So the other day i blogged about the weather forecast for guilin. it looked pretty grim with 4 days of thunderstorms being forecast.
Well, we’re 48 hours in and the last thing I expected was this:
i think it’s what’s known as “a healthy glow”, it’s been glorious sunshine since we arrived. i had to take a detour on the bike today to find somewhere that s0ld suntan lotion, a bit late mind you….. currently lying in bed writing this, my arms and face are swollen to gargantun proportions…
Later this week I’ve booked a few days off work and I’m taking H down to Guilin for a long weekend (four nights to be exact). Actually we’re not even stopping in Guilin, we’re stopping in Yangshuo, a smaller town down the Li river, famous for the 1000′s of hills shaped like biro caps, and we’re not even stopping in Yangshuo, I found a small B&B in a little village about 10km outside of Yangshuo in the hills, surrounded by glorious countryside with free bike rental etc.
The weather recently has been absolutely glorious, clear skies for weeks and temperatures pushing the mid 30s, anyway I checked the forecast yesterday just in case:
Marvellous! Perfick weather for four days of outdoor activities! The full gamut of crap weather, it wouldn’t surprise me if we even get hot hail. I’d better pack my laptop, and a pile of dvds……
Anyway, so just in case I don’t get chance to take some nice pictures during the trip here are some nice pics I took last year in Yanghuo:
I read this minging minging story the other day about coffee. Apparently, the anecdote goes, there was an eminent entomologist who always insisted on making lengthy detours on field trips to find coffee which was freshly ground from coffee beans. His colleagues assumed he was a coffee snob but when one of them asked he replied that he did this because he was allergic to cockroaches.
It turns out that for preground coffee is all processed from huge stockpiles of coffee which are infested with cockroaches, it’s impossible to separate them so they all get ground up together and the preground coffee you buy is actually a blend of coffee beans and cockroaches (the same goes for chocolate of course!).
Anyway, the FDA has a website on “Defect Action Levels” for food, which is basically the acceptable limit of defects in food, it makes for some very interesting, yet stomach churning reading, here are some excerpts:
Blackberries (Drupelet, Canned or Frozen) - 10 or more whole insects or equivalent per 500g
Chocolate – 60 or more insect fragments and 1 or more rodent hairs per 100g
Curry powder – 100 or more insect fragments and 4 or more rodent hairs per 25g
Fig paste – 13 or more insect heads per 100g
Red fish / ocean perch – 3% of the fillets examined contained 1 or more copepods accompanied by pus pockets
Whole ginger – 3mg or more of mammilian excreta per pound
Macaroni and noodle products – 225 insect fragments or more and 4.5 insect hairs per 225g
Mushrooms (canned and dried) – 20 or more maggots of any size and 75 mites per 100g
Ground pepper – 475 insect fragments and 2 or more rodent hairs per 50g
Ground thyme – 925 insect fragments and 2 or more rodent hairs per 10g
Canned tomatoes – 2 or more maggots and 10 or more fly eggs (1:5 if both found) per 500g
Anyone feel hungry?
Before you throw up, bear in mind that these are MAXIMUM limits, hopefully the average levels are much much lower than this
I saw this in Hong Kong Plaza the other day.
I think it’s an all singing, all dancing, modern iron-lung, except made with space age materials like plastic, aluminium and some double sided sticky tape. I’m getting a double one for me and H, we’re going to lock ourselves inside with nothing but a crate of cornflakes, several gallons of UHT milk and a large toblerone to keep us going until this swine flu has passed us by.
Afterwards we’ll emerge into the wasteland, the only surviving members of the human race and start the new world, a proper one with rivers of chocolate, thorny bushes sprouting fruit pastilles, chickens that lay steaming chunks of chicken tikka onto nan-bread nests and magic corduroy trousers that never give you swamp-crotch.
A metro station medicine vending machine, where the rest of human race will spend their last few days panic buying Lemsip Extra and blackcurrant Strepsils
A while ago I blogged about my typical breakfast in Shanghai, healthily fried onion cakes and pumpkin cakes, probably in used Castrol GTX. Well, at last I’ve found some place near my office to get a healthy breakfast!
I noticed it a couple of weeks ago and noted the queues getting steadily bigger every day, then one day one of the drivers treated me to one, it was delicious. Basically they’re baozi but these ones are really really good (much better than the places near my apartment) and they’re steamed (= double healthy), I’ve been eating them for breakfast AND lunch lately.
Mixed meat (according to my colleague), which probably means it’s got the gubbins and everything continue reading…
“Why are most restaurant chefs male in China?”. A simple enough question which I asked my lunch companion as we waited for our food.
‘Ah, I think you already know the answer” he replied, laughing at my “bizarre” question.
A million random thoughts ran through my mind, I wasn’t sure what to expect; Oil vapour is bad for women’s health? Women typically wear unsuitable footwear for the kitchen? Women’s hands are too small for the larger commercial kitchen cookware? Women attract insects? Too many cold drinks?
I gave up trying to predict, “I really don’t know”, I said.
“Because women cannot judge the amount of ingredients like salt when they are menstruating” he replied.
Ah, yes, of course, how did I not think of that……..
H has just left for Canada, she’s going for 9 days for reasons so complicated I’m not sure I can explain.
Anyway, in the meantime, this leaves poor old me home-alone with nothing to do other than sit in the corner of my lounge rocking backwards and forwards while listening to The Carpenters on repeat.
Or, I could get off my arse and try to get out a bit…
I’ve had a go at patching together a rough agenda for the next 9 days taking in the enormous variety of night-time options Shanghai has to offer, it looks something like this:
Wednesday – pub (The Spot)
Thursday – pub
Friday – pub
Saturday – pub
Sunday – pub
Monday – pub
Tuesday – pub (just for a couple though, I’m not going mad next Tuesday)
Wednesday – pub
Thursday – pub
DingleSpeaks.com is ALL about giving, now’s your chance to give something back, why not have your say on how my life should be run for the next 9 days:
Maybe you think I should have a Pimm’s Cup at C’s on Monday the 27th April, a glass of Le Piat D’or with some random late night New Zealand guy at Cuvee on Thursday the 23rd April or maybe six bottles of Harbin sitting on the pavement outside the All Days on SongShang Lu on Sunday the 26th April, starting at 4pm. Whatever you think, why not let us know, all suggestions will be given consideration!
Answers on a stamped, addressed envelope, we regret that videotapes cannot be returned.
Shenzhen is a dangerous place! Ooooooooh by god it is, or so your colleagus will tell you if they find you’re travelling there, they’ll have you believing you’re travelling to Mogadishu or Bogota. “One time there was a woman” one of them tells me, “a man tried to take her bag but she wouldn’t let go, so he took out a knife and chopped off both of her arms…”; “if you ever meet a girl and she offers to come to your room then you must say no. If you let her into your room she will kill you and steal all your things” another tells me. There’s not a lot you can say about stories like this, they’re almost certainly urban myths and nobody I know actually knows anyone who has been a victim of violent crime (although I’ve met people who had their bags snatched in Shenzhen or Guangzhou so it certainly seems that crime is more prevalent than in Shanghai).
Anyway, last week I was stopping in Shenzhen city centre by myself for the first time (I’ve been there before, but normally with a chaperone who makes sure I don’t leave the hotel), I arrived early on Wednesday morning to meet a customer with a HK colleague, later as he dropped me off at the hotel he left me with the words “I would recommend you do not leave the hotel”. So anyway, it was with this advice still fresh in my mind that I went for a walk around the back streets close to my hotel, I took off my watch, left behind my wallet (just in case) and off I went with just my camera (bloggers never leave home without one), a few hundred RMB in cash and my mobile phone.
But before we get into that let me start by saying that I wasn’t staying in the best of areas and not the best of hotels, the “Grand” Chu as it was so called. Actually the hotel wasn’t too bad for a couple of hundred RMB, free internet etc, the room was quite large but the bed was a bit on the hard side. The first morning I skipped breakfast and left my 15th floor room at 8:45 am to meet the customer, I was just walking to the lifts when I heard a PING, the lift doors opened and I was almost knocked down as 10 local Chinese ran out from the lift and straight through the door behind me which led to the stairs. “There’s a fire!” I thought, until I noticed them running up the stairs instead of down, very curious. I got in the lift and exited on the ground floor to find a queue for the elevators which backed up straight across the lobby and approached the main doors, I’d estimate around 100 people waiting for the elevators. It turns out that the top half of the building (above 15) is an office block, the lifts are separated, hotel lifts on the left (only going to 1-15), office lifts on the right (floors 16-29). Of course, being China, the office workers from the lower office floors just cram into the hotel lift and then just run up the last flew flights of stairs (always run in China, never walk) meaning that the hotel guests have to fight it out with the office staff to get back to their rooms after breakfast (to be fair, on the second day there did seem a little more order, there was a guy stationed outside the elevators trying to stop office staff from taking the hotel elevators).
For eating in the hotel you have a couple of choices, on the first night I ate at their Western restaurant on the ground floor and chose the fillet steak, it didn’t look at all bad on the menu, served with sautéed potatoes and various vegetables, but when it came the steak was small (I’d estimate 6oz or so) and served with several thin slices of raw red pepper which I think was only there to make it look nice, no potatoes, no vegetables, nothing, just a chunk of meat with a garnish. I was just raising my hand to ask where the rest of my meal was when a waitress came across carrying a small bowl, “great” I thought, vegetables! She put it down, ah, it’s a bowl of rice… I complained, they brought across the hotel manager, she didn’t understand what the problem was, I compared my plate to the one in the menu “but this is just a picture????”, “yes, a picture with a meal on it, not a snack”, “do you think it is not enough?”, “yes, I think it’s no enough”, “would you like an extra bowl of rice?”, “no, I want the sautéed potatoes and vegetables I was expecting”, “but sir” (looking around wildly as if I was insane) “that is just a picture!!!”. I gave up (what was I thinking I could achieve by complaining?) and downed the steak (which tasted pretty good after all that) in 4 or 5 mouthfuls before nipping across to the hotel shop to buy a large pack of Lays and a Dove bar to take back to my room. The other restaurant in the hotel was a Chinese restaurant, I went there for lunch, I don’t even need to comment, have a look at this picture of their head chef (apparently some kind of war hero) amongst their racks of wine.
A smorgasbord of wine – to suit ANY taste (as long as it’s Great Wall red wine) continue reading…
A lot of the massage places round my hotel in Shenzhen had pictures like this outside.
Apparently it’s a new way of losing weight, by actually setting you on fire, they claim you can lose 15 jin (7.5kg) in 15 days (1kg every 2 days), presumably this is a combination of hair, skin and flesh.
Hmmm, here at DingleSpeaks we do like to experiment with science and stuff but I think we’ll be giving this a miss, unless I have a volunteer?
Ok, this is it folks, this here is pretty much the mustard right here, a live blog* of my return from Shenzhen
April 10th 2009
2:30pm – arrive at Shenzhen airport having finished early to try and change my 6:20 flight to Pudong to an earlier flight.
2:45pm – there’s nothing available, time for a foot massage
3:45pm – and an ice cream from KFC
4:00pm – check in using the new automatic check-in booths and make my way through security and to the gate ready for boarding at 5:50pm**
5:45pm – Almost everyone at the gate is queueing up by now in anticipation of boarding
5:55pm – an announcement along the lines of “the flight will be delayed because of bad weather in Shanghai”, I call H, the weather in Shanghai is glorious.
6:20pm – another announcement, the flight will be further delayed due to the ongoing bad weather (at this point every single person waiting has been up to the gate to ask when the flight will actually take off).
7:00pm – People take it in turns to hang around the gate desk pointing aggressively at the staff and shouting. It’s all in Chinese, I haven’t a clue what’s going on. The whole things go in waves, when someone gets particularly angry more people get up and join in and then eventually sit down again until someone else gets really angry, then they all get up again and point fingers accusingly, maybe I should join in.
7:30pm – Bottles of water and pepsi arrive at the gate, again we all surge forwards to get a drink, the girl behind the desk (who has already helped herself and is drinking from a bottle of water) tells us they are not available yet, we have to wait. They’re safe while they’re behind the desk but if any of them need the toilet I swear they’ll be torn to pieces by the mob before they make 3 metres. Rumours abound of the flight being too empty to take off, mechanical problems and financial problems at the airline.
7:45pm – A box of vouchers arrives, everyone rushes forward, myself included, they’re being snatched out of the girls hand quicker than she can get them out of the box, she quickly runs out, there’s not enough. The people who managed to get them look momentarily happy, then read them and look angry. I ask the girl what they are, “proof” she says, “proof of what?” I ask. “It says that the flight is late because of the weather”. Ah yes, of course, I forgot, I’m in China, food vouchers????? what was I thinking… continue reading…
