ISpyShanghai

I’m back in the UK.

My flight was supposed to go from Shanghai to Heathrow to Manchester- but it was raining in London so they cancelled the second leg of the trip and I had to abandon my bags to get the train up to Mum and Dad’s house. Am currently trying to work out how to get that bag back, but since there is a slight breeze today, there’s every chance that British Airways decided to just throw it in the sea.

So that’s the end of my first stint in Shanghai- six and a bit months from January 2 till July 20th. It’s been a mad time so far (I’m due to live there until March 2008), and if I’m totally honest, I’ve enjoyed it much more than I expected I would. The oppourtunity to live and work in China came up when I was still living in Seoul, South Korea and when I first touched down at Pudong airport back at the start of the year, I felt that there wasn’t a big enough gap between the two trips- and I was a bit burnt out on the whole Asian ex-pat thing.

Shanghai, though, is such an incredible place to live, that I knew I’d made the right choice about 48 hours after arriving there. It’s hard to talk about Shanghai without dissolving into superlatives (journalists don’t even seem to try)- 20 million people, 24 hour fruit shops on every corner, restaurants costing anywhere between 1 and 100 pounds, food that bites back, construction work throughout the night, bars that only close when you leave and bars that only open if you know the secret combination for the door.

Some of the tea in China

My lifestyle, even on the humble wage of a software engineer, is like that of a 1920s millionaire. I’ve had conversations about what one should wear to visit a tailor, whether the maid is stealing my mineral water, and the outrageous cost of silver topped walking canes (to fend off street urchins). Six months have gone past in the wink of a monocle, and I can’t wait for the next six. Mind you, I needed a break. It’s great to be back in a country where the question “How much does this cost?” isn’t the start of a 20 minute battle of wits and a taxi ride doesn’t resemble the car chase scene from “Bad Boys 2″.

The photos bear no relation to the post today, they’re just some that I like.

England is as green and pleasant as ever, I’m eating a bacon sandwich with a cup of tea as I type, and in about 6 hours, I’m going to Spain with my family to celebrate Mum and Dad’s 40th Wedding Anniversary [feel free to tell them 'congratulations' in the comments, my Mum reads this site more often than me].

See you when I get back.

Work’s pretty busy at the moment, it’s nose to the grindstone from sun up to sun down, in fact I’m so busy that during my lunch hour I barely have time to floss my teeth.

Luckily the good people at President Foods (Snacks, Dental Care and Motor Oil Division) have come up trumps again with meat floss biscuits. A real tasty timesaver I’m sure you’ll agree.

Once I sweep the crumbs out of my moustache it’s time for a quick swig of (surprisingly delicious and refreshing) Mint flavoured water and it’s back to work Dentist Fresh Stylee

On my way to and from the death trap building site formaldehyde infested stink hole world class test lab where I’m working, they’re building an overhead road to go from the old airport terminal to the new one.

Or at least they were building it, now it seems that someone had the plans upside down and/or a few glasses of snake-wine over lunch, and they’ve had to knock the whole thing down and start again.

Unlucky lads, fancy a biscuit?

OK so we’ve learnt / assumed that the insects in tiny wicker cages that I saw are either for:

a) fighting
II) the pleasant noise they make as they suffocate
4) ‘manpower’ medicine

But surely one Cricket is pretty much the same as another, so why is this fella going through specimens with a fine tooth comb?

Five years ago we had that “Muldy & Sculler” to help us out with these kind of mysteries. Now who have we got, Dr. House MD? He’s just Doogie Hauser with a hangover.

The last time I saw the Scratch Perverts (3 DJs who move their gramophone recordings back and forth to make young people dance) at Bonbon was in April. They were mint, the club was packed to the gills, and a smashing time was had by all.

They came back again on Saturday, this time with half-naked dancing girls, MC Jin from the states (who I’ve wanted to see for a long, long time) and free t-shirts for the punters. Predictably the club was packed, repacked, and packed thrice more- if you wanted a swig of your drink you had to ask the guy next to you to breathe in.

Once I got used to people shoving me like I was trying to carry a canoe onto the subway at 8:30 am, and the fact that Bonbon smells like the stairwell of a Glasgow multi-storey car park, it was a good laugh. I danced as much as my 8 inches of personal space would allow, had the inside of my mouth rinsed out with other people’s sweat, and went to bed happy. It wasn’t, however, as good as the first time I saw them, last week’s “Bananas” night, or getting raging drunk on alcoholic beer (4 more booze-free days left).

In the morning I went to pick up a suit at the fabric market. I’d specified a slim fitting number along the lines of Michael Caine in “Alfie”, but something got lost in translation and the guy gave me a baggy sack of cloth that I’d have needed to tie a piece of string round to see my hands. I gave it him back, took the ready-made one off the dummy as a compromise, and headed to the Insect & Bird Market.

Birds

This is a place that the enigmatic Emma had spotted in the Lonely Planet. 30 odd stalls selling turtles, kittens, Minah birds and hundreds and hundreds of Crickets in tiny cages.

Insects

I’m told that Chinese people like to buy these, hang them up in their house and listen to the gentle chirp-chirp of an insect starving to death inside a grisly wicker cage.
Odd? Yeah, I’d say that was odd.

Actually though, that can’t be the whole story because there were also stalls selling tiny paintbrushes to clean (or maybe tickle) insects, ceramic water dishes the size of a Leprechaun’s contact lens, men comparing row after row of tiny insects in specimen dishes like farmers at a bloodstock auction, and trays of cocoons hatching in front of watchful (/bored) sales clerks. It seems like bugs are big business here, but whether trained to fight to the death, kept as tiny pets for kids in small apartments, or ground up for medicine I couldn’t say.

Market

I need big pockets in Shanghai. Just to get from home to work, eat lunch and get back again, I need 4 separate credit-type cards. Every different transport system and restaurant demands you get another stupid plastic rectangle that fill up my wallet and are probably making me sterile.

If China takes over the world like everyone says, then this is our future- there’ll be one card to pay for your bacon, and another to pay for your eggs. Cards to get you into the building where you pick up your cards, and a card to open your wallet with all of the cards in.

Think it could never happen? That’s what they said about Alphabetti Spaghetti.

In other news, it’s been 10 days since my last drop of alcohol and so far it’s a piece of cake.I went out on Saturday night on nothing but Ginger Ale and danced until the sweat ran off my head and down my back.In fact I don’t miss the sweet,refreshing taste of ale at all, and might not even start drinking again when my dry period is over (in 8 days, 3 hours, 25 minutes).

He’s a miserable bugger my landlord. I pay him an obscene amount of rent each month, in cold hard cash which takes me 4 days to extract from the ATM (since I hit the daily limit otherwise). I don’t complain that the internet has never been hooked up (since I steal wireless from a neighbour), that my TV only picks up “Bollywood Hits” or Fashion TV (I always just watch hooky DVDs), nor that he left me a cupboard full of dirty underwear when I moved in (shamefully, I washed and now wear it), but is he grateful?

Is he flip.

However, he does send a quality text message:

Let’s hope he spends this month’s rent on a new English dictionary.

On Sunday I like to walk around the back streets of my neighbourhood: Wuding Lu, Xinzha Lu, Xikang Lu, I get lost within about 5 steps of my apartment block. Most of the streets have the same stuff on them- DVD shop, fruit stall, foot massage place, two guys with their shirts off sleeping in deck chairs whilst still smoking cigarettes, and a dumpling/noodle shop.

At the dumpling shop, the ayi who worked there disagreed with our order. “That’ll never fill you up” she said, and gave us an extra ration of pork Jiaozi  for a special price. The total bill was 5RMB (35p) so perhaps she was right. Whilst they were boiling, I went to the fruit stall opposite and saw something new-

Emma thinks it’s called a ‘Strawberry Apple’ in English,  but since that’s clearly some name she just made up, I’m not 100% convinced. Anyhoo the woman in the shop told me to eat it like a tomato (people just eat whole tomatoes here as though they were some kind of delicious treat) and it tasted, funnily enough, like a cross between an apple and a strawberry.

Took these photos with my new camera by the way. The old one got dirty so I threw it in the bin.

If anyone had “less than a week” as a bet on how long I’d last without drink, you can tear up your bookie’s chit- I’m 8 days and counting. This weekend I had visions of sitting in with a “Quincy” box set and bumper bag of Murray Mints, going to bed at nine pm, and up with the larks to go for a morning constitutional. It didn’t really turn out like that however.

Friday night I went out for Texan food at a place called “Big Bubba’s BBQ Ribs Yes Yes Y’all!” or somesuch.
It was just me and “The Godfather” AKA my mate Jonathan who’s over here for a month. Bubba’s alledgedly has the best BBQ ribs in all of old Shanghai. Just the thing with a pint of foaming Cranberry juice.

Afterwards we headed to The Spot, where we discussed the issues of the day (the works of Chaka Demus & Pliars, Gordon Brown’s speech impediment, how amazing I am at table football) over a delicious Soda water. Then onto the Big Bamboo where I switched to still water (the bubbles were stinging my tongue, I ain’t Chuck Norris) and watched a bit of Australian ‘Rules’ Football, slowly shaking our heads in disbelief.

I called it a night after a Coca-Cola at the Blue Angel, but not before getting a big laugh from the table behind ours; the house band had just finished the last emotion-filled notes of a Chinese pop classic number when I called out:

“Ting bu dong!” (”Hear but don’t understand!”).

Which is hilarious  if you’re a world-weary Chinese prostitute.