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

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:

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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?

Kids today eh? I get them, I’m down with the youth.

They don’t care about whether Ross ends up with Rachel, how to hitch up their trousers,  or spell basic words.

No. All they want these days is squid heads, roast string, and a little cole on the side.

@The Science & Technology Museum.

Here’s an idea for the October holiday- go to Kunshan, take a taxi to the lake, and eat the famous  Hairy Crab.

Hairy Crabs are a speciality of the lake at Kunshan (Yang Cheng Lake) and, rarely for a Chinese delicacy, are delicious. They’re in season right now, and for the next few weeks so the peaceful waters and empty restaurants that I visited a few weeks ago are probably swamped with people right now. Happy, hungry people.

Here’s what you have to do to get your crab on:

Shanghai to Kunshan

Take the train to Kunshan- there are plenty of them and it’s only a 20 minute trip but hey, this is China so you might struggle to get tickets on the day. Buses are an option, there were certainly plenty of shifty guys selling bus tickets back to Shanghai at the train station- the journey is about 60Km.

Kunshan to YangCheng Lake

You can flag down a taxi outside the train station (I make it a principle to always ignore anyone waiting outside their car saying “Hello! Hello! Taxi?”), it’s a lovely 50RMB drive out to the lake.

Depending on your level of Chinese you can either tell your driver

The west side of YangCheng lake good man, and don’t spare the horses!”

or just make little crab pincers with your hands and shuffle side-to-side.

Choosing a restaurant

All of the crabs should be coming from the same lake*. At most of the boat/restaurants hybrids they keep the crabs in cages right there in the water until you order, so I don’t know how much difference it really makes.

My mate Christina picked the one with the highest rating on Dianping.com- it’s called Cheng Ao (tel: 1380 6260886 and hand to the taxi guy for directions).

*There was a scandal recently where some of the Crabs were said to come from other places, and then put into the famed Yang Cheng lake for the final few days on earth. Maybe some of those half-fakes are sold in restaurants in this area? Still you did all you could to get the real ones.

Price

70RMB for a pair (one male, one female, like a lovely crab marriage where the bride and groom get eaten) seems pretty standard for one person.

The owners of the restaurant told us we could get the more expensive 100RMB crabs which have a bigger body, but the same amount of actual meat (suckers!)

Since we went before the season properly kicked off, the owners of the restaurant offered to take us out on a ride across the lake.
We ordered our food first (well, Christina’s parents did- they ordered like crazy, it took 45 minutes), picked the crabs (do you know how to look for a good crab? Me neither) then took a little boat trip whilst the food was cooked.

Sweet.

Eating the crabs

Hmm well now, this is the thing. Eating a Hairy Crab is a bit like trying to solve a very spiky Rubik’s Cube, except your fingers get full of yellow gunk.

At first it seems like a lot of work for a few scraps of meat- but remember that pretty much the whole thing is edible given enough time, effort, guile and pointy metal tools.

The best set of instructions I’ve seen are these from SH magazine.

The restaurant can arrange a ride back to the train station- we set off at about 3pm and were back home at about 10pm the same night- full of crab goodness and the joys of autumn.

Return train tickets to Kunshan approx. 40RMB
Taxi fares approx 100RMB
Crab feast, about 100RMB per person

I’ve bought some horrible stuff at Shanghai’s various fabric markets. Shiny blue jackets that I’ll never wear, an ice-white linen suit that saw a brief outing at one of Dingle’s fashionable BBQs, and numerous pairs of trousers that developed holes at just the wrong place and time.

Still though, winter is coming up and I can’t be seen wearing last year’s coat- what would the neighbours say?

Here then is my timely guide to getting a good price at the Fabric market:

Act like you’re not bothered
Only suckers act like they really want to have a suit made, suckers who get ripped off. You really haven’t decided whether you’re going to buy today, maybe you’ll buy a hamburger instead.

This is a hard act to pull off when you’re specifying fabrics, number of buttons, extra-crotch reinforcing etc. so pretend to treat all decisions hypothetically;

“Assuming I was looking for a jacket, then maybe I’d like you to copy this one that I’ve brought all the way across town in a plastic bag.

Perhaps I would want you to make the waist slightly bigger, because it’s possible that I eat a lot of mashed potato and gravy at KFC“

Subtly imply that you don’t have much money

“You don’t need to make the pockets very big, usually all I carry is a bus pass and some stale rice“

Speak Chinese
The more the better, but at the very least you need to manage a passable ”Aiyo!” when the first tentative prices are being floated around. Extra bonus points are added for a

“Tai gui le!” (too expensive!)
or a
“Wo bu shi ri ben ren!!!” (”I’m not Japanese!”)

If you’re white / otherly foreign, then speaking Chinese is basically a way of saying that you’re not a tourist, and it also gives the stall holders something fun to laugh about when your back is turned.

and a free health check too

Speak Shanghainese
Slightly more tricky to pull off, but expat wisdom suggests that whilst stupid old whitey always pays more than the Chinese, out of towners also pay less more than anyone who can speak Taxi-driver talk.
(fixed 30th Oct, ta Liam)

Don’t blink first
Market stall holders can spot a sucker at 30 paces, but if you’re following the steps above it’s going to take them a bit longer to work out what kind of sucker you are.

Prolong their realisation by point-blank refusing to name a price that you want to pay. Let them name a price (which you should find both hilarious and horrifying) and have them come down a couple of notches first.

Ideally you should have the clothes hanging up in your wardrobe at home, with patches of wear beginning to show from a few seasons of regular rotation before you call up the tailor and make your first low ball offer.

Remember: stay vigilant at all times

Do the walk off. (But not that walk off)
Everyone knows the old walk-away-in-disgust technique- where the stall holder is supposed to chase after you in tears begging you to come back and pay whatever small coins you have in your pocket.

Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t- but there are few things more embarassing than doing the walk off and then having to come back shamefaced because you can’t find another stall that’s willing to make a lace girdle for a 30 year old man.

If you do decide to go this direction, then pretend that you’re breaking up with someone. It’s not them, it’s you, you want to think things over, you can’t help thinking that somewhere out there is a piece with better quality, a cheaper price, or sleeve buttons that actually fasten (hmm, this metaphor needs some work).

Finally

Always remember that the following phrases have no meaning whatsoever and should be ignored:

• “Friend price”
• Final offer
• Ohh handsome!
• Where are you from? Oh I like England/USA/Botswana very much!
• Please put underwear back on! Do not touch fabric like that!

There are two main fabric markets in Shanghai:

South Bund Soft Spinning Materials Market
399 Lujiabang Lu (near Nanpu Bridge)

Shiliupu Material Shopping Market
Dongmen Lu near Zhonghua Lu

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

At the weekend I finally tracked down a Seagull camera!

Seagull is a photographic company that is still cranking out the kind of camera that has gone right out of fashion back West: manual focus, 35mm (that’s a kind of “film” kids, ask your Grandpa), it’s based on a Minolta camera from the 1970s with so few changes that the instruction book still features snapshots of kids wearing kipper ties and Deely Boppers, listening to the Bay City Rollers (seriously, ask your Grandpa).

Even though they’re kind of crap, I wanted to buy a Seagull for three reasons:

• I’ve got a small collection of Minolta lenses that I really like, and the original camera body I was using with them broke a couple of weeks ago
• The Seagull factory is about 2 miles from my house right there on Suzhou creek and I like the idea of using a Shanghainese camera to take photos of Shanghai
• Even on the internet, hardly anyone seems to use one-

See?

After trying to get into the factory shop several times (it’s only open on the eighth Wednesday in February, from 3pm until someone tries to get in), I found a camera shop right next to Nanjing Road East metro station.

They had a couple of models tucked away in the far reaches of the store, next to a Betamax tape of Billy Ray Cyrus and a few cans of Tab Clear.

It was just the camera I wanted, no accesories, but the only way I could buy it was as a complete package including a flash, terrible lens, huge camera bag, straps and caps that I’ll never use and a partridge in a pear tree.

This bumped up the price to 1,250RMB- not cheap, and probably a daft idea but I had my heart set on the stupid thing, and still haven’t worked out how to use TaoBao (the Chinese ebay).

I guess we’ll see what kind of pictures it takes in a week or so.

–UPDATE

Anyone who can help me buy one of these things can have my hand in marriage. I can use a Union Pay or Visa card to pay.