ISpyShanghai

Here’s my round up of the year. 

jANUARY

I started off the year in in Letterkenny, Oirland where I was pitched up in a remote cottage following my brothers wedding.

It was great craic (fake irishmen: please note the spelling) although if you want to get a Chicken Tikka Masala at 3am on January the 1st, I’d recommend not being in a village of 250 toothless fishermen. 

On returning to Shanghai, Emma convinced me to take a trip to the freezing wastelands of Harbin where they brighten the place up once a year by holding an ice festival. 

“How cold was it James?” 

I hear you ask. So cold that there was frost on the end of my eyelashes. 

So cold that when I saw a man peeing in the street, I wanted to shake his (left) hand for bravery.

Very, very, cold.

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I’m in Kunming today, it’s a city of 6 million people in Yunnan province. In China they call it “Spring City” because this is where 94% of the world’s bed springs are made.

All packed for Kunming

I’m here for work and we had a meeting this morning that was so entirely in Chinese, that I had to drink 6 cups of tea to stop falling asleep, and then had to pee 4 times. Luckily I don’t think anyone noticed though as I craftily pretended to have an important phone call every time I went to make toilet.

In fact they probably all think I’m insanely popular and important, I find it’s important not to let the mask slip too soon

A man who may or may not be a minority. I find it hard to tell

N.B Yes I was joking about the Spring City thing.

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

On the BBC website

Check it out for yourself (Photo number 3)

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.

Olympic TV Tower

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:

WoAi Refuels

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?

The top three medalling nations at Beijing 2008?

Birds nest

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.

<cue Shoe Tuesday music>

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.

Display outside a Beijing shopping centre

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.

Fuwa (mascot) shoes- for kids only unfortunately

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.

Equestrian Nikes

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.

Undone shoelaces cost lives

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.

Me with a volunteer

Admittedly, in the past I’ve slagged off the Olympics. They’re just an overgrown sports day, any real sports (Tennis, Boxing, Football) have their own, more important competitions, and for the minority sports: well, there’s a reason no-one normally stays up late to watch Water Polo.

On the other hand, it’s only 4 years, and I wanted to see some action damnitt.

So on Friday night I met up with WoAi, his workmate Neil, and He Who Must Not Be Named (as he gets embarassed when workmates look him up on the internets).

We got to the hotel a little after midnight. The staff there, and I assume everywhere in the capital, were in a security frenzy- photocopying all of our passports several times, searching our luggage for who knows what (luggage searches at hotels now?!), until they eventually let us go to our rooms. (Interestingly, two chinese guys had brought prostitutes to the hotel and managed to check in without any ID whatsoever. Ho hum).

Highlight of the night (other than some amazing late-night Chinese food) was talking to an American guy who was so drunk that he claimed to speak “United Nations, Asian, and other languages”- he then started talking about the word “Bloke” and how offensive it is to English people. It didn’t seem to matter that 3/4 of the table were English and told him it wasn’t offensive at all.

The next day we met up with a few friends including Chas, a mate of WoAi’s from back in the day (WoAi lived in Beijing for 5 years). We talked about going to various events; (mens) Beach Volleyball, Rowing, Sailing, Cycling but then Chas got a call from someone who was prepared to sell let him have two tickets to the athletics for face value.

Me “Is there anything good on tonight?”
Chas “Well, the men’s 100m final…”

WoAi shows the goods

I’ve always thought of the men’s 100m final to be the event in the Olympics. The race to be the fastest man in the world is the purest expression of sports I can think of, and I can remember races going back to when I was a boy. Linford Christie, Carl Lewis, Ben Johnson- it doesn’t get any more tense than the silence just before the starting pistol as the best sprinters in the world take their place.

Chas was happy to go and see other stuff whilst we had his tickets and for that Chas- I stand up and salute you (note: I am literally standing and saluting as I write this).

We still had two tickets to find and, long story short, we got them for about double the price on the ticket (OK OK- actually we went to a ticket agency in a pub bought two tickets for the athletics today and then two Fencing tickets as back up. Sold the Athletics on for a profit, and offset that against the 5,000 the guy wanted for the other two tickets).

Touting (scalping) is open and easy at the entrance to the secure zone, and since the tickets are security scanned very close to where you buy them, there was practically no risk. In fact WoAi and I waited with the tout and only gave him the money after the other two guys were through security.

Once we got through that first check point we had to take a subway (the new line 8 ) to the complex with the Birds Nest stadium, Water Cube, Olympic TV tower and whatever else they have in the grounds. The atmosphere was buzzing, people were taking photos of and with me in my Union Jack British get-up, and the sun was shining on 100,000+ happy people.

Usain Bolt's 9.69 new World Record

Since John and WoAi are as geeky as me (between the four of us we had 4 laptops, 5 cameras, and enough paraphenelia to be arrested and hung as spies) we spent a good hour outside the stadium taking photos of this and that. I expect we’ll see the results from those two in 6-8 weeks after they finish tinkering with the white balance and photoshopping out any minute specks of dust on the lens.

Neil and I eventually got bored and went to the stadium to make a start on those 30RMB beers I’ve been reading about.

The stadium is as enormous, impressive and buzzing as you’d expect a 91,000 capacity venue to be. Everything is new and well built, and although the staff serving up the snacks and drinks were pretty clueless (I think for some of them it was the first time they’d tried to pour liquid into a cup) there were so many of them that the queues were short and sweet.

After watching long jump, 800m and shotput competitions the time finally came for the main event. Tyson Gay had gone out in the semi-final so all eyes were on Usain Bolt, the Jamaican who had already broken the world record several times.
Presumably you all know what happened next.

The crowd went beserk- it was an insanely fast race with personal bests and national records being broken all over the place, but no-one was even close to Bolt who is the first man ever to break 9.70 and did it whilst stopping with a few metres to go and moonwalking over the finish line (kind of).
An amazing thing to see live, we were still talking about it as the sun came up and we finished our last drinks at 10:30 am Sunday morning.

Ticket for Athletics 1600RMB
Windowless Hotel Room in Beijing (per night) 600RMB
Flights to Beijing (return) 2100RMB
Union Flag (thanks WoAi!) 60RMB
Beer in stadium 5RMB

Is Emma going to be mad at me for going to the Olympics whilst she’s on holiday in England?

Have I been eating (delicious, nutritious) babyfood for the past 3 weeks?

Note to self: stop booking flights when hungover. I didn’t plan to come back on Saturday night…