Attending Catholic Mass in Shanghai

Yesterday being Sunday, I researched online whether/where there were Catholic churches in and around Shanghai. I found several, but one was particularly convenient from my apartment next to People's Square, at the Xujiahui metro stop. This was the St. Ignatius Cathedral of Shanghai. Here's a photo of the front of the church:



You can actually find my contribution to Google Maps that pinpoints the location of this church by searching on maps.google.com for "xujiahui catholic church puxi road, shanghai" (if there's an option, be sure to include User-Created content which will search my travel places).

I would have been on time but I was a little lost after exiting the metro stop at Xujiahui, so I had to backtrack a little before coming across the church. With the high number of tall and wide buildings throughout Shanghai, it's difficult to just arrive somewhere and know where your destination is, even if it is a famous landmark.

The 10:00am Mass yesterday was celebrated in Mandarin. It seems that St. Ignatius does not offer weekly services conducted in English, although a church in the south-east part of the city does do so. I will try to go there next week, if I can find the right bus to take in the morning.

As for St. Ignatius, although the Mass was conducted in Mandarin, there was an opportunity for English-speakers to follow along some parts. The readings appeared on TV screens throughout the cathedral, which in a split-screen presented both the Mandarin that was read and also the English translation. However, the homily did not have any translation, so I had to do the best that I could with the Mandarin that I have. From a purely linguistic standpoint, I think that going to Mass here would be an excellent way to reinforce my Mandarin studies because not only is the speech and oratory delivered as clearly as possible, but there is the possibility of following along with the characters on the screens. I was even able to sing a teeny, tiny bit in Mandarin because all the song lyrics appeared on-screen as well, and I exited the church armed with some new characters and words to look up as soon as I arrived back home.

Now, how does Christianity or Catholicism proliferate in a country such as China?

When I was researching churches online, I came across one comment that warned would-be Mass-goers to bring their passport along with them, ostensibly because only foreigners could practice a religion such as Catholicism within China. I did bring my passport but no one checked it when I visited St. Ignatius. Inside the church, I noted that the Mass was being predominantly celebrated by the Chinese. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether these are ex-patriots from other countries or if they are native Chinese citizens, but I did not sense any restrictions or threat of restrictions on the celebration of the Catholic Mass. The only aspect of the visit that was slightly anomalous was that there was no photography permitted of the outside of the church. I did sneak in a couple photos, and of course no one can regulate photography from a long ways away, but to not be able to photograph the church from inside the gate was a little strange and I'm not sure why this was the case.

Inside, I did find clues as to how the Catholic church may employ a type of strategy to connect to the decidedly different belief system not only of China, but of Asia in general. Please read this small explanatory note which appears under each stained glass window of the cathedral:



Here is the type of stained glass window that might appear throughout St. Ignatius Cathedral:



And so I also took details from the elements that the small explanatory text described. Here is the narrated Biblical scene:



Along with some text:



... and finally, up top, a connected symbol from traditional Chinese art:



(My apologies that all of these are not necessarily from the same window, but are provided to be illustrative only.)

The model of connecting the Christian church with Chinese tradition is interesting and I wonder to what degree (and with what success) there has been an intentional effort, and for how long, of integrating elements of Christianity to the constant cultural education that the Chinese receive as they grow up, live and work within China. I also wonder what new understanding is brought to the Christian narratives in the mind of a Chinese person through the connection with traditional imagery, and whether this dilutes or strengthens the original message as interpreted by Rome (in the case of Catholicism). And, more interestingly, if the Christian narrative and Chinese traditional imagery are tightly correlated, what does this say about the role of religion and culture in society?

This does remind me a little bit of a paper that I wrote in French in the spring of 2005 while studying in Paris. The course dealt with the history of Southeast Asia and my paper, "Les missions Catholiques au Tonkin," treated the theme of how (and perhaps why) a religious mission can or would access the people of a completely foreign culture. I'll post the paper separately for anyone interested; I myself am reminded that I should read it before my trip to Vietnam in January!

The Impressive Buildings of Shanghai

When I visited Shanghai in June 2008 with friends, the weather was quite rainy and I don't remember that we ever really had clear air with which to reliably view the skyline and buildings. Yesterday, however, was a perfect day in Shanghai so I walked around, armed with a camera, and tried to find some good shots for the Shanghai landmark buildings.

First, my Shanghai babies. These are some of the awesomest buildings that I know of: the Jinmao Tower (left) and the Shanghai World Financial Center (SWFC; right).

A year ago before I left Shanghai, I stopped in Pudong where the buildings and, essentially, the famous Shanghai skyline are located and I travelled up to the 88th floor of the Jinmao Tower to have a cocktail. According to Wikipedia, as of 2007 it was 70 RMB to go to the 88th floor observation deck of Jinmao, but I found another way to enjoy the top of the tower: head to the cocktail lounge on the 87th. Instead of using the express elevators, head to the hotel entrance and take the elevator up to the Grand Hyatt lobby where, incidentally, you'll have a great view from the bottom of the famous 30+ story lobby that rises through the inside of the skyscraper. The cocktail I had at the top was about 90 RMB a year ago -- roughly $15, probably the same as one would spend for a cocktail at an upscale place in Manhattan.

As for the SWFC, from what I gathered yesterday you have at least three (tourist-priced) options of getting a good view. You can choose to go to the 94th floor (perhaps 50 RMB), or the 97th floor (100 RMB), or to the 100th floor (150 RMB). I may or may not decide to splurge and head to the top, which opened just at the end of August and seems to house the world's highest observation deck at 474 meters. But I wonder if there's a free way to get almost to the top ...


A view up the straight side of the SWFC:


Here's a view as the sun heads far to the west:


And here's a view with the Oriental Pearl TV Tower and the buildings to the north-east of it:

Review: GoodSync File Synchronization Software

So I have my laptop - traveling many thousands of miles with me and to three/four countries during this leg of my travels - and I figure that anything can happen to my data. Computer might be lost or stolen, or maybe the hard drive will come loose and destroy itself like it did with my last computer.

Before leaving home I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to put some of my most critical files on a USB drive. However, thinking ahead, what if I ended up changing or adding files on my own to the laptop, or alternatively when I'm out and about and maybe using a friend's computer or an Internet cafe and need to add some files, how to keep them up to date?

So I tried to hunt down some file synchronization software -- free, of course. GoodSync was one of the first that I came across. The interface was very comprehensive and it gave lots of information about the sync (including free vs. required space on the "destination" or secondary, in my case, drive). I guess this spoiled me, because when I looked at other software to see if anything was even more "free". (GoodSync allows free unlimited use only for a month; afterwards, the website warns that you're limited to syncing 100 documents "routinely". Not sure yet what that means. Pro version costs $30.) However, other programs just didn't have all the features I would need.

For instance, I keep all of my documents -- basically from middle school on -- in a folder with my name under "My Documents". Of course, while I'm traveling, I'm probably not updating my 7th grade Literature papers, nor do I need to keep a close eye on whether I've saved any new programs to my computer. So these should be excluded in the backup, whereas all the other files should be synced up.

The software does have its bugs, but I found workarounds.

The first issue I noticed is that when you permanently Exclude a file or folder from the list of files to be analyzed (compared between the two locations), GoodSync doesn't update the required disk space on the secondary drive: if you simply Exclude a 1.0 GB folder, the software doesn't decrease the required disk space by a gigabyte. The workaround I found is just to make sure that, before you Exclude, you click on the "Do Not Sync" option for that file or folder (in this software, it's the green circle between the two arrows that show in which direction a file would be synced). When you select that option, the software updates the required space, and then you can choose that file or folder and Exclude it from the analysis and sync.

The second problem was that the program doesn't seem to know how to re-Include files or folders that had previously been included. I had to work around this problem simply by creating a new job from scratch, being careful not to Exclude anything that I would want back into my list of files to sync.

As for next steps, I wonder how well this software would be when you want to create backups of files onto writable CD or DVD media. I also wonder whether the post-30-day restriction applies when you're just starting a new job. But that's a discussion for another day!

你好！

(my Facebook post -- I am trying to keep everything here at Blogspot)

So it's been a week since I took off from New York en route to Shanghai, and it's been an interesting and busy week. I had been hoping to do some posts on my blog, tarasmc.wordpress.com, but it's hard to access and update it from China so I guess it will have to stagnate for the time being. (But you can check out my travel map which I posted to one of the latest entries.)

In any event, I hope to keep a pseudo-blog here!

To start things off, some photos from outside my apartment balcony in downtown Shanghai:

View across People's Square (人民广场). An exquisitely evil-looking building towering high above the park. I'll post a comment when I figure out what the building is.


Like in midtown Manhattan, when you're looking across the city from one tall building, all you can see is .... other tall buildings!


A rooftop garden or walking area with a water fountain.

The Travel Map

My apologies for the delay to all friends and colleagues who have been patiently waiting. Here’s a link to a PDF that more or less shows where I hope to go over the next year. (Red dotted lines mean mostly overland travel, and blue dashed lines indicate flights.)

Countries on the list:

China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Morocco, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina

The Family's Goodbye

Facebook seems to be taking forever to load, just seeing if Blogger is any faster. Here's a photo of my parents and sister, waving "Bye!" over breakfast at the JetBlue terminal at JFK airport on 9/20:

Life-Poker-Monopoly

Last Thursday I flew down to Huntsville, Alabama with my mom. I hadn’t seen my grandmother in a couple of years, not to mention my young cousins and also my aunt and uncle. It didn’t work out for us to do a whole family trip with my sister Sonia and my dad (who had a fishing trip scheduled in the 1000 Islands this same weekend) prior to my departure for China, so we initially thought that we would do a family trip around Christmas. However, since I was hoping to start a tour of Southeast Asia after Christmas and there were ideal trips starting around 12/27 and 12/29 (run by Intrepid Travel and departing from Bangkok), it really didn’t seem like I could squeeze a trip to Huntsville into the time I would be back in the U.S. following the time in China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

As a family we usually drive the trip down to Huntsville, which takes about 16.5 hours, or longer in a motorhome. The rare times we flew in the past, we would take three-leg flights from Binghamton that stopped in Pittsburgh/Philadelphia and Charlotte before landing in Huntsville. This was usually the option presented when my dad made reservations using his Dividend miles over the phone. However, I thought that maybe we could buy pretty cheap tickets by looking around, and the research paid off. Syracuse is only an hour north of Binghamton, a pretty easy drive, and I was able to find fares even cheaper than flights from NYC down to Huntsville by going from Syracuse instead. And they made only one stop at Washington-Reagan.

Now to Life-Poker-Monopoly. Both my cousins, Orest who just started ninth grade and Oksana who just started sixth grade, are quite bright and quick learners. So after playing Life, Poker, and Monopoly separately, we decided that a fun grand finale would be to combine all the games. For those of you looking for a new twist on old family fun, here’s how we did it, with the modifications we eventually came up with.

Playing with Monopoly money, we distributed somewhat more money than one usually starts with Monopoly; however, you can probably just start with the same amount because with everything together it is much easier to earn money in the hybrid game, faster.

We played a round of poker to determine the order we would start the game. Then, every property for sale that we landed on, rather than giving the player the option to buy it outright or give it up for auction, we left it to a hand of poker. The ante for all players interested in obtaining the property was equal to the price of the property, meaning the cost was divided between us. Then we played out the hand of poker and the winner received both the bet money and the property.

After discovering that Oksana had an uncanny ability to win poker hands, we eventually (but too late) instituted a new rule that if a player is behind the others in property ownership (perhaps say that any one player has over 5 fewer properties than the player with the next-least number of properties, then that player would get a buy option on any property landed by any player in the game. Obviously in Monopoly it is crucial to own property to stay viable in the game, so to keep the game competitive for all players this rule worked out rather well.

“Free Parking” money, non-standard in Monopoly play but I think a common phenomenon, would also be decided by a poker hand when any player landed on the space.

Be sure to also integrate poker when you want to exchange properties or other cards (see Life integration instructions, below), since it adds to the excitement of the game. And leads to compulsive gambling Better sell a Monopoly title deed than your actual house!

Integrating Life into the picture was a little more complicated but fun nonetheless. The first way we thought of doing this was having each player pick a career out of three cards, and then pick a salary card, also choosing three like in Life. The salary chosen would be added to the normal $200 salary after passing Go, but divided by 1,000. (For instance, a player with a Life salary of $80,000 would get $280 Monopoly whenever they passed Go.)

However, since in the game of Life there are opportunities to switch salary cards, we also came up with the following. If a player rolls a pair of 6’s then they could take one of two options. They could switch their salary with another player, or they could keep their current salary but choose a new salary card and keep whichever they wished from those two choices. This was a good way to try to get that $100,000 salary card into play. The reason we chose the pair of 6’s for this honor relates to how we dealt with stocks (below). And although we didn’t quite get there, we figured that the graduated income tax level shown on the salary cards could be tied into the Monopoly income tax amount, meaning that the highest-earning players also pay the highest amount of money in taxes. (For related discussion, see section on the career cards.)

We liked the idea of Life stocks. We decided that we could buy stocks for $100 (but only one per turn) and then we would receive $20 each time a player rolled that number. For the “1” stock card, the payout occurred upon rolling 11. We didn’t have any stock number associated with rolling 12, so we chose that number for the salary-switch privilege. Note that using this method, the “7” stock card was the best deal because there are 6 of 36 ways to roll it. Next best are the 6 and 8 cards, and so forth. The worst stock to own, of course, is the number 2. (Of course, all of these can be traded by a mutually agreed-upon hand of poker.)

Going back to the career cards, we liked the idea that each career came with its perks. For instance, what we ended up doing was that the Accountant would receive the taxes that any other player would have to pay. The computer technician would receive a set amount of money if any die would land off or on the edge of the board when thrown. The police officer received a payment whenever someone rolled a 10 (“speeding”).

In terms of receiving little “LIFE” blocks, we decided that whenever someone landed on a Chance or Community Chest space and received any cash from the card, then they would also receive a “LIFE” block to tally up later (or to trade in a poker hand).

I think there would be plenty of other creative ways to tie together Life with Monopoly. Maybe buying homeowner insurance would reduce the cost of repairs (making it worthwhile to make the insurance investment whenever a player started developing multiple properties). Perhaps taking a college loan, and repaying it with interest, would allow limits to which players could have which careers and salaries, or maybe taken in the middle of the game it could increase the salary of a player by a certain percentage. I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to play the games together.

Of course, with so many modifications, some caveats are in order. The game can get pretty busy and it’s challenging (and fun!) to keep track of what’s going on as each player rolls the dice and takes his or her turn. Also, adding in all these modified payment transfers should be done carefully so that any one player doesn’t get a huge advantage over the others (the “tax goes to the accountant” rule comes to mind, because this happens pretty often whereas other modifications might not). In the end, though, we found that the amount of money that flows into the game is generally pretty high compared with regular Monopoly (where each player passing Go infuses just $200 into the total wealth available in the game), and this can make for quicker play. While this may be a rule in regular Monopoly, we found it pretty help to limit house-building to one house per turn so that no one player goes from riches to bankruptcy just by being behind on building. Maybe provisions could also be make to force players who have the holdout card for a color group to put it up for a hand of poker so that another player can develop the property (if other negotiations fail).

All in all, this was a ton of fun! And my sister has a challenge to learn all the above rules when she comes to visit my cousins while I’m away overseas. I would love to read your comments, suggestions, and stories as comments to this post.