Dingle Speaks

On the way to work this morning I passed through a major metro station and noticed sniffer dogs patrolling the station. Not something you see every day but I’m all in favour of this extra security, as I’m sure everybody else should be.

Well that is I would be if the guy controlling the dog bothered to pick up it’s piles of poop. I narrowly avoided the pile nearest me and noticed it had already been stood in, leaving a trail of shitty footprints leading past me down the passageway.

Surely these guys should be issued with pooper scoopers to clean up the mess??

The only thing that dog’s sniffing right now is it’s own crap..

As you no doubt know I travel a lot around Asia and get to stay in some pretty nice places as well as some not so nice places. The place I’ve been staying for the last 4 days and for the next week or so falls somewhere in the middle, it has a somewhat splendid view and reasonable service but the staff seem hellbent on poking me full of holes and telling me what I can/cannot eat or drink for all manner of inconvenient chunks of the day ..

The room wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for either, sparsely decorated and uncomfortable seating, the dealbreaker for me though was the twin bed, which is likely to be occupied by a stranger at any point. Although thankfully after much complaining it’s so far remained empty.. The price isn’t too bad either, 300 RMB per night for a downtown Shanghai stay, although at one point the nurses insisted that I had to stay in the intensive care ward because I was a foreigner and the nurses there all spoke English (1000 rmb per night and every injection/procedure is charged at 2 or 3 times normal rate). We insisted that this was not acceptable and eventually they let us stay on the ward I needed to be at and then it turned out that most of the nurses spoke English anyway… Do they get commission or something??

It does have a decent TV though, but no DVD player. I’ve already checked round the back and I’ll be bringing my dvd player back with me along with a pile of dvds. (they let me home for the day as no procedures today), oh a private bathroom too, which is very welcome!

Oh yes, did I mention they poked me full of holes? Here’s a snippet, but I’ve honestly lost count of the number of times they’ve taken blood or injected me with something, it’s approaching 15 to 20 times so far I guess, I’ll have nothing left by the time I get out..

Here’s something interesting though, have a look at the nurses blood sampling tray:

Absolutely no rip-open sachets except for the needle. Everything is still in glass vials. They dip a cotton bud in the brown stuff and wipe it round your arm, then inject, then use a cotton ball dipped in alcohol to clean you up, which is great except when you squeeze to stop the bleeding you get drenched in alcohol, which in retrospect is probably a good thing rather than a bad thing, some of it probably gets absorbed into my bloodstream..  Also, note the bloody needle in the plastic tray from the previous patient, no sharps bins here. continue reading…

The big news this week is that I’m an uncle! Again!! My sister had a baby boy earlier in the week making an older sister of my niece Millie (I can’t believe she’s so grown up already), we’re all very pleased for them, they’ve got the perfect family now! I haven’t seen any photos yet though, HINT MOTHER!!!!

Difficult to follow that, here’s some photos I took instead!

Last weekend I met up with a photography group called Shanghai Exposed in the Jewish Quarter in Hongkou. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, I’d been along to a few flickr meets when I first arrived in Shanghai (mainly with the intention of meeting girls.. I was young, free and single!!) but I never took any nice photos with the group, it was more of a social event, and I’d made plenty of friends outside the group so I stopping going.

Anyway, I’d not really taken many photos for about 3 years but I started again recently and heard about the group on Fiona’s blog and thought I’d give it a go.

They mostly meet in the daytime during the week which isn’t so good for me but have occasional weekend meetups, which is where I ended up last weekend, in the pouring rain..

They were a nice group and I actually took some semi-decent pics for a change, a few of them were featured on Shanghaiist this week (just shows how standards have dropped…), anyway, enough babbling I’ll just get on with it

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I went for a walk with H the other day, trying to find a cobbler I’d seen somewhere between Xintiandi and Xujiahui Lu, we found him eventually on fuxing lu, close to xizang lu I think, but I wasn’t convinced, for 550RMB you get some pretty basic looking shoes, I’m going to keep looking  (reason being I’m looking for some Oxford cap toe shoes to go with my new suit, everything I’ve tried off the shelf so far doesn’t fit, I’ve got hobbit feet).

Anyway, while walking round we came across this place (below), which I’m sure I’ve seen before but never really paid any notice, it’s at 76 Fuxing Zhong Lu (near Xizang Lu)

It’s pretty small inside, the “museum” is probably only around 3m x 3m and has a large range of old locks on the wall. Now I’m not the sort of person who gets excited about locks so I didn’t really take a closer look, but maybe you ARE the sort of person who gets off on locks, in which case you might think this is worth checking out (and possibly consider some kind of counselling)

The front wall of the shop is, wait for it, a key cutting service (the excitement never stops at Dingle Speaks!!). Again, if you’re the sort of person who gets off on keys and locks you’ve probably dropped everything at this point and are rushing over to Fuxing Zhong Lu, GET SOME HELP!!

Another TOP NOTCH post from Dingle!

I’d read about a watertown in Pudong a couple of years back which was pretty much off the tourist radar and worth a visit. But then I completely forgot what it was called and kind of forgot about it.

Anyway, during the mayday weekend we talked about a day out in Hangzhou or Xitang but were worried about the crowds, I remembered the watertown.

So, we spent half an hour on the net and came up with Xinchang, a watertown in Pudong accessible by public transport (a 90 minute bus ride from Longyang Lu metro station). I didn’t fancy spending half the day getting there though so we figured we’d just chance it and take the metro to the last station on line 8 (aerospace museum), which gets us within 15 or 16 km of Xinchang and then figure it out from there.

By the way, here’s Xinchang:

View Larger Map

It wasn’t quite as easy as we thought, we arrived at the aerospace museum to find chaos, scores of people all trying to get away. We stopped a few taxis and nobody had heard of the place, or if they had heard of it they had “issues with the meter” and wanted a fixed price (no Dazhong out here, only orange taxis), normally in the region of 100rmb after sizing me up and making the usual fat=money assumption which is the norm in China. So, I disappeared for a few minutes to let H sort it out.

Sure enough within a minute or so I could hear the negotiations beginning in earnest as H took on a group of agitated illegal taxi drivers who were either giggling or grinding their brows with their palms as H explained exactly what she thought of their prices and what she was prepared to pay, in a voice which I am informed is not “screaming” but “a normal negotiation tone in China” while stabbing at them with her finger. Finally and inevitably they agreed, yes, they’d been wrong, her price was the right one, not theirs, they’d been thinking of another Xinchang which was much further away etc etc.. and so we set off, agreeing on 120rmb for the round trip.

Xinchang it transpires was the location of filming for “Lust Caution”, so my “off the radar” watertown was actually pretty much “on the radar” these days. Still, it’s a few years behind the likes of Xitang and Zhouzhang and instead of shop after shop of cultural artefactsgarbage you can still see local hairdressers and shops selling soy sauce etc.

The commercialised bit is nice but small, nothing compared to Xitang or Zhouzhang, but nice enough. The real gem is the hutong though, there are a large number of well preserved hutong with some splendid looking stone gates (see pics below) and wood carvings. Also, it’s well worth crossing the main road and walking away from the main centre along the canal (South I believe), the further away you get the more you get the sense of a real community rather than tourist hub, walking around the hutong here you see locals doing their washing, cooking and invariably leave their doors wide open allowing sneak peeks into the way they live.

All in all we were really glad we went and would really consider taking guests there as an alternative to Xitang or Zhouzhang, but we really need to figure out a better way to get to it…

Anyway, here’s some pics! continue reading…

Returning to the office in shanghai after a long break in the uk is always the same and this year was no exception.

It started the moment I was picked up in the morning, I noticed the driver kept craning his neck trying to look at me in the mirror, I asked my boss what he was doing, there was a brief exchange in Chinese, ‘he is trying to figure out how much weight you gained back in the uk’, ahhhhhhhhh, here we go….

Back in the office I decided not to mess around and headed for customer service, where last year I was told ‘we think you enjoy going back to the uk very much, because when you come back you are much fatter’. After wishing them a happy new year and exchanging a few pleasantries they huddled down and got down to the serious discussion.

The verdict?

‘you look…… better’ and ‘your jumper is much fashion’

GET IN!!!!!

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

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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…

After watching the world cup in Big Bamboo in Shanghai and then the Brass Monkey in Taipei I was pretty much blown away by the difference in quality.

Most of it was the picture, in Taipei they were showing in amazing high definition on a high contrast 3m projector screen while in Shanghai we have to make do with a fuzzy, poorly low-contrast picture.

It wasn’t just that though, the Brass Monkey had made a real effort, they’d totally cleared the bar area and put in rows and rows of seats like a cinema, their restaurant was serving food in cardboard take-away boxes so you didn’t need a table to eat, there were extra bottle bars dotted around the place (Big Bamboo by contrast was waitress service and your selection of drinks was limited to what she could be bothered to fetch for you. In my case I wanted a pint of Carlsberg, ““Oh, our draft beer is broken tonight, we only have bottles” the waitress told me, I pointed out that everyone else was drinking pints, “oh, yes, it broke just now” she said, so off I went to the bar to find everything as normal and they were still serving pints…), oh and a big thing for me, The Brass Monkey was no-smoking inside (proper no-smoking, not Shanghai style no-smoking)!!

So, when I got back to Shanghai I somewhat missed watching the World Cup in Taipei, we ended up watching the england match in the Park Tavern at the weekend, that was somewhat better than Bamboo, but still not as good. Then at the weekend I popped into my local game/dvd shop to buy a couple of movies and noticed a box in front of their tv and the empty box at the side, the empty box had 1080i written on it (the resolution of HD tv) so I asked what it was. “Oh, this is so you can watch the world cup in high definition” they said. Well, within about 10 minutes I was back at home wiring it up, and it was well worth the 480 kuai we paid for it.

Basically it turns out there are two domestic HD channels which I’d never heard of, CCTV-HD and Dong-Fang, they broadcast terrestially. So you basically buy a digital set-top box and an aerial (which you just seem to have to place near a window, there’s no aiming and it seems like it doesn’t even have to be outside) and away you go.

So far it looks amazing, the picture is a bit up and down, it almost seems like they compress the signal a little more during the daytime repeats, it looks amazing for the live games though (with english commentary from radio 5 live!). Here are some pictures of the image (click for full size images):

HDTV – watching England get humiliated by countries I’ve barely heard of will be even more painful in jaw-droppingly sharp HD, in fact I’m going to watch the England match in the pub…

Naturally the first thing H wanted to do when we set this up was watch the news to take a look at how dreadful the presenters looked in “real life”. Sure enough the news came on and I heard H screaming with laughter from the lounge, sure enough the presenter had a face like the surface of the moon and was absolutely caked in powder and make-up…

At the moment it seems like CCTV-HD is showing pretty much 24 hour coverage of the world cup, not sure what their normal footage is going to be like..

Edit:

here’s how the setup looks:

I’ve just read something that says you should point the aerial towards the pearl tower, well I’m pointing nowhere near it but still getting a great picture.

Oh, you’ll need to buy a HDMI cable to connect to the tv, other than that everything’s in the box

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….