So it has been a while since I have thrown a real update my blogs way. I have been busy I guess, but also lazy. Many times have found myself thinking I should write something, but never getting around to it. Just really need to make blogging a habit, if my sister is any indication, a little habit might soon turn into an addiction.

But anyways, back to the subject at hand, my life and its progression in Shanghai. As I was saying to Tim just last night, when October 1st hit over a week ago now (holy shit!) I could not believe that a month had passed so quickly. I don’t know if it is the business everyday or what, but time is really flying over here. It is a bit monotonous I guess, not that I am not having fun, but class + work can get a little repetitive. Of course I am still telling myself I need to get out an explore more, and it is still not happening. There is always next weekend…

I joined a website for hooking up people for language exchange from all over the world (I think originally started by people in China, but in no way China specific) called italki.com. Got a lot of hits off of that from mostly Chinese people wanting to learn English from me. Have made a few friends though, some in Shanghai, some not. Hung out with one girl, Mandy, during the National Holiday vacation last week. We ended up having dinner at her friend’s parent’s restaurant so that I could speak English with her friend (Mandy’s English was quite good, all things considered). It was a fun time, and lots of good food, though there was, of course, the awkward, “Yeah, I really don’t like that…” after they brought out all the food without ever asking anything I might dis/like. On the upside I didn’t have to pay, so why am I complaining.

Finally, in non-school/work news, was my trip to a nearby sports bar this past weekend on both Saturday and Sunday morning to watch MLB games. Seeing the Sox on a nice big TV, with the English commentary blarring through the empty bar and a beer in my hand, while the Chinese employees looked at the TV with no idea what was happening, was just freaking awesome. Every time I would erupt in elation or dismay at a play I would then have to explain in broken Chinese/English whether I was happy or sad, and why that was the case. Plus the Sox won, and went on to take the series. Good times. I will definitely be back at a bar this coming weekend.

Side note: I can not find shoes in China. I have been to many, many stores and no one cares anything about a US 10.5. This could soon become a real problem. Must find the hidden shoe man that caters to the 老外 (foreigners).

A stinging editorial from Esquire endorsing (sort of) Obama. Amazingly written and saying all the things that need to be said after the past seven years of disaster:

Bushism must be ripped out, root and branch, everywhere it has been established, or else the presidential election of 2008 is a worthless exercise in futility. Barack Obama may not be the man to do it, but John McCain, for all his laudable qualities, clearly is neither willing nor able to do so.

Esquire Endorses Barack Obama for President – Election 2008 – Esquire.

The people in urgent need of long-term banishment – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com:

The GOP has controlled the House for all but 20 months of the last 14 years. They’ve controlled the White House for the last 8 years, and also had control of both houses of Congress for 4 of those years. It’s amazing what “the Left” can accomplish by never being in power, and how “the Right” is powerless to stop it even as they control the levers of Government.

And a few long-form posts coming soon, for those finding themsleves wanting for updates.

The past few days have involved a lot of reading of good writing, and a few emails to friends back home, and through all of it I have quickly realized that the biggest problem for me is going to be a lack of stimulating conversation for a while. Between classes and work I have very little free time, and with those two I am either working in broken Chinese (speaking it myself or only understanding little of what is being said), or severely handicapped English with my students and many of the people I work with. Of course, my fellow teachers are all fluent in English and intelligent people, but we also don’t sit around and have the sort of discussions that I would have with friends back home, it being a work environment and all.

The logical next step here is to get out and find those people, but that has been slow in coming. I am not an exceedingly social person as is, and the combination of an unfamiliar place and many excuses to be “busy” have made it even less likely I would find myself out on the town. Hoping this will gradually evolve of course, but for now it looks like I will be relying on lot of reading and some blog posting to keep my own communication skills sharp. [Oh, woe is me, he says from Shanghai.]

So I moved to China a few weeks ago, Shanghai specifically.

I am here teaching English to little kids – mostly Koreans (the company, Readingtown (RT) is run by Koreans and caters to them at their many locations worldwide) – and taking Chinese classes at a local university. Everything has been going well so far, minus the vicious leg infection I got within my first week here that led to a delay in starting to post, as well as almost anything except going to work and laying in bed.

I think I can say that being here is really starting to have an effect though, as for the first time in my life I had a dream that included spoken Chinese last night. I don’t remember the specifics at all (I’m not much of a dreamer and remember little to nothing of them) but I do remember waking up this morning and finding it so odd that my dream had included people talking to me in Chinese and I believe me responding in Chinese. I took a little Chinese (as well as Spanish) during various levels of school and always remembered teachers saying that once you started dreaming in the language it was some big step. Had never happened to me though, as I usually only had exposure to the language in my classes and even then it wasn’t that much. I guess this whole “emersion” thing isn’t overstated!

Besides that, not too much to report thus far. Like I said the injury/infection has kept me mostly home/neighborhood bound for these first few weeks. Certainly heard about a lot of cool things to check out, but have yet to actually get to many of them. Hopefully this weekend I will be heading to Moganshan, the main contemporary art district of Shanghai to check out a few galleries. My roommate/fellow teacher Tim was over there last weekend, and found that a few of the galleries recommended by our mutual friend Daniel (also a teacher at RT) were closed. So it is back there this weekend to see if we can find them open. Last weekend was a holiday, so I’m assuming that is why they were closed, though Daniel has also mentioned that many things in China (or at least Shanghai) seem to have very odd hours. He meant this more for events I think (gallery talks/openings), but did say that for our work hours (about 3:30pm to 8:30-9pm daily) they were incredily inconvenient. Have to see how that develops.

Finally, discovered that very close to my apartment is the “best location for a solid burger in Shanghai” as related to my by an older man from Florida I met while at the ex-pat hospital for my leg. It’s called the Blue Frog, and while expensive for China, is about nothing outragous for the quality of the food and decor (about $25 for a good burger with fries and a few beers). Definitely not an every day or even every week sort of thing, but good to know it’s there.

At UC Berkeley there are parking spaces marked NL for Nobel Laureate …

… and yes, to use them, you must have won a Nobel, they are not just in honor of UCB’s Nobels.

A great paragraph today from Matthew Ygelsias:

…what makes America weird isn’t that we have a conservative political party (they have ‘em everywhere) or that the conservative political party succeeds at winning elections (happens in England, Canada, France, Italy, etc. all the time) but that the conservative political party is so unreconciled to the modern welfare state. That’s what’s weird. It isn’t true of major political parties outside the United States, and for a while it wasn’t true of the United States either.

In a post critiquing David Kennedy’s review of Paul Krugman’s new book.

In relation to my previous post on trade adjustment assistance, a quick quote from knzn on efficiency of trade. He notes:

The traditional Ricardian theory of gains from trade applies in the case of certainty: those who benefit from liberalized trade will have sufficient benefits that they could (theoretically) compensate the losers and still end up better off, so trade is Kaldor-Hicks efficient ex post. But in a world with uncertainty (and with incomplete insurance markets), liberalization of trade can be Pareto inefficient ex ante.

In normal-speak that is: just because trade can make everyone better off if things are efficient doesn’t mean that it will since our world is often inefficient. An important point.

His full post is here, including a link to the paper that brought about his post.

[via Kevin Drum] 

A hilarious look from James Fallows at what it is like to be a member of the media in China (or at least have your work heard):

If you’re actually exposed to the info-machine day by day, the image that occurs is not the suave Zhou but instead Scott McClellan, flop-sweating his way through an agonizing White House press conference.

….Here is today’s illustration: official sources have been trying to claim recently that the worldwide press is happy with the government’s current level of openness. The worldwide press generally disagrees. So this evening CNN International carried a story on the dispute. And just as the anchor began to say, “International complaints about media access in China have continued. From Beijing…” the screen went blank. Two minutes of white-noise on the screen, then the signal returning when it was time for the weather report.

Clever! Wily, even. And no one would possibly notice! Far more effective in damping down complaints about press controls than actually showing the report would have been. America has problems in getting its image across these days, but it’s not the only one.

A good post from Mark Thoma about worker assistance for jobs lost to globalization. He includes a good piece from John Berry of Bloomberg in it. I wanted to highlight this bit of Mark’s own commentary after the Berry piece:

There are political reasons for paying particular attention to workers displaced by globalization, and that attention was needed in the past to allow markets to be opened, but unless there are economic reasons I’ve missed I don’t see why we should treat workers displaced by globalizaton differently than we would treat a worker displaced by technological change (e.g. labor saving machinery), changes in consumer preferences (the demand for hula hoops falls and you lose your job), or cyclical factors (the natural boom and bust cycles in capitalist economies).

It’s an issue that is important, especially with all the political hay that is made from globalization when most of the job loss in this country has nothing to do with it.

Mark’s full post is here.