Wow. Day 100. This morning Ricky and Liz went to visit the neighborhood where Ricky's grandmother lived. I know that was a really special thing for them. And it was good for them to get away a little, because something had happened in Beijing while I was still in Shanghai that had caused some major tension between many of my closest friends. Unfortunately the only thing that could ease it was a lot of time and a lot of talking around in circles. On my end of everything, it meant a lot to me that I was immediately brought into the loop and into the circles of communication. It made it hurt a lot less, and for my part I was able to keep from attaching the faces of my friends to the things that hurt me and thus keep all of my friendships intact and complete. We were lucky, when all was said and done, that between all the different ways we each interpreted the situation, all the different ways we all processed and handled it, and all the different ways we communicated with each other, that we are all still friends. It was the most interesting study of interpersonal communication I witnessed in all my time on board the ship, and I would never have guessed that it would end up being between my closest friends. Let's back up, and clarify that no one is at fault for anything. No one caused the situation, although some of us would be willing to debate that point. If you ask me, the things that were building up within all of us that led to the tension we were dealing with now were bound to come boiling up whether anyone turned the burner on higher or not. I am quite thankful it did while we were all still together and able to communicate effectively and get each other through, relationships intact. If we had all simply sat on it and it had somehow come up after debarkation, the likelihood that we would have all made it through together - well, it's not so good.
Well the point is, it was a relatively stressful day for everyone. Nikki had been hoping to take us all out to dinner for days, and the plan was to go out that night. We almost didn't make it because there was still some resolution to be had, as there always is, but we did finally make it out the door, all of us together, with enough time for some shopping, and some talking, before being stuck around a little table in a crowded restaurant with nothing to distract us but food. Nikki, ever on top of things, went to make a reservation and find the restaurant so we all wouldn't have to go round in circles looking for it. She also needed to call home, and I lent her my phone card while Jonathan, Liz, and I went shopping. I was hoping to take Liz to that same underground market Vanessa and I had found the first day, but I couldn't find it. We did find a pearl market, though, and that seemed to relieve her disappointment a bit.
Jonathan was looking for a gift for his mom, Liz was looking for something for a guy friend of hers (don't worry, she didn't buy him pearls), and I was looking for something for Nina, my cabin steward. We all succeeded. I bought Nina a beautiful three-strand pearl necklace that was just what I was hoping to find for her. Something beautiful and personal and not too expensive but not chincy like a lot of the things you find at street markets are. It was something I would have worn, if I wore nice jewelry often enough to justify buying myself one. Liz found a really cool necklace that was made out of misshapen pearls dyed bright green. It was really cool and looked great on her. We almost had to buy it for her to get her to buy it though. She really wanted it, it was more out of indecisiveness that she wasn't buying it. I know because I do exactly the same thing. I really want something and I know I'll buy it but I don't commit to it because I don't want to commit. That's why it takes me five times as long as it should to buy something.
After that we wandered around the pearl market and found that it was much bigger, and had a lot more than pearls. We found a souvenir shop that had name stamps, which is the third thing I'd discovered I wanted halfway through the week and didn't think I'd get. Liz found her present for Cole - his name in a stamp. And I got my last souvenir item. My name in Chinese, at least in this particular name dictionary, means flower. Not bad. The stamp I chose had a tiger carved in it, which is the last symbol I needed as well. My birth year is the year of the tiger in the Chinese Zodiac. So I got everything I wanted and all the symbols that I needed as well. Souvenir shopping in China was a success. An expensive success - well, let me amend that. A lot of money. But for what I got, not expensive at all.
Nikki found us there while our stamps were being carved, and we went straight to dinner. The place she had found was one she'd been to earlier in the week with some other people who knew it. It was called the Dolar Shop. That doesn't necessarily mean it's cheap. But for a high-rise fancy restaurant, which it was, it was very reasonable. And considering that Nikki paid, hey, it was incredibly reasonable. The restaurant was amazing. The waitress didn't speak a word of English, and when we tried to ask a question and she started talking I swear she just started her intro speech over again three or four times. It was a really good thing Nikki knew what she was doing.
We all ordered soup, but it wasn't actually to eat: you see, the way this worked was you ordered food that came raw and then you cooked it in your boiling soup. We ordered a lot of things between us - Nikki knew what to order and what not to: for instance, if you ordered shrimp it came not only with the shell still on it but alive, and you had to put it in the boiling water alive. None of us were into that, that's for sure. Nikki ordered a sliced beef thing that was amazing and came in this giant vase thing that looked like it would hold the biggest dacquerie you ever saw with dry ice streaming out of the middle of it. We ordered mixed vegetables but it turned out to be lettuce, so we ended up not eating much of that. The bamboo shoots took a really long time to cook so they lasted a long time, but the corn disappeared in about five minutes. Jonathan ordered a mix seafood plate that turned out to be one clam. That was pretty funny. They brought things in shifts so we waited the whole night for the seafood to come and then it was this one clam. The waitress kept coming back and filling our soup bowls with more hot water and clearing the plates away to bring more. I hadn't realized how much we ordered, and I thought they were just going to keep bringing stuff all night.
I knew there were things we were missing out on - there was a whole bar of sauces and dips around the corner, and they brought us little bowls to put them in and everything, but none of us were brave enough to try anything. And there were so many you'd really have to know what you wanted or try the lot and you'd never get through them all. The best part was I could feel the tension easing throughout the course of the day, and by the end of dinner it was almost gone completely and I was pretty sure all of us had moments when we forgot we were supposed to be angry with each other altogether. That's the funny thing about being angry - it usually only lasts because you know it's there, not because you're still angry. Taking us out to dinner was the best thing Nikki could have done to diffuse the energy and make it easier to process in the next few days. Oh, and process we did. But it was good not to have to worry about it right now.
After dinner we had a nice, long, leisurely walk back to the ship through the nightlife of Shanghai. Nanjing Road is the center for shopping, we were told, at least tourist shopping, because the street vendors are everywhere. The repeated "Hello, lady..." made me think of the movie The Princess Bride - you know? Fessig (is that his name - Andre the Giant's character) is under Buttercup's castle window and Inigo leans out and Fessig says "I was just walking by the stables, and there they were. Four white horses. And I thought, there are four of us - that is, if we find the lady." Then Buttercup comes to the window and he says, "Hello, Lady!" So that's what I was thinking of all night. On the way back we walked by the market I'd been looking for all afternoon. We didn't have much time but we went down there for a while, and I bought a silk scarf (just for fun and I had 20 yuan left) and Liz was looking at knock-off North Face jackets. She didn't end up having enough money to buy one although if she was ever going to buy one here would be the place, they're way way WAY cheaper. Anyway then we had to be off again; we had a late ETL this time but we'd been at dinner almost 3 hours!
It was a beautiful walk back and much more fun than the walk over to the shopping centers now that we'd all had some time to decompress. I was starting to feel confident that we might all get through this alive, so to speak. And we did. We got back to the ship in plenty of time; we had about 20 minutes I went to check my email at an internet café across the street. I wanted to post a few blogs but the computers had their USB ports blocked. So that would have to wait. And then it was back to the gangway and back on the ship, and off again into the open sea toward Hong Kong.
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