. A few other people came up and tried to get by but couldn't either. After a bit, it became clear that these women (or at least 2 of the 3) had never ridden an escalator before. They were dressed in their "sunday best" sarees for the trip to the mall. They seemed to be in their 40s or 50s. All seemed to be having the best time. Finally, two of them bit the bullet and did a small leap on to the escalator. The third did not jump. The first two shriked with joy. The third smiled, shrugged, turned, and walked up the stairs next to the escalator. All three hugged at the top.

Finally, I bought the new Harry Potter book today. It cost R975, or about US$25. For perspective, I spent R300 / night in Leh for my hotel. But the Harry Potter phenomenon is amazing. India's infrastructure and logistics capabilities are incredibly bad. There are few good roads, almost no runnning water, and the power goes out every few hours. In Jaipur, for a specific example, residents have running water for 15-20 minutes per day. Yet somehow, in every city and town of any size that I went to, you could find the new Harry Potter book. Today, I caved and bought it. Somehow, it seemed necessary.

Animal House

2007-08-03T04:04:00.000-07:00

At the risk of over-emphasizing the zoological portion of traveling around northern India, I wanted to write avout two recent adventures with animals who I don't get to play with very often - the monkey and the camel.

First, at dusk one day in Jaipur we went to the Temple of the Sun God. The temple was set in a pretty cool, crazy canyon. Vines and trees climbed their way around the buildings, and the temples were intricately carved and painted different pastel colors. If you picture a sun god temple in India (or if you can't, imagine something from an Indiana Jones movie), this was it.

The temple had two notable inhabitants. First, the sun god worshippers. They chanted songs and banged drums. At sundown, they formed a little, raucus parade and marched from one end of the temple complex to the other to make an offering to the sungod.

Coexisting with the worshippers were thousands of monkeys. They made a similar pilgrimmage jusyt after dusk from one end of the temple to the trees at the other. They also played with each other, climbed up and all around the temples, and pretty much had their way with things. We fed them portions of banana. They would come up, look at me and the banana a bit suspiciously, then reach out and grab it with their hand before scampering off a few feet to eat it. Really cool. And amazingly, no tourists - just us, worshippers, monkeys, and about a dozen military police there for no reason.

Second, I also took a day trip to Pushkar. This tiny (pop. 15,000) desert oasis town was once a major Hindu pilgrimmage site, as pilgrims would come and bathe in the bathing ghats in the lake in the center of town. Now, the town is a terrible mess, rundown, rancid, full of little shops for skeptical tourists.

The lone highlight were the camels. There are camels everywhere in Rajasthan, and we saw this caravan crossing the highway on the way.

The process of riding camels was also fairly interesting.

First, we went to a "travel office" in town and set up a camel ride. Then we took a guy from the travel office in our car to a pretty nice house just outside of town. This was the camel owner's house, and there were 3 camels tied up in his yard. When his two employees saw us approaching, they began to saddle and prepare the camels.

We got on the camels and set off for our sand dune ride. First, we set off down the residential paved street, on camels with our two guides. Then we turned and walked a bit down a major paved road, joining traffic with other bikes and cars. Finally we turned off and went off into the dunes.

Along the way, we had the following conversation with one of the guides who spoke english.

"My boss is a very rich man. He owns 10 camels, 20 bikes, and 1 car. He also has 2 wives."
"Two wives?"
"Yes, the first one could not bear him children. So he got a second one who gave him two sons."
"Oh. I see."

Riding the camels in the dunes was fairly fun, but since it is monsoon season the dunes are fairly green. More dry fields than sandy dunes. Still fairly cool, but we rode for about 1.5 hours. About 30 minutes is plenty of camel riding for me.

end-of-day hiking adventure in Jaipur

2007-07-31T22:55:00.000-07:00

Around 5:30 one afternoon in Jaipur, we tried to take a rickshaw up to Nagaranth fort, which overlooks the city and is supposedly good for sunsets. Instead of being taken all the way to the top though, we got taken to a path 2km below the fort on the hill and got asked to walk up the path or pay R500 extra. We chose to walk, but arranged for the rickshaw to come back and pick us up after sunset at the end of the path.

We started to walk up to the fort, and aside from the few beggars at the beginning and occasional massive reeking piles of trash, the walk up was a little sketchy but pretty nice.

Once we got up near the fort, there was only one group of guys who yelled some Hindi at us but seemed harmless. We eventually found the "entrance" by ducking through a hole in a door and found ourselves in a huge fort, almost all to ourselves. We walked for 10 minutes or so along the mountain ridge to what turned out to be a deserted spot looking over the city. It was really cool and turned out to sort of be a cafe, as a guy brought us a beer for 100 rupees. A few other people even showed up and were milling around watching the awesome sunset as well. I offered to take a picture for the group of Indian guys next to us, who then gave me a bag of super spicy potato chips. All was well.

The sunset was so cool in fact that we sort of lost track of time. And after the sun went down, it got very dark. When we realized how dark and late it had gotten, we hurriedly tried to find our way back to our path down the mountain. There were a few guys lurking around in the shadows, and just to be safe I moved some money and a credit card to a second pocket, just in case things took a bad turn.

When we got back to where we entered the fort, the door we had come through was closed up. We walked around a bit and found a different path that looked like it might go down to town, and followed it a bit. It was really dark though, and we couldn't tell where it was going. A little concerned as the night got darker and the fort felt more deserted, we decided to go back towards the "cafe" to see if we could find some people to walk down with.

We asked the first group we passed on the way if they knew how we could catch a taxi or rickshaw. They did not and said that nobody really drove up here. We thanked them and kept walking further.

Almost back to the cafe, a group of about 20 Indian men came walking towards us, singing and chatting loudly. In the middle of the group were the guys whose photo I took! We spotted them and I asked if they were walking down to the city. They said no but they could show us the way. Excited, we turned right around and joined the group.

We talked to some of the guys and it turned out they were in Jaipur on a management retreat for an Indian Conglomerate called ITC (incidentally we had a Stanford case on their agri-business, ITC e-Choupal, though these guys were from the technology business). They had a bus waiting for them outside the gate. Walking back with them, we picked up the guys we had passed before, who were also part of their group. Apparently it was just us and ITC at the fort.

When we got to the entrance where the bus was, they offered to drive us into town, and we gladly accepted. So there we were - on a bus with 25 men (no women) from all over India, totally crashing their corporate outing.

The guys were super nice, offered us water, more potato chips, and seats in the front of the bus, and we took off. In the bus, everyone kept singing. As best we could tell, people were taking turns singing songs from around the different parts of the country they were from, mixed in with some Indian pop songs. Everyone was laughing and having a great time. We felt slightly out of place.

We rode along for a good 30 minutes (the road down was much less direct than the path we walked up) and enjoyed the singing and generally laughed at the situation. Then, it became our turn to sing. Brittany and I are not the best singers in the world and the prospect of singing to a bus full of people was a bit intimidating. Despite out adamant protests, the crowd kept yelling at us and forcing us to sing something. Finally we managed to belt out two terrible versions of American Pie and California Girls but they seemed to make the crowd happy.

Earlier in the day, we had bought tickets for our first Bollywood movie at a huge movie theatre off the main street. The bus took us all the way into town and dropped us off right by the movie theatre. We thanked them and said goodbye. The whole bus waved to us as they drove off, and we waved back, then turned to head into the movies.

Rajasthan

2007-07-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

We left Leh Tuesday morning and headed to Jaipur, a city of close to 3 million people in the state of Rajasthan. Lonely Planet describes Rajasthan as "a step back in time from Delhi". We were not certain how that was possible, and definitely were unsure of what to expect.

On the plane here, I read an article about Rajasthan. Near the end, it said that Rajasthanis regard moustaches as a sign of "manliness, virility, and macho power" and nearly every man has one. So of course I decided that I was trimming my emerging beard down to a moustache. And it's sweet.

In many ways, Jaipur is what I expected Delhi to be like. Its a pretty big city, and there is definitely poverty everywhere (beggars on every corner and people sleeping on every sidewalk), but there are also some nice areas as well. Traffic is still chaotic at times but some intersections have traffic lights and a semblance of order.

There are also a few interesting aspects of Jaipur worth noting here:

Jaipur's maharaja in the early 1800s was huge. Literally. He was 6ft 6in tall and weighed 560lbs. He also had 108 wives. This is where he lived. His pants were on display, but sadly photos were not allowed. The waist was over 4 feet.

Jaipur is known as the pink city. This is because, naturally, all the buildings in the old town are painted pink. This is not an ancient tradition however. In the 1800s the British King visited Jaipur. They painted the city pink for his visit, then decided to keep it.

As Rajasthan is largely desert, camels are big in Jaipur. So added to the traffic mix are urban camels pulling carts of vegetables and construction supplies or passengers. And in front of many buildings are hitching posts for tying horses (also used regularly) and camels. See if you can find a camel, horse, auto-rickshaw, bike-rickshaw, bicycle, scooter, pedestrian, and bus in the photo of the busy intersection with no traffic signals below.

The maharaja a few rulers previous to the fat man was a huge astronomer. He built 5 observatories around India, but the one in Jaipur is the biggest and best (#1 observatory). It also has the worlds biggest sundial (#1 sundial) in addition to numerous other astronomical and astrological instruments. Supposedly they all still work. It seemed like that was at least mostly true. We took a sweet guided tour. Also, a monkey ran around the observatory with us.

We went around to a few other forts and palaces which were fairly cool.

Below is me with the #1 largest silver object in the world, along with some guy who guards it.

Our last stop of the afternoon was for coffee. Jaipur's super trendy coffee shop is of course at a gas station. I sipped an iced mochachino as we listened to Ludicrus and US hip-hop music in comfy, modern, air-conditioned couches. Outside, 6 gas station attendants scurried around the 4 pumps serving rickshaw drivers a liter of gas at a time.

Finally, to reiterate, I have a moustache, and it's sweet.

Trekking in Northern India

2007-07-29T23:01:00.000-07:00

After two days in Leh, it was time to do some trekking in the Himalayas. So naturally, we hired a jeep and driver and set off for a couple days of mountain exploring and hiking. Cost of a jeep for 500km, gas, tent, sleeping bag, and a driver for 2 days - $200.

Our first target was Tso Moriri (Tso means lake in some language). It was described by people in town as somewhere between a 6 and 11 hour driver. Our driver - Tashi - despite his propensity to stop for tea at every opportunity seemed to think we could make it in 6. It ended up being 7 and a half "rough and tumble" hours in the back of the jeep. But the views were awesome and the lake and mountains were absolutely amazing.

We camped for a night at the lake which was really cool. It was also at 15,100 feet. Immediately after arriving and setting up the tent I set off to see how high I could climb in the surrounding mountains. Despite my mountain goat-like characterisitics, the answer was not very far. I was out of breath after every few steps. I did make it up to the top of a peak-let (is that a word?) that was over 16,000 feet for sure. Really amazing views. Night though was freezing and super windy, and I was definitely underprepared. And after my high altitude wanderings I kept waking up breathless and with a pounding headache. But even though I first checked my watch hoping it was morning at 910pm (8pm was bedtime) I made it through the night fine and the tent did not blow away.

On the next day we headed back on the scenic route past a big salt lake - Tso Kar. These roads were somehow worse than the day before. Lots of dirt, sand, rocks, everything else. At one point, the road we were on ended and Tashi looked around, confused, then asked me for help. My sense of direction in the Himalayas is not so good either but I did manage to spot where the road started up again and we darted through some scrubbrush to get there.

One section of the road was mostly sand, and after a few close calls, we naturally ground to a halt mid-morning, stuck in a dune in the middle of nowhere. Tashi announced "Sorry, sir" and we both got out to assess the situation.

We soon settled into a nice routine. First, we dug with our hands a little path forward for each tire. Then I got in the back to push, and Tashi started the car. We would go about 3 feet, and the car would stall out. Then, we would repeat. Finally, after about 30 minutes and a dozen repetitions of our car-pushing routine, the tires caught for good and we made it back to the road.
The rest of the drive was relatively smooth. We went over the second highest motorable pass in the world at 17,500 feet. We also stopped for lunch in a Tibetan familly's tent (noodles, hard boiled eggs and tea) which was a welcome change after 2 days of clifbars, fruit, and a few cheddar cheese sandwiches. We even found Tso Kar, though it turned out to be a scenic but smelly salt lake full of muck not too different from the Great Salt Lake. Finally, we made it back to Leh before nightfall.

Noteworthy animals spotted (in addition to the standard goats, donkeys, and cows in the streets):
- 1 yak
- 5 asian wild asses (seemed like a cross between zebra and antelope)
- Many Himalayan desert birds and lizards
- Countless marmots (These critters look like big meerkats or small beavers, or furry snipe. They outnumber humans 50 to 1 in Ladakh. They live in little holes all over, and as hard as I tried, I could not catch one)

Two pieces of blog logistics

2007-07-29T05:01:00.000-07:00

First, I have arrived in Bangalore. Sorry for the limited posting over the past 3 weeks but the internet has been painful to find and use. I have written a number of posts though and hope to upload them and their corresponding pictures quickly over the next few days (assuming all goes well).

Second, since this blog is getting a fair amount of traffic, I am going to experiment with adding Google AdSense to the site. Basically, this will put some targeted ads in the right hand column of the blog. If you click on an ad, this blog will earn money. Given the striking poverty I have seen over the past few weeks, I will donate any and all revenues that the blog generates to UNICEF earmarked for children in India and China. So click on ads generously (but appropriately - too excessively and your clicks stop being counted).

Leh, Ladakh

2007-07-22T22:58:00.000-07:00

[more pictures to follow]
First - where is Leh, Ladakh? An excellent question, as I had not heard of it until recently. Leh is in the Ladakh area in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, all the way in the north of India. J&K state is best known for its Kashmir area which is continually disputed over and claimed by both Pakistan and India. Ladakh is in a region of J&K whose border is disputed with the Chinese, but is relatively far from the Pakistani disputed area. There is a very heavy military presence in lots of random spots and numerous patriotic signs (e.g. "We love peace but are ready for war"), but this and the excessive permits needed to travel around are the only signs of conflict in the Ladakh area.

Ladakh is a heavily Tibetan influenced area of the Indian Himalayas. Most people speak Ladakhi, which has the same written script as Tibetan but is pronounced differently. Most people look and dress Tibetan, though there are definitely Indian influences as well.

The north and west sides of the Himalayas (where I went in China) are very wet and are mostly rainforest at altitudes where plants grow. The south and east sides of the Himalayas (here) on the other hand is very dry and is mostly desert.

We spent the first day mostly acclimatizing to Leh (altitude of 13,000 ft) and exploring some of the old Tibetan monasteries in town. Day 2 we explored some of the sights in the immediate vicinity of Leh. These included a really cool fort/palace built into the mountainside and a big Tibetan monastery above the fort.

These Tibetan monasteries looked almost exactly the same as the ones I saw in Shangri-La. The one major difference was the photos of the Dalai Lama. Here, there were many pictures of the "real" Dalai Lama. In China, however, the government imposed a PRC friendly Dalai Lama in the 1970s. It is illegal in China for a monastery to show photos of the real Dalai Lama, so they all have photos of the China-appointed Lama. Though a few times, way in the back, you could see some pictures of the real Dalai Lama in China.

Agra/Taj Mahal

2007-07-20T06:48:00.000-07:00

On my second day in a country, it seems I like to wake up really early and go see a wonder of the world. Today, it was a 4:45am wake up call to head to the Taj Mahal.

Also, our overnight low temperature - 91 degrees.

Somehow, we had a second straight flawless day of Indian transportation. After getting off the train (which was fast, air-conditioned, and nice) bleary-eyed in Agra at 8:30am, we hired a rickshaw wallah (driver) to drive us around all day for just over US$8. He was very good (he never abandoned us or had any major accidents and took us wherever we wanted) so I tipped him $2.50. We quickly settled into sharing the road with camels, water buffalo, wild horses, cows, donkeys, goats and monkeys as well as a million pedestrians, mopeds, bike rickshaws, motor rickshaws, tractors and even occasionally a car.

The Taj Mahal was awesome. Its hard to describe with words how amazing a structure it was. Very quick historical summary: the Taj was built in the 1620s by the Mughal emperor as a mausoleum to his 2nd wife who died giving birth to their 14th child. It was simply beautiful. Symmetric in all four directions with exquisite gemstones inlaid in transluscent marble. Gorgeous. Pictures definitely better than words.

Today the high temperature was 109. And it is a wet heat. For those keeping score at home, that is really, really hot. So we mostly kept moving between world heritage sights and shady spots. We saw the Agra Fort which was another huge red sandstone structure with a few interesting mosques, a masoleum outside town with lots of animals (peacocks, antelopes, and monkeys) running around, the Baby Taj Mahal, and some sweet and oddly deserted Mughal gardens right across the river from the Taj.

And between darting from shade to sights, it was another day of starring in random Indian family photos. I am in at least 30 photo albums thaty aren't mine already.

Finally infrastructure here (or lack thereof) continues to astound. The power went out four different times today. Also, in front of the Taj, there are large grassy areas that were being mowed. How you might ask? Well obviously by two men in a motorless lawn mower cart that were being pulled by two cows. Inside the grouds of arguably the nost famous building in the world, cows are hard at work.

Hong Kong/Macau

2007-07-20T06:43:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong was a good way to finish China. Actually it was not much of a finish to China but more of a trip back to the US. It definitely felt less Chinese than many parts of San Francisco and New York do. Everyone spoke English, tons of ex-pats (largely British and Australian), and a very modern city.

A few highlights from touring the city include the 800 meter long set of escalators that takes you from down by the waterfront up to the mid-levels on the hill where most of the hotels are, eating a Burger King Big Fish sandwich up on top of Victoria's Peak, a few nice ferry rides around from high-end shopping mall to shopping mall, and finding hot, fresh krispy kreme donuts.

One of the highlights was definitely a random night out Friday. The Stanford group I met in Yunnan also happened to be in Hong Kong for the night, so we met up for a big fun dinner. For different portions of the meal, I brought a few friends who were in town from school and from New York. The other group also had a few friends who lived in Hong Kong. Thosew friends brought some more friends. We ended up having one of those great its-a-small-world nights with a good italian dinner that could have been in little italy and then a few sierra nevadas at a brewpub that could have been in san francisco.

The last stop on the China circuit - Macau - was a pleasant surprise. It had many things I like: cool casinos, lots of waterfront areas, and great portuguese food.

The town/SAR/country of Macau still retains a lot of its Portuguese heritage. Signs on stores were an interesting mix of portuguese and cantonese with occasional bits of english haphazardly thrown in. It was pleasant, walkable and felt more like being in Peru than in China. I even managed to get a workout in one of the parks. The blackjack dealers at the Wynn however were not so welcoming.

Welcome to India!

2007-07-17T09:36:00.000-07:00

"Hello sir, welcome to my crazy country."

Most guidebooks or slogans about India say things like, "India is a feast for the senses." Or "Incredible India!", or something like that. Three different times today, someone has welcomed me to their crazy country. At this point, I would tend to agree.

In half a day here, I have seen large monkeys (baboons?) running on top of city buildings, grown accustomed to cattle in the streets, been attempted to be scammed twenty times at least, and had between 10 and 20 people come up to us asking to take photos with me, or Brittany, or us both. There are people and rickshaws and animals and trash and beggars and old cars absolutely everywhere. Its complete chaos.

Upon landing, it seemed like we entered the early 1970s. Our plane was probably 40 years old and was literally falling apart inside. Then, we made our way to a sketchy communist era taxi from the 1940s. Eventually, we found our hotel.

Delhi has been really interesting, overwhelming, and sweaty all at once. This morning we went to the red fort and a huge mosque in old Delhi. Definitely the only white people in the huge mosque that seats over 25,000 people. Elsewhere along the way we explored several bazaars selling everything from books to t-shirts and saris to car parts. We ate with our hands (don't worry mom, I used Purell first) at an amazing lunch at a tiny, hole-in-the-wall place called Karim's. We even found an iced coffee restaurant with AC to escape the heat and a great park by the parliament house with trees and therefore shade.

So far, its been quite an introduction to my new country of residence. I am not sure I can call it my crazy country yet. But I think I can call it crazy.

Lijiang - an epilogue

2007-07-13T01:57:00.000-07:00

First - some background. I do not mean this to be negative or too stereotypical, but I need to make a broad generalization. Please don't be offended.

Chinese tourists love taking solo photographs in front of random places. Without fail, older Chinese tourists give a stoic semi-smile, and younger people flash a peace sign. All photos are individual only. In fact, Lijiang may only exist in order to give Chinese tourists random places to take individual photos.

Ok, enough context, on to the story.

My last afternoon in Lijiang I walked about 30 minutes north of the old town to Black Dragon Pool Park. Just a few steps inside, a torrential downpour started. I had no rain jacket or umbrella so I scampered to the nearest pagoda for shelter. Since I am Dola-e, I had many electronic devices in my pocket that I was not eager to get wet. So I sat under the pagoda and started to read my book.

After a half hour, I got tapped on the shoulder. It was an old Chinese woman, probably in her 50s, holding a camera and an umbrella. Thinking she wanted me to take her pictures, I stood up and took her camera. She gave me the umbrella also. A little surprised, I took it, then followed her out into the rain. She stood out in the rain at a few classic random spots, and I snapped photos. Then she ran back over, looked at the digital photos, approved, and took the camera and umbrella and headed back under cover. Now a mix of stunned and amused, but definitely getting wet, I followed her back to the pagoda.

Then she started to gesture excitedly and talk loudly to me in Mandarin. Eventually, I realized she wanted to set up a trade of sorts. I could take her photos along the way, and she would share her umbrella with me. I laughed, thought for a second, then agreed.

At first we walked along a little awkwardly. She would stop, set up a photo shoot, and I would take a pictures. But soon, we struck up a great dialogue. She spoke rapid Chinese. I replied in English. Neither understood a word the other was saying.

Eventually, we settled into a great routine. She even offered to take a few pictures of me random places, and I accepted.

As we got closer to town, we started getting some funny looks from strangers as we huddled together under the umbrella, but we just giggled like a happy couple and continued on.

Finally, we got to a big water wheel with some other people nearby, and I gestured to ask if we could get a picture together. She smiled, flagged down a stranger, and we took pictures on both of our cameras. I wanted to include the umbrella, she yelled at me to put it down. I held it awkwardly off to the side.

Soon though, we had to go our separate ways. She led us to a little store and arranged for me to buy my own umbrella for Y10. We turned and looked at each other one last time, she said "Bye-Bye", I laughed and said the same, then turned and headed home under my new lavender umbrella.

To invest in China?

2007-07-11T07:41:00.000-07:00

Note: This is a still in process draft that I hope to turn into a paper at Stanford. Much of it is still poorly developed and explained. It is also quite long. But, as I am leaving China, I think it is appropriate to post it in its current form for those who are interested.

Walking down the neon-lit streets of Shanghai buzzing with energy, shopping in the modern downtown malls of Hangzhou, Beijing, and Xi’an, or studying the massive development projects on display at the Urban Planning museum, it is hard to conclude anything other than China is about to take over the world. When asked in a recent survey, "Do you think you will be richer in 10 years time?" approximately 90% of Chinese respondents chose "quite possibly" or "possibly".

But at the same time, there are problems here which seem nearly insurmountable. The recent US seafood bans and toy lead paint outcry just scratch the surface. The pollution in many parts of the country is unbearable. The northern portion of the country is facing severe water shortages. AIDS is ravaging large portions of the population of Henan province due to terribly misguided government blood gathering practices in the late 1990s. Huge numbers of workers are migrating from rural farms to slums in and around the large cities. Numerous local minority groups want political freedom and independence. The economic disparity between rich and poor is tremendous.

So maybe China is not going to take over the world. Maybe the government will lose control when the economy slows, as the growth slowed in Japan and all of the “Asian Tigers” of the 1990s. Maybe America has just outsourced almost its entire production base to a country with problems growing as rapidly as its economy?

The answer is definitely not clear.

One thing is for certain, the Chinese economy has showed no signs of slowing down yet. Even with the one day 10% drop in the stock market in March when the government suggested there may be new taxes, consider the following:
- Real estate investment and prices have soared (28% annual real estate growth, 25% annual infrastructure growth YoY May)
- The stock market has nearly tripled in the last two years (Shanghai Index up 124% in 2006 and ~70% YTD)
- The Trade imbalance continues to surge (surplus increased 73% YoY May)
- The Yuan is still not free to float (some estimate the currency is 15-20% undervalued)
- Venture Capital money is flowing freely ($220MM was invested just in cleantech directly in China in 2006.

Almost every single person I have met here is working for a startup or a VC. Everyone is getting rich and think they will continue to get very rich, very soon. I have met many people who talk about their plans to retire to the US in 10 years based on their riches from the Shanghai stock market.

Can this growth possibly continue?

I think this answer is actually quite related to my work here at Kijiji. I have been working to expand Kijiji’s presence by entering new markets around China. As such, I have studied the socio-economic characteristics in all of China’s major cities and regions. While today, Shanghai, Beijing, and to a lesser extent Guangzhou and Shenzhen, are wealthy, global economic centers, these cities will not drive China’s growth over the next twenty years. China’s “Tier II” cities will be even more important for China and the world than I ever imagined.

I have analyzed Kijiji’s performance in Tier II cities where we have a presence, and assessed other markets where Kijiji could enter. I have visited China’s Tier II cities firsthand in Hangzhou, Xi'an, and Kunming. It is these Tier II cities, the cities with an average population of 3.5 million and an average purchasing power / capita of just over US$10,000, the cities that most Americans (myself included) have never heard of, that will determine China’s impact on the world over the next twenty years.

Urban household data is one way to see the importance of these Tier II cities. Clearly, Chinese urban households are much better off than they were even ten years ago. While only 6% of urban households are classified by McKinsey as “Global” or “Affluent”, 43% of the urban households are classified as upper or lower aspirant – basically middle class. 10 years ago this same statistic was at only 3%.

One consequence of this growing middle class is a tremendously widening gap between rich and poor. The chart below shows this staggering evolution.

The chart below shows high, low, and base case economic projections for 2025 China. A rising middle class of staggering size seems almost certain. The country is just too big and has gained so many resources that it is hard to see the development of a huge middle class stopping. For reference, if 25% of China’s population is middle class, that would be roughly equivalent to America’s entire population.

Another thing in China’s favor is its long-long-long term outlook. Even in the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping was writing about how China needed to plan for the next 50 to 60 years to become the dominant global power. Today, China’s long-term economic plan projects that it will “realize modernization” overall by 2050 and that every province will reach its modernization goal by 2070. I am positive there are no similar government projections, let alone 20 volume scholarly plans, planning for US economic development between 2050 and 2070.

So what does all this analysis of Tier II cities and the rising middle class mean? Here are my takeaways:

1) There is probably an investment bubble here today. This is not a consensus view, but it is my view. It may not end tomorrow, it may not end before the Olympics in 2008, but there is a bubble. It will burst, likely sometime between 2008 and 2010, and it may not be pretty.

2) There is a chance that if the bubble bursts in a very messy way, China will not be able to hold together politically. The country is so big geographically, economically diverse, and culturally divided that there may be serious political turmoil which effects China’s economic development.

3) I think the most likely scenario is that the bubble will burst but there will be a relatively soft landing. The slowdown will not be politically catastrophic, and the huge forces behind China’s economic growth will largely continue over the long run.

I think some Westerners will make some money in China over the next 25 years. I think a lot of Chinese will make a lot of money in China over the same span. I am hoping for the former, but not expecting much. I have a little bit of money invested in the Chinese market today, but mostly I am waiting and watching. I plan to invest much more after the bubble bursts. And I plan to target the sectors like healthcare, transportation, and recreation (see final chart, below) that will benefit most from the growing middle class in Tier II cities.

The 20th century was dominated politically and economically by events in Europe. The two major world wars, the cold war, and most of the economic expansion was driven western forces. I see no way that will continue. The 21st century may not be the “China Century” but it will almost definitely be the “Asia Century”. America may still be the biggest and most powerful country, but it needs to change its focus and adapt to a new center of the world in the East.

(Sources: Charts in this posting are all from the McKinsey Global Institute November 2006 report: “From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Sold in China’: The rise of the Chinese urban consumer”. Most other statistics are from Chinese census data, or articles in the New Yorker, the Economist, or the People’s Daily)

Chinese Politics

2007-07-11T07:40:00.000-07:00

I have had a number of interesting conversations about the political situation here. I think most Americans do not have a very accurate view of the Chinese political system. While I only have gathered a few weeks worth of impressions, here are my thoughts.

First, most Americans know China is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, the only legal party in the country. But it is important to realize that this party is communist in name only. The party says its political stance is “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, but socialism is actually very limited. While there are still some artifacts of socialism (e.g. you cannot own land in China, you can only own buildings and you lease land from the government), free-market capitalism governs the country maybe even more than in the US, especially in the wealthy eastern portion of the country. I think most Americans falsely associate the Chinese style of government with Soviet Communism which it most definitely is not.

Within the local population, the political sentiments are also much more disparate than I once thought.

There seems to be a portion of the population who believes that have a strong, one-party government system is very important and has led directly to China’s growth. India is an oft used example of where democracy has largely failed to effectively run an emerging economy with many similar characteristics to China. Looking at China’s incredibly well managed expansion, the development evidenced at the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, and China’s rising global influence, this position seems to have some merit.

[As an aside, the recent book, The J Curve, might agree with this stance. It was written largely about democracy in the Middle East, but its point could be applied elsewhere. It can also be summarized in two sentences. If you plotted the benefit / effectiveness of democracy on the x-axis and a country’s level of development on the y-axis, that chart would look like a J. Since the plot is curved, that suggests democracy can actually have a negative (though short-term) effect on a country if it is still in an early stage of development.]

There also seems to be a portion of the population who is frustrated less by lack of freedom of the one-party system but more by the ineffectiveness of the government at providing some public services. This would include the poor healthcare system, grinding pollution, water shortages, etc. They might prefer a multi-party system, but more because it might be more effective in improving bureaucratic processes and enforcing political accountability.

At least some portion of the population here resents the government intrusion into every day life. This includes everything from blocking websites, to limiting personal freedoms, to enforcing the one family-one child policy. This group is most interested in political freedom and democracy. While China has radically evolved economically over the last 20 years, politically the country has evolved hardly at all, and there are consistent calls for more open political choice.

This last group – which I think is the view that Americans expect all Chinese have – seems smaller, less passionate, and more frustrated than I expected. I also think this group is also fairly hopeless that meaningful change will occur.

Finally, one of the biggest political surprises I have seen is how un-powerful the Central Government here actually is. Yes, it may be able to control the weather, police the internet, and suppress political choice. In major issues that are truly important to the Central Government, central politics is unbelievably important. But almost all the time, the real power in China is in the hands of the local and provincial governments.

The local party officials who run the jails (and make prisoners play video games to earn money for themselves), take bribes from local factory owners, grant or deny building permits, and manage most of the day to day affairs of the country are extremely powerful. They are the authorities who bulldoze through poor areas to make room for new high tech development centers. They have the tightest grip on the one-party system and the most to lose if the system changes.

I think few Americans have a good understanding of this complexity between local and central Chinese political authorities.

Lijiang, China wrap-up

2007-07-11T06:15:00.001-07:00

To elaborate more on the Colorado analogy from earlier, if Kunming is Denver, then Lijiang is a weird version of Aspen and Shangri-La is Durango, or Moab Utah, or something like that.

Lijiang may be the weirdest place I have ever been. It is at least in theory an ancient Chinese town home to the Naxi minority tribe. In practice, it is a bizzare cross between Disney World, Las Vegas, and Williamsburg Virgina, except in China.

But still, I have spent a pretty chill couple days here and have enjoyed my stay.

Thanks to Shu, I am staying in a really cool tea house owned by one of her friends with an amazing view over the city. I am the first white traveler to stay there. Last night, the owner force-fed me beer until 1:30am as we sort of communicated through hand gestures and laughter for a few hours.

I have spent lots of time walking around the old town and chilling in cafes (amazingly, I had french toast at a place this morning that was playing a Miles Davis cd)

I got a 2 hour massage from a blind man that was largely phenomenal but at times more than a little uncomfortable.

And now, today, my legs and back ache. My forehead is peeling from sunburn in a ridiculous checkerboard pattern that would probably not be considered attractive. My clothes are filthy. After six weeks here, I have breathed pollution equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes every day for 5 months.

But I am happy.

This morning, I saw bright blue sky for the first time in China. It seemed appropriate that this comes on my last day, here in Lijiang, one of the most difficult places to understand in all of China. While I am headed to Hong Kong and Macau for the weekend, this is my last day in the "mainland".

At times, China has been unwelcoming, frustrating, and baffling. And at other times, it has been unbelievably friendly, spectacular, and amazing. I think China and I battled at least to a draw, or maybe even I came out slightly ahead. In any case, it has been extremely interesting and rewarding. I already can't wait to come back.

Landslide!

2007-07-11T01:23:00.001-07:00

I think the best way to start this story is with a description of my luggage. You will see why this is relevant shortly.

I arrived in Kunming with 3 bags. One large duffel bag with my work clothes. One midsized day pack full of souvenirs and hiking supplies. One large backpack full of stuff for my week in Yunnan. I left the large duffel bag and the mid-sized pack at the Kunming airport when I flew to Shangri-La.

At the start of the hike, the weather did not look very good. I knew the trail was steep and slick, and I did not have a cover for my large pack. I had bought a tiny pack for US$8 in Shangri-La (where a bunch of North Face gear had "fallen off a truck" and was being sold for cheap). After much internal debate, I decided that I would leave my large pack at a guest house at the start of the trail, fit whatever I could into the small bag, and go with that.

So in addition to what I wore and had in my pockets, I brought for the hike:

1 spare pair of socks, 1 spare pair of underwear, a poncho, 4 clif bars, 4 half liter bottles of water, a book, my passport, a few pages describing the hike torn out of the Lonely Planet, about Y600, and a couple credit cards.

Notable items not on this list include (among other things):

Head lamp, advil, celebrex, spare clothes, a knife, dry shoes or sandals, my wallet.

The last object is particularly noteworthy since I was paid by Kijiji in cash (no electronic payments possible from China to US). So I have a few thousand dollars cash balled up in the bottom of my pack. I decided to leave it in my big pack because my day pack had absolutely no place to hide it. I decided it would be safer stuffed in the bottom of a dirty old pack at the start of the trail, since the Lonely Planet mentioned that solo foreign travelers should beware of thieves.

Until the avalanche came, scattering my belongings all around Yunnan to save weight seemed brilliant. But the landslide blocked the only road between the end of the hike and the start of the hike. Note the map below: The trail is in gray, the only road in black, the river through the gorge is in blue, and the landslide is in red. I am at the end of the hike. My stuff is at the start of the hike. I need to go to Lijiang.

It quickly dawned on me that I was in the middle of nowhere in Yunnan China, knew nobody, had a cell phone that didn't work, did not speak Chinese, was soaking wet, and all I had with me was about $50, a pair of dirty socks and underwear, and 1 last clifbar.

I hiked as fast as my tired legs would go uphill to a little cafe at the end of the hike. I got there around 12:30. There were 7 other travelers there including my new friend from Guangdong Province, another guy who turned out to be from Beijing, and 5 Israelis. I immediately attached myself to the hip of the two Chinese speakers.

After about 30 minutes of discussing the situation, we decided to hire a car for Y5 each to take us to the landslide. We would see if we could walk through it. If we could, we would hire a car on the other side to take us to the start of the hike. This seemed like a reasonable enough plan, so I hopped in a minivan (sidenote: the chinese word for minivan is loaf-of-bread-car) with the two chinese guys. The Israelis argued for about 20 minutes and finally 3 of them decided to come with us, leaving the other 2 temporarily at the cafe.

We headed off on the crazy, windy road with no guardrails and 2,000 foot sheer drops towards the landslide. Along the way, we passed about 3 small landslide areas any one of which undoubtedly would have closed any road in the US. We barely slowed down to avoid the boulders and waterfalls. Then, we saw it: the entire road was covered for about 30 yards with huge boulders. Definitely no cars getting through.

We got out to inspect the situation. It might have been possible to scamper through the landslide to the other side. The big problem was that there was still rocks that kept falling. Little rocks and dirt were falling continuously and would have made the ground very slick. Rocks about the size of a person's head fell every few seconds. They could probably be avoided, but if they hit you, they would definitely knock you off the cliff. And every few minutes, person-sized boulders would tumble down.

After discussing the situation for a few minutes, we decided to turn back. To punctuate the decision, a huge rock fell about 10 feet from where we were standing on the road. We quickly got back in the minivan and returned to the cafe. A mid-sized rock bounced off the side of the van as we drove off.

Along the way back to the cafe, I was discussing the situation with my new best friend from Guangdong. I told him that I needed to get back to the start of the hike to get my pack, so maybe I would just hike back. While walking 8 hours back to the start of the trail seemed far less than ideal, I couldn't come up with any better options. He suggested that I call the cafe at the start of the trail and have them send my bag to Lijiang. I was amazed at this idea. He explained the idea to the woman at the end of the trail cafe. She called the woman at the cafe at the start of the trail. After about 10 minutes of discussion, they said that I could pick up my bag that night at "Mama's" Guesthouse in Lijiang. It would cost me 15 Yuan (US$1.95) for the delivery. I quickly accepted the offer. Now all I had to do was get to Lijiang (and hope my bag did too).

Back at the cafe, I stayed as close to the lone minivan as possible. A few more travelers arrived and were also trying to sort out the situation. There were rumors that we could take a car to a ferry, take the ferry across the river, then try to find a car on the other side to take us to Lijiang. The two Chinese guys arranged for the minivan to drive us to this ferry crossing, so I hop in again. The Israeli's again tried to figure out how to split up. In the meantime, I met a white American guy! This was the first American I had met in 5 days in Yunnan. We got to talking and it turned out he is a CS Masters student at Stanford (Sergey) who was traveling with 2 Chinese-American Stanford girls (Carri and Diane)! I told them to quickly get in the van, we ditched the still arguing Israelis, and took off.

We drove along about 30 minutes mostly on these dirt farm roads through some corn fields vaguely towards the river. Eventually, the path ended, and the driver said we should get out. We paid him Y10 each, he pointed off in the distance, and said it is 500 meters to the water. We set off.

After nearly an hour of uncertain hiking (definitely more than 500 meters), we reached the cliffs and followed a winding path down to the river. Across the river, we could see a boat and a few caves where it looked like somebody could live. After a few minutes of yelling, a ferryman woke up, came down to the river, and brought his boat across the river to get us.

We took the ferry across the river for Y15.

On the other side, we climbed up a trail from the water to a dirt road. We followed this dirt road for about 30 minutes towards a cluster of buildings that was supposedly a village. Finally, we got to the first building which was a guesthouse. By now it was about 4:30. The two Chinese guys decided to spend the night at the guesthouse and take a bus the next morning to Shangri-La. The Stanford kids and I both wanted to get to Lijiang. There were no more buses. But the owner of the guesthouse eventually said that the village's one car could be hired to drive us to Lijiang for Y300 at 7pm. We accepted.

Still though, we had almost 3 hours to kill, so we wandered into "town". This was as stereotypical a Chinese village as you can imagine. One dirt road through town with a few shacks surrounding it. Chickens wandering in the street, a few donkeys, etc. The little kids all ran into the street and wave and yell at me and Sergey (I imagine not many white travelers make it in these parts). We did not see any cars for about 30 minutes.

Suddenly, a mini-bus rumbled down the street towards us. We flagged it down. After about 2 minutes of amazing negotiation by Diane, the mini-bus driver agreed to take us right then to Lijiang for Y300. We immediately jumped in and we took off, ecstatic that success was finally in sight.

A few small adventures later (we switched cars once and drivers twice for no apparent reason), we finally arrived after about 3 hours on bumpy dirt roads at Lijiang around 8pm. I found my way to "Mama's" within about 20 minutes, and sure enough my backpack was there, contents entirely intact! I have no idea how it got there.

Total cost of the trip: Y5 (car 1) + Y10 (car 2) + Y15 (ferry) + Y75 (bus) + Y15 (bag) = Y120 or about $15.

We decided to celebrate that night at a local bar which was of course named "The Sexy Tractor". And obviously, the bartender was a Chilean guy who used to live in Brazil. I told him I lived in Sao Paulo for a while, and we talked in Portunol for a bit. He pulled out some Cachaca from underneath the counter and made me an awesome caiprinha. Amazing end to a crazy day.

Shangri-La to Tiger Leaping Gorge

2007-07-11T01:08:00.000-07:00

[Note: I am on the slowest internet connection in the world. More photos to follow soon]

I think I did not emphasize enough in my previous post how cool of a little town Shangri-La was. It's really small Tibetan village, with stone streets, little shops and restaurants and the occasional hostel, and two very cool monastaries - one on a little hill in town and one that we cycled to. There is also a big square where there is some sort of Tibetan dance party nightly. A little touristy, but still pretty cool. Some photos:

Monday morning I woke up in Shangri-La with no real plans, looked outside, saw that it was overcast but not raining, and decided to go do the Tiger Leaping Gorge hike. This is one of the most famous hikes in Yunnan Province, and runs through a gorge that is over a mile deep.

I left Shangri-La on the 10am bus for the little town of Qiaotou ("Chow-toe") where the hike starts. The bus was fairly nice - better than Ecuador, worse than Peru. I dozed off for a bit and woke up when the bus made a stop and then started again. Confused, I asked the guy next to me "Qiaotou?". He said something. Ｉasked again. He said something that seemed like yes. I yelled to the driver "Qiaotou?" He stopped. I hopped off, got my bag, and trudged back up the hill to Quiatou.

The Gorge hike is around 20 miles long. It starts around 1000 feet above the river at the west end of the Gorge. It then climbs up 3000 feet in the first 5 miles, then goes up and down and eventually descends back down to 1000 feet above the river over the last 15 miles. Top altitude is around 8500 feet. At the end of the hike, there is an optional 3 hour excursion down to the river.

Since the rainy season makes hiking tricky, my plan was to hike for as long as possible when it wasn't rainy too hard. I started around 1:00. As the weather rotated from light drizzle to steady rain but was never a downpour, I hiked until it started to get dark - about 6 hours. It was tough going, and quite slippery and wet, but a really cool hike. The mountains that surround the area are even higher than the gorge - their peaks are over 16,000 feet - and their tops poked through the clouds every so often like I was in the Lord of the Rings.

The weather scared away many travelers so I did not see very many people. But I also had a goofy wide-brimmed hat which I could tell made everyone I passed super jealous. I totally sunburned my newly exposed forehead, neck, and scalp while cycling outside Shangri-La. High-altitude sun and newly short hair do not go well together.

Most people I passed on the trail though had hired a guide with a horse. I hate horses even more than bikes so I did not. Still almost everyone I passed were also saoking wet and had mud-covered spots on their butts (like I did) from falling on one of the slick rocks. But I managed to find my way even though at times the trail was

not well marked:

crowded:

unclear:

probably not that safe:

and definitely wet:

But in the end, it was definitely worth it. The hike got progressively better, and it was awe-inspiring by the time I arrived Monday night at a little guest house that offered dinner and a place to crash for less than $4.

I woke up early and hiked the rest of the trail Tuesday morning, then trekked down to the bottom of the Gorge and climbed out on Tiger Leaping Stone in the middle of the river.

At the bottom of the river, I met a nice Chinese traveler from Guangdong province. As he was the only other person I saw on the 3 hour trip down to the river and back up, we chatted a bit and took a photo together. He took off first, I stayed a bit on the rock, then went up a few minutes later. As I was sweating and out of breath about half way back up, I ran into two guys who were headed down to the water. They mentioned that there had been a landslide in the road and that travel out of the gorge would be "challenging". That was an understatement - I will elaborate on the adventures that followed in the next post.

But the hike was exhausting, I was soaking wet for two days, but it was very cool, had great views, and was a great way to re-connect with nature after spending a month in the very urban lifestyle of Shanghai.

Shangri-La

2007-07-08T03:02:00.000-07:00

It's been a whirlwind 48 hours since I wrote last so I will try to describe a few of the things that have happened.

First, Friday was my last day at Kijiji. Everyone gathered to take a photo (below) as I was leaving which was very cool.

Then I went out with the GSB crew to great Cantonese dim sum and then to karaoke with a bunch of Shu's friends. I knew it would be an interesting experience but it was crazier than I imagined. The place felt sort of like a nice casino, with big marble floors and high ceilings, chandeliers, great service, and fancy private karaoke rooms. Everyone was so in to singing it was crazy. I expected that, but it was more intense and more fun than I thought. Kind of like Lost in Translation, but with bigger, nicer rooms. Our GSB group sang Sweet Home Alabama, though I mostly banged on the tambourine to drown out my voice.

I left bright and early Saturday for Kunming, Yunnan. I have decided that Yunnan is equivalent to Colorado, and Kunming is Denver. There are mountains all around, a pretty unique culture that is not like California and not like the East Coast. I am probably not explaining this analogy very well, but the point is Kunming is a pretty cool city, especially for China. Very little pollution, a really nice downtown, some great pagodas and temples and a great lake. I spent a very pleasant 6 hours there, then hopped on a plane to Shangri-La.

Shangri-La is in the very Northwest corner of Yunnan/Colorado. Despite it's technical location in Yunnan, Shangri-La is a Tibetan town. All the people I have met have classified themselves as Tibetan, they dress and eat Tibetan food, and many of the local people are monks at one of the local Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries. [A quick note on Tibet, the people that we met here say that Westerners falsely associate the Tibetan culture with the Tibet SAR that is designated by the Chinese government. There are many Tibetan villages in the provinces that border that border Tibet SAR.]

I checked in to my hostel last night the same time as two Dutch travelers, so the three of us went out to check out the town and grab dinner. The town has a really cool monastery on the top of a little hill which was great. Then we went out and had a surprisingly good dinner of dried yak meat, pickled potatoes, and barley noodle balls.

Today we rented mountain bikes to explore the area. I will not write more about my dislike for the act of biking but I survived off road biking in the Himalayas on my first day at altitude (the town is at 3200 meters, surrounding area is higher) with only one bleeding knee.

But the best part of biking was that we got to see all sorts of off the beaten path things. We met a monk who took us into one of the monastery's kitchens and had yak tea with us (absolutely gross but amazing experience). We went through all sorts of gorgeous valleys with flowers and yaks and yak sheppards and Tibetan people going around the daily work. Everyone was super friendly and yelled "Hello" or "Nihao" to us. We went to the biggest monastery outside Tibet and hiked all around it, went through its dozens of cool temple areas, and trekked up through some of the hills and villages around the monastery. Finally we ended up in a huge lake bed and chilled in the fields.

That's all I can write for now. I will upload more pictures to this post later.

Moving Day / Posting Update

2007-07-05T20:41:00.000-07:00

Today is my last day with Kijiji and in Shanghai. It has been absolutely amazing, and I am sad to leave.

I am taking a circuitous route over the next few weeks to get to Bangalore to start work with Softbank’s Venture Fund. I look forward to sharing what I am sure will be many interesting stories from this trip.

First, I am going to Yunnan province, China– visiting Shangri-La, Lijiang, and Kunming for about a week. I hope to do some hiking, see some mountains, and avoid the rain.

Then I plan to spend July 13^th – 16^th in Hong Kong and Macau. Hopefully I do not lose all my American Dollars playing Mah Jong.

Then I fly to India on July 16^th. I will spend 12 days in northern India touring around Delhi, seeing the Taj Mahal, and visiting Ladakh province (Leh), and Rajasthan province (Jaipur and Pushkar).

Finally, I fly to Bangalore on July 29^th to start work there.

I do not expect to have regular internet access until I start work again but I will blog (can it be a verb also? On my blog, the answer is yes) whenever I can.

For those feeling empty and lost inside, wondering what to do for three whole weeks without new blogs from me, I have uploaded some emails I sent around last summer from Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. They can be found in the July and August 2006 sections. Consider this the summer re-run season.

*This is my 19^thmove since graduating high school - way too many.

Final Shanghai Thoughts

2007-07-05T20:17:00.000-07:00

First, wrapping up some loose ends:

I have been meaning to write about an interesting conversation I had with Jian Shuo about Chinese naming. But he beat me to it and explained Chinese naming much better than I could.

Second, I got a haircut today. A bold move I realize, since “not too short” was not one of the mandarin phrases I have learned. But it’s very hot, and I can’t go the whole summer with no haircut (when I have a job). It was a nice place though, and it is a good haircut, just too short. I look a bit like a white, 5’11” Yao Ming (no disrespect intended for Yao Ming or his hairstyle).

Finally, Beijing is planning to ban 1 million cars from the road for two weeks to test its effect on reducing pollution (Thanks Susan!)

Now, on to some Shanghai thoughts.

I was very surprised when I realized this week that I am not at all ready to leave Shanghai. As everyone knows, I am always ready to move on to try new adventures. But my time here has been great and I wish I could stay longer.

I have been going through and trying to hit some hot spots in my last few nights here. I went to the top of the Grand Hyatt in Pudong for some drinks (although my shorts and flip-flops kept me from the bar on the 87th floor, the view was still pretty cool). I have been back to 3 on the Bund and had drinks at the roof café there overlooking the river. Probably my favorite place in Shanghai. I went back to Xiantiandi and to People’s Square and walked around and ate some food. I went to Yueyuan and bought some souvenirs. I took some pictures from the office and from the walk to and from work.

I think Shanghai is a great city. People complain that it is too much about spending money. They say it’s like New York, but without the cultural and artistic side (though some would say the real culture has been pushed out of Manhattan and into the boroughs anyway). Most local Chinese think Beijing is a better place to live because there is “real culture” there. Apparently there are 10 artists in Beijing for every 1 in Shanghai. That may be true, but I would pick Shanghai over Beijing for sure.

Another common complaint is that Shanghai is too western. I think Shanghai may be western-friendly but it is decidedly non-western. There are definitely McDonald’s and KFC’s and Starbucks all around. But there are countless more tiny restaurants and shops and local establishments. Somehow, the colonial influence of the French Concession and the modern skyscrapers with neon lights work together and give Shanghai a feel that is not western, and probably isn’t Chinese either, but is something all its own.

A few final photos:

Views from the office

Pudong

Xujiahui (taken on my commute)

Kijiji - final thoughts

2007-07-05T02:13:00.000-07:00

This morning I went through my morning routine at Kijiji for one of the last times:

I arrive at the office, absolutely covered in sweat and dripping wet. (This has happened 17 of the 19 days – I took a taxi successfully once and unsuccessfully yesterday to escape the heat.) I drop my bag off at my desk and immediately head for the bathroom to try to clean up and dry off. I then search around in vain for a cool area, but wind up back at my desk still sweating. Then the battle begins. I can’t do anything productive until I have some coffee. But I am way too hot to have coffee. So I sit and stare at all the emails I got from the previous day in the US until I am a reasonable temperature.

Last night I took some people from work out to Bubba’s Texas Bar-B-Q to celebrate the 4th of July. Bubba’s was an amazingly authentic BBQ place. If I was in Houston, I would think it was only good, but it was probably better than any BBQ I had in New York or California. And since it was in Shanghai it made it more amazing. We had Budweiser, margaritas (not really American, but still better than green tea and whiskey), pulled pork sandwiches, beef brisket, yellow bbq sauce, red (vinegar) bbq sauce, pork ribs, hush puppies, French fries, corn bread, baked beans, and cole slaw.

And, like a typical American restaurant on the 4th of July, the service was really slow, and the place was packed with loud and obnoxious Americans (at one point, a version of the Star Spangled Banner broke out that was painful even to my tone-deaf ears). Still it was a lot of fun, good food, and I think everyone here enjoyed trying an American restaurant that served something other than just hamburgers and fried chicken.

And after dinner we promptly returned to China and went to get foot massages.

Coming to America

2007-07-04T19:11:00.000-07:00

From the WSJ:

EBay Opens U.S. Classified Ads Site

Online auctioneer eBay Inc. has quietly opened a classifieds Web site in the U.S., its first foray stateside into an area that has been dominated by the scrappy Craigslist Inc.

On Friday, San Jose, Calif.-based eBay opened a U.S. version of Kijiji, the online-classifieds site it launched overseas in February 2005. Until now, Kijiji was available in certain countries in Europe and Asia, as well as in Canada, but not in the U.S.

Kijiji, available in 220 cities in all 50 states, looks barebones compared with the main eBay site. While that site is covered with images and links, Kijiji features mostly text, calling out sections like "for sale," "community," and "jobs." For now, anyone can post an ad for free, said eBay spokesman Hani Durzy, though the company plans to explore ways to make money, for instance by charging for display ads or premium services for sellers.

The U.S. site puts eBay in closer competition with Craigslist, the Web-classifieds site that was founded in 1995 by a San Francisco resident named Craig Newmark and has since expanded internationally.

EBay in 2004 bought close to a 25% stake in Craigslist from a former Craigslist employee and has closely watched that company in recent years to learn from its success, Mr. Durzy said. EBay has been "very happy with the financial and strategic returns" from the investment but sees room for more Web-classifieds players in the U.S., he said.

"We look at Kijiji as being competitive with Craigslist as well as the other classified platforms in the U.S.," Mr. Durzy said.

EBay owns other international classifieds sites, including Marktplaats.nl in the Netherlands, Loquo in Spain and Gumtree in England, Australia and New Zealand, and Mr. Durzy said eBay plans to look into expanding those sites into the U.S. as well.

More miscellaneous China thoughts

2007-07-03T20:21:00.000-07:00

Language
I am quite proud of my Mandarin development over the past few weeks. I can now do such useful things as: get the waiter and the check (fu yen, my dan), say I am feeling “ok” (ma ma hu hu), and of course order ice cream (bing ji ling).

I can also very consistently tell a taxi driver where I live (near Xujiahui, at Tianyaoquio Lu and Nandan Lu). This morning, it was raining, and I had left both my umbrella and map at the office. I had not successfully taken a cab to the office without the map but I felt confident and hopped in a taxi.

My office is at Guanyuan Xi Lu and Huashan Lu. I struggle with the Yua and Hua sounds. But I tell the driver the address and think I get the point across and we set off. 20 minutes later we are at Guanyuan Lu and Hengshan Lu. Not right. I try again, and we set off again. 10 minutes later we are at Guanyuan Xi Lu and Hongqiao Lu. Not right either. Finally, I convince the driver to just go to Xujiahui. Going to Xujiahui, we pass my intersection. I tell the driver to stop and he says “Oh, Huashan Lu!!” 45 minutes later, I am at the office.

Pollution
The World Bank released a report on pollution in China today that is summarized in the Financial Times. They claim 750,000 people die a year due to the air pollution, though Beijing forced the World Bank to cut that statistic from the final version of the report, saying it would cause “social unrest”. It does say the China has made improvements at curbing pollution over the last few years.

Sino-Japanese relations
I think most people know that Chinese people and Japanese people do not get along. But I did not appreciate how tense the relationship is. Many Chinese truly hate Japanese people after the war crimes that were committed in WWII. In Xi’an, one of our friends joked that he was Japanese and that was why he didn’t speak Mandarin (he actually is from Hong Kong and speaks Cantonese). It went over very badly. Our friends told him to not even joke about that. I have also on several occasions seen World War II referred to as “The War of Defending against the Japanese Invasion”. I don’t think it was used as lightly as the War of Northern Aggression is sometimes used today in the US.