The other weekened we packed our bags and went off to Anhui province with a couple of friends for a day in the country.
We took the overnight train which I have to say was a bad option, we couldn’t get seats/bunks together so we could only spend a few hours chatting before other passengers arrived and we had to separate. The train left Shanghai at something like 5:45pm so it ended up a long long sleepless night. We’d got bunks in the hard sleeper section of the train which is totally open so every time I nodded off I’d get woken by groups people walking for a cigarette or to use the toilet and talking or bumping into my bunk.
Anyway, we finally arrived in Huangshan at around 7am, dumped our bags in the hotel and set out for Qiyunshan by taxi.
At the base of the mountain we bought tickets for the cable car and joined the long queue to get up the mountain (there’s no way I was going to even consider walking up after the sleepless night I’d had).
It turned out to be a really enjoyable day, in some ways it was a typical Chinese “nature” trail (concrete paths and steel hand rails traversed by tour groups with megaphone-laden guides) but there was more to it, it seemed less artificial than other, similar places I’ve been to. For example we once went to a lake near Wuxi (I forget the name) and took a boat out to a small island in the lake to see a waterfall (alarm bells were already ringing, how can you have a waterfall in the middle of a lake? where does the water come from?), sure enough we arrived on the island and were lead to the waterfall, the guide described it as the 17 dragon double holiness waterfall (or some other nonsense) which no doubt had some kind of magical power if you were able to rinse your hands in it. I popped round the side for a look and sure enough, the whole thing was made of concrete, no doubt with water pumped up from the lake.. Later on the same trip we were introduced to “Squirrel Hill” which, despite it’s natural sounding name turned out to be just a hill with lots of cages containing squirrels (did I never blog about this??). Anyway, none of that at Qiyunshan, everything seemed relatively real..
Anyway, here are some pics from the day, I’ll add comments where I can
The day was a bit hazy but the view from the top was still amazing, we could make out the shadows of the surrounding mountains and see the lush green fields below. We were told we’d just missed the flowering time by one week though (seas of yellow etc)
I visited a customer yesterday, among the many items they deal in they’ve started moving into iPhone covers.
During the meeting I was eyeing up some neat covers that clip into matching desk stands which you can flip from horizontal to vertical.
We eventually talked about iPhones and I mentioned that I liked some of their stuff. “AH!” he said, “let me get you something” and off he went.
He came back with something and picked up my phone, discarded the old cover, fitted a new one and handed it back.
Now, this is the cover I used to have, nice and tasteful matt black:
And this is what I now have:
Fortunately I managed to retrieve my old cover on the way out….
I had my annual medical check yesterday, well I say “annual” but I haven’t actually had one since 2005, so I guess that makes it hexannual or something. Anyway it started well but rapidly descended into an odd affair when I had the ultrasound.
It all started innocently enough, the guy had asked me to lift up my top so that he could take a look at my liver and was having a good rummage around with his fancy machine. “It’s fatty liver” he told me via H after probing around for a while, “medium fatty” he said looking at me accusingly, “now hold on, is there a problem here officer? It’s all paid for you know!! Finest English sausages and pints of ale what what!” I replied.
He seemed satisfied at that and continued further south, exploring my entrails with renewed zeal. “Everything’s normal” he informed us, almost disappointedly. Good lord, he’d already got me on the liver, what more does he want?
Further south he went until H popped out to receive a call, he motioned at me to undo my trouser button, which I did, then he motioned for me to undo my zip and pull the whole lot down. I did what he said but couldn’t help wondering what his game was with me lying there naked in the middle with my cumberland curl lolling around.
He shouted something over to the nurse at the other side of the screen, I’d spotted her on the way in, a saucy little minx she was too, “she must be on her way round” I thought, “maybe this isn’t going to be so bad after all”.
I was just beginning to contemplate this when he grasped my firehouse and pointed it north, straight at me, asking me to hold it down with a bundle of tissues. “Hello I thought, if this thing goes off it could have my eye out, where’s this bloody nurse anyway?” I turned my head to one side to minimise the damage only to see the guy with one of the larger probes in hand, applying the best part of half a tube of lubricant to the tip. “Good lord, this is an outrage, where on earth does he think he’s putting that?” I thought “and why is this nurse taking so long?”
Well, before I could utter a syllable of complaint he was rubbing the thing over my plums and staring at his monitor, he called over to the nurse, who had apparently never moved an inch and shouted a series of measurements. I could hear her typing away on the computer, “you’re wasting your time” I thought, “she’s on QQ”.
At this point H returned from the call and wandered back round the curtain, virtually collapsing with laughter the moment she saw what was going on. “Close call that”, I thought, “good job that nurse stayed put.”
He continued in this manner until he achieved satisfaction and handed me a bundle of tissues to clean myself up. “Everything is ok” he informed H, “ok? OK??? What part of this whole experience has been ok I wondered??”
Overall: 0/10 – I did not achieve climax and left the room basically feeling abused
When the shopping mall at Madang Lu/Xujiahui Lu opened at the start of Expo last year I was quite excited, it’s just around the corner from me and the area until then had been a bit stagnant, I imagined a mall full of Starbucks/Costa Coffee cafe’s, cool clothes shops (with no clothes that fit me), maybe a couple of gadget shops, great bread etc..
Well, I was right on one count, they did have a good bread shop, but nothing else. On the day it opened it was already more than half full of shops, mostly selling clothes and toiletries, but also a Korean food shop and a couple of home furnishing shops, it definitely had potential. Everybody was hoping to cash in on expo, the mall was on the same corner as one of the main expo entrances (line 13) and I think everyone expected to make a fortune from the expo crowds.
Except they overlooked one thing, when people arrive in the morning to visit expo, they don’t want to go shopping and potentially have to carry round bags full of shopping every day, they want to get straight into the expo site and look around. Also, when they leave the expo site, they don’t want to go walking round a shopping mall looking at stuff, they just want to go home or go for dinner.
So from day 1 the mall was a ghost town.
Pretty soon the shops started closing down, one stall near the front door was occupied by two different shops in the first six months and both closed down within about 3 months, one by one the other shops pretty much all followed suit. Now the place is completely empty apart from the much reduced bread shop (two complete rows of storage units is now down to 1 or 2 smaller units with vastly reduced range), a Happy Lemon drink shop and a Japanese grocery stall which opened a couple of months ago.
I took some photos a couple of weeks ago
The latest we heard is that the whole place is now going to become a Suning Electrical Store, but they’ll allow the breadshop, the Happy Lemon and the Grocery Store to remain.
You’ve got to wonder though, when will Shanghai decide it has enough shopping malls?
edit: just walked past, the Japanese grocery and happy lemon have also closed down…..
I updated my iPhone to 4.3.1 recently and got major battery issues, I went from normal usage (over a day) to needing to recharge about 3 times a day, even when mostly on standby.
Upgrading to 4.3.2 didn’t help
Two nights ago I went to bed at midnight with my phone at 60% then woke up at 6am with a dead phone, I recharged to 15% before leaving for the office, then found my phone was dead again on arriving at the office 45 mins later..
Not sure what the problem was but my iPhone was constantly hot because of the rate the battery wad being eaten up. Similar problems have been noted on the net but nobody seemed to have a solution (switching off ping didn’t help). My bet is on one of the 3rd party apps I have installed, it seems hard to believe that it could be a standard Apple app, you’ve got to believe they test updates on all their own stuff before releasing!
So I switched off everything (location services, push alerts, notification services, external mail etc etc), reset the iPhone and so far my battery is back to normal, I’m down 20% in 15 hours (compared to 15% in 1 hour yesterday).
Now I’m slowly reintroducing services 1 by 1 to see which is the culprit, external mail had no effect, about to reintroduce push email, will update later!
Edit: Ok, switching notifications back on had no impact on battery usage.
I then tried switching back to push for my work email account, with the phone on standby the battery dropped 10% in just 35 minutes.
I switched off push and the battery only lost 2% in 90 minutes.
So, it’s looking like an issue with pushed email. For reference i’m using mobileiron to access my work email, possibly an incompatibility issue with the latest updates.
This post is dedicated to irregular commentator balticninja, I discovered yesterday that he’s currently battling regular bouts of trapped wind and bloating. I immediately donated a strip of Deflatine, but come on folks lets all send him our best wishes.
DON’T LOSE THE FAITH BALTIC!!!
Anyhows, that’s enough off that, time to release a bit of my trapped wind from this weekend (when I say ‘release trapped wind’ what I actually mean is ‘upload photos off my phone..’ Ok?)
Chef assembly on something-or-other Lu, shanghai, china
A dapper gent surfing his streetbike down huaihai Lu
Impolite door sign on ruijin Lu(ish)
I defy you to read this sign without thinking in a comedy Chinese accent..
That’s it really, pretty poor show eh…
Flexibility – 10/10
Ability to recognise a perfectly good seating opportunity – 0/10
For reference this was photographed next to street sign number Q/12JH4366 in Xuhui, which I believe dates from 2008.
I blogged a while ago about how shanghai was still mourning over the tragic death of Paul the Octopus
(link to be inserted: please do not read further until the linkback is inserted)
edit: here is the link. you may now read on
Well you can imagine my excitement last night as I fiddled around with the touchscreen display in the taxi and came across good old Paul floating around wearing a crown of all things?? (a guy in the pub told me there’s porn on these things somewhere but i’ve been through pretty much every page on the system and can’t find anything, it’s cost me a small fortune in taxi fare).
He’s not looking that well though bless him.. Probably been out on the razz with spongebob and whatnot..
Apologies for the poor image quality, but there was this bus and the taxi was getting past it somehow, oh, and then there were several cars etc etc…
When are the Japanese going to make Paul the octopus porn anyway??? Well overdue….
I mentioned in the last post that one of the events on the course was about overcoming fears, you had to choose between climbing and caving.
Now, I used to climb as a student, so that wasn’t a challenge for me (albeit that was 15 years and 15 kilos ago) but the thought of caving was terrifying, I’m a bit claustrophobic and the thought of all those tight squeezes was the stuff of nightmares (literally).
So I chose caving..
We got overalled up, jumped into the van and drove to this car park in a forest and walked to a smallish hole in the ground with a steel door across it. We opened it up and down we went. The cave was an old iron mine and had the odd belly scramble from chamber to chamber but nothing too bad. Not beautiful by any means, just a dirty, muddy, hole in the ground..
Then we stopped, “now then, we’ve got a bit of a challenge for you, there’s a bit of a squeeze here, have a look”. One by one we crawled on our bellys up a slope with a very low roof to look down a hole that i’m certain my head wouldn’t even fit through. He described the technique for getting through, you basically had to crawl up to it on your belly then spin round and drop your legs down into a narrow trough (he said trough but i’m sure he meant coffin) and through the tiny keyhole. Then drop your whole body down in the trough on your side (with your nose pretty much touching one side and the back of your helmet the other) and kind of squirm through, feet first, into a tube about 2m long which then started to open up. I started to consider suicide as an option..
“Right, some of you CAN fit through here, some of you CAN’T and some of you WON’T, who’s in which group?”. Then he turned to me, looked me up and down and said “yeah, you can’t”, well, the relief! I could have hugged him!!
That was pretty much the only challenging bit in the cave and as we finally made our way back out I thanked the instructors and said that I was glad to get it finished with and would never have to go down a cave again. I swear I saw them snigger.
Sure enough, the next day was caving part 2, the wet cave. Basically similar to the day before but more claustrophobic and with the added bonus of wading through a stream which was only 3 deg C. At a couple of points we had to lie down on our backs in the stream and scramble underneath low lying rocks. I mean, am i missing something?? Are cavers basically extreme masochists????
NEVER AGAIN!!!
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