Dingle Speaks

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…..

After the Urban Future Pavilion, which I mentioned the other day we went the other part of the Urban Best Practise Area where cities from round the world had individual pavilions or booths in large halls.

Some of these were a bit lame but some were really cool, the Montreal booth had this cool movie showing about how they’d converted a quarry into parkland, sounds kind of ordinary except the thing was 3D. The screen was made up of smallish white blocks which moved out around half a metre or so depending on what was being shown, it was reclined at about 45° to maximise the effect, it looked best when they were sweeping across the rock face and the whole screen rippled with the rocks, a bit noisy though…

Next we called in at the Shanghai Pavilion, which was pretty much the Philips pavilion as every single thing inside was made by Philips, here are some pics:

Ok, this didn't actually say "Phillips" on it, but I'm sure they've had a hand in it

continue reading…

Yes, after all my complaining last time I actually went back to Expo, to be honest H’s continuous nagging about going again had increased sufficiently to overtake memories of the enormous queues and make me just want to get it over and done with to shut her up. As a compromise I said “ok, but can we go to this urban thing I read about on the interwebs?”, astonishingly she agreed so i finished work early and off we went at about 5pm.

We got off the metro at the puxi side and started to walk to the urban thing (ok, it’s the Urban Best Practice Area, I just looked it up), I’d looked at the puxi side on a map and it’s way smaller than the pudong side. It must have taken us 40 minutes of walking before we got there, I forgot how ginormous expo was, we were both pretty much knackered by the time we got to the urban area.

Anyway, first up was some future thing (it’s the Urban Future Pavilion) in the huge old Nanshi power plant, a lot of this we just walked through, displays about how cities should take account of nature when they are built etc etc (yawn) and a room full of future gadgets, which seemed pretty much tomorrow morning than particularly futuristic. Then we walked into an enormous hall which was about cities of the future and had this huge wall at one end, probably 3-4 stories high showing this amazing trippy video clip about a group of kids, a kind of futuristic famous 5, all talking about what they think cities of the future will be like. “To have more space the cities of the future should be built on the seas. The views would be great and we would play in the ocean, swimming like fish, with artificial gills”. They imagine themselves in their future utopias and their friends come to visit, kind of like a futuristic Mr Ben.

We sat down and turned on, tuned in and dropped out, we must have ended up watching the entire thing almost twice before we could tear ourselves away.

After watching it I came to the following conclusions:

• In the future kids will ride round on 1950′s jetsons style hoverboards.
• Poor kids have to make do with a steroid enhanced bambi
• Adults don’t exist apart from in their minds

Here are some pics:

I looked for the entire video but couldn’t find it anywhere (actually i’ve got a minute of it on my camera but can’t figure out how to upload to youko, you’ll have to make do with this annoying clip from CCTV where the woman never shuts up:

continue reading…

Yes, I went back to Expo again (I’m bonkers me, BONKERS!!!), but more on that later, here’s samfing what I sin wif my own eyes innit.

Kung Fu masters, as you know, are almost extinct, hardly surprising since whenever they wander into each other’s turf they pretty much fight to the death, although not immediately, the good one gets a good old whupping first, then trains some more and comes back and roundhouses the bad guys head off (the savages have never even heard of Marquess of Queensberry rules and aren’t even affiliated to one of the major boxing organisations), on rare occasions the bad guy will forego death to become the good guy’s student and reform his bad ways, but this is very rare.

Anyway, the guys at expo have come up with a great idea, why not train Kung Fu masters to be able to mark their territories in the wild so that they don’t wander onto each other’s territory and roundhouse each other to death. Maybe we can even save this dying breed.

They made some helpful statues demonstrating this:

Real kung fu masters probably pee concentrated acid, that poor couple down below are catching the overspray

You know what, territory marking doesn’t even have to interfere with with what they do best:

Marking turf while kicking the hell out of a rival monastery, "YOU KILLED MY TEACHERRRRRRRRRRRR" etc..

Marking turf while kicking the hell out of a errr... miniature car

Well, I’ve blogged before about queuing in Luwan and queuing for expo itself so I wasn’t especially surprised when I came tumbling out of a taxi close to my apartment the other night (after the driver got bored of me falling asleep and failing to point out the correct turning, meaning he had to continually drive round in a loop) and finding an enormous queue for Expo already, in the middle of the night.

The time was around 4am (I know this as my UK colleague was getting picked up for his flight at 4:45 am and we left the pub at the same time so he could go back and finish packing and stuff), I was completely hammered too (for the record “the Rhumerie” is the worst bar I’ve ever been to in Shanghai) so I piled straight into the queue taking photos left right and centre with my mobile phone, the vast majority of which are just blurred grey and black shadows.

I tried to ask people what motivated them to queue through the night but unfortunately it just came out as “HEEEEEEEEEYYYYYY NI HAO SHUAI GE!!!!”, so there’s no satisfying conclusion to meat out this post with, I’ll just have to blather on about nothing as usual.

Here’s a couple of pics that actually came out:

Yes it's 4am and people are queuing up to spend their entire day queuing up outside pavilions.

Yes, my mobile camera is shit even in the daytime, let alone when it's dark!

One last photo before I made for the bed

Well, I didn’t want to go but H finally forced talked me into it. Not even on a normal day either, on a saturday.. which by all counts should be far worse than a weekday.

And it wasn’t half busy, as we were regularly reminded as we walked round, “THE QUEUE FOR THE GERMANY PAVILION, THE UK PAVILION AND THE US PAVILION IS NOW 4 HOURS, THE QUEUE FOR THE FRANCE PAVILION AND SWISS PAVILION IS 3 HOURS.. etc etc etc” (the announcement didn’t actually say “etc etc etc”, I added that bit myself… Actually it turns out that yesterday, when I was there was the busiest day and the first day which the park reached it’s full capacity of half a million people (stats here), lucky me, the Saturday before there was only 360,000…

Anyway, I’ll probably blog about a couple of things, but I won’t bore you with more pavilion pics etc which everyone has no doubt already seen, ok, just one:

How H would look if she grew a ginormous platinum ‘fro

This is how Expo looks when there’s half a million people there:

Looks like a lot of fun negotiating those crowds eh!

We took a golf cart through the crowds to get from one side of Expo (Europe) to the other side (Asia), it took an age to wind  its way through the crowds.

Here’s something weird though, why would a golf buggy which typically moves at between 5 km/h and moves at a maximum of 10km/h need a speedo that goes all the way up to 100km/h??? Do they race these things in the middle of the night when the park is closed?

BOSS BOSS WE REALLY FUCKED UP THIS TIME!!

What?? what is it?? what did we do??

Well, you know the man said we had to get the building completed before EXPO in 2011?

Yeah…

Well it’s NOT 2011, it’s 2010!!! It starts in a few weeks and the man’s coming back to check on our progress, what are we going to do???

Hmm, I’ve got an idea so crazy that it might just work!

It’s not very often I blog twice in a day but I opened my curtains this morning to see the entire street filled with people. I live opposite one of the entrances to expo and we’d seen signs going up saying “tickets” since the weekend.

There have been rumours in the press about locals getting one free ticket per household and presumably today is the day they’re made available!

Here are a couple of photos, I’m praying it’s not going to be like this during expo itself!!!!

Bear in mind this is only half of it, there’s a separate queue coming from the other side! Unfortunately I can’t see how far the queue goes in the other direction..

Personally, I’d rather just pay than queue in that nonsense….

It was a glorious Sunday in Shanghai yesterday so me and her took the metro to nanjing dong lu and walked down to the new bund which opened yesterday.

Unfortunately half of Shanghai had the same idea…

Getting close to the waterfront was nigh on impossible, but we persevered and eventually fought our way through. Actually we were helped by a police helicopter flying overhead, most people stopped for several minutes, all open mouthed and pointy fingered allowing us to sneak through to the front. Thiking about it, when was the last time I saw a helicopter in China, I really can’t remember seeing one before at all..

There were so many people that at first it was difficult to work out what had actually changed, but as we made it further away from nanjing dong lu it became more apparent, but first let’s look how things used to be:

To be honest I really didn’t appreciate the scale of the change until I saw this pic on the net (sorry pic owner, I lost the link!!). There used to be an 11 lane highway splitting the building fronts from the waterfront itself, with subway crossings to get over from the buildings to the waterfront. The area between the waterfront and the road was pretty much blocked up with trees etc, essentially cutting off the buildings visually from the waterfront on large sections of the bund (you’d either walk in front of the buildings or along the water, you couldn’t really enjoy both).

continue reading…