A Bit of a Hairy Problem

There was an article in today’s paper about a teenager who was having stomach issues, but many people speculated she was just pregnant as her belly was getting quite large. After extensive tests doctors found what they thought was an extreme amount of fiber-like material in her stomach. Apparently, the girl had been eating her own hair for the past 15 years. The giant hairball weighed in at 1.5kg (about 3.5 lbs) upon removal. Doctors don’t know why she was eating her own hair, but it sure does beat eating duck tongue or chicken stomach.

The Daily News

We subscribe to the local English newspaper here in Shanghai. Despite being filtered, it provides the basic going ons around China and the world. However, after being here a year now we’ve noticed one very significant difference in the paper service here versus the U.S. (in addition to the ads for “Happy Ending Massages”) … collections.

Just like in the U.S. you prepay for a given subscription length - 3, 6, 9, or 12 months. However, not like in the U.S., when your subscription runs out … no more paper. No pre-warning, no friendly note from the delivery man, no pre-emptive phone call … no more paper. This is bad in that it takes at least a week and 3 phone calls to the “sales office,” which apparently only has sales people that speak Chinese (funny, for an English newspaper), before the paper gets delivered again.

However, this can be a good thing because you can actually stop the paper service whenever your subscription runs out. This is certainly better than the U.S. where you can decide you don’t what the paper anymore yet it still gets delivered for the next three years … at which point you receive a bill for $7,000.

A Taxi Ride with Added Benefits

We have posted before that taxis are cheap – here in Shanghai you can go across town for less than $10. However, this week Scott was in Hefei which is located in Anhui Province. He took a 45 minute cab ride from the airport to his hotel. This journey set him back a whopping $3.

$3 for a cab ride – what a steal!!! It’s even better when you consider that the cab had no air conditioning so he got a free blow dry whizzing down the highway with the windows down. If this wasn’t enough, the driver was apparently offering his “Tuesday Special” as he threw in a complimentary case of whiplash on the 25 kilometer journey.

What goes up ...

One of the peculiar things about Shanghai is that often the direction of escalators is switched. We don’t know the particular reason but after several weeks of running in a certain direction, the “up” escalator is changed to where it runs “down” and vice versa.

As you can imagine, this can cause some confusion if one is not paying attention when walking on an escalator that he or she uses fairly regularly. In the building next door to Scott’s office, there is a Starbucks located on the second floor. He will occasionally walk to get a cup of coffee in the mornings. Last week, while on the phone, he headed to the escalator on the “right” because that is where the “up” escalator had been the last time he had been there. Little did he know the “switcheroo” had been conducted since his last visit.

Now, as you can imagine in the lobby of an office building next door to the Shanghai Stock Exchange in a city with 25 million people, there is quite a bit of action at 9am. As Scott took two clumsy missteps up the “down” escalator at least 25 people (especially those riding down) wondered shockingly with their co-workers “What’s wrong with this moron? Don’t they know in America that it’s a helluva lot easier to use the stairs that are moving upward? And wow look at that – you ever seen somebody’s face turn redder than the Chinese flag?”

Ahhh … the ups and downs of China!