ISpyShanghai

I’ve been here for ooh 20 months now, so it’s about time I started talking about how everything used to be much better ‘back in the day’.

So, Wujiang Lu.

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.

Is that progress I ask you? Bah.

“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.

I don’t know what’s more alarming about this photo; the thought of the static electricity building up between the plastic imitation leather and the nylon “Summer socks”, or the fact that I don’t even remember taking it.

New to Shoe Tuesday?
Find it slightly odd?
Wonder why I started it?
Suspect I can’t really remember either?

Catch up now Every Shoe Tuesday Ever!

I’ve got some good memories of this one, and thanks to WoAi a nice memento of Beijing 2008.

Check it out for yourself (Photo number 3)

Every time I think about complaining about my job, I think about these poor fellas.

Holding up the targets whilst the rest of the troop fired at them.

No helmets either.

Here is something I never thought I’d say: I can’t wait to watch the final of the Synchronised Swimming.

It seems the American team have employed Stephan Miermont- son of a dancer and a French Army General, Maverick, rule-breaker, enfant terrible of the nose-clip world. On Saturday Stephan is going to tear up the rulebook and turn the sport on it’s head with a routine he calls “Light”:

“There is light, then there is a boom and the light goes away and the swimmers must dance through the water searching for the light, trying to rebuild their broken world.

And in the end… the light returns and everything is beautiful.”

Since most of the chaotic routine involves swimmers that are not, umm, synchronised- the team may finish last, or even worse. Stephan isn’t bothered:

“I don’t really care about the score, we can’t control that. What I want is a standing ovation. If all the people who come to watch and see are standing up then it will be a success.”

link

15:00, Saturday 23 August
Watch it.

I’m at my wits end with this blogging lark.

Don’t know if it’s the same when you try to leave a comment but every time I attempt to update a post, add a new photo, change the way something looks, or basically do anything at all- the thing crashes and I get an error message.

Being a computer geek I’ve been trying all kinds of things (I got shell access to look at the CPU usage, have optimised the MySQL tables, reloaded the admin code from scratch, deleted spam comments, changed themes, ran traceroute etc. etc.) and I just don’t know what the problem is.

Thinking about moving to another host, or even ditching wordpress and trying something else. What a palaver. Anyway, I don’t want to whinge…and in fact I’ll stop.

Here then (hopefully) are a few more of my favourite photos from Beijing.

This building looked pretty cool- it overlooked the Olympic Green: the Watercube, Birds Nest training track for the athletes etc.

Unusually for an Olympics, the ticket security was done before you could get to into the whole green- so instead of having anyone with a vague interest milling around the area, you’ve just got ticketholders on their way to an event.

McDonalds (who have the only ‘restaurant’ in the green) aren’t best pleased apparently, neither are other sponsors who built big exhibition sites for casual observers to ‘absorb the brand experience’ and all of that twaddle.

To me it made good sense to keep the riff-raff out, although inevitably, the odd one slips through the net:

If you ever find yourself at an Olympics, I highly recommend taking your national flag with you.

After the 100m final anyone with a Jamaican flag outside the stadium was mobbed by people wanting their photo taken with a genuine Jamaican. Wearing a big Union Jack around my neck meant photo ops galore all day, including one with Miss World as we left the stadium (she was nice enough but would she buy me a Typewriter for my birthday?), and even though I didn’t see any British success (wish I’d been there yesterday to see the Women’s 400m!) it still felt good to be one of Her Majesty’s representatives. God Save The Queen what what?

In non-Olympics news, the turtles were fine when I got back from Beijing.

Once you put them in a big water tank, those things take care of themselves- no food, no changing the water for two days in the heat and they still look happy as larry. When I was in England, Emma took them to the vets when one of them had a slight cough, but I reckon the laidback approach is best.

If only Amphibian upkeep was an olympic event.

Well it ain’t over yet, but by next Tuesday it will be. So this is the time and the place to take a look at how the three big sh-sh-sh-shoe people faired at t’Olympics.

adidas

Made the best advert before the games (and was then royally ripped off by Reebok), but some of the athletes appearing in the ads seem to have been cursed- or at least that’s what the occasional person on the internet is saying. I saw a great Olympics display they had in the center of Beijng though.

Nike

Lost out to adidas for the official sponsorship but countered by bringing out a wicked set of 5 shoes to match the 5 Olympic mascots (presumably with a sole that makes it looked you’ve stomped on the annoying little gremlins) and a shoe for every possible event including a black boot with a spike at the back for the Equestrian stuff. Kinky.

It takes some nerve to bring out 28 different shoes for an event you’re not even sponsoring, and I wonder how many pairs of weightlifting shoes they actually sold. Still though, that is one cool boot.

Puma

Shod 100m champ Usain Bolt- who then held up his gold spikes for the cameras like a good little sponsoree.

However Bolt’s laces came undone (cheers Bozzley for telling me this!), which Mums everywhere will tell you is the major cause of Childhood falling-overness.

Forget Asics- that Japanese rice-shoe marathon woman I was banging on about last week didn’t even get a medal. Reeboks are, as ever, for losers.