This is part of the back-to-back posts on China adventures!
The weekend before I represented my company at a forensics conference in Wuhan, China. Wuhan is a huge city about two hours away from Shanghai by plane, so I flew out from the airport closer to the city in Shanghai (Hongqiao).
Air travel in China has gotten a lot better since the days of “rude inflight behavior” that was quickly quashed by the government.
The ride to the hotel from the Wuhan airport was very long, and featured row after row of tall, dark apartment buildings. It felt a little bit dystopian, Ghost in the Shell-like.
The Hetian hotel itself was nice – Hetian means field of lotuses – and the accommodations were pleasant. They did have creepy pandas at the entrance and rip-off Peppa Pig statues though. Why are there always creepy animal statues everywhere in China? Is it just creepy because they are putting cutesy things in non-family spots?
Anyway, allow me to introduce a little about part of what I’m doing in China. Over the course of civil litigation in the United States, there is a Discovery phase where the litigants have to surrender (almost) all of their records related to the case. The scope of discovery is determined by a judge or simply by management if they are doing an internal investigation.
Right?
So our job is to go and collect as instructed by lawyers all the documents and data related to the scope of discovery, including emails, Word, Excel or Powerpoint documents, mobile data like text and instant messages, other specialty data types, sometimes social media, scanned and paper documents, everything. Obviously this can get to be a lot of data.
“Greatly nurture and actualize the core values of socialism”
Then we process and load that data into a database where lawyers and (our) investigators can review the documents in a page-by-page format.
Military Olympics in WuhanWuhan University
In my next post, I’ll go over some details of the conference.
I realize that the Shanghai Edition of this blog is my most popular feature, so I am pushing out back-to-back posts about more of my experiences in China.
Two weekends ago I travelled to Hangzhou to support a colleague running the Hangzhou marathon. I did not run the marathon myself. Hangzhou is a very developed city about an hour southwest from Shanghai on the high-speed rail (HSR). It is most famous for its picturesque West Lake and for being where Alibaba’s main headquarters is located.
Not my picture
Booking the HSR ticket was a pain as you need to connect your real-name authenticated identity with a Chinese railway app called 12306 to book a train ticket (no such requirements for plane tickets, I guess it’s impossible for people to enter or leave the country otherwise). But I ended up having to go to the train station itself a day or two before to stand in line for tickets, and “tying” my passport (i.e. real name) to 12306 in person at the train station service center.
The other alternative is to buy tickets at special ticket counters throughout the city, but none were close to where I live or work. Then there is a special lane for foreigners when you go through the gates at the station.
Shanghai or Hangzhou station
Saturday evening I arrived at a Holiday Inn, which was an experience in of itself. These hotels aren’t exactly luxury ones in the US, but they are in China. Because of my status as a Spire Elite member with Intercontinental Hotels (a distinction I earned while staying at the Crowne Plaza in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay for more than a month for work) around only $80 a night I was upgraded to a very nice room and given 2 drink vouchers. I also got a 15% discount on the food I ordered for dinner.
What?? You’re lucky to get bottled water in the US! There must be so much competition between the hotels leading to such niceties. The wine with the drink vouchers was quite good Chilean (?) wine and the Hainanese Chicken Rice was good too. At a Holiday Inn. I forgot to take pictures, you can look it up yourselves!
The next morning, the marathon itself began and ended near West Like, but we never got to see the lake because it was so crowded in the vicinity of the finish line (the Huanglong sports stadium). Below is a picture of the stadium. It was pretty interesting because the inner ring of the stadium, not in the stadium itself, was filled with restaurants. Everywhere around the stadium were restaurants.
We arrived around 11 AM and the marathon ended around 1 pm. Apparently this marathon is a lot easier to get spots in than the Shanghai marathon, which gives spots mainly to foreign runners.
My other colleague and I watched the finishing runners from a vantage point and ended up cheering on our colleague as she approached the finish line. After it was done we went to a local restaurant and toured a creative colony (? essentially a lot of creative industries and cafes in the same area).
Hard to believe China has such a place, but there you go. Most of Southeast China is considered the cultural center of the country. On the other hand, the traffic is notorious for being very bad, so we spent a lot of time in DiDi rideshares.
There were a lot more people than this makes it look like
Actually I have been to West Lake and Hangzhou before, since I have family in the area – My grandfather on my dad’s side has a sister who lives in the vicinity, and I visited her and other extended family members around when I was in middle school. They lived a hour or more drive away from Hangzhou in nice villas now that they made some money off of owning a factory. They also had a small lake where we took a speedboat ride (grandpa’s sister included) and I remember playing ping-pong with some extended family as well. Needless to say, times have changed since those folks were growing up.
These are the family that my grandfather could not return to in China after 1949, as he had gone to Taiwan prior to the Nationalist Government escaping there from the mainland. He did not see them again until the 1980s.
Ads running outside of the subway train (on the walls)
There is one more tidbit about the Hangzhou trip that is interesting: I booked the wrong ticket going back so had to quickly get another one at the ticket window in East Hangzhou station. But they could not provide any more tickets on the same train going back, they only had tickets for the next train. Fine, I thought. But my colleague ended up actually booking a ticket for me on the original train through CTrip, one of the travel booking apps I covered in my other post, by “competing” for an online ticket for that train. You compete by inviting friends to support your “competition” for that ticket as they click into a link and “push” you forward in the app. We won the ticket, so away I went.
Here we go again – To round out the Early Period of my computer gaming, here is a closer look at four titles that I remember quite distinctly, along with casual mentions of a few others.
Hellcats Over the Pacific (1991)
I began to learn a little bit about World War II and World War I when I played the combat/flight simulators based off of these conflicts. I think I really got into the WWII stuff after I read an account of the Battle of Midway from the point of view of the American torpedo bombers (note: this is getting turned into a questionable movie about Midway featuring Nick Jonas which I’m probably going to go watch anyway). Basically the story I read is they happened upon the defenseless Japanese ships by accident, which were refueling and reloading so the Japanese had all their fighter-bombers on deck when the Americans attacked. Fun fact: The Hellcat was not invented until after the Battle of Midway, so it did not partake.
But in terms of this game I mainly just played the demos and shot down Japanese fighters time after time. The demo was randomly generated which made it replayable. This title was particularly memorable because the graphics were quite good for the time and the Japanese fighters were bright yellow, which made them quite easy to track, along with the guns of the Hellcat which conveniently shot out black dots as bullets. There was also an instant replay and bombing function built-in to the simulator.
Honorable Mention: An F-16 simulator that I don’t remember the name of, but allowed me to learn about the different missile types used by that fighter jet (Sparrow, AIM-120 etc.)
U-Boat – and Battle of Britain (1994)
This game was from the perspective of German U-Boat sailors operating in and near the Atlantic. You would go on missions to find merchant vessels, or destroy military ships, which got progressively difficult (some of the merchant ships would surprise you with weapons or were actually destroyers). I remember trying to sink a battleship, that did not go well. If you didn’t destroy the enemy at a first sneak attack you likely had to run away or dive deep, and hope that the enemy didn’t sink you. It was very suspenseful waiting for the depth charges to go off and dealing with “battle damage” while underwater – the sound was very atmospheric. Of course all the Germans on the U-boat are speaking English with a German accent. This was another fun game to play with my dad.
The Battle of Britain came with U-Boat and was an interesting simulator around the titular air battle. You would be in charge of directing British fighter planes (Spitfires, mostly) towards incoming German bombers and fighters as shown on a radar screen. It was pretty difficult to anticipate the movements of the Luftwaffe, usually the Germans won when I played the simulation – meant to show how difficult the battle was for Britain, I suppose.
Comanche (1992)
In this game the 3D graphics are getting noticeably better, so it’s getting harder to run it on our old Mac. But Comanche was a great game that pit you as an American assault helicopter pilot against Russians, warlords and drug runners, etc. The variety of enemies was interesting and the missions were fairly engrossing but not overly difficult. This is where I learned about the stinger and Hellfire missiles at an early age.
This was one of the games where the user manual was super detailed and interesting, starting a trend where I enjoyed reading user manuals and strategy guides as much as the games themselves. In the guide, it introduces the player-character as a US pilot who used to fly fixed-wing aircraft and was now being trained for what was then a prototype Comanche. If you think about it, most of the coverage of American military helicopters are Black Hawks (like in the movie) or Apaches, not this helicopter.
SimCity 2000 (1993)
This one is a classic. Maxxis would later make the best-selling computer game at the time, The Sims, but started out with this city-building simulator. It was recommended for urban planners, which is how my father started playing it. At first it was too difficult for me so I ended up using a lot of cheat codes and turning natural disasters “off.” The classic natural disaster was the alien robot that would cause havoc on the city from high above in the sky.
In the game, you can build residential, commercial or industrial zones and had to provide for everything like hospitals and police stations, schools, waterworks, power lines and power plants, and parks and so on. I think one of the most interesting parts about this game was the high-tech power plants that were available later in the game, like a dish to convert energy beamed from the sun’s rays or a fusion power plant. In addition, there were Arcos, which are massive self-contained structures that would increase your population substantially. These had a heavy influence on my thinking and sci-fi writing.
That’s it for now. Next time we will begin the Landmark Period of my computer gaming, from when I was 7 to 11 years old, where my gaming…habit?…really took shape.
