Kerala - La Casa de Madhu

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.

Holy Cow

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.

Kijiji - final thoughts

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.

Weekend update and food

Weekend
I am going to Xi’an this weekend with two GSB friends, Ian Chiu and Wu Shu, and one of Ian’s friends from HBS. Xi’an is an ancient capital of China in the central part of the country most famous for being the home of the Terracotta Warriors. In characteristic modesty, the Chinese Tourism Bureau says the Terracotta Warriors are the “most significant archaeological excavations of the 20^th century.” No more blog entries likely until Monday (China Time).

Food
I haven’t written much about food recently. But that is not because it has gotten less weird, more that I am somehow getting used to it. Earlier this week I went to a hotpot dinner – like the Chinese version of fondue, but weirder. We had some regular beef and lamb and shrimp, but then there was a bunch of stuff like cow stomach, some other cow parts in a red sauce, some balls of some kind (supposedly “meatballs” but they were oddly hollow), etc. I was only a little bit disturbed and we all basically just plowed in. The stomach was quite good (though did not look like something you should be eating) as were the supposed meatballs. The cow parts in red sauce were not my favorite.

Then, since this is Shanghai, you can also get any western food that you want as well (except Mexican food, which is killing me). So the next night I went to a nouveau Mediterranean restaurant on the roof of the modern art museum in People’s Square. The place had great views, and I had a pretty good salad and veal tenderloin. Then I went to a cool bar in Xiantiandi that had a jazz band in from New York. Could have been anywhere in the world and seemed as far away from cow stomach as possible.

Finally, I have been eating a ton of dumplings. Averaging about 25/day this week of all different types. My favorites are xiao long bao (steamed soup dumplings) and sheng jian (grilled? jumbo dumpling) .There is a hole-in-the-wall place a few blocks for our office that has been called the best dumpling place in the world. It’s tiny, and dirty, and crowded, but really good. And today at lunch there, I ran into a guy who grew up in Norcross and went to the same middle school and high school as me and who is my brother Michael’s friend. Crazy.

Finally, an interesting article from the People’s Daily – What will China be like in 2050? Hopefully I get time to elaborate on some of my thoughts next week.

Three random stories from the weekend

Dogs

We saw someone walking their pet dog in Hangzhou, so it prompted a conversation about dogs: pets or food? A warning – what follows is a terrible story.

Apparently most people here who keep dogs as pets do not eat dogs. But many other people do. Our Product Manager, Victor, had a pet golden retriever. He called it Big Yellow (or I guess the Chinese equivalent of Big Yellow). A few weeks ago, he heard a yelp from his dog in the middle of the night. He woke up and stumbled downstairs to check on Big Yellow. Two beggars/thieves had broken into his house, killed his dog, and were eating it! Really sad.
Everyone at the office felt bad for him, though one of the guys – Dengjia, who particularly likes dog – was (jokingly) angry that somebody else had gotten to Big Yellow first!

Text Messages
On the train to Hangzhou, I got a few text messages in Chinese from a number I did not know. After the second one, I asked somebody to read them. Apparently, when you enter a new city, that city often sends you a welcome text message, saying hello, telling you the current weather, and providing a tourist hotline in case you have any questions. None of the locals found this was even remotely interesting or unusual, but I thought it was amazing.

Umbrellas
It is considered more attractive in China (and maybe Asia more broadly?) to be light-skinned rather than dark skinned. Just as American women spend all sorts of money on tanning beds, tanning lotions, and who knows what else to make their skin look more tan, women here spend a ton of money on skin whitening products. When a woman gets too suntanned, her friends jokingly tell her that she would “be popular in the West”.

The extension of wanting whiter skin is being afraid of the sun. So whenever it is sunny, all the girls walk around with umbrellas. That in itself is not so big of a deal. But in Hangzhou, I saw a girl riding a bike and holding an umbrella to protect from the sun at the same time! As most people know, I cannot ride a bike with just one hand for more than about a second, so I found it particularly stunning. This practice is not very common and I was too slow to get any action shots, but here is a photo of my friend Ellen stopped on her bike talking on her mobile and holding an umbrella.

Latin night

First an update – I chose trip D. I think the trade off between manageable travel and cool sights will be the best. And I am hopeful about the weather.

I just finished another great weekend that has given me a lot to write about. But it’s late so I will just write about Friday night now and will follow up with more over the next few days. But I will say that today was my highest risk travel day since escaping from the volcano last summer.

Friday was my friend Armando’s last night in Shanghai so we went to a “Brazilian” Churrascaria. But there was really nothing Brazilian about it. Everyone there was Chinese, and there were definitely no Brazilian chefs. There was a big salad bar, guys walking around with grilled food on swords, and there was a little card on the table that flipped from red to green. But the similarities ended there. Caipirinhas were not available and there was only one type of steak. But there was a lot of Chinese food brought around on the skewers. And at one point, three guys got up on a stage and sang La Bamba.

All that said - the food was pretty good.

After the Brazilian place, we met up with a GSB friend at a really cool jazz bar where it was Latin Night. This Latin Night was really authentic however. There was a full 9 piece salsa band, and at least 6 of the band members were from Colombia. A largely Latin ex-pat crowd danced and sang in Spanish and Portuguese. Really fun, though my salsa ability in the eastern hemisphere is precisely the same as my salsa ability in the western hemisphere.

Ganbei!

Last night was one of the most fun nights I have had in China.

Like many activities in Shanghai, the night began out of nowhere. I am not sure if this is a Kijiji trait or a China trait, but there seems to be no advance warning when something is about to happen. Maybe conversation takes place in Chinese around me and I just don’t get told until the last second, but I am always being asked to do something – go to lunch, dinner, whatever, and then it is instantly time to go. This was no different - I was getting tired and ready to pack up my stuff around 6:45 and head home for a laidback night. Yiyi walked over and asked if I wanted to join some people for a party to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival. Of course I said sure. And she said, ok let’s go. Less than 10 seconds later I am in the elevator out the door.

First stop on the way to the party was the grocery store. This was the first Chinese Supercenter I have been to. It had a Chinese name (but Tesco owns a portion of it) and was very similar to a Super Walmart in the US – huge, lots of groceries and lots of other stuff. There were some small differences of course, like most chicken and meat was not packaged, it just sat uncooked on ice. People would pick up chicken breasts, look at them, throw them back on the ice chest, and eventually stuff a plastic bag full of them. We picked up a bunch of gross looking food, and I smuggled some Chips Ahoy into our shopping cart.

Then we went to a co-workers apartment (relatively similar to a post-apartment complex) for the party. The “party” was a small group of 7, and almost immediately upon arriving I was sent to work in the kitchen. I tried to explain that I have only cooked spaghetti and microwaved Trader Joes in the past 3 years, but that did not work. So less than 30 minutes removed from my desk, I am making bacon, mushroom and tomato omelettes (they turned out good tasting but unattractive - omelette flipping with chopsticks is hard) in a Chinese kitchen.

Then we had a generally great night talking casually about all sorts of stuff ranging from movies and tv to political issues in China – Big Brother, the Great Firewall, One Family One Child policy, abortion, gay rights, etc. Really fascinating, though a little depressing [note: editing this out, I will elaborate more once I am out of China, just to be safe].

After talking until around 11:00 (the beer really helped people be more comfortable trying to speak english), I introduced the Zeros and Ones game that I learned in Australia which was a total hit. Finally, the beer ran out and we decided to move on to Chinese whiskey which tasted as bad as you would think. We were drinking out of paper cups and the whiskey was so strong that we had to use two cups since it would eat through the bottom of the paper. And I also learned the Chinese word for Cheers – Ganbei! – though it is different from toasting in the US because when someone says Ganbei you have to finish your drink. Lots of fun, but I am glad we did not have a larger bottle.

First weekend in Shanghai

Friday night’s two activities could not have been more different.

First, I went to dinner with a group of 8 people from work. We went to a little hole-in-the-wall local restaurant on the third floor of a sort of dumpy building a block or so from work called “Yummy Place”. It was not. All meals are family style that I have eaten here where one person (not me) orders for everyone. This dinner worked the same. First dish that was brought out was a pile of chicken feet. Not even fried or breaded, just plain (baked?) chicken feet served with tiny hot peppers. You could see the webbing, toes, everything. I am not normally phased by foods of different cultures but this was one of the least appetizing things I have ever seen on a table. Rest of the dinner was unspectacular. Total cost for the 8 of us was about US$12.

After dinner, I met up with my friend Roy from New York and who is now working in ASCP’s Shanghai office. He had some friends who just graduated from Wharton in town visiting. We went out to a super trendy lounge in Shanghai called Volar, with a world-class crowd in a world-class space (Philippe Starck) and world-class prices. We had table service with US$150 bottles of vodka and green tea/whiskey. About 1/3 the price of a similar place in Vegas, Miami, New York, but with the exception of the 98% Asian crowd, you couldn’t tell a difference. But, our bar tab was almost 40x the price of my entire group’s dinner.

How sustainable is China’s economic growth like this? I am mentally composing a much longer separate post about this, but the disparity here between rich and poor is incredible. And China is supposedly socialist.

After the unsatisfying dinner Friday, I opted for an American-style brunch Saturday morning at Kraze Burger, an excellent upscale burger chain that of course is Korean-owned. Then I headed to the People’s Square and to the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. I had heard a lot about the museum and had high expectations.

The ground floor was very impressive - a huge model of Shanghai’s riverfront probably 60 feet long and 10 feet wide, shadowed under Shanghai’s slogan “Better City Better Life”. I wandered around a bit, quite impressed, and took some photos. Then I noticed there was an upstairs. I took the escalator up to the 2^nd floor which had some mildly interesting pictures of Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s. I almost left the museum then but decided to take the escalator up one more floor to see what was there. As I stepped off the escalator, my mouth opened and I literally said “Holy Sh-t” outloud. The entire floor was covered with a model of 2010 Shanghai down to the tiniest level of detail. It must have been 100 feet by 100 feet at least. (Photos below) There was all sorts of other crazy exhibits also – like a 360 degree video tour through 2010 Shanghai, and a room describing the eco-town of 200,000 people the government is building on a now deserted island just up the river from Shanghai. A final highlight was the big exhibit on containerized shipping (photos and shipping note below!).

After the museum I went to the new Xiantiandi district. It’s a “stylish business, entertainment, and cultural complex” that looks pulled right out of Epcot Center. But it is also somehow the new trendy place in town. I had a straiccatella gelato and coffee outside at a nice café. Then I wandered a bit more and found one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been, a German Brauhaus complete with pretzels, home-brewed German lagers, Chinese girls in blue plaid dresses and two Chinese singers on a little stage belting out Bavarian hits. Picture below does not do it justice.

Finally, taking the subway home, I was shocked to see a white guy wearing a Georgia Tech t-shirt! I talked to him, and he was actually with a group of 5 current Tech students who are all CompE’s. Apparently there is an exchange program with Jian Tong University (the premier technical university in Shanghai) which my office sits adjacent to. There are 47 of them studying here this summer. In an interesting nod to undergrad norms these days, we exchanged not phone numbers or emails but facebook IDs so we can meet up later.

Shanghai plan (above), View of museum from People's Square (below)

German Brauhaus (above), Me commanding a COSCO ship (below)

For the containerized shipping fans out there (and really, who isn’t?), an interesting aspect of China’s growth has been its impact on the port of Hong Kong. For years, Hong Kong was the world’s busiest port. As mainland China has grown and as Hong Kong has prospered, it has become more economical to ship directly from the mainland. Despite China’s crazy growth, container volumes at Hong Kong were DOWN ~3% YoY in Q1 2007. Singapore took over as the world’s busiest port in 2006 and is likely to hold the lead in 2007. But Shanghai has moved into second place and is forecast to take the lead in 2008. Over 90% of world trade is shipped by sea.

Food: Initial Reactions

List of foods eaten in first 24 hours in Beijing:
Dog crepe, Shark fin soup, Peking duck, lots of dumplings, mystery curry, Starbucks coffee and muffin, two Granola bars

Quick story about the dog crepe:
My first night in Beijing I took a taxi to a “Snack Street” where supposedly locals go to eat lamb kebabs and similar food. It turns out that the taxi actually took me to a touristy night market, not the one I tried to go to. But anyways, at one of the stands there was a sign that had in English “mutton” next to this crepe/pancake thing. Even though a lot of the stuff being served were cockroaches, scorpions, and other insects, mutton seemed very reasonable since I was looking for lamb kebabs. I ate about half of my crepe thing and threw it away because it was not very good. Then I see a sign at a different stall that says in English “Mutton (dog leg)”. Not very good news. Sure enough, I go back to the stand I ate at and below the word mutton it says dog leg. Awesome.

Update from Monday:
The developers took me out to dinner last night. We went to a restaurant that served food from northeast China. None of it was that great, but we did order both pig ears and spicy goat. The goat was quite good, tasted disturbingly like tacos. The pig ears looked too much like pig ears to be good.

Even considering the restaurant last night, Shanghai is much more Western than Beijing. There are two 24 hour McDonald’s on my walk home from work. There is also a Dairy Queen, a Starbucks, and a few KFC’s (very popular in China – over 1000 locations). But I have only caved in and gotten western food for breakfasts (not counting ice cream) because Chinese breakfasts are gross.