ayi in a hat

]]> http://ispyshanghai.com/2008/09/07/looking-at-the-mountains/feed/ http://ispyshanghai.com/2008/09/06/back-from-kunming/ http://ispyshanghai.com/2008/09/06/back-from-kunming/#comments Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:42:52 +0000 Swiss James http://ispyshanghai.com/?p=1132 I’m back from Kunming! It was great!

(Although I burnt the top of my head.)

Sticking it to Buddha

 If you click this picture it gets bigger and looks better.

I don’t have time to fix it right now, and if I turn it off we’ll all be buried within the hour.

Sorry kids. Patience is a virtue.

A spam factory, China

All packed for Kunming

I’m here for work and we had a meeting this morning that was so entirely in Chinese, that I had to drink 6 cups of tea to stop falling asleep, and then had to pee 4 times. Luckily I don’t think anyone noticed though as I craftily pretended to have an important phone call every time I went to make toilet.

In fact they probably all think I’m insanely popular and important, I find it’s important not to let the mask slip too soon

A man who may or may not be a minority. I find it hard to tell

N.B Yes I was joking about the Spring City thing.

If you live in China this means that when you try and post a comment, it won’t just work 35% of the time. If you’re me it means the fingernail-tearing agony of writing a blog that crashes every 20 seconds should be over.

I’m very sorry that I lost the stuff you wrote over the last week or so. If you can forgive me, feel free to go comment-crazy from now on.

Me and the Godfather

ISpyShanghai is now brought to you by .
(Cheers Eric)

Except it wasn’t a stroll, it was a gauntlet run through the hawkers, gawkers and stalkers that are constantly trying to sell you fake tat on that street.

Watchbag! Watchbag! Looka! Looka!

They bleat. It’s annoying because as soon as you fend one of them off (tip: carry a can of hairspray and a cigarette lighter) the next one is on your back. Did you not just see my tell your buddy to do one? Have I really changed my mind since 3 steps up the road?

It wouldn’t be so bad if they changed up the pitch from “Watchbag” to, oh I don’t know…. Shoebag!

Shoebag!

(Just pulled it back from the brink at the end there didn’t I?)

But you know what, I’ve lost the post that went with it, and nobody seemed to care about all of that stuff anyway, so I’m just saving us all some time and getting straight in with the funny photos.

Lewis

Yi

Lewis is a guy who was just visiting this previous weekend.

The other two are people I’ve known for ages, but they don’t read my blog so I can say anything horrible I like about them.

Wow, this is an intoxicating feeling. Ummm.

Yi is a former child lap-dancer.

Fabien

Fabien likes to tie up street urchins and throw them into the Huangpu river.

Canon EF-S 10-22mm lens, 4850RMB
Camera Mall @ Xietu Lu, LuBan Lu (near Lupu Bridge)

Who should be there but my blog buddy WoAi Peter Guo, quietly stalking one of the waitresses.

He joined our happy crew and we dined on dough balls and whatnot, enjoying a couple of cases of red wine. At some point during the meal (it all gets a little fuzzy for me around this time) the staff came up to present me with a free gift. This handsome MP4 (it’s like MP3, but one better) player.

Thanks Wolf Blass!

MP4

Who said that drinking heavily on a school night was a bad idea?

So, Wujiang Lu.

Shopping Street? Boo!

Wujiang Lu used to be a food street where you couldn’t move without tripping over a stall frying up some fish eyes, or grilling a nice Chicken claw kebab.

There weren’t any spaces inbetween the food vendors, but if there were, they would have been filled up by guys selling second hand books, CDs and pig-shaped balloons.

Fellas with monkeys on the end of a bit of string used to walk up and down the street, and if you caught their eye they’d demand money for looking at their monkey.

It was great.

Now it’s been turned into a mini Huaihai Lu: soulless Levi’s stores, glossy coffee shops, Subway sandwiches, people washing their hands after going to the toilet.

Then: Monkeys

Is that progress I ask you? Bah.

Now: Children

Then: Crowded

Now: Space

At the postal museum

“With great power comes great responsibility”

Spiderman, 2002

With cheap DVDs comes a low boredom threshold

Me, 12:32

Aside from a landscape as beautiful as it is varied, the rich culture that comes with 5,000 years of continuous culture, and a language more fascinating and poetic than any other, the best thing about China is the cheap knock-off DVDs.

Olympic crackdowns have closed some of the bigger shops, but it’s still easier to find a hooky copy of “High School Musical” than a toilet with a seat. Fake DVDs cost between 5 and 10RMB per disc, and at that price  you don’t mind abandoning a movie at the first sign of suck.

So here are 3 DVDs I didn’t watch all the way through:

1. The Oxford Murders

Frodo from Lord of the Rings goes to Oxford University to study something or other, and gets involved in some kind of murder. I’m not sure whether he kills, is killed, or just dies from boredom because I turned it off at the following lines:

Frodo (playing Squash): *Grunt*
Frodo’s Love Interest: Wow, you’re really hitting those walls
Frodo: Don’t talk to me about walls, this town is full of them

*CLICK*

2. Futurama: Bender’s Big Score

Painfully unfunny sci-fi cartoon twaddle. Here’s part of the synopsis from IMBD:
“….Fry returns to the 31st century by freezing himself while his temporal double, created after another time travel trip, stays on in the 21st century, the double ends up befriending a Narwhal and becomes a marine biologist, but is apparently killed by Bender in 2012…”

Need I go on?

We already know that time travel is not possible, otherwise someone would have gone back in time and killed Matt Groening shortly after The Simpsons Season 10.

Stopped this one when the terrible Jamaican accent and complete lack of jokes became too, too much.

3. Rise Of The Footsoldier

Apparently based on the true story of a cardboard cut-out gangster called, oh I don’t know, Rockhard O’Hooligan or something. This is the most violent film I’ve seen and yet was still, somehow, boring.
My only good bits of this film were
a) When the delivery guy turned up with my pizza and
b) when I turned it off after 50 minutes.