ISpyShanghai

Shanghai brought in a law a while back that shops have to charge a few pennies for plastic bags.

Some of them are worth it.

Apologies for the lack of shoes yesterday, but I think you’ve had too many of them recently anyway.

Here’s something with a bit of substance- the various parts of a Tuna.

Learn them well, there will be a test next week

You know when you have a French exchange student at your school, and you think it will be funny to teach them really filthy English?

Well apparently the China Daily has a 14 year old boy writing their “Better English” column:

Don’t think this was a one-off either, here’s the same column on the following day.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the “Better Maths” section shows you how to write the word “BOOBIES” on a calculator.

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St Christopher was a Canaanite 12 cubits (18 ft) tall and with a fearsome face. While serving the king of Canaan, he took it into his head to go and serve the greatest king there was- Christ.

A hermit advised St Chris that he could serve Christ by carrying people across a dangerous river. One day a small child asked to be taken across the river, during the crossing, the river became swollen and the child seemed as heavy as lead, so much that Christopher could scarcely carry him and found himself in great difficulty.

When he finally reached the other side, the child said: “You had on your shoulders not only the whole world but him who made it. I am Christ your king, whom you are serving by this work.” The child then vanished.

From The Golden Legend by Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine (1230-1298)
And that’s why St Christopher is the patron saint of travellers, and many westerners have medals of him in their cars, mopeds and caravans.

What good is Mao supposed to be during a heavy river crossing?

None whatsoever. You might as well have a graven image of Donald Duck.

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Shanghai can be a stressful place with many little annoyances.

Only yesterday Emma was in Starbucks when the lady behind the counter put hot milk in some guys coffee- naturally he threw a huge fit and publicly shamed this woman until she almost cried.
He was right to do so.

Some people take things a stage further and get so enraged by one tiny annoyance that they have bilingual colour business cards printed up to hand out to any offenders.

It’s not 100% clear, but it seems this chap doesn’t like it when people mimick his Chinese. He doesn’t like it one bit.

When I showed this card to a workmate he said

Workmate: He seems very sensible

Me: I think, in fact no, I’m sure you mean sensitive.

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It’s easy enough to laugh at the odd ways of Chinese people (I should know, I’ve done it for 500+ blog posts), but westerners are daft too.

Here are some “chopsticks for dummies” for sale in one of home town supermarkets.

Why there would ever be a need for such a thing, I don’t know. If you can’t be bothered to learn to use actual chopsticks, how about a fork?
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Taken just outside my front door, Jing-An.

It’s a casual sort of neighbourhood.

Here’s an older gent who was making his opinions known

You’ll note the tiny speck of land off the South East coast, definitely part of China that.
Co-incidentally, I was wearing my “Say ‘No’ to an independent Cornwall!” t-shirt.

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Both Shanghaiist and the LA Times have been talking about how the locals behave in Ikea: sleeping on the beds, clambering all over the furniture, pooping in the display toilets and treating the place like a cheap cafeteria.

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