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Archive for January, 2011

(101 Things About Shanghai) The Bund, reformatted

2011
01.27

Tags: China, Gerald, Photos, Shanghai, The Bund
Posted in 101 Nifty Things About Shanghai, Nebulous Items | 4 Comments »

Although I’ve been living in Shanghai for about a week shy of two years now, I’ve only been to the Bund 4 times. The first 3 times were fairly pointless as it was being renovated, just like everything else in Shanghai.

The first time I went, I was on the Pudong side looking across and was too jet lagged to make any record of it, whether mental or digital. I’m sure it was nice. I honestly can’t remember.

The second time I went was a month or so later, with Doug, back when we embarked on marathon walking tours of the city every weekend. It was almost entirely construction panels and dust, with a few open viewing areas.

Do you see the Bund? I can't see the Bund.

No, still no Bund. But I can see the Sex Toy in the distance.

Ah, so this is the Bund. Majestic.

I tried taking my parents there last year when they were here but we couldn’t get anywhere near anything- there were temporary walls everywhere, and scaffolding and more dust. We turned around and went for a coffee.

However, this year it was ready. It was probably ready months ago, in time for the Expo, but I wasn’t really paying attention. This time, you could see stuff. And not just cranes and plywood walls and hardhat signs. And you could walk three people side by side for ages along the river side walkway. A miracle in Shanghai. Normally you can barely fit one person anywhere.

A view! The Bottle Opener, the Sex Toy and other Fancy Buildings in Pudong

Watching the barges in the river

I’d show you the pictures of the lovely wide promenade that was practically deserted on the Monday morning when we went, but those are on my parents’ camera and their camera takes an unusually tiny USB cable that was accidentally left back in Canada. So no panoramas of the lovely open space and the ornate old colonial buildings and whatnot. Sorry.

I can, however, show you a photo of Gerald hard at work on his new novel, Sleep, Prey, Grubs.

Gerald is very busy

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Meat and Mops- My Parents’ Journey to Qibao

2011
01.22

Tags: China, Fish, Food glorious food, Gerald, Mass Tourism, Meat, Mops, Photos, Shanghai, vendors
Posted in Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 13 Comments »

Am considering adopting this as my motto

So we went to Qibao yesterday, our first grand excursion in a week or so, as I’d been busy with stupid school stuff and having my jaw sledge-hammered, and my mother was battling her semi-inevitable post-flight cold.

Doug and I had gone there about two years ago when we first moved to Shanghai, back when we used to go out and explore on weekends. Now we mostly base our weekend schedules around eating, drinking and being horizontal. Of course, we tend to walk great distances to get to the food and drink (and thus are not 100kg each) but the wandering is a bit less compulsively curious. It was good to get out and see the city through unjaded eyes.

The last time we went, line 9 hadn’t opened yet so we took a taxi there. This time, we just walked down to the Jiashan lu metro stop at the bottom of our street and emerged a half dozen stops later opposite the giant billboard advertising the Ancient Water Town ™. I appreciated not having to go anywhere near a freeway in a taxi.

It was slightly less crowded this time, though not by much. The previous visit had been on a weekend in springtime and the hordes, oh the hordes were brutal. Here are the photos from that visit that I had uploaded to a Facebook album. The narrow lane ways were still packed but at least there was some leeway this time. My parents were brave and happily ate all sorts of unidentifiable street food I thrust at them. I took a lot of photos. Mops predominated. Let me show you some.

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School’s out for…um, Spring Festival (insert Alice Cooper tune here)

2011
01.21

Tags: China, Photos, Shanghai, Teaching
Posted in Nebulous Items, Teaching | No Comments »

End times: Still life with school detritus

Classes finished nearly two weeks ago but the final exam for my course was scheduled only for the very last possible time slot.

This means I’d spent the first week off hauling my parents around town and drinking absurd amounts of coffee, sitting in the living room in my awesome new high-tech thermals (thank you, family), looking out the window at the frigid city rooftops and laneways.

I started this week temporarily back at work on Monday, invigilating in a freezing, dimly lit, post-apocalyptically deserted university where everyone except me, my 40-odd kids and the class matriarchs had gone home for the long winter break.

The walls radiated cold. The admin office was locked and dark and I had to wait until the last minute for someone to give me the exam and exam room number.

No one had remembered to get me the keys to the listening console so we had to send a runner down 5 flights of stairs to the tech office for that. They brought back the wrong keys and had to start all over again. Then it turned out that the computer console’s electricity had been turned off at an unknown source, then it turned out that the computer itself didn’t even work so the techie had to go back down to his lair to bring up a new one. Half an hour after the exam had started (and half an hour after the listening part should have started) I plugged in my USB memory stick and told the kids to brace themselves for the listening section only to discover the new computer didn’t have a media player installed. The techie was summoned again. The kids were nervous wrecks from all the interruptions. We were able to begin 40 minutes late. The class matriarchs didn’t bat an eyelid. Such is China.

Not this year's kids, as I was too busy dealing with tech issues to play paparazzi

Yesterday, I trudged back to my office after two days of hair-pulling marking at home to input the final grades, only to find it even more dark and chilled and echoingly deserted. My normally chipper and green potted plant was shivering in its ceramic pot. It was snowing sideways. Three days of snow in a (insert quotation marks here) Tropical City. I wore my mittens as I typed. My poor old computer roared after being awakened from its long, icy slumber. Every other office on my floor was locked tight, dark, deserted. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just hallucinating my job.

Trudging away from my building through the deserted, snowy campus

Today, I’m officially done until the 21st of February. My parents and I are off to Qibao for some touristing. Good times.

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Good Times: Getting Your Wisdom Teeth Yanked Out Away From Home

2011
01.18

Tags: China, Dentists, Shanghai
Posted in Nebulous Items | 9 Comments »

Awesome image from http://teeth.tomlea.co.uk/

I have evil, appalling wisdom teeth. Or rather, I had evil, appalling wisdom teeth. Over the past decade, they have been slowly but surely yanked out across three different continents.

The last one, the bizarrely long one on my top-right side that made closing my jaw completely kinda impossible, was pulled out this afternoon by the former dentist-to-the-Chinese-Military, Dr Bee. You can call him Tony. He can be found in the awesome Kowa dental clinic in the Jinmao Tower in Pudong.

So far I’ve had two dentists in Shanghai (both at Kowa) and neither have been much into painkillers, aside from basic local numbing when absolutely necessary.

When I had my first wisdom tooth extracted in Canada, way back in 2001, my face swelled up rather unattractively afterwards from an awkwardly brutal yanking, and I was put on a diet of antibiotics and pain killers for two weeks. The extraction cost me $300 and a lot of pain. A week before Christmas. Just as I was about to fly to London. Good times.

My second one was taken out by the mother of one of my flat-mate’s kindergarten students in Kayseri, in Central Turkey for 20,000,000TL (about $15). That one left me with a very short round of potent antibiotics (a strength not even legal in Canada, apparently) and a couple Tylenol equivalents. I ached a little but it passed quickly. I was eating pizza by that evening. Carefully.

But Shanghai, oh, Shanghai! I suppose you’re expecting me to channel my qi and gird my loins and endure the struggle of dentistry. And you’re right. Chinese dentists– or at least the two I’ve known intimately in a toothful way– are so delicate and careful and deliberate that I’ve had no pain, no bleeding, no swelling, no need for any pharmaceuticals whatsoever. Doug keeps asking me after every visit, “So, did they give you pain killers?” and each time I shake my head. This is, apparently, anathema to the North American dentistry experience. You go in to get bone ripped brutally from bone and you bloody well expect some relief. Dr. Bee just told me to relax and drink warm water. I’ll be fine. Don’t work too much at a desk, stretch, don’t talk much for a day or so. Don’t spit. I’ll be fine. The total came to only 380 yuan, or about $58CDN. And Kowa is a slightly posh multi-lingual clinic aimed at expats with insurance (which I’m not).

Last week he drilled (drilled!!) a huge perfect hole in the side of my second molar (that had been cracked by my weirdly angled, super-long wisdom tooth and needed an inlay), cleaned it out with a very pointy stick, fitted a mold, and filled it with a temporary filling all without any needles or even a jolt of pain. This was a live tooth, people. There was a nerve in there. This week he fitted the inlay after grinding away the temporary filling and cleaning out his perfectly drilled round hole (I saw the photo on the screen– it was a perfectly drilled round hole!) with no needles, no pain, no accidental nerve jabs. For 1/8th of what my mother paid for the same thing in Canada. The Chinese military lost a great dentist when he went to Kowa.

Shanghai, you may be killing my lungs slowly with your pollution and my body with your melamine and pesticides and dyed oranges and whatnot but, oh my, you are good for my teeth.

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Short film: Shanghai Museum and the Former French Concession

2011
01.13

Tags: China, Shanghai, Travel Narratives, vendors
Posted in Nebulous Items | No Comments »

4 comments

A Series of Partially Related Photos: Walking With my Parents in Shanghai

2011
01.10

Tags: China, Food glorious food, Photos, Shanghai
Posted in Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 4 Comments »

They arrived yesterday and they are jetlagged. However, I was a cruel daughter and we went on a veritable Long March around Shanghai until they screamed for mercy. Here are a few covert phone photos.

First of all, at the corner of Fuxing Lu and Xiangyang Lu, en route to coffee, there was a masterful display of kebab skewers from the Xinjiang street grill folks.

A veritable tree made of Xinjiang shish kebab sticks

And then, somewhere over near the newly gentrified Sinan mansions, they were trimming the branches from the plane trees that line the roads. They have been doing this for the past few days all over the city.

If you look up, the chances are good that you will see two or three men up a tree in municipal day-glo vests, tied to a now-disused power line that runs through the branches, wielding small scythes, balanced precariously on outer branches, sawing off lengths of tree.

The falling branches land where they may, mostly on the road and many on the sidewalk as people continue to walk by and cars attempt to dodge them. There are many fallen bicycles below them, weighed down by layers of intricate branches.

After a few meters’ worth of branches have fallen, another worker comes along with a chainsaw and neatly turns them into firewood and deftly ties them into cute little bundles of neat twigs that line the sidewalks. The chainsaw roars remind me of my childhood.

Unfortunately, I didn't get any photos of the actual tree trimming

And a random door sign.

How is YOUR level of glass awareness? Huh?

And finally, heading back to the flat for a cup of tea, I came across this. The dude in the little key-cutting shop who hung this duck thought it quite amusing that I stopped to take a photo of it. As did a dude I passed just after taking the photo. Lots of chortling. I swear, this city is making me want to go back to being a vegetarian– no, not just vegetarian- vegan! No, wait, raw! I’ll go raw! Except maybe I’d end up with typhoid or diphtheria. No, hell, why not go fruitarian? Wait, no, the pesticides would kill me. Maybe breatharian? No, the pollution would kill me.

It's not safe to be a duck in this town

Sigh. Poor duck. Sometimes China just makes me feel sad about things I can normally just ignore.

26 comments

It’s MAO’s Annual Self Criticism Time, Shanghai Style

2011
01.05

Tags: Chengdu, China, Dead Macs, Harbin, Language Learning, Myanmar, nanowrimo, Shanghai, Teaching, Yangshuo
Posted in Nebulous Items | 26 Comments »

Mao meets Mao, coming through the rye

I missed the new year deadline for resolutions by a few days but I was too busy drinking litres of tea in bed and eating Doug’s Christmas gift of German chocolate covered gingerbread and posting endless photo spam of frozen mops and singing students. Sometimes one just has to tread lightly upon the blog before dropping the anvil of thinky thoughts onto unsuspecting readers.

I’ve had a rather difficult time trying to articulate this post in my head.

Should it be a retrospective of the year? Should it be about what I’ve learned or what I’ve seen and done? Should it be about what I hope do see or do in the coming year? Should I at least pretend that I have resolutions? Should it be a list? Will I lose all dignity if I write a list of things I’ve done? What if there are exactly ten things on that list? Is that too gimmicky? Have I done enough to even merit a list? Should I even bother?

Unfortunately for my students doing speaking exams this morning, I spent most of the time only half listening to them attempt to speak. My mind kept formulating sentence starters and catchy titles and I found myself distracted by my numb fingers and toes and by my complete lack of witty yet thoughtful ideas.

And so what is this undefined mess I am reading, you may ask.

Well, thank you for asking. I’m not so certain myself what this is or what it will turn out to be. I’ve decided that rather than actually planning out what to write, I’m going to do as I did with the novel back in November and just fling things at you as they occur. Hopefully it will all work out in the end, with lovely caves full of wish granting goats and a nice espresso maker.

First of all, 2010 sucked considerably less than 2009 did. 2009 consisted mainly of a series of rugs being pulled out from under me: flats, jobs, friends, cities, appliances and coping mechanisms all repeatedly lost or broken or rearranged in displeasing ways. 2009 had found me moving to China after 6 years in Turkey and then within months regretting it profoundly. 2010 found me sucking it up and just dealing with the fact that I was indeed living in China and would likely be doing so for a while to come.

Here are a few themes that emerged last year, in no particular order. Pour yourself a drink, put your feet up- this is going to be a long one.

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The Chinese Christmas Party Post! (Part 2)

2011
01.02

Tags: China, Christmas, EFL, My students, Photos, Shanghai, Tea
Posted in Learning, Nebulous Items, Teaching | 2 Comments »

Remember how my students organized a Christmas party in a tea house at the side of an eight lane ring road, under the shadow of a spider’s web worth of overpasses? Where I feasted on *sigh* everything that features heavily in my almost-but-not-quite worst nightmares?

The cold offal snack plate

The grinning whole fish with the staring eyes and the cold offal plate and the pumpkin soup studded with things in shells and things with legs and feelers and eyes at the end of long sockets. The one where there was not one but two pork dished that consisted 98% of just shining red fat, an inch thick. Oh, and watermelon slices and mashed-potato pastries for dessert.

That Christmas party. Yes.

The one where after a delicate nibble of everything placed before me by my forcefully adopted mother, Mrs Gu, I dined primarily on the vinegar-marinated red-skin peanuts that she ladled into my carcass-filled bowl, afraid I would starve.

The one where I met Gerald, or rather, Gerald was carried up the aisle between the tables by my moon-walking student in the fedora and presented to me on stage to much applause. An auspicious meeting, to be sure.

Jerry and Gerald

Well, it wasn’t just about trying to force feed myself every food group that normally makes me want to cry. No! The kids had prepared a full evening of light entertainment: surprisingly funny comedy skits, boy-band dance moves, funky freestyle moves to beatbox mouth-work, soulful crooning, surreal games of charades, intervals of gift giving and candy throwing and many many bottles of soapy bubbles blown for atmosphere.

The lovely D.L. was the official bubble-ista

Most of my kids should not be studying business administration. They should be enrolled in performing arts schools. In my two classes, I have nearly-pro musicians, dancers, singers, actors, artists. The dancing boy with the fedora, Jerry, was reportedly a finalist this year for Tongji’s Got Talent, my huge, multi-campus’d university‘s talent show. A degree in business administration will undoubtedly take full advantage of his awesome drawing, singing and dancing skills. Or not. *sigh*

Anyway, Let me show you some things from that evening.

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Shanghai is Tropical, Part 2

2011
01.01

Tags: China, Cold, Mops, Photos, Shanghai
Posted in Nebulous Items | No Comments »

Remember that delusional law that says every city south of the Yangtze River is Tropical and therefore needn’t have, say, indoor heating in public buildings or properly insulated flats? Yes, that one.

I would like to take a moment to show you a few scenes from tropical Shanghai on the first day of 2011. Temperature is around -5. Am guessing the icicles are just a kooky way of expressing tropicality.

Yes, frozen over. Am guessing the koi are a bit chilly.

I failed to get a photo of the frozen-solid-with-chunks-of-ice-all-over salted dried eels on our street, or the flayed chicken carcasses covered in frost, but I did get some laundry. And a mop. An icicle mop: a revolution in moppery.

Yeah, no, don't want to wear this

The icicles clean your floors better than regular mops

We went to Kommune for breakfast when we discovered the Wagas wasn’t opening until ten. We walked a huge loop up Xiangyang to Huaihai to Ruijin Er and down to Taikang then further down to Dapu and then up to home again. I still can’t feel my legs. My jeans are chilled.

At Kommune, you could sit outside if you were insane. Hot water bottle and blanket provided. Builds character.

Even the hot water bottles are feeling the cold

We went inside. I had a latte in a jar. Like whiskey, except different.

#1 Model Latte Unit

The light was pretty in the warrens

I saw a nifty wall. I’d only ever gone all the way down Taikang lu at night when I was lost and searching for a friend’s flat in all the wrong places. I somehow missed the tulle.

Now that's a wall.

And when I left Doug to go continue his search for his PS3 after two initial failed attempts (everything was closed in the morning), I saw another mop, this time joined by shoes and pretty light.