ISpyShanghai

Just went for a massage with Emma, I won’t name the place*.

Anyway there we are, me and Emma side by side on tables when the two massage girls start talking to each other in Chinese.

These two are sweaty

Yes, foreigners are sweaty. This one is really ticklish too, watch

She gave a bit of a poke in my fleshy rump. I giggled.

Do you like foreign men?

Noo, I don’t like them. What about that foreigner you have who comes in regularly with the curly hair? I bet you like him.

Oh him, he’s almost like a black man!

I’m not sure why they assumed neither Emma or I could understand any of this- especially when I started laughing. In the end Emma cracked out of turn by asking for something or other in Chinese; they stopped talking and started blushing.

But she doesn’t like foreigners though you know.

Too much hair. Everywhere.

George Michael, at the precise moment he turned

*ah screw it- ‘Everlasting’ on Shaanxi Lu.

Can I just make it clear that this last week or two isn’t going to be some golden age where I pull out all of the stops?

Now that there’s cleared up, here’s some Chinglish from the fortress of Carrefour- most hateful of all the supermarkets.

Back in the summer I wrote about some very expensive apples in the Freshmart supermarket, Jing-An.

Well since then we had that whole financial apocalypse and everyone tightened their belts a little.

Oh wait no, the price actually went up.

On my birthday I received, from notorious internet japemongerer Dingle, one of these space-gold-apples.

We had the bar staff cut it up and passed it around the table.

It tasted pretty much like a normal apple, except a bit more floury and dry. I don’t remember suddenly developing the ability to fly or shoot lasers out of my fingertips, so you’d have to conclude they’re not really worth the money. In fact there were a few slices left when we moved on to the next bar.

Five apples in a cardboard box: 998RMB (about 150USD, 90GBP)

One of the main things I’m looking forward to when I go back to the UK is reasonably priced Guinness, proper cheese, nightclubs with no french people my newest niece Eve.

My brother Andrew is just a few years older than me and we’re very close- hang out together whenever we get the chance, talk on the phone when I get drunk, I was best man at his wedding etc.

Andrew had a baby girl in September last year and I’ve only seen her a handful of times since then, so I’ve missed a lot of stuff.

Apparently she’s walking now, dancing too, so I’m hoping that I’ll get to see her take these bad boys for a test drive.

They’re a kind of shoes I’ve only ever seen in asia- with a squeaker in the bottom that’s triggered when you walk. It’s kind of a safety feature I guess, since the toddler can toddle off on their own and you’ll hear when they’ve gone to far or fallen over. But it’s also just the cutest thing when you hear them walking off:

squeak……squeak……squeak
<Hey look! A bird!>
SQUEAK!SQUEAK!SQUEAK!SQUEAK!
<oh it’s gone>
squeak………squeak……

I think they’re cool anyway.

Hey wait a minute, I hope Eve isn’t reading this though, it’ll ruin the surprise.

OK now this is going to be old news for most people, but I was at a hotpot restaurant last night and we cooked the broth on little individual hotplates.

EXCEPT THEY WERE NOT HOT.

You could put your hand on the thing and it wouldn’t burn, but place a metal pot on there and the soup would bubble up real nice.

“Oh sure” you’re thinking, “He’s talking about a confloosion unit pad”.

Well yes, if that’s what they’re called then I’ll believe you.

But how did such a technological wonder go from being a show-stopping marvel that people would crowd around and stare at, to so commonplace that I just realised somebody in the next office is making Cappuccino with one?

“Hmm, no sugar- I’ll just pop out on my hoverboard and get some”

I know I didn’t get an iPod until August this year, but am I so far behind the times?
What else have I missed?

Spicy Joint is a chain of Sichuan (i.e. spicy- that’s how they got the name, a team of monkeys worked for a week on that) restaurants.

They’re huge, busy, tasty and cheap. Dinner for 5 last night cost about 630RMB including plenty of beer and lashings of food.

Because they’re so big and busy, the queuing system is well organised: you turn up, tap your phone number into a machine, add how many people you are, and get a ticket with a number on it.

Three separate queues (for small, medium and large tables) tick through these numbers and you can easily wait for an hour or more in the waiting room. To amuse yourself, you can look through the onscreen menus the restaurant provides for you, or drink the beer that they don’t .

Viewing the menu onscreen in the waiting room

Last night though we were through in ten minutes flat though, maybe it’s not as popular as it was.

When you sit down they give you a funny lifestyle magazine.

Reading material whilst you wait?

That turns out to be the menu:

No, it’s a menu!

although it does still have the odd “feature” in there about how to be the perfect bride, or what hat looks cute while you’re holding a plate

  
No! It’s a magazine! 

Not many foreigners go to Spicy Joint (yay!) and there’s no English menu. So either bring your best pointing finger, or someone who can read foreign.

We ended up having to ask about some of the dishes for clarification- the one below was described as

“Some part of a pig that’s just north of the tail”

I’m still none the wiser which bit that is, but damn it was good.

 
Better than the bit just south of the tail huh?

Spicy Joint
Many Locations- including
4F 500 Jinling Lu near Xizang Lu

#407 Walk out into the middle of the road during rush hour, set up a bamboo ladder, and start tinkering with the power cables.

Nike have made a few shekels from a minor baseball player called Michael Jordan.

They got him to jump up fancy, took a photo, stuck it on a few pairs of shoes and boom! Mazooma in the bank.

Air Jordan 

If my favourite Chinese trainer- FeiYue ever want to make the leap* from cheap canvas plimsoll to a major sporting brand, they’re going to need similar brand recognition.

Based on the kind of people who wear FeiYue right now, I’d say their main options for a Jordan-style tie-in logo are:

1) Manual labourers digging a ditch

Air Gong Ren

b) ironic indie-rocking hipsters

Air Studied Pose 

or… iii) awesome kung-fu kicking monks from the planet DoubleHard.

Air I’m lying on a bunch of spears and what are you going to do about it?

Continue Reading »