ISpyShanghai

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?

click to read on… »

I’m leaving Shanghai, and leaving China.

Me and Emma are going to live in Manchester, we leave on December 7th*.

It’s been a great three years, and just feels like the right time to leave for me.

*So that means you’ve got 3 more Shoe Tuesdays

I was in a meeting this morning, my only contribution was to stand up and nod my head slightly when somebody said my name. It was a productive 3 hours.

If you find yourself in a similar situation (common for foreign looking foreigners in China) you will need to know who to nod you head slightly at in order to get the most out of the meeting.

Spotting the top boss

When working out who the most important man (or woman!) ((just kidding, it’s a man)) looking at clothes isn’t much of a clue  in the room is. 

If you watch the recent broadcast of the 60th anniversary of the CCP you’ll see that drab and cheap looking is the order of the day for leaders.

Spotting a fancy watch is no good either; don’t tell anyone, but there are 1 or 2 fake Rolexes knocking around in China (shhh!)

 

 

No, the best way to tell who is important is to look at the…

Seating Plan

For example, imagine you’ve just walked through the door to a meeting room and seen this:

Who is the most important guy in the room? Probably the guy with the red robe and blue cloak right? Same in China. The most important guy sits facing the door in the middle.

Now let’s take a closer look at that table:

click to read on… »

 

Gillette are running these adverts in the back of taxis. As you can imagine I almost dropped my pad and paper trying to take notes.

I know the Asian chap tends towards more of a wisp than a beard, but surely the basic tecnhinque is common knowledge by now?

Here on I Spy we devote every Tuesday to shoes. Why? Because it sounds funny- say it with me:

Shoe Tuesday

Shoooooooee Tuuuuuueeeesdayy

See?

Anyway, best crack on.

click to read on… »

It costs 1,500RMB (150 quid) to fly return from Shanghai to Seoul right now.

Good eh? I went on Friday.

Seoul is a lovely place, nestled in the mountains, on a Sunday afternoon it feels like a sleepy little village compared to Shanghai.

The nightlife is good though- all little independent bars tucked away down alleys where if they don’t have the tune you ask for, they’ll download it.

I used to live in Korea for 3 or 4 years- I forget how long exactly, this is back when I used to drink too much.

Now I’m a little older and more sensible I try not to go too crazy- in fact I have a strict rule: once the sun comes up, no more shots.

Originally I’d planned to go to the wedding of an old workmate. But it turned out to be far away, and I had a hangover that could fell a tree so I just stayed in the city and stared at the increasingly bizarre outfits of the Korean metrosexual.

The guy in the his’n’hers pink sweatshirt is the butchest looking man in the photo

It’s terrifying how camp the Korean guys look these days, terrifying. Don’t get me wrong, they pull it off and the street fashions are, well, streets ahead of Shanghai. But the levels of camp are off the scale- two examples, the guy below, Bae Yong Joon is one of the biggest stars in the country.

This image is taken from his role as spokesman (honestly, it is a man) for a cosmetics company.

and this (here on youtube) is an advert for a cellphone featuring another two popular stars. Aside from wearing outfits made entirely out of tinfoil, they come within about one Banana Daquiri away from making out at the end of the ad.

Oh and did I mention that the phone they’re advertising is called “Magic Hole“?

If you’ve never been, I really recommend a trip to Seoul- if only for the fact that walking around the place makes you feel like a manlier version of Wesley Snipes.