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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Do you know what Terrapins eat? I didn’t- and for the first two we had, we tried to feed them on the dry turtle food that they sell you in a pet shop.

Now I don’t know what that stuff is made from, but I do know that turtles would literally rather starve to death than eat it, so I’m guessing it’s not peaches and cream.

What Terrapins will eat is raw fish. Doesn’t matter if it’s shrimp, tuna, or cuttlefish- as long as it’s raw and cut up into match head sized pieces that you feed to them with a toothpick, they’ll gobble it down.

Which is fine, but my fridge is broken and fish goes off quickly when you leave it on top of a radiator.
So what happens when you realise at 10pm on a Sunday night that you haven’t fed the damn things? You end up spending 35RMB on Sushi for 15RMB worth of turtle. 

Grrrrr.

Dragons eat people

Haven’t mentioned my pet turtles (Kip and Svetlana) for a while.
They’re doing fine- getting into all kinds of mischief like, sitting on their rock, diving off the rock and going for a swim, sitting on the rock again.

We’ve had them since they were babies but I didn’t realise how big they’d grown until our friends asked us to look after their turtle Dos (his little buddy Uno was recently buried in the memoral garden at La Doll apartment building).

Dos: A turtle

His little head is barely the size of the “On” button of my DVD remote control. I think I could fit his whole body in my mouth and still have room for a bite of a Mars bar to take away the taste.

Dos’s parents dropped him round earlier in the week and then set about setting up the huge laboratory of equipment which apparently is needed to keep 5RMB worth of turtle in tip-top condition.

For reference- here’s where Svetlana and Kip hang out:

Theyre lurking in the corner

They’ve got a water heater in there (now that it’s winter), a floating rock, and few poxy pebbles thrown in at one end.

Now check out Little Lord FauntleTurtle’s tank.

Svetlana and Kip keep gazing through the plexiglass at it.

It’s the Turtle equivalent of watching MTV Cribs.

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.

If you remember, the last time we met our turtles they were living in a huge glass ashtray with about 1cm of water, and a couple of stones to while away the hours.

Oh-ho how times have changed. We’ve now got them installed at Turtleham Palace- a spacious glass tank where they can swim freely in oceans of water, shape up their flippers in the gravel corner, and then chill out on a floating rock.

They certainly seem to like it. Last night we were cleaning the tank and when Emma tried to take one of them out, the other one bit her.

We’ve only got ourselves to blame for the biting though, instead of feeding them horrible dried up turtle food pellets, we’ve now got them on fresh (defrosted) juicy shrimp.

Feeding with the shrimp is good fun- if you just chop it up and put it in the water they will eventually eat it, but a better way is to stick a bit of meat on the end of a cocktail stick and then bob it through the water all innocent like until the Turtles hunt it down.

Have a look for yourselves:

If that video doesn’t work for you, here it is on YouTube.

For names, we’ve gone East / West, old and new, long and short. The darker toned, angry-looking one who is so edgy she jumps off the rock as soon as she hears a noise is Svetlana, whereas the dopier, chilled out fella is Kip.
Svetlana and Kip.

And that concludes another fun-packed week here on ISpyShanghai. If you enjoyed it, tell your friends!
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Hot damn. Last night I went to ZhongShan park and bought a load of generic Chinese contact lenses.

I think they make them by cutting a circle out of a plastic Coke bottle and melting it into shape with a cigarette lighter. Very uncomfortable and I can hardly see a thing. 450RMB well spent.

In fact it was a bad shopping trip all-round: couldn’t find the fishtank I wanted to buy (for the turtles), realised I had no money left in my Chinese bank account, and then forgot the PIN number to my UK bank account.

Have you ever forgotten your PIN number? Oh it’s humiliating- there’s just a moment of doubt as you put the numbers in the first time and the machine smells fear.

PIN Number Incorrect _

Incorrect? That’s impossible, I’m an upright member of the commuinty, ask the parish Priest.
My finger must have slipped up, let me try again:

PIN Number Incorrect _

Sweat prickles your hands, you weren’t really thinking about the number before and now you’ve got one try left and a head full of thousands of possible numbers.

Think. Think!

It’s 91something. Or something91. Definitely.

Or 92something.

As the frustration builds up, I start weeping, hot wet tears falling on the screen as I mash the keypad with my fists, hitting random digits in a furious tempest.

PIN Number Incorrect _

I know! I know!

Regular readers (hi Mum!) will know that I recently suffered the tragic loss of two 5RMB turtles: Lambert and Miss Julie.

- for anyone new to the game, the full shocking story is told here-

Oh it was a bitter, bitter blow and for a long time I wasn’t sure whether I could risk being hurt again. But we still had the bowl and half a tub of turtle food so it only made sense to pick up another two turtles.

The couple of new little ‘uns don’t have names yet, we’re going to wait until they’re at least a week old before we christen them, but they seem to be in good shape. Here is a timelapse vid of them taken every 10 seconds. It’s non-stop, hardcore, turtle action.

Video is also here if that one doesn’t work

[Unfortunately, Kristi tells me they will either die, or cost me $500]

Bad news on the Turtle front. We’re a man down.

I returned last night to find one half of our pet duo sprawled out flat on a stone- turtle head stretched out of the water, eyes tight shut, looking a paler green than usual. Carefully picking him up by the shell, his floppy little body soon confirmed my worst fears. He was a goner.

Cause of death unknown although a small mark on the side of his neck which at first made me wonder if we were dealing with Terrapinicide (Miss Julie was being suspiciously quiet on the other side of the bowl), but I suppose we shall never know.

I wrapped him up in a kitchen towel shroud and sent him on his way.

We’re trying our best with these turtles, we really are; using filtered water in their bowl, giving them turtle food and lettuce but not letting it fester in the water. They’ve got rocks and tiles to clamber onto, we put them outside in the sunshine every now and then, but it’s harder than I thought though, and I don’t hold up much hope for Miss Julie making it now she’s all alone.

Maybe we’ll try again when the weather is warmer- they’re tropical I think, so presumably fair a lot better in the heat and humidity than, say, me. Chinese friends tell us we should be feeding them chopped up shrimp or possibly insects- seems odd to feed that to something so small though.

In the mean time, any tips on Turtle care, or coping with Turtle related grief are welcome.