Playing Host

Today's weather: High = 9 Low = 4
Cloudy and windy

A visitor from Vancouver came to see me over the last weekend. I've been receiving quite a few guests lately this year. Funny that nobody wanted to see me while living in Wuhan, and all of a sudden they do now that I'm in Shanghai. Not sure what to make of this, it has both good and bad points.

This recent flurry of hosting guests in the city has shown that there is much I need to learn about playing this role, and the last few times have left me exhausted. Hopefully the people have gone away with a good impression of the city, but simply put it's a hell of a lot of work to coordinate these kind of visits -- it becomes a job in and out of itself, it becomes more work than my actual day job, and there aren't many rewards.

Then again the two 'jobs' may be connected in more ways than one. Similar to what happens in the classroom, the solution to the problem of exhaustion is more of a matter of facilitating and delegating, instead of trying to orchestrate the whole thing by myself.

In other words, all visits from guests here have ended up in the same pattern. They show up, time is limited, we see a few sights, meet a few people, and then it's time to go. Who's to say I couldn't just outsource all this work to the well-established tourist market here or some of my own contacts in the travel business who specialize in giving tours for a living.

The counter-argument to this is that I could provide a unique spin on the city that a tour company would miss, and hence I should be doing the work for a more personal touch. But given the common fact here that the majority of visitors come on ultra-short trips, we end up doing the same things that a tour company would do anyway. You know, the stroll down Nanjing Road at night, walking the Bund, sipping tea at Yu Gardens, bargaining in the markets, and so forth. These are all totally worth doing in Shanghai, along with many more great tourist experiences, but the bottom line is that a business could do this better than I could.

As a teacher and a resident, I'm not the best person to be leading tours anyway. I find the whole tourist thing to be rather dull and boring, not to mention very exhausting while fielding the same questions over and over again. It's easy to lose patience in situations like this. Since most foreign guests share typical reactions to life in China and they all ask the same questions, it stands to reason that a tour company would be better qualified. Even basic things like how to cross the street, how to take a taxi, or how to bargain could be handled this way.

Meanwhile, the real reason I like to host, and hopefully why guests also come here to see me, is to get a glimpse of the kind of life I've got going in this great city --- I really appreciate that. With the whole 'show you around' thing out of my hair, it frees up more time and energy to line up activities where the guests can be a part of what I do in the city and see how it all fits together.

So in a nutshell, it makes more sense to keep going about my own business and find creative ways to involve guests in that, while delegating the tour business to others.

An example of how this might play out is that a tour is arranged for the morning, we all meet for lunch near my work, they come observe one of my afternoon classes, then a friend takes over and shows them the ropes on how to use the subway. After an afternoon of free exploring and me teaching, we then meet up with some other friends for dinner. While eating, we discuss what they might want to do in the evening, because I will surely be up all night marking papers.