It’s a wild ride my friend, so come with me now, step into my weekly world of shoes….

This week I received a letter through the electronic mail.

Dear Dr Swiss

as we all know, the hot look that’s wowing the fashion world right now is the Shanghainese Street Sweeper.

I’ve got my faded blue coveralls, the hair full of cigarette ash and have grown my little fingernail to the required 3 inches. When it comes to the shoes though, I have hit a major snafu.

Me and Kate Moss were shopping down at Carrefour when we bought what we thought were genuine FeiYue shoes, and yet something doesn’t feel right with them. Have I bought fakes?

Help me Dr Swiss, you’re my only hope.

Mackers.

xx

Well Mackers- firstly, you’ve come to the right place (so that’s good news), however you have bought fakes (so that’s bad news). Do you know what though, when it comes to that funky oppressed Chinese peasant look- what could be more authentic than fakes? They’re probably rarer than the real thing too.

For the best selection of the real thing (including some one-off custom jobs) head down to Culture Matters on Dongping Lu (near Henghsan Lu- opposite Vargas Grill). For the fakes- head down to the docks and look for a guy with a wheelbarrow full of nail clippers, pan scrubbers, and shoes that say “FeiYin”.

Real uns down at Culture Matters

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I was walking around by Yu Yuan at the weekend (the old town really- those side streets near Yu Yuan) and I spotted a bunch of halloween decorations for sale.

Deeply chilling I’m sure you’ll agree- I would give the address for the shop but when I went back to find it the next day…IT HAD COMPLETELY DISAPPEARED*

I’m still in two minds about my costume- a lot of people have said that when I take my shirt off I look a lot like Jason Stackhouse from True Blood, but others have said I’m a dead ringer for Don Draper out of Mad Men.

*Not really- in Nanshi (near the Bund) try:
225 FuYou Lu near Anren Lu
福佑路225号 近安仁路

If you’re in Gubei / Hongqiao you can get decorations at my buddy Steven’s parents place:

Star Box
Shop E16 Hongqiao Flower Market

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When that dark day happens here are three alternatives:

Shoes that say “I L <crown> VE Shanghai”

Pros: Excellent ankle protection against shopping trolleys and sniper fire.

Cons: Ugly as sin, make you look like a golf club.

Ying Yang Shoes

Pros: Buddhists believe

“Maitri or Metta in Pali (Loving Kindness) and Karuna (Compassion) to all living beings including animals”

and since these shoes aren’t leather- you’ll have Pali coming out of your ying-yang

Cons: Shoes appear to have been a pile of wet laundry in a previous life.

Electrician safety shoes

Pros: Protection from faulty cables up to a maximum of 250Kw, assuming dry conditions.

Cons: You don’t think they actually work do you?

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Arcade Games! Time Crisis 2, 3 & 4! Harley Davidson + Hummer driving games! Shooting up baddies- playing the drums- bashing rats with a hammer!

The place is enormous- an entire floor of a shopping mall- get there NOW.

Players Arena 8F
New Century World Shopping Mall
Nanjing Dong Lu / Xizang Lu (basically- People’s Square)

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I’ve never been to an Ikea in any other country, so I don’t see anything unusual in that kind of behaviour (which is probably what Mrs Josef Fritzl said to the police).

Anyway it’s a great place to try out a new camera, as you can take people’s photos and they think you’re just looking at the furniture. I took my new 4 lens super-3d effect camera.

This was the best one.

Super 4 lens 3d camera

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I’m guessing they didn’t fly a top pizza chef in from Tuscany to come up with the “Abseriction Orchard”, and I do wonder how many other ingredients they tried alongside “Meat Gut” before they decided that pineapple was just the ticket.

The potato special sounds particularly insipid

It sounds so bad that it would be worth trying- sadly though they only deliver to Pudong.

If anyone in the ‘Dong is feeling brave, I’d love to hear what these things taste like. In fact I DOUBLE DARE YOU.

“Share My Way” Pizza

tel: 5844363 (open 10am-10pm)

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After a while though you get tired of that stuff, and start to find the next tier of Chineseosity cool: Shanghai watches, electric bike accidents and Haibao Mexicano.

No contest is there?

Many of these second-tier cool items can be found in a shop called The Thing.

Here are three examples of the kind of stuff they sell:

“Back to the village” cap.

The material on the front of this is the same as the cheap bags that migrant workers buy when they travel home at Chinese new year. The Chinese for it is something like “Snake skin bag”, but Emma always calls them “Back to the village bags”.

Louis Vuitton brought out a version of the back to the village bag for suckers with too much money, but this hat is to that bag what Haibao Mexicano is to regular Haibao.

Mao purse

The quotation on here is a Chinglishy translation of a famous Chairman Mao quote (often written on school walls) meaning that if you study hard you’ll improve every day.

It sounds much cooler in Chinese though-

hǎo hǎo xué xí tiān tiān xiàng shàng!

See?

Chinese zodiac shirt

My knowledge of the whole Chinese zodiac story is still pretty basic. It’s something like

The Jade Emperor wanted to select twelve animals to represent the different years as totems. Hearing this, all the animals on earth rushed to the call with each desiring to be selected. Finding no suitable method on which to base his selection, the Jade Emperor decided to have a tournament of physical skills and abilities.

And then the Chicken cut the head off a hostage.

Whatever, I like this shirt.

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It’s called Comic Plaza or some such thing, so I was expecting it to be full of awkward teenage boys completing their Power Rangers collection instead of shaving off their wispy upper-lip hair and getting some sunlight. Whilst there was a little of that- there was also a bunch of stuff I just did not understand at all.

After about an hour in there, I felt confused, disorientated and out of my depth- just like those teenage boys probably feel when staring at the ground in front of an attractive woman.

Most of the stuff didn’t even seem to be aimed at boys- there were lots of weird clothes that Avril Lavigne might wear if she was a prostitute, key rings that look like sushi, perverted toilet signs, and comic books where one Japanese schoolboy forces himself on another.

I think it's called "When lunch money isn't enough"

Who can possibly need a passport cover that says “Prince of Tennis” on it?

Why is Tim Burton’s “A Nightmare Before Christmas” still culturally relevant?

When would I ever want to listen to a CD featuring the music from Final Fantasy VI?

I was tempted for 35RMB, but not sure what it really says about me

Presumably it all makes a lot more sense if you’re full of teenage hormones, hate your teachers, and are convinced that your parents spend all day long thinking of ways to make your life miserable.

The plan was to pick up a few quirky model robots for my nephew, instead I ended up with a headache and a sour taste in my mouth. Oh and a cute purse for my niece.

Seaweed monsters: Not for sale

Weirdo Arcade For Misfits- 1856 Nanjing Lu, near Changshu Lu

To find out more about this place- read what Morgan at Smart Shanghai thought.

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Right next to Cotton’s on 604-608 Jianguo Xi Lu (near enough An Ting Lu as makes no difference), there’s a place full of office furniture, desks, chairs, old PCs, rubber jumpsuits, and all sorts of cool bric-a-brac.

The anitquey type stuff was reasonably priced (that saxophone was a little over 1,000RMB) and the furniture was cheap. They’ve got a website at Sh2buy.com

I had a look at an old Leica camera and still fail to see why they cost so much, toyed with the idea of getting an Accordion, then walked out with nothing.

You might have better luck than me- especially if you’re in the market for a second hand pipe.

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We get a taxi home and the guy starts up asking where we’re from.

Me [in Chinese]: England
Taxi [in Chinese]: Ah, England is a (something or other)
Me [in Chinese]: England is what?
Taxi [in Chinese]: A (something or other)!- China is also a (something or other) Germany is a (something or other else).
Me: ?
Emma [in English]: I think he’s saying that England and China have a free trade agreement, but Germany is a protectionist state.

Now, see, this is why I prefer to sit in the back of taxis.

This guy was a student of Philosophy so we spent the rest of the journey playing a bizarre game of charades, with a twist. Instead of acting out the name of a film, he would sound out the Chinese name of a famous western thinker and we would try to guess who it was:

Taxi: A To Ma, Ah Kwi Na
Emma: Errr err, Aristotle?
Me: No we’ve had him. Umm, Thomas A Becket?
Emma: Thomas Aquinas! Thomas Aquinas!

What I learned from the journey was thus:

• Francis Bacon was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays
• Napoleon is “the same” as Descartes (somehow) 
• You can fit an Ikea double mattress in the back of a Volkswagen Santana (but one of you has to sit in the front)

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