ISpyShanghai

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.

Boy oh boy do we foreigners love that ole’ fashioned Communist imagery.

Little red books, Chairman Mao satchels, ceramic figures of intellectuals being beaten to death- unless you go home with a little something from the old times in your suitcase, you haven’t really done Shanghai.

It’s all a bit embarasssing for the modern day Commies of course, so you won’t find much of this stuff in any big official museum.

Luckily, an enterprising chap has set up a small museum in the basement of an apartment complex on HuaiHai Lu and don’t worry, the gift shop accepts US Dollars and Euros.

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KAP- Kite Aerial Photography is where you attach a camera to a kite, hoist the thing up in the air, and then take photos of the lovely scenery down below.

Sounds cool doesn’t it? I’ve been determined to have a go for a while.

First of all I bought a kite from Decathlon- a double string stunt kite, because that’s all they had, but it seemed sturdy and fairly light weight.

Then I cut a hole (for the lens) in an old camera case and attached it to the bar of the kite. Secured the bottom of the case to the back bar with plastic ties, checked everything was OK, and waited for a sunny day.

Click for more detail, it's pretty securely attached

The whole kite

Complete with camera

Sunday was a beautifully clear day, I went down to the Science & Technology museum to try out my kit.

Click below to see stunning photos taken from a kite soaring high above Pudong!

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The Science & Technology Museum subway station (Line 2) is mainly famous for its giant fake market. This is where tourists go to enjoy the whole “What price you want to pay?” dance with vendors selling “tribute” watches, fake handbags, dodgy luggage, snide golf clubs, dubious drinking straws, knock-off baby lotion etc. etc.

Snifferbot

The Shanghainese walk straight through all of this nonsense and take their kids to the huge Science & Tecnology museum just across the courtyard.

At least 4 stories high with way way too much to see in the few hours I was there. Intellectually the museum is geared towards kids (the Natural History section is all roaring Lions and Spider exhibitions) but what the hell- I’m 30 years old, I’m done with learning new stuff anyway.

Me: clever enough already

eLandscapes

The first stop was the E-Arts (like normal art, but it needs a plug) exhibition called eLandscapes which was full of 360 degree projections onto domes with people wearing polarised glasses for that 3D experience. Amazing, amazing stuff that’s hard to describe (and harder to photograph), I didn’t realise that techonology had come this far to be honest.

Next up “The World Of Robotics”- which wasn’t exactly as up-to-date.

I was hoping that the whole section would be staffed by automatons who could arm-wrestle, quote 12th century persian poetry and then fly me to the gift shop.

Instead I watched a robotic arm sketch a bored child’s portrait for 20 minutes.  Tokyo in the year 2012 it was not.

Robotic Artist- slower than the real thing

The main attraction of the whole place though is the Imax cinema- of which they seem to have 4. The one we picked was showing a Pirates film where Leslie Nielsen and Eric Idle fall into various booby 3D booby traps as your chair vibrates and water drops from the ceiling.

The “Pirates 4D” movie was funny, scary and something an 8 year old boy would talk about for the next five months. Mandarin-only, but you don’t need subtitles when 3D bees are appearing in front of your eyes and stinging the chair.

eLandscapes Festival – Free
Science & Technology Museum entrance (adults) – 60RMB
Pirates 4D Movie – 40RMB
Dodgy “Cariter” watch- “I give you good price, look-a! Look-a!”
 

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.

Officially, springtime in Shanghai doesn’t begin until there are three consecutive days where the temperature is 20 Celsius or higher.

But since the sky is blue, the grass is green and tomorrow is a public holiday I hereby declare that Winter is dead!

Fishin’ for tadpoles in Jing-An park

I’m not sure what to do with the day off tomorrow. It’s the QingMing festival so I should really be sweeping the tombs of my ancestors, but that doesn’t like much fun.

Instead I’m thinking either

a) go drinking all day

b) fly a kite down at the Sci & Tech museum

c) drink whilst flying a kite.

Any other suggestions (now that those pesky kids have taken all the tadpoles) would be gratefully received.

For the last one or two years I’ve made a calendar at Christmas. Photography is in my top three hobbies (others: binge drinking, teasing shrimp) so by the end of the year I tend to have 12 shots that I think would look good in a calendar. Let’s face it, only my Mum looks at it, so the bar does not have to be set high.

Anyway, I’m rambling- the point is that whilst looking through my photos for this year’s effort I came across some of the first shots I took of Shanghai back in March 2006.

March 2006, from Science & Tech museum towards Lujiazui 

The way I came to Shanghai in the first place was that I was working in Seoul, South Korea at the airport there. I took a weekend trip across the (<insert name of sea or whatever here>) and had a look around Shanghai, loved the place, and decided it would be a place I’d love to live. My company won a contract at the new terminal here, I told anyone who would listen I’d be prepared to go, and bish-bash-bosh, here I am.

Before I made the big move though I came over for a month in March- partly to introduce myself to the customer, partly to work every hour Jah sent on whatever crisis we had at that time.

A park near the Four Seasons, just off Nanjing Xi Lu

Looking back at the photos I took then is strange. It seems like a really long time ago, and I remember how the city looked very strange; foreign, alien.

I’m sure Shanghai has changed a lot since then, but I’m guessing my view of it has changed more. Some things don’t change though, seems that even back in the mists of March 2006, manbags were all the rage on the streets of Shangers.

The Spring ‘06 collection

In some ways, I did a lot of stuff this weekend.

I saw a guy called Jimmy Graham who used to play guitar with Hendrix, and must have been watching carefully because he now plays guitar in a very similar style to Hendrix every Wed, Fri and Saturday at a nice bar called Piccone. Ate dinner with Emma at a restaurant called Frankie’s (where they make a Pork chop that was definitely in my top 3 Pork chops of all time), played a lot of pool with Matt and a lot of table football with Fabien. I even went to the Urban Planning museum at People’s Square, a place Emma has been trying to convince me is good fun for about 6 months now, and that I finally now agree, actually is pretty good fun and not geeky (you were right Em, enjoy it while it lasts).

An enormous model of Shanghai at the Urban Planning Museum

Mostly though, what I did was waste huge swathes of time watching television on my sofa.

And here’s the rub. I like staying up late, and find it really really difficult to go to bed at a reasonable hour unless I have something important to get up for the following day. Work just about ranks on the ’something important’ stakes so I’m OK Sunday to Thursday, but at the weekend there’s nothing between the hours of 9am and 5pm that I’m keen enough on to warrant going to bed between the hours of 1am and broad daylight. I basically end up getting jet-lag every weekend by turning my sleep pattern upside down on Friday night, and then trying to pull it back to normal on Monday morning.

So my new plan is do find something good to do on either Saturday or Sunday morning / early afternoon. Good enough to get up for, good enough to go to bed for.

I’ve been looking through the ex-pat magazines and, whilst I’m open to suggestions, think I’ve got it nailed down to one of two things:
a Chinese Cooking Class and learning Kung Fu. Both have their pros and cons, and I suppose it really boils down to whether I want to end up fat and being able to swear in Chinese, or avenging the death of an old man.
Thoughts?