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.

• Two appeals (19 comments)
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• The first 3 months (13 comments)

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.

February

Spring Festival time again- out with the Pig, in with the Rat (or was it Mouse?) 

Spitting, flags, fireworks. They're all here!

I spent Chinese New Year in Hong Kong. Took the overnight sleeper train from Shanghai to Shenzen (and I’m still getting google hits for it) which was almost as much fun as the destination itself. 

"Hello is that Disney's copyright department?"

Hong Kong really does deserve its reputation as a great place to shop, it’s also a fantastic city to eat, and if you’re looking for a place to watch fireworks explode over Hong Kong Harbour- it’s absolutely world class.

Hong Kong Harbour

March

I came to Shanghai to work on the new Terminal 2 at Pudong airport, so you can imagine my relief when Terminal 2 actually opened and didn’t explode. 

Terminal 2 at Pudong

In the end it turned out to be kind of an anti-climax, I was on the second shift of engineers who clocked on at around 7am to clear up any problems that happened during switch over. But there weren’t any real problems.

Damn. If only I’d been working on Terminal 5 at Heathrow instead.

The other big news of the month is that I saw two middle-aged Chinese guys being nice to a cat and neither of them were WoAi. 

No, they weren't fattening up their dinner

April

The Smiths sang “November Spawned A Monster” but I say it was April15, 2008. 

That was the date when I decided to take two random photos I’d taken at the weekend, and pretend they were part of an ongoing feature called “Shoe Tuesday”. 

The first ever Shoe Tuesday image

Oh I thought it was a laugh at first, but yesterday I spent 10 minutes of my life chasing an 11 year old girl up three floors of a shopping mall because she was wearing a plastercast in the shape of a giant roller boot. 

I’m not sure who’s laughing every Tuesday, but it isn’t me I can tell you.

May

This was the month when Emma left her bag in a taxi on the way back from the airport. The driver fell asleep, I ended up in the back of a police car. 

You’ll really have to read the whole thing.

It was a strange incident that, in a way, shows the full spectrum of what life as a foreigner can be like in China.

Especially since the way I think about that night depends on whether I choose to remember how nice the police guy in the station was 

Please don’t think badly of China, we are trying to find your bag, I hope you have a great time here.

I like Lady Diana.

or to remember the attitude of the Emergency phoneline operator (i.e. the 999 / 911 woman)

Emma: Hello, I’d like to report a missing bag

Hatchet faced old Witch: Why are you in China? Do you have a visa?

It was also the month of my trip to a resort (called Xanadu!) near Hangzhou. Ahh, good times.

Xanadu in Hangzhou

June

During the merry old month of June I got heavily into timelapse and spent an entertaining (for everyone around me) hour or so stood on Nanjing Dong Lu taking a photo of the street every 20 seconds. 

Some results can be seen here, and another result was that I owed the long suffering Emma a trip to Beijing, my first time in the capital.

Three Bald Men

It’s lovely there- a lot more peaceful than Shanghai, and with cheaper sandwiches too.

July

Back home for the summer and a barrage of questions from friends and colleagues:

So do you have some kind of shoe fetish?

Seriously, what’s with all the shoes?

etc.

Once again, it’s a joke that somehow got out of hand- I’m as confused by the whole thing as you are.

July was also the first time I played the world’s greatest video game: Rock Band, got lost on my bike and nearly drowned in my own sweat, realised I could feed my turtles with a toothpick, and discovered how monkeys quit smoking. 

a t-shirt for evil hags

August

OK I’ll admit it- I was totally wrong about the Olympics. 

At the start of the year I thought the whole thing was nothing but hype and minority sports that no-one cares about. I was ordered to spend the opening ceremony from a secure location in the airport to defend from any cyber-attacks on the software (true story) and was blown away by the spectacle.

As the games wore on it felt like something historic was really happening, and that I’d be a fool not to take the short plane hop over to Beijing to see it for myself.

Three great sporting nations

In Beijing I had an amazing weekend, got tickets to go to the Birds Nest stadium, and saw something I’ll never forget: the first round of heats for the Women’s Pole Vault.

(Oh and Usain Bolt winning the 100m final)

September

I was in Nanjing enjoying a terrifying weekend of cable cars and taxi queues when I heard the news that my brother’s first baby, Eve Erin Creegan had arrived.

September was also the date of the first ever 150 club night out (a night out where the total cost of all of your clothes must be less than 150RMB), a free business trip to Kunming and the Stone Forest, and the month in which I bought a cool new lens for my camera.

Yi in wide-angle

On balance though, I’d still have to say that Eve’s arrival was the highlight.

October

Medical emergency! This is the month when I was rushed to hospital (well OK, I rushed myself to hospital) when my elbow suddenly turned infected and swollen. 

If I’m honest, part of me thought that the doctor was going to cut open the wound and millions of baby ants would crawl out of it. Instead though, they gave me some pills and it just sort of got better by itself.

Disappointing.

On the upside- I did get time to fly back to England and say hello to the new arrival. 

Eve Erin Creegan

Looking at this photo again, she looks so tiny! The beautiful smiling Eve I was playing with at Christmas must be twice as big as the newborn here.

Ah it won’t be long before she’s stealing cars and writing poems about how no-one understands her.

November

I started the month picking glass out of my feet following my disastrous halloween costume: (John McClane in Die Hard), but ended in triumphantly raising a good solid chunk of money for Prostate Cancer research by growing an awesome ginger moustache.

Me as John McClane

Me as Tachey McAwesome

 
 
Truly it was a wonderful Movember.

December

Shoe Tuesday turned ugly as a series of battles broke out: high-top sneakers versus shoe/trainer hybrids, boot warmers versus furry Crocs.

It’s a disturbing trend and no-one quite knows where it’s going, but we’ve opened Pandora’s box now, and it’s no use crying over spilt milk.

With a couple of friends away, we looked after Shanghai’s fanciest turtle- Dos, who spends his getting flipper manicures as he eats peeled Shrimp at Turtleham Palace.

How the other half swim

Let’s hope he enjoys it whilst it lasts- by the time this econmic crisis is over, he’ll have been boiled up for soup and served up at an Investment Banking soup kitchen.

• The first 3 months (13 comments)
• Shoe Tuesday: Apocalypse (11 comments)
• Shoe Tuesday – Olympics roundup (8 comments)

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?

• South Korea’s got Seoul (31 comments)
• Humping Dog (21 comments)
• Buddha Boxes (2 comments)

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.

• 2008 (3 comments)
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• Two appeals (19 comments)

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

Photo by Nad

• Halloween: Halloween harder (40 comments)
• 2008 (3 comments)
• Two appeals (19 comments)

<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!

• 2008 (3 comments)
• Shoe Tuesday: Olympic Special (4 comments)
• Shoe Tuesday – Olympics roundup (8 comments)

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?“

• The first 3 months (13 comments)
• Storming out of restaurants (11 comments)
• Shanghai 2006 (12 comments)

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.

• Two appeals (19 comments)
• Three unusual views (7 comments)
• The Subs (7 comments)

In The Beaver, a classy bar for gentlemen, I’d just won a game of table football that was pretty much a play-by-play re-enactment of the 1966 World Cup Final. When the ball hit the tin for the final goal I went bananas with joy, banged my head against the mirror, knocking it to the ground.

If Kit from The Beaver reads this, I’m sorry. Oh and whilst we’re chatting, can I have a VIP card?

It was time to make a quick exit after that, and via a couple of bars on Tongren Lu I ended up with my boss’s nephew in one of the lower class bars on Julu Lu.

It was the kind of bar that is filled with very friendly, very thirsty girls. In fact the girls are borderline prostitutes, and I’m being pretty generous with the borderline.

At some point during the evening, one of the girls saw my name card for a website called Shanghaiist

Oh you’re a journalist!

She says

Hmmm. Yes!

Said I, (not 100% truthfully).
Well after that there was no more flirting and asking me to buy her a drink, and lots more of her telling me all about the lifestyle of Shanghai (borderline) prostitutes and me asking what seemed like insightful questions at the time.

Here are the facts that I remember:

• If you pay 45RMB for a girl’s drink, she gets 15
• Most of the girls come from the provinces and work to send their money home
• The girl I spoke to sends home between 500-2000RMB per month.
• Her momma don’t ask where the money comes from (and baby don’t tell)
• Rum makes you drunk

• My Olympics (23 comments)
• Are you a prostitute? (15 comments)
• Two appeals (19 comments)

Extracts from my diary

8:34pm Shanghaiist BBQ
This place is really crowded, I keep knocking everyone over with my backpack, think I’ll just have one drink and go home

8:40pm Vedas
Oh look, an Indian restaurant, I’ll just pop in here and have a curry and a light ale, then go home

9:30pm Vedas
This couple sat next to me are very nice, they’re here on holiday, I’ll give them a few tips on places to visit then go home.

11:04pm People’s 6
It’s a shame not to show them this nice bar that’s close to the restaurant, I don’t have to drink or anything. Well maybe I’ll have one. Then go home.

12:07am Abbey Road
Well this bar is just down the road and it has a terrace- I’ll have a glass of Porter in this nice weather with this nice couple then go home.

1:15am Abbey Road
I’m definitely not going to watch the European Cup Final. It’s on way too late. Definitely not.

2:00am O’Malleys
I’ll just watch the first 10 minutes of the match to get a feel for the atomsphere then go home.

2:47am O’Malleys
Lots of Chinese lads are really into Man United aren’t they? Going home soon.

3:30am O’Malleys
This game is great, can’t believe Chelsea just got an equaliser- should be a good second half. I’ll watch a bit of that then go home.

3:37am O’Malleys
Jagermeister on a school night? This isn’t going to end well.

4:10am O’Malleys
Extra time, blimey. Maybe I should switch to Coke. or go home.

4:13am O’Malleys
Still extra time, it’s going to be a nail-biting penalty shoot out!

Wait a minute, I’ve just realised that I don’t care who wins.
I’m going home.

• Beckham in Shanghai (12 comments)
• 2008 (3 comments)
• Two appeals (19 comments)