a weirdo in china, pt. 5: coadunition

Finally, finally, the week had begun, the students went to work, and I went to see Shanghai for myself.

I spent the morning exploring the French Concession, a neighborhood of beautiful architectural holdovers from the old days of European imperialism.

First up was Fuxing Park, where I experienced a series of small wonders. Wonder the first:

MARACA PARTY

Wonder the second:

MARX ENGELS PARTY

And wonders the third through sixth:

It was an extremely relaxing place to be, so of course I ran for my life and stomped around some lovely tree-lined streets, trying to stay one step ahead of the gang tags and one jump ahead of the guards lurking around these fancy-pants estates.

It was a near thing, too. This guy tried to jump on my head:

I took a wrong turn somewhere and found myself smack in the middle of a hospital campus.

This is not a very interesting picture.

The hospital, however, gives us an excellent opportunity to discuss something particular to the way things are done (in Shanghai, at least, though I imagine it's much the same anywhere incentives are similarly structured):  they aren't.

The woman in the above picture is walking towards some doors which appear, for all intents and purposes, to be designed to open on approach. And indeed, I watched her and about a dozen other people over the course of ten minutes walk up to the doors and then feel very foolish indeed when they failed to open up. In Japan, a worker would stand there apologizing until the emergency repair crew arrived and the doors were fixed. In America, a sign would be put up warning people the doors are out of order. In Shanghai, people just have to walk into doors and figure it out on their own.

And this was at a really fancy hospital! Just imagine the conditions and concern for people on display in settings that don't owe 100% of their success to functioning technology and attentiveness to individual needs! Everywhere you go, something is broken, crumbling, unusable. Corners have been cut, and other peoples' needs are never even placed on the other side of the scale when balancing the pros and cons of an action.

Also, there was a hilarious display defending the principles of Western, evidence-based medicine. Getting lost at the hospital was far from a wasted trip.

The rest of my day isn't nearly as interesting to talk about, so I'll let the pictures fill in the blanks: