ISpyShanghai

Ceiling at Vargas’ Grill on Dongping Lu (near Hengshan Lu)

I had brunch here with Emma- it’s 100RMB for all the juice and coffee you need to fight a hangover, then they have fresh scones, lots of salad and sundried tomato- deli type stuff, a really delicious cold rice pudding, fruit. There’s some kind of all you can drink option- but what kind of monster goes on a 2pm Sunday drinking binge?

New Century World department store lifts, looking down.

Can you imagine what this must look like to a rural farmworker on their first trip to the big city? There must be a puddle of drool at the bottom of this drop from all of the slack-jawed gaping.

Up to the roof of the Hongkou Football stadium.

Home of Shanghai Shenhua who recently threw away their chance of winning the Chinese football league. Just like they did last year.

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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There’s a great new shop opened up near Dingle’s house- it’s called Meat Puppets and it sells all kinds of utterly useless tat.

The woman who owns the place speaks good english, which will be very useful when she’s back working in Starbucks after the business fails.

Here’s what I wrote about it for Shanghaiist:

Gadgets! Gadgets! Gadgets for all!

If there’s one business model that’s sure to ride the current economic storm, it’s a shop which sells nothing but useless gadgets.

Recently opened “Meat Puppets” on Shaanxi Lu (near JianGuo Lu) is a shop that sells gadgets such as “High School Musical” themed magic 8-balls, old-fashioned telephone receivers on a curly cord (to plug into your cell phone, obviously) and one of two awesome infra-red powered air guitars!.

Take that Credit Crunch!

Takara Tomy Air Guitar Pro – 275RMB

Takara Tomy Air Guitar Pro Acoustic (pictured) – 475RMB. 

 

One thing I didn’t mention in that post is that I bought the guitar in the picture, and then tried to make a video of myself playing the thing.

With limited success.

I hear strong rumours that there is a clip of Professor Dingle playing “Walk This Way” on his, whilst wearing superman pyjamas. Let’s wait and see if it turns up eh?

It's John McClane what was in Die Hard!

So this is my John McClane, Bruce Willis in ‘Die Hard’ Halloween outfit.

If you’ve never seen Die Hard then, well you really need to re-appraise your life, but also you won’t understand the costume.

John McClane is Bruce Willis’s character from Die Hard part 1, 2, 4 and parts of 3 (although I wash my hands of the scene where a huge burst of water sprays him and Samuel L Jackson out of a pipe).

I estimate that of the 200 people who saw my costume, three people “got it” without any explanation, so in any measurable sense it was a massive failure (especially since Shanghai taxi drivers are not keen on picking up guys wearing a dirty vest covered in blood).

The Shanghaiist party was cool, I saw the Pope, a guy dressed as Super Mario, Earl Hickey and a couple of middle aged Chinese guys dressed as cops who…

Oh wait a minute, that actually was the cops- they shut down the party at about 1am.

Emma had a huge toy spider on her back- the wire legs wrapped around her as the giant arachnid sank it’s fangs into her shoulder. Lots of people loved that spider and kept shaking its legs and grabbing its little spider thorax.

The moral of the night seemed to be that if you’re going to hang out at a dark crowded club built inside an old bomb shelter then no-one is going to notice ultra-realistic touches like writing the terrorists names on your arm in marker pen, or the fact you’re not wearing shoes in a bar covered in broken glass, but they will notice a 4 foot spider attached to your back.

p.s. Liam- I’m in for Mo’vember.

I don’t know if any of you are planning to go to the Shanghaiist party tonight, I’m excited about it, got my costume sorted and everything.

If you see a guy whose feet are cut to ribbons, that’ll be me- say hi.

Photo by Nad

Today’s shoe tuesday is part 2 in a series of 3 to celebrate the games of the XXLVIP Olympiad.

<cue Shoe Tuesday music>

If, like me, you spent 4 hours of Friday night watching the opening ceremony (did you see Da Shan in the Canadian team? The Hungarian women’s outfits? Burundi carrying spears? The Islamic Republic Of Narnia?) you will have no doubts that the Olympics are on in that Beijing.

Security is tight, tight, tight in the capital. So tight is the secureness in fact that some of it has spilt over into Shanghai, resulting in the closure of my favourite club, presumably so that the government can hide in this former bomb shelter when separatist bombs rain down from the sky, without having to listen to some quality techno and enjoy very reasonably priced drinks as they do so.

As the bombs start to fall (some time after the 110m Hurdles final) the top brass will cower away in their concrete safe-house, whilst the streets turn into a river of blood. Nuclear clouds will block out the sun, acid rain will fall from the sky and the city will be in a state of martial law with citizens kept in line by Explosive Dogs, ready to explode at the first sign of trouble.

I have already seen these dogs patrolling the streets of Shanghai, and naturally a dog of such terrible power needs a special handler, and with that special handler comes……special shoes (and you thought this was going nowhere!).

Explosive Dog Handler shoes are impossible to spot in ordinary light, since the camouflage pattern blends seamlessly into the grey concrete background. However this specially enhanced photo reveals that the “Jackboot stamping on the face of humanity. Forever” (George Orwell, 1984) will actually be made from a light canvas, with a soft rubber sole. Perfect for the summer!

Had a bit of a mixed weekend.  On Friday night I went to a pub quiz at O’Malley’s
(sample question: “Which LA celebrity has a tatoo of an angel with her wings spread across the back of his neck?“)
we came a respectable fourth although I have written to my MP to demand a recount of the points.

As I was enjoying a post-quiz cocktail, I received the first of approximately 314 phone calls from work . Things were wrong at the airport and they kept going wrong all the way through Friday night until around 3:30am, then started again at 8:30am on Saturday morning.

To make sure everything was OK I went to the airport on Saturday afternoon, and didn’t get away until 8pm when I went to a friend’s birthday party at Bambou.
After the meal I had promised to go back and sleep at the airport to make sure nothing else went wrong (although how me sitting in a nearby hotel with my fingers crossed would help, I don’t know).

Sunday after getting back home, I thought it would be fun to ride my bike to the Photography mall. Well it must have been 38 degrees in the baking sun and I rode around for 2+ hours getting more and more lost. When I eventually returned home, my black t-shirt was covered in the white salt I’d sweated out and I stank like a Weasel in a rubber catsuit.

“Excuse me chaps, which way to the photography mall?“

Recently- following either the recent bus explosion, the Tibet protests, or just general Olympic related paranoia, the transport cops have been getting really antsy.

At a lot of subway stations there are guys checking anyone with a heavy looking bag to see if it’s full of plastic explosive or popping candy. At the Maglev station, they recently started X-Raying my laptop case，(although not KFC bags I notice).

There’s also a cool set of posters up around the place- the ones where the letters S-E-C-U-R-I-T-Y spell out the Chinese equivalent “平安” are my favourite. Ironically，I’ve stolen about 8 copies of that one.