ISpyShanghai

When I lived in Seoul, I was always reading about how Korean culture was sweeping the world; a tsunami of weepy TV shows and genderless boybands crushing everything in its terrible path. I always found it hard to believe, and read on ex-pat message boards (the modern-day counsel of elders) that it was all hype, so took it with a pinch of salt.

Strangely though, it does seem to be true, at least in Chinaland. In my office there’s one guy who downloads gigabytes worth of Korean TV onto his laptop, and another who has Hangeul written on the back of his jeans. Walking through the airport yesterday I was surprised to see a gaggle (an ogle? A giggle?) of teenage girls waiting for TVXQ to float down from heaven and fill out their customs forms, and you don’t have to go far in the downtown area to see an advert for a concert by Rain which has been forecast for the last 8 months.

Excitement builds for Rain’s concert
Assuming a nightmarish Bird-Flu type scenario where this foolishness spreads to the english speaking world, I can save everyone months of ear pain. There are precisely two good Korean pop songs:

“Falling In Love Again” by Bobby Kim

“Chingu Yeu” by Cho PD

Korea is fantastic. K-pop, not so much.

If you ever read the blog I wrote when I was in Korea, you’ll have seen the sentence
“Then me and RachelLynn stayed out until 6am and got hammered on soju”
written somewhere between 15 and 1,000 times.

Well RachelLynn is calling in on me this week, on her trip over land and sea from Seoul, South Korea to Vancouver, Canadialand.

RachelLynn

So far she’s gone from Incheon to Qingdao and then taken a 19 hour, hard-seat train ride from Qingdao to Shanghai. Presumably it was on the crowded train that she caught the fever / flu that she’s still recovering from, which makes the journey pretty good value for money at 160 RMB.

In an effort to speed her recovery on Saturday night I got a blender at the weekend (thanks Craig!) and have been making fruit drinks packed with nutrition / Rum. Like Grandma always says, if a glass of Watermelon juice, crushed ice and enough Vodka to topple a Cow doesn’t fix what ails yer, you need a Priest not a Doctor.

She was well enough on Saturday to take a trip down to the Bund, the waterfront haven for tourists, pickpockets, hustlers and scallywags. If you like looking at tall buildings and being asked whether you want to buy a fake Rolex, you’ll LOVE the Bund.

This season’s collection

The weather was fantastic, clear blue skies, little fluffy clouds- everyone along the front was smiling in the sunshine. We took the ferry across to Pudong, sat on the terrace of Element Fresh and watched the last rays of dusk sink behind the old banks and insurance buildings of Puxi.

Sunshine brings out the umbrellas, downtown.

To get out of toytown and back to Puxi, we took the Tourist Tunnel; the world’s most pointless and brilliant tourist attraction. It’s basically a very slow subway ride of one stop, with an unexplained and inexplicable sound and light show along the way.

“Liquid Mag-ma” goes the voice, as red LEDs flash around your transparent monorail bubble
“Fossil Variants” it booms again, as green laser beams ping off my shiny scalp and take out a child’s eye. It’s disorienting, baffling and brilliant, if you can’t go in person, some kind soul has videoed it for you..

Here’s what it’s all about then, the reason I’m in Shanghai.

Pudong airport currently has one terminal and they’re building a new one to be opened at the start of 2008 (then, rumour has it, a third for 2011). This is what the inside of it looked like yesterday:

The main departures area
Not to get all airport-geek on you, but it pretty much looks like the terminal at Incheon, Korea. Massive glass walls at either end to let in light, and more light coming in through the ceiling. It feels much bigger and cooler than the old terminal, but that could be because there aren’t thousands of people standing around eating cup noodles.

No shops or anything in there yet of course, but the ceiling and floor look finished, loads of check-in desks are almost ready to go, and there’s light and a/c all over the place. The usual rigorous Chinese quality control is being applied to the English signage.

Apparently there are a thousand people working just on the terminal construction (not including geeks like me, people doing the gardens around the place, the new hotels, the subway link, roads etc. etc.)

Should be open in plenty of time for New Year’s Day then.

(Did I say a thousand? Make that 998)

I’m back in the UK.

My flight was supposed to go from Shanghai to Heathrow to Manchester- but it was raining in London so they cancelled the second leg of the trip and I had to abandon my bags to get the train up to Mum and Dad’s house. Am currently trying to work out how to get that bag back, but since there is a slight breeze today, there’s every chance that British Airways decided to just throw it in the sea.

So that’s the end of my first stint in Shanghai- six and a bit months from January 2 till July 20th. It’s been a mad time so far (I’m due to live there until March 2008), and if I’m totally honest, I’ve enjoyed it much more than I expected I would. The oppourtunity to live and work in China came up when I was still living in Seoul, South Korea and when I first touched down at Pudong airport back at the start of the year, I felt that there wasn’t a big enough gap between the two trips- and I was a bit burnt out on the whole Asian ex-pat thing.

Shanghai, though, is such an incredible place to live, that I knew I’d made the right choice about 48 hours after arriving there. It’s hard to talk about Shanghai without dissolving into superlatives (journalists don’t even seem to try)- 20 million people, 24 hour fruit shops on every corner, restaurants costing anywhere between 1 and 100 pounds, food that bites back, construction work throughout the night, bars that only close when you leave and bars that only open if you know the secret combination for the door.

Some of the tea in China

My lifestyle, even on the humble wage of a software engineer, is like that of a 1920s millionaire. I’ve had conversations about what one should wear to visit a tailor, whether the maid is stealing my mineral water, and the outrageous cost of silver topped walking canes (to fend off street urchins). Six months have gone past in the wink of a monocle, and I can’t wait for the next six. Mind you, I needed a break. It’s great to be back in a country where the question “How much does this cost?” isn’t the start of a 20 minute battle of wits and a taxi ride doesn’t resemble the car chase scene from “Bad Boys 2″.

The photos bear no relation to the post today, they’re just some that I like.

England is as green and pleasant as ever, I’m eating a bacon sandwich with a cup of tea as I type, and in about 6 hours, I’m going to Spain with my family to celebrate Mum and Dad’s 40th Wedding Anniversary [feel free to tell them 'congratulations' in the comments, my Mum reads this site more often than me].

See you when I get back.

When I lived in Korea, most of the locals would cope with the rising heat and humidity of summer by going into shopping malls and buying shirts with slogans like:

“Express yourself in the feeling! Power-play tooth quest!”

The average Shanghainese however, faces the problem head-on, and falls asleep. Whether it’s a taxi driver with his seat reclined and feet out of the window by the side of a major road, a commuter holding onto her strap on the packed subway, or the dangerous driver of a 20 tonne truck full of pigs, the Chinese people can catch ZZZs pretty much anywhere.

I haven’t watched the Olympics for, ooh, it must be at least 3 years, but if competitive napping is on the program for Beijing 2008 then I expect China to sweep the board- place your bets now before the rush.

But what to wear in the summer? Most of the fellas around my way tend to go for the bare chest and shorts look (FYI going to the gym hasn’t really taken off in Shanghai) but those that do cover up, go for pyjamas.

When I say “pyjamas” I’m not having a dig at the traditional Chinese silken outfit, I’m talking about genuine over-sized-buttons, flanellete, big-lapelles, pictures-of-teddy-bears-wearing-nightgowns, the full bit. What is bizarre though, is that I’ve never seen someone wearing pyjamas whilst having a nap. A shiny new donkey for anyone who can send me a photo of that.

Once when I was in a sauna in Korea, I saw a guy with a series of red polka-dot marks on his back, each one about the same diameter as a cup. I assumed that either he slept on the world’s cheapest bed, or his wife beat him up very precisely with a wooden mallet (he, presumably assumed I was giving him the glad eye).

On Saturday, I had the traditional Chinese medicine treatment that is the actual cause of those bruises- it’s called ba huo gan and goes like this:

You swab the inside of a glass bowl with alcohol, light it, then put it on the patient’s back. They whimper like a little girl as the alcohol burns off, this creates a vacuum and sucks the (ample) spare skin up into the bowl.
Repeat this until the whole back is covered in globes, and the guy can ripple the skin on his back to make a sound like a wind chime.

Put a cotton sheet over him, go for a cup of tea.

Pull them off, one by one, enjoying the slurping sound as the air rushes back in- try to ignore the tears and pleas for mercy coming from the cowardly laowai.

Her face is a picture isn’t it?

Step back, admire handywork.

It looks a bit rough, but I actually enjoyed the whole thing, Liam described it as feeling like a stretched canvas- and I’d say it’s like that, plus a pleasant sunburn. The health benefits are numerous / dubious, but one thing is for sure- the marks have barely faded after 3 days and if they’re not gone before my July beach holiday, you can expect to hear scare stories about a giant Octupus on the beaches of Majorca.

Tang

Here’s something that I used to eat in Korea quite a lot, and have now found in China.

It’s a tube of deliciously sour Orangey, sugary powder which is like a cross between Sherbert, and that tasty stuff they fill Hackysacks with. The packaging has got a load of letters on it, which I’ve always assumed were the names of the essential vitamins and minerals which keep me as toned and lithe as an Olympic swimmer.

On Sunday I went round to Emma’s to watch a DVD and brought a couple of Tang’s to enjoy during the film.

“Do you want me to make that for you?” says she
“Make it?”
“Yes. [Pause]. You know it’s a drink right?”
“Ahhhhh! Of course! Please, perform the action which makes this otherwise useless powder into a drink. What else was I going to do? Eat it?! Why that would probably kill a man!”

I think I got away with it.

Importing Korean culture to China; I brought my workmates some kimchi flavoured chocolate

When I lived in Seoul I would hear the occasional thing about Korean fashion, films and music being popular in other parts of asia. I always took it with a pinch of MSG though, since the Korean media isn’t always as fair and balanced as, say Fox News in the States, or a 4 year old child telling you why they should have an ice-cream.
Now though I’ve seen it first hand- people sporting clothes with the Korean language on there, hearing people rave about Korean drama series and films, and seeing Rain’s flat face splashed on billboards everywhere.

Military service and makeup for girls under 30 are compulsory in Korea.
The other lad is watching the telly on his phone- whatever next?

In Asia, Korea is cool- and that makes me very happy. I feel like a supporter of a minor football team (hello Doncaster Rovers) that have gotten it together and had some success in the Cup (hello Johnstone Paint Trophy). Plus, on my return I realised it isn’t all hype either, Korean women dress up all pretty with makeup during the day time- the whole bit, the men realise that wispy nostril hair and flannel pyjamas are unlikely to be seen on a Milan catwalk this season, and there are little boutiques and quirky bars springing up all over the place. On the Saturday afternoon I ate Tapas for flip’s sake- TAPAS! It’s a place with some style, no question.

I however do not, and went on a bit of a blitz on Saturday, the details of which are patchy but I shall do my best.

In Pulse with Cam, RL, SJ and Erin

First of all I went to Haebangchon for a multimedia / chin-stroking festival where my mate Peter had a few photos and a guy called Chris showed an animation called “Fake Laugh” that I’m still having nightmares about. Therein I met Amy, went with Amy to Wolfhound where I met Heidi and her entire football team, got drunk on booze, then went to Friends bar (happy hour lasts until 3am there), Pulse, then breakfast at some 24 hour pork restaurant. Back to the hotel for about 8am (a guess since I had no watch, but it had been broad daylight for quite some time) and was kicked out of the room at midday- feeling faaantastic

A random girl in Pulse

On Sunday I ordered a chicken burger and chips and just stared at it for 30 minutes before having it wrapped up in a foil coffin which I wanted to jump into. Officially my worst hangover of all time.