So a couple of nights ago I was walking back from Starbucks after a late night coffee / programming session.  I live about 5 blocks away from the Starbucks on Mission and 4th in downtown San Francisco so I was crusing back on MIssion Street, Pandora blasting through the headphones. This was around 9pm.  Mission St. at that time is actually pretty empty besides the occasional weirdo, (which I spoke of here). So when a guy who was approaching me from the other direction passed me, I was able to get a fairly solid look at the guy’s face.

Since I had music blaring, I initially was not very focused on staring at this guy’s face but hey, why would I care, right?  But I had one of those weird and awkward double take moments where you think you recognize someone but it happened so quickly that you passed up the opportunity to really confirm what you think you saw.  After I passed the guy and walked like 20 feet, I thought to myself, wait a minute.  Was that guy Dave Chappelle?  I went back and forth in my mind at first, from ‘I’m pretty darn sure that was Dave Chappelle’ to ‘Sean don’t be such a racist bastard, the one black guy you see walking towards you and you think it’s Dave Chappelle?  Gimme a break’.  As these two voices were back and forth in my caffeinated head, I couldn’t help think, what if it was really the man him, Mr. Dave Chappelle?  So I stopped, turned around and was surprised to see that he had also stopped, just in front of an apartment complex that I had just passed.  This was all actually right beside the San Francisco Chronicle building, if you know where that is (if not, here go).  He seemed to be waiting for someone to open the door, giving me the perfect chance to get a better look at the guy and confirm for myself if it was the real Dave Chappelle.

I turned around, performed a magnificent “fake” phone call motion, as if this guy was really concerned about catching me “spying” on him.  I like how my first reaction to anything I do that might not be totally open and honest is to do it in the most ridiculously covert (and obvious) way I can.  Whenever I’m at the supermarket and I decide for some reason or another that I’ve chosen a product that I no longer want and I am in a different section of the market, I do this move where I pretend to bring the product up to the shelf, look at another product and smoothly walk away as if I’ve “accidentally” forgotten about the product that I’ve left in the shelf.  I think to myself that I’ve fooled the ‘eyes in the sky’ who watch over every move I make in the supermarket.  Oh, I live in a real life Truman Show, you are all in on this adventure, right?  I get it now. Is anyone else this ridiculous?

By the time I was able to actually get close enough to see this guy’s face, the person he was waiting for had opened the door and swooped inside the lobby part of this apartment complex.  Just my luck.  Anyway, I was still able to get about the same view that I got initially from the street and I’m still fairly confident this was Chappelle.  Just really really odd.  The guy was walking by himself on Mission and 5th at like 9pm by himself and met a small Asian woman in a mediocre apartment building?  Very very odd.  So odd, it makes me skeptical…

I will say though that my ‘celebrity’ spotting has some merit to it.  I was getting a cup of coffee at Coupa Cafe just around the corner from the office a few weeks ago and almost the same thing happened.  I was leaving, walking back to the office and I thought I spotted a guy that looked just like Phil Hellmuth, the famous poker player. Every poker player knows of this guy but outside of poker, nobody knows of him.  So I kind of did the same thing where I walked all the way back to the office, going back and forth in my mind about whether or not this guy was who I thought it was.  When I got back to the office, I decided I couldn’t continue the day without knowing for sure, so I walked all the way back, did another one of my super duper secret covert maneuvers, in an attempt to catch a glimpse of this guy without “anyone” knowing I was only there to confirm a Phil Hellmuth spotting.  Sure enough, I caught a glimpse of the guy’s hat before I could see his face and it had large lettering on the back spelling out “PHIL HELLMUTH”.  My internal dilemma went away

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San Francisco is such a crazy place.  Since JJ and I moved into the city, we have gotten to know the inner-workings of Mission / Market street pretty well.  This city is just so unique, so many odd people.  I was walking around yesterday afternoon, mainly just bored, people watching and trying to get out of the house.  It’s just incredible to see how many people you see on the street are crazy.  Literally I was doing a count and you find over half the people you come across are nuts and unapproachable, either drugged out, homeless, have some sort of obvious mental disease or all of the above.  In some ways it will freak you out (ie.  JJ), but at the same time its really sad.

One thing that I find pretty interesting is how many different types of wackos you find on the street.  Probably most people think that these wackos are all homeless people, sleeping on the sidewalks, doing drugs out in public, committing crimes and whatnot.  What I quickly found out after living on Mission Street though is that most of the people are actually not homeless and a very small percentage of the crazies actually don’t have a bed to sleep in at night.  If you watch carefully around Mission and 6th street (and pretty much everywhere in the Mission / Market neighborhood, there are tons and tons of rundown hotels.  They are called hotels but actually they are where most of these people live.  I am not sure how they can afford to live in these long-term stay hotels (whether they are government subsidized or welfare funded) but they are everywhere.  Just on my block alone, between Mission & 6th and Mission & 7th, there are 5 of them, I counted.  It’s one of those things that you don’t really think twice about if you are just walking around.  I just can’t imagine the quality of these places, they must really be bad.  What a terrible job it must be to be the bellman for one of these places….Workin in Palo Alto ain’t so bad….

Getting off the train now.  Check out my latest photos of SF, I saved the best:

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To start, this story is not to prove that everything in China is illogical or worse than the US.  There are plenty examples of things that are stupid everywhere you go and it’s not about comparing one thing to another.  That being said, this is a true story about something that has happened to me recently in Shanghai and I think it is a good example of how the old parts of China still ring true in certain degrees of Chinese society.

I have been planning on going on a vacation, a nice little trip away from technology, away from the computer since I crafted this idea of returning to Shanghai.  Haven’t been away from the computer for what seems like over year and it’s about time.  Not that work is not exciting, it’s just odd that my body has gone through several years of being glued to the computer, day in and day out.  So, in my quest for a nice little location spot, JJ and I finally decided that the Hong Kong / Macao trip would suit us the best, considering her parents would be joining us, it offers a good balance of culture, interesting activities, good food and it’s not too crazy of a place that her parents are lost and at the same time, it’s not too much in the countryside that I find myself stuck and bored.  So Hong Kong and Macao was the perfect choice it seemed.

Now, the next step was to figure out how to get there.  First, I did a little research to figure out how easy it is for an American to get to Hong Kong.  Luckily I purchased the multiple entry visa when I was in the States.  Since Hong Kong has their own separate government from the mainland, when a foreigner goes to Hong Kong (or Taiwan), it is considered leaving China.  Luckily I had a multiple entry visa, making it not a problem to leave and come back on the same visa.  In addition, Hong Kong is very lenient towards foreign travelers and I discovered that I do not even need any visa whatsoever to travel to Hong Kong.  Nothing.  No fees, nothing.  Great!  Now to the planning stage I thought.

Well, not so fast.  It turns out, JJ (and her parents) need to get a special permit to travel to Hong Kong.  I guess this is like a visa, but specifically for Chinese people leaving the mainland for one of the designated areas not governed by the PRC (Taiwan included).  So as silly as it sounds, they had to go down to the visa office where I have been so many times, wait in line for over an hour and pay $20 for some kind of permit just so that they can visit Hong Kong.  It doesn’t sound so bad but there’s more.  First, the permit takes 10 business days to get.  Fine, but what if you want it earlier (or need it earlier)?  Do they have some kind of rush service for those people who need it sooner?  NO!  Impossible.  No rush service.  Actually, it turns out, the absolute only way to get it sooner than 10 business days is the black market of Hong Kong permits, meaning you find someone with ‘connections’ to someone else at the visa office, pay this person somewhere in the $40-50 range, and you can get it in 4-5 days.  Ok, fine.  But really?  No official rush service?  That makes no sense.

So as inconvenient as it sounds so far, it’s still not that ridiculous.  As you well know though, there’s more to come.  Let me take it back days before we actually went to the visa office.  I remembered, as we were deciding to go to Hong Kong, that when we previously went to Thailand with JJ’s parents, her father had to get some kind of special permission to leave the country.  Before he retired over ten years ago, her father was a policeman, first as a traffic cop, then as an officer inside a police station and towards the end of his career, as a prison security guard in one of Shanghai’s local jails.  Apparently China has this special rule about former policemen that in order for them to leave the country, they need to get an official stamp by their former police station.  So when we went to Thailand last summer, he had to go to the station he used to work at and get some official document stamped before he could apply for his Thailand visa.  At the time, it was a bizarre thing but it was not that inconvenient considering he also needed to get a passport, a visa and that he had never left China before in his life.  This time though, we are just going to Hong Kong, a place IN China.  So I asked JJ if her father needed special permission to travel to Hong Kong.  She asked her father and he replied saying he would be fine.

When we eventually went to the Visa office, they filled out their documents and waited in line.  When her father handed in his documents, they apparently did some database mining.  To her surprise, my surprise and even his surprise, they found a match and discovered that this guy used to be a police officer.  She said he needed a stamp and that he could only apply for the visa when he had approval from his police station.  Wow, I just couldn’t believe that for this thing, they could so easily discover he had been a police officer.  I mean, if they have the capability to track people like this and store them in a database, they can use this ‘technology’ elsewhere.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve squabbled with JJ about why this and why that and the reason ultimately is ‘it would be too hard to track everyone’. Ok, in hindsight, maybe he should have asked about the stamp before actually going to the visa office.

Not a huge deal though, he could just go to the police station the next day, get the stamp and return to the visa office, one day later.  As we walked home from the Visa office to the subway station, I pondered this a bit more though.  Wait a minute, I thought.  This was actually a ridiculous situation.  This guy worked as a policeman over ten years ago.  Let’s face it, he was not a secret Chinese CIA agent.  He was your run-of-the-mill police officer.  Why in the world would they even have this strange restriction for police officers?  And it actually doesn’t make any sense.  According to him and JJ, there is actually no requirement for traveling to Hong Kong.  They don’t inspect anything or decline former officers who want to get the stamp.  In fact, they just give them the stamp.  I asked him what is the chance a person of his stature gets rejected by the police station when requesting a stamp to visit Hong Kong.  HIs response was 0%.  So it’s not like they have to be approved.  It’s just about the physical act of getting this official stamp.  Ok, but I thought, is there a time limit?  I mean, it makes sense a little more sense if he just retired a year ago.  But her father retired when JJ just started high school.  According to this policy, he is going to have to do this forever.  He can be a 90 year old man, having been retired for over 30 years and he is still going to have to go to this police station to get a stamp saying he is allowed to go to Hong Kong (or Thailand or wherever).  But wait, what if he moved.  It’s possible right?  He could move to another city in China, that’s not a crazy radical idea.  What happens then?  What if he moved to Northern China and he wants to take a trip to Russia?  Still the same, according to her father, he must get the stamp from the local Shanghai police station.

To top it off though, we have to  dive into level 5 of ridiculousness.  It turns out, only the police chief can stamp his document.  His local office of course has a single police chief who is responsible for stamping this visa document.  Nobody else.  They have access to the stamp, but nobody but the police chief carries the power and responsibility to be able to stamp these visa documents for former policemen.  Ok fine.  So of course, the following day, he goes down to the police station, expecting to have this document signed, expecting to immediately head to the visa office after getting the stamp and guess what he discovers (no surprise to me of course)?  The police chief is away on business.  For a week!  So rather than someone else, like second in charge or anyone given the circumstances and requirements in getting this silly stamp, they tell him he cannot get the stamp until this single police chief returns to Shanghai, which wont be for another week.  I mean, how much more ridiculous can we get here?  The entire vacation now rests in this police chief’s ability to sign this one stupid document, of all the people who should have made this happen before we arrived at this place in time.  And one week, not like one day.  And not even exactly a week, but ‘it should be about a week, we aren’t sure exactly when he is coming back’.  It’s pretty incredible.

So finally this story touches on several things that I have noticed over the course of my time in China.  One being levels of responsibility.  I don’t know if its a cultural thing that brings China to this level or if its just a traditional issue but I’ve experienced countless examples of offices and businesses that grant power and responsibility to one person in the company.  Nobody else.  Only the boss can do this task.  And these are situations when clearly others should be given the responsibility.  Obviously in the police station’s case, her father has no risk of being denied.  There is no requirement he needs to meet in order to get the stamp.  Why not just have anyone who works in the office be able to stamp his document?  That would make the most sense.  I think the issue is two-fold.  One, there is a sense that people are not assumed to be able to handle responsibility unless they are primed and promoted to levels of upper management.  So the expected value of your average employee is so low that giving them the responsibility, like stamping official documents, would get out of control.  The other is from the employee’s perspective.  There is a sense that nobody wants to take responsibility here.  So if you are that regular worker in the police station, there is a fear that if they have the responsibility that is shared with others like their superiors, they can potentially fuck up, which in their mind is a huge disaster.  Rather than use the responsibility as either a career booster, a self-esteem booster or however else other people like to have responsibility, they would rather carry as little responsibility as possible, therefore creating as little risk as possible.

The other aspect of Chinese society that I encounter all the time is the lack of rules and the grey area between what is a rule and what is not a rule.  What this does is essentially create loads and loads of black markets and corruption.  So instead of the visa office not offering any rush service for this Hong Kong permit, why not just have an official rush service?  Maybe even have two levels of rush services, one that is 5 business days and an even more expensive one that is 1-2 business days.  That way, the black market of Hong Kong permits goes away, they can officially charge more money for these rushed permits, more people will pay for the rushed service anyway because they are more inclined to pay for an official service than one that is kind of illegal and under the table.  It just makes sense.  Rules seem to play such an insignificant role here sometimes.  In addition to getting jj and her parent’s visas, I had to extend my tourist visa by another month.  So I went through the same ‘waiting in line’ process they did and handed in my passport, along with my application for a new visa.  When it was all said and done, the guy said it was going to cost over $100.  Fine, but wait a minute.  I did the exact same thing last year and it was $20.  Exactly the same thing.  You see, in China, rules play such a small role in how decisions are made that experiencing a five times hike in price is just another inconvenience, not something crazy.  I mean, why not have an official place in the visa office where they explain all the prices for all the different services.  That way, everything is official.  If they want to raise the price of the visa extension, they can do so by posting information saying on such and such a day, we are planning to raise the prices of visa extensions by such and such percent.  The more rules places have, the official they seem, the more legitimate they seem and the less corruption they encounter.  Seems obvious to me that things should move towards this direction especially in a city like Shanghai.

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Walking on NanJing East road was pretty interesting this evening.  I guess I haven’t strolled down what they call the “Walking Street” for a long time, especially without someone like JJ to keep the sellers away from me (or as much as she can keep them away from me).  But walking alone down this street was quite different than I remember it.  For one, I felt much like I did at Qi Pu road, which I described in a recent post, about how the aggressiveness of sellers on the street has risen since I’ve been here last.  There are definitely a lot more hawkers and the state of how far they will go and how obvious they are has increased.

Immediately when I walked out of the underpass from the opposite side of People’s Square, I was bombarded with some very random questions from random people.  Some of the best ones were:

Getting handed a few lewd cards with photographs of scantily dressed women and text saying 80 RMB / hour for massage.  Clearly this was not for just your run-of-the-mill massage, wink wink.  Being the person that just came from Vegas a few months ago, I thought this was pretty hilarious because the cards look just like the ones handed out by the Mexicans in droves on the strip in Las Vegas.  On a serious note though, I can’t ever recall seeing such open prostitution anywhere in Shanghai, much less an entire business around printing these ludicrous cards.  I can’t imagine there is a large demand for tourists, who have usually traveled halfway across the world to visit this place, picking up a prostitute from some weirdo who is handing out sexually explicit cards advertising that special kind of massage.  So strange.

Right in the middle of the street, several women came up to me and asked me directly if I wanted a massage, clearly soliciting sex.  It’s just so strange to see this in Shanghai, considering I keep hearing all kinds of things about how the local government is trying to clean things up for the 2010 Expo (like cracking down on all of those Red Light barbershops I’ve spoken of before).

A young fellow asked me the generic “Do I want bag, watch, dvd, phone, apple iphone, sunglass (not sunglasses)…….”.  I said no once and barely acknowledged this guy after that as I continued walking towards the coffee shop, where I am currently writing this Blog post.  Instead of eventually giving up though, this guy was determined.  He continued to walk with me.  I mean, it would be one thing if I kept giving him the ‘No, no, I dont think so, I’m not that interested. Sorry, no thanks.  Sorry.’  That at least would have been an acknowledgement that I was listening to the guy.  I was listening to the guy but I was also doing my best to get rid of him and considering I was walking at a pretty brisk pace, he just would not go away.  I am not exaggerating when I say that I walked a good two long blocks before this guy gave up.  It was so long in fact that I started to think he had some kind of ulterior motive, like a posse that was pick-pocketing me in the process.  (Of course that was just my paranoia taking over).

Of course, what would a “Walking Street” story be without bringing up my favorite question of them all.  The sellers who are hawking the roller skate attachments for your shoes.  You’ve seen those kiddy shoes that have the embedded wheel on the sole, so kids can slide around as they walk.  They don’t seem as popular in the US now but like 5-10 years ago, they were big.  Well there are sellers on this street trying to sell you this device that is essentially the same thing as those kiddy shoes, except instead of being embedded into the sole, they are just an attachment that fits on the outside and supposedly can be used on any normal tennis shoe.  I guess in theory, this product is not totally ludicrous, but these things are for little kids.  These things are not only for kids, but they are for little kids.  I remember when I was starting high school and these things were kind of popular and by that time, I was much much too old to be even find these things in my size in a shoe store, much less be popular wearing them around school (Not that being popular was ever one of my concerns).  If you watch these sellers though, they are literally trying to sell these things to adults, as if any adult in their right mind would buy a pair.  So I am walking down this street, in my size 13 1/2 shoes, and I get asked repeatedly if I want to get a set of these things.  “Wait, you have my size?” I always sarcastically ask.  “Yes” is always the answer.  So I think at some point I need to actually get a pair of these things, if just to complement these sellers for making it so easy to buy these stupid wheel attachment things and so friggin complicated to buy a pair of shoes in my size.  Bizarro world.

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