ISpyShanghai

Hot damn. Last night I went to ZhongShan park and bought a load of generic Chinese contact lenses.

I think they make them by cutting a circle out of a plastic Coke bottle and melting it into shape with a cigarette lighter. Very uncomfortable and I can hardly see a thing. 450RMB well spent.

In fact it was a bad shopping trip all-round: couldn’t find the fishtank I wanted to buy (for the turtles), realised I had no money left in my Chinese bank account, and then forgot the PIN number to my UK bank account.

Have you ever forgotten your PIN number? Oh it’s humiliating- there’s just a moment of doubt as you put the numbers in the first time and the machine smells fear.

PIN Number Incorrect _

Incorrect? That’s impossible, I’m an upright member of the commuinty, ask the parish Priest.
My finger must have slipped up, let me try again:

PIN Number Incorrect _

Sweat prickles your hands, you weren’t really thinking about the number before and now you’ve got one try left and a head full of thousands of possible numbers.

Think. Think!

It’s 91something. Or something91. Definitely.

Or 92something.

As the frustration builds up, I start weeping, hot wet tears falling on the screen as I mash the keypad with my fists, hitting random digits in a furious tempest.

PIN Number Incorrect _

I know! I know!

I’m going to Beijing!

Tomorrow!

On the train!

Straight from work!

Regular readers (hi Mum!) will know that I recently suffered the tragic loss of two 5RMB turtles: Lambert and Miss Julie.

- for anyone new to the game, the full shocking story is told here-

Oh it was a bitter, bitter blow and for a long time I wasn’t sure whether I could risk being hurt again. But we still had the bowl and half a tub of turtle food so it only made sense to pick up another two turtles.

The couple of new little ‘uns don’t have names yet, we’re going to wait until they’re at least a week old before we christen them, but they seem to be in good shape. Here is a timelapse vid of them taken every 10 seconds. It’s non-stop, hardcore, turtle action.

Video is also here if that one doesn’t work

[Unfortunately, Kristi tells me they will either die, or cost me $500]

<cue Shoe Tuesday music>

It’s tempting just to let the photos speak for themselves here, but I should really mention that today’s photos were sent in by a Mr C Dingadang from Stoke on Trent.

Apparently they’re from Japan- all I see when I look at these photos is what it would be like if you got a cramp in your toe.

Nasty.

Click on if you are not offended by photos of mashed up feet…

When the adidas adverts for the the Olympics first started showing up, I thought they were amazing:

Clearly Reebok thought so too, here’s their latest ad campaign on Nanjing Dong Lu:

Then again, perhaps we shouldn’t feel bad for adidas; they weren’t exactly the first people to hit the same idea:

Turkish battery company for Euro2008

Portugese Sports TV channel for the 2007 Rugby World Cup.

I suppose I’m no better, for some of this post I ripped off http://www.joelapompe.net/

This, believe it or not, is a children’s English text book. It continues:

“See me saw the seesaw”

“I saw! I saw you saw the seesaw!”

My workmate asked me to read this book aloud into an MP3 recorder for his daughter. She needed to hear how it should sound with a proper English accent, but since no such accent was available, I did it.

The thing reads more like a tongue twister than a gentle introduction to English- the next page shows a duck, which flies over the cat’s head, so he ducks:

I saw you duck the duck!

I saw you saw the seesaw!

Etc. etc.
My workmate’s daughter is only 5 years old and she’s now spending her free time reading a book that makes no sense, and listening to my tortured Yorkshire vowels on MP3

“By ‘eck- look at t’dook! T’cat is ducking t’dook!”

There’s no hope for the poor girl.

The land all around Pudong airport is either reclaimed from the sea, or was farmland.

In fact all (or most) of the security guards and cleaners who work in or around the airport once farmed the land- one minute you’re breaking your back in the sun, the next you’re sat in a control room, asleep in front of a bank of CCTV monitors. Life is sweet.

As with a lot of airports then, the surrounding area has loads of wildlife; there are frogs everywhere, Land Tigers, and now this thing:

It’s a Xiao Long Xia (little lobster) in Chinese, some people call them Crawdaddies in English. They live in freshwater, often rice paddies and are about the size of a baby’s foot.
They’re good eating, at this time of year there are glossy Salmon-pink stacks outside restaurants up and down town.

This is the first live Xiao Long Xia I’ve seen though, it was scuttling along the road at 4am this morning as I finished work. I don’t mind telling you that hey look ‘orrible on a shadowy road at that time at night, at first I thought it was some kind of Scorpion.

I did not, however, scream like a little girl. I screamed like a man.

I’ve been into the idea of timelapse photography for a while now- ever since I saw this cool video by a fellow Shanghai expat called Lifemage.

You take a series of photos every so often, then string them together to make a movie clip at 24 frames per second (or whatever). Time is sped up, everything moves fast, flowers bloom before your eyes, fruit rots as you watch, people gasp in astonishment.

The idea has been around forever but what with digital cameras, the Internet, smokeless fuels and the Macarena now freely available, anyone can have a go.

Sitting around pressing the shutter every minute for 16 hours is a bit of a pain though so on Monday I bought a battery pack for my camera to do the timing automatically. I set it up on the balcony and recorded the sun setting over the grey sky West of Jing-An.

Not bad for a first try, if a bit murky.

Now I know how to do it, I’m thinking about making a clip of my journey to work, the sun rise out of the back window of my place, Nanjing Dong Lu pedestrians, me drinking a whole bottle of Rum, the decline of Western Civilisation- the possibilities are endless(ish).

Geeks-only information below. Click if you want, but no complaining