There Goes the Neighbourhood! (part 2)

After checking out Baidu Lu (see this post), I thought I would extend my documentation of this community by venturing inside one of the old housing complexes.  Here I got a little nervous.  Given the half-demolished nature of the neighbourhood, it was like entering a construction site (one without any regard to public safety).  But, also, I assumed that there may be people still living inside, and me poking around with a camera might be a little confronting, if not condescending, in nature.

But, I was genuine fascinated about what lay behind the decaying walls of the neighbourhood.

So, I caught the eye of two women who were standing at the window of an apartment above one of the shopfronts.  I showed my camera, gestured towards the nearest gateway and asked “ke yi ma?” (“can I?”).  Whether it was the content or the dodgy linguistics of my question, they laughed and answered “ke yi”, beckoning me through.  It was typical Chinese openness and helpfulness.

Despite partial demolition, the general layout of the neighbourhood was in tact – pedestrian laneways running deep into the complex from the street, giving access to apartment buildings via rows of private and shared courtyard spaces.  Often, the buildings would extend over the laneway, creating a series of thresholds as I moved deeper inside.

At the end of one laneway, I discovered a shikumen house – the traditional Shanghai housing style that I discussed in this post.  “Shikumen” translates as “stone gate”, through which the residents entered their private courtyard, and then, their house.

These larger houses often sit at the rear of complexes, buffered from the street by apartment buildings, and housing the bigger families and wealthier residents of the community.  This one, it seemed, was still being occupied, as evidenced by laundry hang in and around the house.

Throughout the neighbourhood, I caught sight of small signs of life, both present and past.

From community notice boards …

… to advertisements stencilled onto the walls (usually selling hardware or other products) …

… and the contrast of formal and informal methods of orientation and identity.  The whole place had a sense of falling apart, rather than being torn down – the slow decay of the buildings, and the community itself.

Whenever I encountered people, they tended to give me a quick glance then happily ignored my presence, in favour of getting on with whatever they were doing.  If I was in the middle of a construction site, full of blind corners and unfamiliar people, anywhere else in the world, I would be feeling incredibly nervous about my personal safety. Here, I guess, there is more to fear from the random collapse of a wall or an unexpected hole in the ground.

The construction (or rather, reconstruction) workers are all housed on site, as is typical on Chinese work sites.  So, beside the old neighbourhood stands new dormitory accommodation, including cramped sleeping quarters, along areas for bathing and cooking.  Most of the workforce would be migrants, from smaller cities and rural areas, based temporarily in Shanghai during the off-season of the agricultural cycle.

From scale to material to detail, the contrast between old and new is clear and sudden.

That is, in construction process, as well as architectural product.

 

There Goes the Neighbourhood! (part 1)

This is Baidu Lu (Street).  It’s quite a short street that runs east-west just south of one of Shanghai’s main roads, Fuxing Lu.  And it is undergoing a major make-over.

In the distance, at the eastern end of the street and closer to Huangpu River, you can see several new apartment buildings, clustered together in a complex that also contains office buildings, restaurants and gymnasium, and a massive underground car park.   And, in front, the remains of how the street once looked – a jumble of street-side shops, with residences above, arranged around a network of laneways and pedestrian pathways.  Of course, it’s already being demolished, to make way for more the new stuff.  So, I thought it was worth documenting it before it is razed … all the name of “progress” …

No-one could argue that the architecture is beautiful.  In fact, I assume that no architect would have been involved in its conception or construction.  These buildings would have been built quickly and cheaply, and haven’t seen much in the way of maintenance since.

Nonetheless, they have a certain charm.  The scale is nice, especially measured against the contemporary multi-lane motorways and tower blocks of the modern city.

In particular, I like the little laneways that run through these neighbourhoods.  (See my follow-up post for a closer look inside the neighbourhood…)

The streets and lanes traditionally would have been – and to some extent, still are – full of activity, from the manufacture and selling of goods, cooking and washing (laundry, crockery, small children, motor scooters), and of course, transportation of people and stuff.

Or, often inactivity.  Amidst the noise and chaos, one can still grab a snooze.

Buildings seemed governed by a set of principles that could be straight out of City Planning for Dummies.  Building to the street edge.  Creating an active frontage (eg retail).  Building height to relate to the human scale.  Use of consistent materials and detailing.

Yet, there is no sense of sameness here.  Buildings have grown organically, with quirky additions and modifications over time.  Internal functions spill onto and across the footpath, even onto the road.

Interactions between people are unplanned, sometimes in conflict, but all part of the colour and chaos of the neighbourhood.  It’s the way a community is meant to be.

And yet, people are desiring a new way to live … where access to your apartment is from air-conditioned car, via basement car-park to private lift, where dinner is delivered to your door, and where you scarcely need to speak to another person.

And where streets end up looking like this.

I guess we all desire to live in an environment that is comfortable and safe and good-looking.  But, when the focus turns so sharply to the space of the individual (i.e. the private home), it is the space of the community (i.e. the street) that suffers.  And in a place where “progress” is being sought, and delivered, at such a rapid pace, the impact is even more pronounced.

Dull building alert: Shanghai Library

Shanghai’s French Concession is where you find most of the city’s old Art Deco apartment blocks, small streets and laneways, cafes and galleries. But, every so often, you’ll encounter a building (or complex of buildings) that isn’t playing by the rules.  The Shanghai Library is one such building.

On my walk to one of the local Metro stations, having just passed the grand mansions of Yongfu Road (now mostly converted to consulates and expensive restaurants) and making my final turn toward the station, the library leaps out of the surrounding low-scale neighbourhood.

Closer, against the overhead electricity cables, it almost looks like one of those two-point perspective drawings I was taught to draw in Architecture school – with construction lines yet to be erased.  It suggests that the building may have looked OK on the architect’s drawing board.  But, in it’s tile-clad reality, totally out of scale and character with its context, not so much.

Said architect (a Zhang Jie Zheng) didn’t seem to spend much time on making the entry to the building a pleasant experience – it somehow manages to be hidden and foreboding at the same time.

Included is a replica of Rodin’s The Thinker.  You don’t have to guess what I was thinking at this moment, I’ve already said it.

The building is big – over 80,000 square metres, and housing 13.2 million books and 30 million other items.  Of course, it is second in size to the Beijing National Library.

But, at over 100 metres high, it is the tallest library in the world.  That way, the correct order of things is respected – Beijing must always have the biggest (and thus, most important), Shanghai can be content with tallest or shiniest or newest.

At almost 20 years old, the library is not that new by Chinese standards.  But, when the light hits at the right angle, it definitely can be shiny.

It can be a good building to photograph on one of Shanghai’s rare blue-sky days.

Not that this makes it a good building.

In fact, anything but.

 

May Update / Huh Wot!

The Huh Wot gallery has been updated!
Pock or Rock, who cares?!

Click here to see the latest in Chinglish mastery….

Figuring out the last year …

WordPress has just introduced a few new ways of tracking what’s happening with my blog.

The main “dashboard”, as they call it (I really tire of car-based metaphors, like cars are the only way to get anywhere …), shows a summary of recent activity – like my posts and other people’s comments.  I now have made 135 posts, which on average, have each received about 4 comments.It has also detected and deleted over 3000 spam messages, which is most kind.  I did find one real message lurking in my ‘spam’ folder, so hopefully that has been the only one it trashed accidentally.  I also have a lengthy list of draft posts … just waiting for some spare time.

WordPress tells me that my top commentators are luKe, bitbot, adina west, natalie, justin and katharine (at least some of those names are real!).  Thanks to all who have made comments.  I love comments!

The blog also has a page devoted to view-stats.  Over the last couple of years, the blog has had nearly 15,000 views (ie one page being opened), an average of about 20 per day.  Admittedly, for most regular bloggers, this would be considered a relatively low figure, but I guess I haven’t been making much effort to cross-promote via other social media … trying to keep a small shred of anonymity.

As WordPress loves to remind me, the more I blog, the more views I get.  But, I also have a life enough to not worry too much about getting a million hits and becoming an interwebs sensation.

This page also tells me how some people arrive at the blog – via search terms entered into Google and other search engines.  Yesterday, this is how 12 people found the blog. Some of the terms used are pretty amusing … “monkey pulls the turnip”, “people in pyjamas” or “functionalism as an oxymoron” are just a few of the important issues that I appear to have been writing about.

When I view the stats over the last 2 years, I can see which topics draw in the crowds.  Far and away, the most compelling topic is Wee Britain, invented by the TV show Arrested Development and referred to in my post on Thamestown.  Similarly, various searches for “Hollandtown“, “Holland Village“, “fake Holland in Shanghai” have led people to this post, as searches about Chinese ghost towns, especially Ordos City, have taken people to this post about Kangabashi.

25 people have found my blog by searching for “how to please your parents” – most likely disappointed to find that my best advice is to build them a ridiculously large garden. A similar number arrived via searches for “baby split pants” – presumedly to find this post.

WordPress doesn’t link the search term with the actual page viewed, so I am not always sure of how the connection gets made.  Some of the more interesting searches have been “stylish farmer look” (2 people, heading here), “babies neglected and tied to high chairs in China” (3 people, not sure what page they ended up at), “chocolates and a louis vuitton bag for valentines day” (2 people actually put these words into Google!), “crayzy sex” (woah!), “pyjama slap” (this means something to at least 2 people in world) and “seducing your mother” (I did ask for this … see here).

The third biggest group of random visitors must have enjoyed reading my post on the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall … containing what I described as a “huge-ass model” of the city.  Over 100 people have accessed this page via searches for a variety of terms, including “models with huge asses“, “huge ass” and “ass models“.

 

 

A new function is a map showing the geographic spread of blog viewers.  As you can see, over the last two months, I am reaching a pretty global audience.  Although, I admit, most of these are random single-view visitors – I am yet to befriend anyone currently based in Finland, Ethiopia or Honduras.  But, Australians!  Currently second place to the US … I see you can pick up your act a little.

All this stat-crunching inspired me to make a few little diagrams of my own, summarising some of the other things that I have been doing recently.

For example, over the last 12 months, I spend a lot of time on planes – over 150 hours in the air (about a full week … not to mention the time spent in airport, sometimes waiting several hours for a delayed plane).  I went to Lanzhou 5 times, Tianjin (see here and here and here) quite a lot, Sydney 4 times.  The year before was just the same.  It’s mostly for work.  Small carbon footprint, begone!

But, when I can, I will catch the train for work.  The last long-haul was to Rui’an – normally it is a 5.5 hour ride, but as they had had a fatal crash the week before, everything was slowed by several hours.  We now fly there instead.  Last year, they opened the Beijing-Shanghai express line, so we used that to get to the capital for our National Holiday last year (see here and here and here and here and here and here).  It’s an important part of the huge and quite amazing rail network that China is building.  It’s particularly good for accessing the big cities close to Shanghai (like Nanjing, which I’ve been to, like, a million times … see here and here and here)

 

And finally, here is a diagram of the vegetarian restaurants of Shanghai, matched with the frequency of our visits.  The big blobs (Kush, Annamaya and Godly) have the distinction of great food and/or close proximity to our apartment.

Surely eating all of that vegetarian food has got to go some way towards offsetting my carbon-hungry travel habits …

 

I See Red! aka The Amazing Hong Yi

So, lately one of my work buddies here in Shanghai has become a bit of an interwebs sensation.  Her name is Hong but she calls herself Red (‘hong’ being ‘red’ in Chinese).  She is an architect by day and an unconventional artist (her description) by night and weekend.  Being a wacky and creative type (needless to say, being an architect and such), she has taken to making portraits of famous people using odd materials.  It all started with a chili-paste-on-a-plate rendition of Justin Beiber.

But, after making this portrait of Yao Ming (with a basketball dipped in paint, quite obviously…) things went a little  ballistic – almost a million views of Youtube, along with a flood of TV interviews, magazine articles and job offers.

 

 

Hong is in her “famous Chinese people” phase, so followed up with this portrait of the actor Jay Chou.  I was in the office on the weekend that this was being made and it smelled wonderful!

 

 

For her next artwork – featuring the filmamker Zhang Yimou – Hong got a few of us from the office to help out.

Inspired by the colour and texture of his films, as well as Shanghai’s famous laneway laundry,the portrait is made of almost a thousand socks, pinned together like pixels from an image.  So we stayed late at work one Friday night and helped thread and arrange the socks into place.  I was on forehead-to-eye duty.

Here is the artist herself, in a blurred state of creative fervour.  I like to call her the Amazing Hong Yi, not only because it’s an accurate description, but because it contrasts with her very self-deprecating and good-humoured character (seemingly intact, despite all the attention she has been receiving lately).

Here is a video of the portrait being installed into one of Shanghai’s traditional lilongs.

 

 

Intended as a temporary installation, the portrait was then bought to our office where it hangs inside the entry space to the studio.

Mounted at the end of the central spine of the building and at about 4 metres high, Mr Zhang is quite a sight, looking out over our workplace like a benevolent Big Brother.

(Not that she needs any help with promotion, you can see more of Hong’s work at her website, www.ohiseered.com)

Don’t eat meat! Don’t seduce your mother!

Recently, I’ve been working on a project in Dazu, which is located a couple of hours west of China’s largest city, Chongqing.  On my first visit there, our client was kind enough to organise a trip to see the area’s most famous attraction, the Dazu Rock Carvings.  This series of carvings, some up to 1200 years old, depict and are influenced by a number of different religious doctrines, including Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.

There are supposed to be tens of thousands of carvings scattered throughout the hillsides around Dazu, and for many centuries, knowledge of, and access to, these carvings was limited.  But this remoteness was also their saviour, especially during the Cultural Revolution, when countless religious buildings and sites were razed.

New road connections, as well a recent UNESCO listing, will now bring thousands of people to the sites.   Having been hidden for so long, it will be fascinating to see how they are understood, and protected, in the future.

We visited the main site at Baoding Mountain, within which carvings line the edges of a U-shaped valley.

The Prowling Tiger guards the entry to the site and symbolises the danger inherent in undertaking one’s spiritual journey.  I sense that part of Prowling Tiger’s mouth has eroded, turning him into more of a benevolent-looking character.  Jolly, even.

The Cave of Full Enlightenment should not be taken literally.  It was so dark none of photos turned out, which was a shame because it had some very interesting stuff in it.

Past nine more guardians (Dharmapalas, humanoid things being carried by animals) is the Great Wheel of Reincarnation.  This great wheel, held in the teeth of a giant demon, symbolises the basic concept of karma, showing the endless reincarnation of higher and lower lifeforms.  Some of the lifeforms are a little odd, being constructed of different animals and wrapped in what looks like part of an earthworm.

The guy in the middle is possibly Zhao Zhifeng, a monk who created many of the carvings.  Around him are the six realms of reincarnation – those of gods, people, hungry ghosts, hell, animals and demigods – then, depictions of the cycles of life on earth.  There are also some pretty gruesome ideas about the dark side of living, such as a giant baby chewing on the head of a man.  Man, I hate when that happens!

The wheel is supported by four characters – an official, a solider, a woman and a monkey, who personify greed, evil, lust and foolishness.  Note to self: be highly suspicious of all officials, soldiers, women and monkeys.

Next up are the Three Worthies of Huayan, which stand about 7 metres high.

The tower being held up by this one alone is 2 metres high.

This carving shows the death of Shakyamuni.  Although 30 metres long, it only shows the upper part of his body.

In front are a procession of Boddhisattvas and other attendants.  Zhao Zhifeng is again depicted, on the left, along with Liu Benzun, an earlier spiritual leader.

And, just like a Tarantino film, we jump back in time to Shakyamuni’s birth and early childhood.  There is a large area devoted to “family values”, a very Confucian tradition likely adopted by the Buddhists when they came to China.  Shakyamuni’s parents are shown “bestowing kindness” to their son, including “forgetting the pain of childbirth” and “placing the child on the dry side, lying in the wet” after he has wet the bed (this is serious, I promise!).

In return, he enacts the same respect to them.  The above image represents a story of the family falling on hard times and running out of food.  Instead of killing and eating the mother (as the father suggests), Shakyamuni gouges out some of his arm flesh for everyone to feast on (again, this is totally serious – at least, it is what our tour guide told us)

Probably the most impressive part of the site is this massive carving of the many layers of heaven and hell.

The lower section shows the many and varied punishments available in hell, delivered by an army of fearsome monkey-men “hell wardens”.

People are being boiled in cauldrons, beaten and stabbed, thrown in vats of excrement and ground to pieces by heavy iron wheels.  Sins include eating meat, killing too many chickens, forcing other people to get drunk and seducing your own mother.  While I agree with the sentiment, the punishments do seem a little harsh.

Here is the chicken killer.

Above this orgy of sins sits Liu Benzun.  On either side of him are his officials and administrators, who occupy a higher level than the wardens.  And above him are representations of Liu’s Ten Austerities – acts of self-sacrifice that he undertaken, such as cutting out his right eye and burning off his genitals.  His small compensation is getting the big and colourful statue in the middle.

At the end of this section, there is a small area of unfinished carvings.  Work on the site, for some reason, must have ceased abruptly.  Even the grandest visions, underpinned by the most universal of ideas and principles, have their practical limit.

 

 

 

10 Things I Not-so-love About Shanghai

Following up my very positive (and positively received) run-down of things I love here in Shanghai, I best give an insight into the other side of the equation.  Call it a balanced commentary.

Now, I don’t want to come across too whiny.  And I don’t want to delve into some of the very serious and troubling social and economic issues that are occurring here currently.  So, this post is more about the simple, yet annoying, everyday things that make life that little bit less enjoyable.

My inability to speak the language

Firstly, I have to admit that one of the most annoying things is entirely my fault.  I cannot speak Chinese.  One of the first phrases I learnt was “wo ting bu dong” (I don’t understand), and unfortunately, it is still my most commonly used.  We have a great teacher, but we are terrible students.

I imagine my experience of living here would be measurably better if I could read newspapers and billboards, understand clients and order more complicated meals.

The agressive-passive escalator technique

Every morning, as I alight from the Metro, I get to experience this one.  I would guess that up to 100 people leave the train at my station, and each and every of them is always in a huge rush to get to the escalator.  This results in much pushing and shoving, elbow-jabbing and toe-stomping.  Similarly on planes, within seconds of landing (and sometimes seconds before landing), people are unbuckling their seats and trying to get to the exit.

I can understand the desire to get a head start on the crowd.  But then, as soon as people get on the actual escalator, they become incredibly polite and passive.  If someone is blocking the left side (ie the “walk” zone), people are always too polite to ask them to stand aside.  They just stand behind them. getting stressed and breathing heavily.

Seems that bad behaviour in crowds is perfectly OK – just don’t try a bit of one-on-one spatial negotiation.

Di gou you

Last year, the phenomenon of “di gou you” gobbled up countless columns of newspaper space and many hours of discussion time.  It was found that around 10% of the oil used in Shanghai’s restaurants could be classified as “gutter oil”.  This is sourced from stormwater and sewage channels, by skimming and filtering the top layer of water.  This is the kind of recycling that I don’t think is so good.

The thought of eating a food product made partially from someone else’s poo certainly removes some of the joy of eating.  Like most people, I am now highly suspicious of any restaurant or cafe that appears to be flexible with its hygiene practices.  This has curbed my enthusiasm for trying new (and possibly risky) things, and driven me into the arms of international food chains (Starbucks! KFC!).  It feels wrong.

Sneaky meat

For vegetarians anywhere, this can be an issue.  But, it seems that the concept of “no meat” is quite relaxed here.  Typical exchange follows.  (I must admit: Item One, my lack of language skills, can complicate things…)

“Can I please have the vegetarian noodles?” (me)
“OK” (waiter)
“I am vegetarian.  So, I want no meat”
“OK”
“So, that dish has no meat, is that right?”
“Yes, no meat”

(later, after delivery of food)

“This dish has meat in it”
“Yes, but only a little”
“But, I asked for no meat”
(silence)
“Please bring me another with  no meat”
“It’s OK, I will pick it out for you” (picks up chopsticks)
“No, please make me a new one, with no meat”
“OK”

(later, after re-delivery of food)

“Hmmmm… this is just the same dish, isn’t it?”
“No”
“But, it is.  When you picked out the meat, you missed some”
(silence)

Doggy do-do

Living the French Concession, I get to enjoy good coffee, cute furniture shops and bakeries.  But, I also get to enjoy seeing small dogs crapping all over the footpaths.  This is one part of French culture that didn’t need to be imported.

The terrible driving

It’s the lack of seatbelts and the stop-start accelerating and the nodding-off-behind-the-wheel and the not-gonna-let-you-in-attitude and hectic overtaking and the frequent unmarked roadworks and random scooters and unenforced speed limits and constant horn-blasting and the non-existence of baby capsules and the substandard roads and that’s all enough to make any road trip totally terrifying.  If you think about it, that is.  The best defence is to sit back and remember that when your time is up, it’s up.

The long winter, the long summer

Yeah, I know the picture above looks romantic.  But after 3-4 months of around-zero temperatures, it’s a bit wearing.  Same said for 3-4 months of unbearably humid summertime.  It doesn’t leave much space for autumn or spring.

The People Upstairs

Today’s Schedule
5:00am:   wake up
5:05am:   push heavy furniture around on timber floor
5:10am:   commence daily exercise routine (clomping on floor)
6:00am:   turn up radio and television, both at full volume
7:00am:   start piano practice (play same song over and over and over)
8:00am:   fry something stinky with front door open
2:00pm:  afternoon nap
2:10pm:  wake from afternoon nap to complain to downstairs neighbours about their incredibly loud ceiling fan
8:00pm:  play loud music and shout at each other
11:00pm:   become disturbed by noise of an air-conditioner somewhere
11:05pm:  use shoe to bang on floor
11:10pm:  storm downstairs, accuse neighbours on making noise (ignore their explanation that it is coming from the shop downstairs, not their apartment)
11:15pm:   argue with neighbours until they force you out of their apartment

Pollution

One time, I went jogging and it was very polluted.  I spent the whole of the next day with a splitting headache.  Supposedly, on that day, Shanghai had the highest pollution level of any city in China.

Lost Heaven

I didn’t really want to highlight individual bad experiences, but the timing of this one was just right.  Last week, Mr IE and I were on our way to dinner, discussing potential material for this post.  We were planning to try the local branch of Lost Heaven, a good Yunnan food place, having visited its city location lots of times with visitors and locals.  Our booked table wasn’t ready, so after politely waiting for 30 minutes, I asked what was happening.  The front desk girls (who I guess may be a little too proud of their incredibly prestigious jobs) then treated me, through fake smiles, to a barrage of condescending and pointless comments, telling me that I was “too impatient”, didn’t trust them and that I was being “unprofessional”.  For the first time ever in this situation, I totally lost my temper, told them we would never eat there again and I’d be sure to tell everyone I knew about how bad their restaurant is (OK, I may have been over-reacting, but I was quite hungry by this point!)

Anyway, my word is good.  I won’t ever go back.  And this is my best way to spread the word.

Walkabout / Fangbang Dong Lu

First west, now east.  Middle is not so exciting … pretty touristy and lacking a real sense of authenticity.

Like the Xi Lu, Fangbang Dong Lu is packed full of shops and restaurants, with products and people spilling over the street (and very few in cars in sight).

But it is certainly a bit brighter.

The same traditional-style Chinese architecture is on display …

with newer apartment buildings a little better integrated into the older urban fabric (at least by colour, by also by scale)

There are homes in the sky …

as well as on the street.

And just loads and loads of shops selling all sorts of stuff.

Although sometimes the display techniques can be a bit dodgy.

Lanterns and hanging things.

Fans and butchered meats.

The equivalent of a “two dollar shop” (2 yuan = about 30 cents).

A tattoo shop.

And, off to one side, a chaotic and hygiene-averse “eat street”.

Like I said, it’s bright.

As Fangbang Lu reaches its eastern end, it becomes a little more European in its styling, with paved streets, awnings and neo-Classical architectural allusions.  And appropriately, a generous helping of dog turd, as the woman in this image could attest.

By then, we are almost to the Huangpu River.

And over the rooftops loom the soaring commercial towers of Pudong, located on the other side of the river and in another world entirely.

 

Walkabout / Fangbang Xi Lu

When asked what I “like to do”, I often say that I like to walk.  Usually, the questioner assumes that I didn’t understand the question or that I am being a smarty-pants.  But, it is true: I like to walk.  It’s the best way to see a city.  

So, I have been doing lots of walking here in Shanghai.  I’ve found that like many cities, it can be easiest to understand Shanghai as a collection of streets, rather than neighbourhoods or precincts or suburbs.   Streets hold their own character and history, distinct from those around it.   

This is the western (Xi) end of Fangbang Road (Lu).  It’s one of the first streets I walked through when I arrived two years ago, and it’s very typical of Shanghai’s old city area.

It mostly consists of laneway housing, with shopfronts along the street edge punctuated by perpendicular laneways that give access to walk-up apartment buildings behind.

The architecture is distinctly Shanghainese, especially these little dormer windows on most buildings.

And, like many streets in the old city, it’s a highly active and chaotic place, with all the sights and smells and noises you could possibly want. 

With shops and restaurants spilling onto the street, the footpaths have been given over to the activities of commerce.  This is an integrated food storage/waste management/vehicle parking structure for the restaurant behind.  I guess you have to know it’s there, having practically no street frontage. 

Similarly, it takes a keen eye to spot the hairdresser’s shop here … given away by the spinning (in theory, at least) barber’s pole.

Along Fangbang Xi Lu, pedestrians are forced onto the street, to do battle with with cars and scooters and stray cats.

These chairs and tables are stored for muchof the day, and unpacked for the afternoon/evening rush.

 Hygiene freaks need not eat here.  An assortment of bowls full of cold water are used to “wash” dirty dishes as well as green vegetables. 

Produce carefully stacked upon box and bucket, constructed and deconstructed at the start and end of each day.

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Within the randomness,you can usually find some sense of order or logic.

It could almost be called art.

Or not.  This is one of those kid’s rides, featuring a very popular cartoon character, Pleasant Goat.

Heading east, the street kinks, signalling the change from Xi (west) to Zhong (middle) Road.

It also marks the shift from ramshackle old-style buildings to overscaled apartment developments, and further along, the faked up tourist zone of Yuyuan Bazaar.  Those things I won’t bother showing … against the charm of the old street, they don’t impress me that much.

 

 

It’s Personal / The February Edition

I bring you the latest personals for this month…

 

 

And we are both much better left to the imagination.
To see the latest stories of love and love lost, click >>>> here

Ha’erbin / … and miscellaneous weird and cold stuff

The last night in Ha’erbin, as if we hadn’t had enough of the mind-numbingly weather and fluoro ice sculptures, we visited the third of the Ice Festival’s main locations, Zhaolin Park.  It wasn’t too far to walk there from the hotel, along the city’s main pedestrian street.

This street also had a bunch  of ice sculptures, including a massive Marilyn Monroe in her famous pose from The Seven Year Itch.  Had that movie been set in Ha’erbin, she would have suffered third-degree frostbite – very quickly and in some very unpleasant places …

Although packed full of brightly-lit and cleverly-crafted sculptures, Zhaolin Park was much less impressive than the other sites we had been.  Perhaps we were suffering a little bit of ice fatigue.

Its key attraction was a big shed in the middle of the park that housed an international ice carving competition.

These were pretty amazing pieces of work, conceptually thoughtful and intricately carved, and representing the endeavours of teams from across the world.

Seems that some teams couldn’t make it though …

Although the placement of the broom in this one suggests some kind of intention, perhaps …

We stumbled upon (or rather were drawn, through a thousand glowing  lights, towards) a large structure in another section of the park.  A small crowd had assembled in front of a small glazed box, which sat atop a glowing platform.

Inside was an incredible display of human initiative … a young (I assume) gentleman (I also assume), dressed in a golden gimp suit (sans mouth-zip) conducting a very strange, yet alluring, laser dance.  Hard to describe, harder to capture, impossible to forget.

    

At the end of the show, he disappeared into a hole in the floor and a lovely young lass came out to wish us a happy Spring Festival and to say some other stuff.

I don’t know if she explained what we had just seen, but it was probably best left unclarified.

Ha’erbin / … and Russian Revivalist architecture …

Ha’erbin is located in the province of Heilongjiang, China’s northernmost region and bordered to the east and north by Russia.  As you would expect, the history between the two countries has been marked by bustling trade, social exchange and plenty of territorial disputes.  After centuries of debate (including an annexation of parts of Heilongjiang by Russia in the mid-19th century), a defined border was finally agreed to in July of 2008. 

Ha’erbin, as the provincial capital, has long had a large Russian population.  But, it was after 1897, when Russia negotiated the construction of a railway linking the city to Vladivostok, a few hundred kilometres to the east, that the major waves of migration happened – initially traders and workers, followed by Russian Jews and then White Russians fleeing the 1917 Revolution. In 1921, one third of Ha’erbin’s population (about 300,000 in total) was Russian.

The city’s European influences are clearly seen in Ha’erbin’s main pedestrian street, Zhongyang Dajie.  The cobblestone street is lined with buildings that mostly date from the early twentieth century, or newer ones made to look like they were.

Perhaps the city’s best known architectural landmark is the Church of St Sophia, a cute Byzantine Revival number in the downtown.  It was built in 1907, a few years after the completion of the Vladivostok rail line, but was “decommissioned” during the Cultural Revolution.  Over time, new commercial and residential developments on all sides of the church obscured it from view, and made access to it impossible.  But, in the 1990s, after the church was added to the national heritage register, a local campaign raised enough funds (from local shopping centres and other businesses) to demolish the surrounding buildings and restore this “hidden treasure” to its original condition.

      

With a small footprint (about 700 square metres) and a dome height of 53 metres, the church has a very pleasing internal proportion. It now houses a collection of historic photographs of Ha’erbin.  While we were there, a bunch of people in bright clothes came out to sing us some songs.

     

It also houses a gift shop full of clichéd Russian stuff, like Babushka dolls and candlesticks and fur hats.

The city’s original synagogue, located on Tongjiang Road and built in 1906, is now used as a youth hostel, cafe and shop.  The neighbouring building, originally a Jewish primary school, then high school, and then home to the Gelazunov Music School, is now a South Korean school.

Further along the same street is a Turkish Mosque, built in 1906, rebuilt in 1922 (not sure why) and now currently unused.  It is a fine little building, not yet (but almost) swamped by the surrounding residential buildings.

But, then, some of the most interesting European buildings could be found purely by chance.  Taking a detour down any street would reveal a collection of early-20th-century structures, once the symbols of a thriving city, but now falling into varying states of neglect and disrepair.

Many of Ha’erbin’s Russians residents fled the city during the Japanese occupation of the 1930s and 1940s.  Those who stayed behind were subjected, along with their Chinese neighbours, to the brutalities of the occupying forces – from food restrictions to beatings and medical experimentation.  When the city was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, its people were not entirely so.  Nationalistic fervour turned locals against the newer immigrants, who were forced back into Russia, or scattered across the world to, amongst other places, the US, Canada and Australia.

But, while the people were lost, their legacy – through design or just pure luck – was not completely obliterated.

Ha’erbin / .. and snow sculptures …

On our second day in Ha’erbin, we visited Sun Island, which lies on the northern side of the river.

   

Said river was, of course, totally frozen.

And although it was daytime, and quite sunny, it was bitterly cold – still hovering about the -15 degree point.

Sun Island is where you go if you like sculptures made out of snow – which is pretty much everyone, right?

Anyway, it has loads of sculptures.  And, when we were there, the sky was blue and there weren’t many people around.  It was like a photographer’s (or a meteorologist’s or sociopath’s) dream.

The sculptures were inspired by anything – from fairy tales (I think that this may be a representation of a kid pulling out a massive turnip…)

to historic figures

to nature and industry

to … ummm … Donkey Kong.

      

And some of it was “art with a message”.  The one on the left shows that the world is being destroyed by over-consumption (represented by a burger).  The one on the right is about people blocking out inconvenient and uncomfortable realities (like the cold weather, perhaps).

At the park’s centre, atop a frozen lake, there is a humongous snow sculpture. You can also rent dune buggies or husky-powered sleighs to take a zoom around the lake.

  

At this point, you are also very pleased to find a little glass cafe, serving warm drinks and cup noodles.

That if you aren’t tempted by the snow-log cabin option.

Or by the petting area, where you can feed real deer.  You can also purchase deer-skin clothes and mounted deer heads – all on display, which would really diminish the workplace expereience for the deers.

On our way out, we took a little detour (I’m not sure why, as the real cold had set in and we were ready to go … quickly).

    

And we discovered the “workshop” of the site, with ice-cutting machines, fresh-cut blocks and some sculptures where people had been practising (or honing, ha!) their skills.  It reminded us that our our hour or two wandering around the park would be nothing compared to the many hours expended by the sculptors in producing these large, yet incredibly detailed, pieces of work.

Ha’erbin / The City of Ice …

Last week, China celebrated the lunar new year, which is also known as Chun Jie or Spring Festival.  The name is somewhat confusing, as the festival usually occurs at the coldest time of the year, right in the heart of Winter and seemingly far from the more pleasant weather of Spring.  Perhaps it is about celebrating that things can only get better from that point in time.

As if the breezy climate of Shanghai wasn’t difficult enough (maximum temperature generally 0-5 degrees), we decided that we’d use the national week-long holiday to take a trip to Ha’erbin.  Ha’erbin is so far north, it is almost Russia.  It’s one of the few places in China that isn’t overrun by tourists during the holidays.  You just have to put up with a daily maximum temperature of around -15 degrees (yes, that is MINUS).   We figured that a dose of colder weather might even give us a renewed appreciation for the more temperate winter of Shanghai.

The winter is Ha’erbin is long and cold, with temperatures staying sub-zero for several months.  So, the city has embraced this period of wintry weather by holding an annual Ice Festival.  It’s been happening for decades (with a few breaks here and there) and may (or may not) be the biggest in the world.

Throughout the city, key public spaces – like parks, plazas, roundabouts on expressways – are dotted with an array of ice sculptures, inspired by the culture and character of the city, and constructed each year by a workforce of thousands.  The scale and detail of the sculptures is amazing, especially considering the hand-numbing conditions they are produced under.

But, when the sun goes down (and the temperature drops further, to about -25 degrees), these sculptures really shine.  Like, literally.

In a few different locations in Ha’erbin, they have massive ice parks, like this one (the Ha’erbin Ice and Snow World).

It contains dozens of life-size buildings, from Russian temples to castles and pagodas, as well as a statues, ice carvings and sculptures.

And there’s a lot of larger-than-life-size stuff too, like beer (Harbin is local beer brand, of course) and Coke bottles.  Everything is lit by thousands of multi-coloured lights, carefully laid into the structures during construction.

    

You can walk up and through the buildings – bringing you in intimate contact with the icy architecture and the painfully cold breeze – as if the very-sub-zero temperatures aren’t freezing enough.  And, after thousands of other visitors, as the ice floor is smoothed down, it is quite a dangerous task too.  Saw plenty of slips and tumbles while we were there.

Another wind-chill option is to take a horse ride around the site.  No-one, especially the horse, seemed to be enjoying this particular activity.

    

As if to tempt fate (and potential lawsuits), the organisers had also installed an ice-slide on this European-style castle.  Within a few minutes, we saw a number of stacks, including an old man who tried to stand up, only to fall and slide down head-first, another guy who back-ended the woman in front of him, and third who was moving so fast, he knocked over three people who were gathered around the end of the slide.

I would have LOLed, except that at that point, my mouth was pretty much frozen into the closed position.  Despite wearing a couple of layers of thermals, snow boots, two jackets and two scarves (one wrapped around the nose and mouth), the cold would get unbearable in about 10 minutes.  The only places of retreat were a few cafes and a theatre, which were all unsurprisingly packed with people, trying to thaw out and get their cameras working again.

Or, the other option was to converge on the  big Russian building in the middle of the park.

Here they had an outdoor performance space with girls gyrating atop ice podiums and lip-synching to Lady Gaga.  Of course, in China, it’s always Lady Gaga, and usually the song is Poker Face.

It gave us all an excuse to jump up and down.  And then the girls made us join hands and skip around in a big circle.  My blood got pumping, my feet got off the cold ground for a few seconds, and my Frozen Poker Face had something to smile about.

And I was given another 10 minutes to cruise around looking at stuff.

Kooky building alert: The Himalayas Centre

Founded on the delta floodplains of the Yangtze, Shanghai is really flat.  There is barely a hillock or mound, let alone an amazing mountainous setting like Hong Kong or one of China’s inland cities like Lanzhou.  But, it does have something that sounds like mountains – the Himalayas Centre. (If you don’t have it naturally, just built it!)

And a building blessed with such a name needs gimmicky architecture to match.  So, the developer engaged Japanese architect Arata Isozaki (kinda, but not totally, famous in design circles) to create what is called an “archisculptural masterpiece for 21st century China”.

   

These are the concept renderings released in 2008, showing the new building – a high-end hotel, arts centre, theatre, retail and stuff – with an “organic forest” contained within hard, symmetrical lines of “crystalline cubes”.  Even if that makes sense, it hardly evokes a feeling of “Himalaya”, which I picture as very large, treeless mountains.

And here is the real building, which mostly looks like the renderings (a rare thing).  I think this part, the lower bit in the middle of the building, is the “forest”.  The main difference – in my mind, at least – is the material used.  The renderings suggest some kind of folded metal, when in fact, it is just a dull rendered surface.  Granted, it was a very grey day when I visited, but it was nonetheless disappointing.

It blobs in and out all over the place (please excuse me for usual technical language), hanging out over the footpath and confusing pedestrians who are trying to use the building for shelter from the rain.

It also creates some very unusable, and thus unused, spaces inside the building too.  Luckily it’s an arts centre, where such extravagance is seen as “creative” rather than wastefulness.

The undercroft of the building is a bit more interesting, with the structure randomly landing on, and penetrating, the ground to form a big cave-like space.

   

Some technicians were mucking around with lights while we were there.

Such grand gestures, while perhaps exciting in concept, can be difficult to finish off properly.  Usually, they work OK when they are stand-alone structures (eg Bilbao’s Guggenheim), but when you have to marry one to more simplistic form, things can get tricky.

The junction between the organic, wilful “forest” and the more pragmatic “cubes” (containing the lower levels of the hotel, retail, loading docks, etc), is blunt.

Besides, the cubes have their own thing going on, with a facade pattern seemingly inspired by Chinese characters or carved woodblocks or something.

Inside, there are attempts to resolve the two competing languages.  But, the blobby bits get totally swamped in all the bling – multiple materials, chandeliers and spotlights, fancy fabrics, pot plants, artworks – found in a typical Chinese hotel.

According to the developer’s website, the Himalayas Centre is a “landmark building that combines nature, humanism and architect”.  It’s OK, but I don’t think it is the masterpiece they claim it to be.
If you don’t have it naturally, just build it!  And if you don’t have a masterpiece, you’ll need to build a marketing campaign too!

January Update / Huh Wot!

The Huh Wot gallery has been updated!
Time to get busy!

Click here to see the latest silliness….

It’s Personal. December Edition

I bring you the latest personals for this month…

 

Some people just don’t know the meaning of fun.
To see the latest stories of love and love lost, click >>>> here

The World! Chocolate! Wonderland!!!

Finally, winter gave Shanghai a rainy weekend.  And, exhausted of shopping centres and annoyed by yet another badly-copied movie from my local DVD vendor, I needed to get a little creative about things to wile away the time (staying in bed with the internet could have been acceptable enough).

    

So, when I saw an advert for Shanghai’s World Chocolate Wonderland, the lure of sugary snacks and trash culture was irresistible.  We needed to catch Metro Line 7 all the way to its very end (a rare thing to do on ANY Metro line here) to arrive at the Himalaya Centre in outskirts Pudong, just beside the city’s main convention centre and not too far, in relative terms, from the main airport.

“World Chocolate Wonderland” tried very hard to live up to its name.  It had chocolate, plenty of it (I think the whole thing was sponsored by Lindt and Guylian, because their products featured heavily). It did touch on the “world” concept, by featuring displays about the traditions of chocolate eating throughout the world – including a few tenuous links to Valentines Day and Japanese manga and Louis Vuitton, but whatevs.   

      

The China section was pretty much as you’d expect – key national icons made out of chocolate.  There were life-size, as well as miniature, terracotta warriors.

    

Also, white chocolate Ming vases and a replica of the famous Chingming painting.  Really, the latter was just blocks of chocolate with a printed layer on top – a pretty standard cake-making technique, I’d say.  One of the guides made the effort to explain that the painting was made of 14 pieces of chocolate, which was quite apparent and somewhat lacking in “wow’ factor.

These are replicas of Buddhas carved into caves in Gansu province.

      

And a number of famous Shanghai buildings had been faithfully reproduced too.  The skyline was set against a dark chocolate river, which give the polluted nature of the real Huangpu, may have been a bit too honest.

      

And there was a dragon, which really was quite detailed and would have been quite a task to produce.

       

Brown, unless teamed with corduroy or used ironically, is not often a “fashion colour”.  Hold on!  What if it made of chocolate?   And forms a wacky headpiece, that is both stylistically and meteorologically inappropriate?

Or, as always, a Louis Vuitton bag?

There was even a spot where you poke fun at years of spiritual practice, by filling out a wish card to the God of Chocolate.  Just like the Mayans did, supposedly.  I’m calling obesity and squabbles over who ate the last piece of the block as the main reasons their civilisation mysteriously collapsed.  And hoping that this Mayan-calendar-apocalypse thing is just a misinterpretation of the prediction that towards the end of this year, the Chocolate God will return, showering us all with Lindt bunnies and Mars Bars.

    

Passing through the China Chocolate Hall and World Chocolate Hall, one enters the Chocolate Life Hall, which truth be told is really just a chocolate mini-mall.  And suddenly the world inverts – instead of looking at things made of chocolate, you can buy everyday things (pencil cases, notepads, stickers, t-shirts) that look like chocolate.  Oh, and chocolate.

Chocolate = yes.  World = I guess so.  Wonderland = I’d say overselling to the extreme.

Totes randomz in the streets

I’ll tell you one thing I really love about Shanghai, and China in general … it’s the ability to just stumble upon totally weird stuff.  But I can’t tell you what makes it seem so weird … perhaps it’s just the cultural divide.  Or, maybe as the country has opened to the world so quickly, there is no sense of judgement or control over strange things.  Or perhaps within a nation of 1.4 billion, you just have to be extra weird to be noticed.  Too often, I find myself in a situation where I want to grab the person beside me and ask “Is it just me, or are you finding this totally-get-out outrageous?!”

Recently, I happened upon this sport car which had been driven onto the footpath, its doors then flung open to disgorge hundreds of pairs of sports shoes onto the pavement (not to mention ear-splitting techno beats into the air).

      

The people were loving it, stopping their usual Friday night routine (dinner then karaoke, I bet) to fumble through the stacks of fluorescent trainers.  The stench of cheap plastic and sweatshop labour was overpowering.  The lady trying to offload a huge bag of steamed corn cobs was totally neglected by her normally loyal fanbase, and probably left wondering why she had limited herself to what was obviously last year’s best-selling street product.  God damn!  Corn is soooo 2011.

    

The sports shoe sports car reminded somewhat of the big wicker chair trolleys that frequent my neighbourhood.  This is a relatively small version … these things can grow to monumental proportions.  The guys that pull them around must get really tired, because every time I see one, they are slumped in one of the chairs (liberated from the huge tangle), fast asleep.

I saw a few of these in Beijing.  Which is weirder: the missing wheel or the obvious attempt to turn the front into a face?

    

This is a small shop in Xintiandi, in the centre of the city, where instead of hocking cheap souvenirs to tourists, someone decided to fill the space with a bunch of plastic leaves.  There no explanation and no-one around to ask what it all meant.

     

Around the same time, an art show was being held in Times Square, one of Shanghai’s more exclusive shopping centres.  Alongside Louis Vuitton and Cartier, this “digital painting art” show did seem odd.  Not to mention that it was full of all sorts of confusing and confronting, if not contradictory, symbolism.  I am surprised that some government official didn’t personally dismantle the whole thing.

    

These paintings seem to show (horror!) two women and two men in a state of kissingness.  Supposedly the catchcry of officialdom in these matters is the “three nos” – no approval, no disapproval, no promotion.  But despite contravening at least one of these restrictions, I’m sure these painting would have ruffled very few feathers.

This on the other hand, maybe not.  I have tried to feed the Chinese characters into my smartphone (via a handy character-writing app) for translation, and I THINK this artwork suggests a new product for the hard-working man – a pad that you can apply to your backside so that you need not leave your desk when you require Number Twos (although, the man in the diagram has already Number Twoed before application , suggesting that the pad is actually a response to, rather than a pre-emptive strike against, pants-based toileting).  And, while the whole is terrible, I do want to take issue with one detail – the choice of red, rather than brown, as one half of the duotone.  No approval, definite disapproval, and hopefully no promotion.

This dog spent a long time standing on a bench outside our neighbourhood pet store, for no apparent reason.  It didn’t move an inch as I stopped, took out camera, framed shot and clicked away.

I don’t know whether it’s being weird.  Maybe its just cute or scared or something.  After enduring so many months of abuse, my weirdness filter tends to play up a bit.

 

My favourite sponge-cake neighbourhood

In keeping with my previous post (in content, as well as naming convention), I popped next door to document another typical Shanghainese housing complex.  This one is particularly important to me, as it provides a link between our street and a mid-block section of Anfu Road, which lies directly north and has a number of good cafes and grocers.  It took a few weeks for someone to tell me about this short-cut, which saves us from walking around the whole block, and thus takes several minutes away from my morning dash for coffee.  That discovery was probably one of my happiest moments in my time here, often reflected upon during the icy depths of winter days (like this morning’s very rude 2 degrees).

Like most housing complexes, this one is arranged around a driveway that runs into the site.  From our street, you’d never know it leads anywhere (apart from into the site itself).  And, given that there are dozens of such gateways long every street, you would spend a long time finding out which ones actually go anywhere.

This one just seems to end on a little house.

Besides, each complex has a gatehouse and guard (or in the case of our complex, a family of three who live in the tiny gatehouse) who will cast a suspicious eye over anyone who enters.  And while we foreigners usually get away with anything, it’s not uncommon to be followed and/or asked to put away the camera.

    

Buildings are arranged around the main driveways and smaller perpendicular lanes.

     

As apartments are often small and overcrowded (particularly those inhabited by locals), these spaces are used for lots of everyday activities, including the storage of stuff.

    

Deeper into the complex, these usually become smaller in scale, more randomly arranged and subject to more everyday usage.  These serve as accessway and meeting place and laundry and rubbish sorting zone and vegetable washing station.

And, within this particular complex, they eventually yield an example of the traditional Shanghainese resdiential style, the Shíkùmén.

Shíkùmén literally means “stone gate” and, as with much of Shanghai, combines elements of traditional Chinese and contemporary Western architectural styles.  In the past, up to 60% of Shanghai’s housing was built around this model, but now most people live in the apartment compounds that cover the city (and literally, the sites of countless shikumen, demolished to make way for this much-less-Chinese but much-more-profitable housing type  Shikumen are typically two-to-three terrace houses, arranged in straight rows, with a small walled courtyard.  The “stone gate” is the entry into the courtyard, and thus the house – the gateway between private and public spaces.  While traditional Chinese housing usually incorporates a courtyard, the shikumen protects this space behind a particularly high and solid wall – a necessity in a big city like Shanghai, where crime and chaos are the natural outcomes of social inequality and historic uprisings.

    

Deeper still, the central accessway narrows to met a turnstile, through which only pedestrians and up-ended bicycles can pass. At some point of the evening (possibly midnight, or whenever the guard does his final walk-around), the turnstile is locked shut, denying access to the short-cutters as well.

    

From here, you can get quite close the everyday lives of the people who live here – in what appear to be the most tiny living quarters, a single room possibly 2 by 2 metres, with outdoor sinks and shared bathrooms.

     

Said bathroom is shown on the right, just beside the central recycling area, the rubbish pile of the adjacent restaurant and a patch of concrete where someone is usually selling fresh veggies laid out on a tarpaulin.  Perhaps I am being sensitive, but I feel that one of those four activities just doesn’t belong with the others.

The end, at a gateway not too dissimilar to that I entered through. But, at this end, in a few minutes time, I have coffee.

 

My favourite choc-mint neighbourhood

Much of the housing in Shanghai is arranged into complexes, ranging from smaller rows of terrace-type houses that are gated at one end, to huge modern estates, where a number of apartment towers are arranged within a landscaped site that is ringed by a security fence and patrolled by guards.

Our apartment is located within an Art Deco complex, typical of the surrounding neighbourhood (the former French Concession).  During the early 20th century, European immigrants developed the area using the architecture and landscape of their homelands, much of which is retained and celebrated as a unique part of Shanghai.   Later, as the foreigners were forced from China, these neighbourhoods were given over to the local Shanghainese.

     

Just around the corner is one of my favourite complexes.  We discovered it when we were looking at an apartment across the road (Fuxing Road) and were wondering if it allowed a short-cut through the block – saving us a lengthy walk around the block – to the Metro station.  Indeed it did, and we have been using it since to shorten the journey through the neighbourhood.

Along the main street frontage, there are two taller apartment buildings.  While fenced to the street, this fence is transparent and overlooked by windows, making it a physical, but not visual, separator.

I think my favourite aspect of the complex is the colour scheme.  Green and brown.  It is the colour scheme of a tree, or a frog, or choc-mint ice-cream, which I used to love as a child, but now makes me feel slightly disturbed for some reason.

    

And the managers of the complex seem pretty happy with it too, applying it to whole-of-building, brick patterns, signage, doorways and electrical boxes.

    

Through the front gate (the small gate for pedestrians is unlocked all the time, but there is a guard who jumps out of his seat to open the big gate for cars), there is a central “street” along which all of the buildings are arranged.

Very few people living here would own cars though.

Away from the street edge, buildings are generally 2 or 3 storeys, accessed along smaller lanes that run perpendicular to the main accessway.

These common areas are used for a variety of everyday functions – clothes washing and drying, motor scooter repair, herb growing, gossiping.  In complexes with a higher proportion of local residents, they are incredibly well used.  But now, as values have shifted from the communal to the individual, people now focus on their private, rather than shared, domain.   The activities of the laneway have been relocated to the laundromat, the repair shop, the supermarket and living room.

And, of course, the foreigners are moving back in.  These types of houses are wildly popular with the expats (us included…) and a local landholder can make a tidy sum out of renting their apartment.

My Chinese colleagues all wonder why we are living in an old style apartment, when for the same price, we could rent a larger apartment in a new complex with pool and gymnasium and manicured lawns.  My main argument – “I prefer something with character … preferably choc-mint” – seems to convince no-one.

A tale of two karaoke halls

This last week, I was fortunate enough to have two karaoke experiences.  Karaoke, or KTV as it is often called, is pretty popular here, a regular social activity to do with colleagues (which I did last Friday) and friends (yesterday).  It is also something you might do with a client or business contact … but this type of karaoke may involve very private rooms, low lighting and “hostesses” who will cater to your every whim.  Fortunately, I’ve never found myself in this kind of karaoke situation.

People tell me that “karaoke” and “KTV” are used to distinguish the two types, but as yet, I have not been able to determine which is which.  I actually think it’s more about whether you attend a “bar” as opposed to a “hall” or “rooms”, that latter being of the more savoury variety.

    

My two visits were to distinctly different parts of the city and to distinctly different karaoke venues.  Friday night, we were in Hongkou, north of the city, a place mostly frequented by locals.  We went to karaoke following a farewell dinner and beer in a Japanese BBQ restaurant.  And yesterday, we met some local friends at Nanjing Road, arguably the most tourist-infested part of the city.  We met at 1pm (yes, not 1am, as I needed to clarify when making the plan).  There were no beers involved.

    

Both times, we went to well known karaoke chain … in Hongkou, it was Partyworld (a more fancy outfit) and in the city, the more down-to-earth Haoledi (which may or may not be a literal translation of “holiday”).  Both extended over two levels of large buildings, with dozens of rooms, ranging in size from intimate couples-only rooms to larger group rooms.  Just a reminder at this point: these venues cater to the “friends having good clean fun” market, not the grubby stuff.

    

Partyworld comes across as a stylish hotel, with a generous lobby and soaring ceilings and soothing lighting.  Haoledi is a bit more blingy.  The rooms at Partyworld have vases of flowers.  The rooms at Haoledi have crayzy disco lights.

I think we were the only group at Partyworld.  At least, the only group making any noise, as I discovered on my walk through its silent halls.

On the other hand, Haoledi – despite the apparently odd timing – was pumping.  There was wailing and harmonising emanating from nearly every room and dozens of people lining up by the time we left.

    

At Partyworld, we were given free beer, jugs of tea and snacks, delivered to our room.  At Haoledi, they have a small supermarket where you can buy soft drink and Johnny Walker and chips and chicken’s feet.

Mini-kegs of Budweiser come standard at Partyworld if you book for 3 hours or more.

So, things can get a little raucous.  For me, beer and karaoke is a brilliant pairing.  At the end of a typically exhausting week, and with the trauma of having to farewell a well-liked colleague, drinking and yelling into a microphone is a great way to unwind.  And it’s how I’ve always conceptualised the role of karaoke.

    

So, the Haoledi experience was a little odd.  Sober in the mid-afternoon, I became painfully aware of how terrible my singing voice is.  And how quiet the room is when everybody is not jumping up and down and yelling out the words while you are singing.  And how slowly awkward moments can pass when you haven’t been drinking.  And this is how most people do it here.  Funnily enough, our friend who organised the afternoon said that she also likes karaoke as a way to “unwind” …

    

Both places had a huge selection of English songs, from ABBA to Robbie Williams to the Beatles.  Supposedly, the Carpenters song “Goodbye to Love” is taught in primary schools across the country, so it often features in karaoke nights.  In possibly ironic fashion, we sang the more melodic Hey Jude at Partyworld (although things amped up at the “na na na na” bits) and Revolution at  Haoledi (we kinda skimmed over the lyrics about Chairman Mao).

By the end of the night, Partyworld looked like partyworld …

… while the afternoon session ended on a more serene note.

Last year CNN published an article about life expectancy in Shanghai, linking the recent sharp increase in longevity to two things more regularly consumed by the Shanghainese: karaoke and cocaine (I think you can get both at those “karaoke bars” I referred to earlier).  I suppose the suggestion is that life is better when we interact with other people and have a little down-time every now and then … when the high wears off, obviously.

Karaoke as the gateway to a longer and happier life …?  I can get into that.

A big bunch of posers …

The Chinese love their cameras.  In a country where conspicuous consumption is catching on like nobody’s business, yet houses and cars are still out of reach of most people, smaller consumer objects are the best means to display your personal wealth.  So, it’s down to clothing and fashion accessories, electronic gadgets and the not-so-humble camera … a constant sight is the latest Canon or Nikon (the only brands worth buying, it seems), with hugely-oversized lens attached, slung casually around neck or from shoulder.  I’m sure there are loads of great photographers here, but given the overt posturing that occurs during the actual act of photography, I reckon it is the object, rather than the outcome, that people are focused on.

People also love to be in front of the camera, and there is always an event or building or object to act as a backdrop.  This year is the 90th anniversary of the forming of the Communist Party of China, and the location of the original meeting (a small complex of buildings in the middle of city) is usually ringed by groups of proud nationalists, assembling in small groups for their portrait.

   

It was also Expo year in Shanghai, and the event’s blue mascot (click here for more Haibao love) was a constant presence in the city, drawing in children and adults alike. 

Shanghai’s ever-evolving skyline is also a favourite place to converge for some camera display.

As are the city’s historic sites, where there is much less of the interpretative analysis going on, and much more of the positioning, grinning and victory-signing.

    

I think a lot of the public art around (in addition to celebrating the achievements of the noble, yet unrewarded, worker) is designed for the photo opportunity.

Whether through their own choice, or by coercion, or perhaps it gets hard to tell the distinction between the two … kids are usually front-and-centre of the photographic experience.  These girls seemed to be willing to stand in a somewhat odd position for an extended time while Dad reeled off a dozen shots.

As did this poor little one.  I was relieved when she eventually moved, demonstrating that she did not have some terrible leg deformity, just a quirky sense of what constitutes the correct way to pose for a photo.  Maybe from the camera’s perspective, it looked normal.  Or maybe, when she saw the photo, she too wondered what the heck she was doing.  An important moment in self-reflection, no doubt.

    

And perhaps, good training for that special day (or week), where she would undertake the greatest camera test of all (and I must admit, one of my favourite things to see), the wedding photos.  Everyone here does it.  After weeks of preparation (selecting the photographer and shooting locations, crash dieting and surgical removal of facial moles), the lucky couple spend hours moving between locations (with photographer and two assistants in tow), posing in a variety of costumes (traditional, sassy, serious, bordello-chic), and with a variety of expressions (happy, fun, sexy, relieved), then spend thousands more on post-production (photoshopping out any blemishes that the surgery couldn’t deal with, brightening skin tone and eye colour, slimming down thighs and jawlines) and packaging the while lot into a professional photo album.  The photos are always amazing, but its often hard to recognise the actual couple in the photos. 

It all happens days, if not weeks, before the wedding.  So, it’s probably the safest guarantee for the couple … with that kind of financial and emotional investment, you’re unlikely to do a runner on the big day.  And, through the intense concentration and likely boredom, you might that together, you can get through any challenge that lies ahead.

 

October update / Huh Wot!

The Huh Wot gallery has been updated!
Speaking of up … or not …

Click here to see the latest silliness….

What happens on site stays on site …

Just the other day, I went to a client presentation, and on the way back to the office, we dropped by the project site to check on the progress of construction.

It’s a huge project – a waterway several kilometres long, fringed by new parkland and sporting areas, residential precincts, cultural and community buildings, and eventually, a new city centre.  The creek and landscape are being constructed first.

This is one small branch of the waterway, leading to an existing reservoir which will be the main source of water.  Like many construction projects, the site is being built by a variety of methods.  The channel itself is made up of huge concrete sections, created through the processes of heavy engineering and machinery … alongside this worker, who was slowly mixing his little pile of concrete using a shovel (when he wasn’t stopping to gawk at us, that is…)

    

A lot of the machinery is quite endearing.

    

The clay-topped site is vast.  It’s hard to imagine that in a very short time, it will house a lake, ringed by plazas and park, cafes and day spas.

But for now, it is just housing dozens of workers.  Many of these workers are seasonal labourers – farmers who spend the agricultural off-season working on construction sites for a bit of extra cash.  Being away from home, they are usually accommodated on the site itself, living in make-shift shelters, and sometimes with bathrooms and a food tent.  It would be pretty hard living … labouring all day, sleeping through wintry nights with very little in the way of bedding, being away from family and friends.

Although, if you can keep yourself looking at stylish as this guy … in grey polo, trousers with hem upturned to reveal a bright red lining, casual slippers and even more casual cigarillo hanging from his lips … life isn’t totally bad.

We had just been to present our latest design option for the site’s main entry pavilion, which the client finally approved.  So, we were a little surprised to find that it was already under construction.  It was explained that this part of the site had been fast-tracked after comments from someone important that work on the site appeared to be progressing a little slowly.  Fortunately, this part of the old design matches the new one, and we saved the workers the effort (and perhaps embarrassment) of having to undo their hard work.

    

We had to do a review of some pavers, or rather, a review of the pavers that the contractors were planning to substitute for the ones we had actually specified.  It was a long-winded and highly excited discussion, which I though ended in anger, but was supposedly resolved with everybody happy.  I really must get my Chinese skills up to scratch.

Further along the creek, work is almost completed, and the finishing touches, such as mature trees transplanted into place, are being applied.  This part will be flooded to form a wetland park.

Already, frogs and birds are starting to make their homes across the site.  And, as they arrive, the workers too will migrate, to homes remembered and people missed.

October update / Small Man, Big Hair

After a 18 month break in proceedings, I have finally updated the Small Man, Big Hair gallery.

Click here see the latest architectural treasures!

Beijing / The Forbidden City (M to S)

By paying an additional (though small) entry fee, you can enter the eastern side of the City.   Not many people bother, and those that do seem to be interested in the various collections of historic artefacts (jewellery, clothing, Buddha statues, carvings) scattered around, although the more intimate buildings and spaces, not to mention the smaller crowds, provide a sense of relief.

This is another small thing that made the journey through the City more engaging … an audio guide that triggers every time you get within range of a significant item, be it a grand Hall or a lump of jade.  Our guidebook said that the guide was narrated by Roger Moore, so I was a little disappointed to find that they have been “upgraded” to a more generic Chinese woman’s voice, who – despite having perfect English skills – is not the third worst James Bond ever.

    

At times, the incessant narration did get a bit much, but it was easy to go unplugged and just enjoy the surroundings.

This part of the Forbidden City was mostly smaller palaces, where the Emperor’s concubines and children lived, and where untold scandals and struggles must have taken place.

    

This lump of marble, like many items within the Forbidden City, was transported from the far reaches of the empire.  From Xinjiang, thousands of kilometres to the west, it was supposedly pulled by 100 horses and pushed by 1000 men (approximate figures only … I’m sure no-one did a roll call).

And this a very sweet little doorway!

Each of the important buildings in the City are fronted by a sun dial and weighing device – symbolising that the Emperor himself controls the fundamental aspects (time and measurement) of all things.

    

And all buildings are equipped with large bronze vats (shuigang) that once stood full of water, available to douse all fires that may break out in the City.   The modern-day equivalent is so subtly integrated into the pavement, it actually needs a big loud sign above it … must be another example of the Irony Fire Extinguisher.

    

This is the NIne Dragon Screen, a mural made entirely of glazed tiles.  Well, not entirely … as Narration lady explained in a very long-winded tale, one of the workers constructing it accidentally broke part of a tile (the base of the body of the white dragon, as shown) and to conceal the mistake, fashioned a replacement piece out of painted timber, a fact revealed centuries later as the mural weathered.  The story ended with something like “Well, there is no proof that this actually happened, but it is a possible explanation” thus in my mind, expertly reforming all of her previous “facts” into “stories”.

     

In search of the toilet, I went off-track for a while (I was half-expecting to hear “you are now standing at a urinal” through my earpiece) and found a great little cluster of buildings hidden away.

I think that this is quite possibly the cutest first-aid facility in the history of forever.

And here ends the journey through the Forbidden City.
It is a big and somewhat overwhelming place to visit, but away from the Supreme Halls and sweeping courtyards, it possible to discover places of smaller scale and symbolic power, but of no less delight.

Beijing / Forbidden City (XL to L)

I think pretty much everyone know that the Forbidden City is big in every possible way.  It is 600 years old and covers over 70 hectares and has almost 1,000 buildings with almost 10,000 rooms and for 5 centuries, was not only home to the Emperor, but the very centre of political and cultural life in China.  Built over 15 years in the early 15th century, it is estimated that up to a million workers were involved in its construction, with construction materials being transported from the far-reaches of the country, including marble from Xinjiang in the west, timber from the south-western highlands and specially made paving stones from Suzhou (a mere thousand kilometres away…)  The forbidden City houses the world’s largest collection of preserved ancient timber structures, and is arguably China’s most significant historic site.

As the name suggests, for its entire life as the home of the Emperor, the Forbidden City was off-limits to the general public.  Apart from the threat of execution (probably without a phonecall to your lawyer, let alone a fair trial), people were kept at bay by a 8 metre high wall, ringed by moats 6 metres deep and 52 metres wide.

      

There were only three gates into the City, including the grand Meridien Gate at the south, which only the Emperor himself was allowed to use.  This is now the public entry into the site.

Give the huge crowds in Beijing during the National Holiday, we arrived early to line up for tickets.  The government had just introduced a new ticketing system, limiting daily visitors to 80,000, with half of those tickets sold online.  It wasn’t as bad as we feared – everything was well-organised and efficient, and it took no longer than 15 minutes to secure our passes.  The gate even opened early.  Sometimes things do work.

It was a somewhat gloomy day … typical of Beijing, but somehow lending a sense of quiet contemplation to the whole experience.  This s the view from the gate, looking south over the entry plaza.

    

Entering through the gate into a large courtyard, you first encounter the Golden Stream, cutting across the space in the shape of a Tartar bow.  Across 5 marble bridges lies the Gate of Supreme Harmony, through which you enter into the hugest and most famous courtyard (that of Supreme Harmony, of course) of the Forbidden City.  This space could hold up to 100,000 people for imperial ceremonies and events, but is likely better recognised as the setting of the climactic fight sequence of just about every big-budget historic Chinese film ever made.

Across the courtyard is the Hall of (you may have guessed it already…) Supreme Harmony.  This is the first of the three grand buildings of the Forbidden City, aligned along a north-south axis that runs through the two main gates into the City, and forms the basis of the wider plan of Beijing.  The three halls sit atop a three layered marble plinth, an elevation that reflects their ceremonial functioning and symbolic significance.

The Hall of Supreme Harmony is the largest hall, rising to a height of 30 metres, and being laid out in a regular grid of 9 by 5 bays (these numbers having particularly majestic properties).  The Hall was used solely for ceremonial occasions, such as the Emperor’s birthday, coronations and appointment of military leaders, and  is largest timber building in China.

     

The Hall’s primary role is denoted by the small figures that sit along the ridgeline of its sweeping roof.  It has 11 such figures, more than any of the other smaller and less important buildings.

Directly behind the Hall is the lesser Hall of Middle Harmony (the name just gives it away, right?)  This building was used as a stop-off point for the Emperor, if he needed to rehearse speeches or hold private talks with close ministers, or maybe just wanted a little bit of down time after all that unrestrained decision-making and being carried around in his chair.  It’s actually a very sweet little building (and yes, “little” is somewhat relative in this case), perched in the centre of two overwhelmingly large Halls, and I can imagine that if I was Emperor, I could spend a bit of time hanging out here.

     

Beyond this lies the Hall of Preserving Harmony, which was mostly used for banquets and later, as the location of the final stage of the Imperial Examination, a process of selecting the best and brighest talent for the Emperor’s posse of administrative officials.  It must of been a little like the West Wing meets The Apprentice, with robes.  Installed at the rear of this Hall is a marble carriageway, intricately with dragons and clouds and things, over which the Emperor was carried in to and out of the Hall.  Carved from a single piece of stone, and the largest such carving in China (weighing 250 tonnes), the carriageway was transported to Beijing on a pathway of ice.

Beyond the Hall of Preserving Harmony,you enter the northern (or ‘inner’) part of the Forbidden City.  Within this section, there is another set of three halls laid out in the same linear configuration as those to the south.  While smaller in scale, these halls (the Palace of Heavenly Purity, Hall of Union and the Palace of Earthly Tranquility) were important in terms of power, being the homes of the Emperor and Empress, as well as the place for receiving foreign dignitaries and important officials.

It was here that the Last Emperor, Puyi, retreated following his abdication in 1912 at the age of 6.  The southern section of the City was then opened to public uses.   Twelve years later, Puyi was forced out of the Forbidden City entirely, the first time he had experienced life outside the confines of the imperial enclave.  Until then, Puyi was a prisoner of sorts, not only within the Forbidden City, but within a crumbling system of governance.  What laid beyond the walls was forbidden for him, as much as the City itself was forbidden for those outside.

It’s a fascinating story of the clash of individuals, armies and belief systems … and, like all else in the Forbidden City, big.

 

Beijing / Eating up the hutongs

Many Chinese cities have a unique typology of housing. In Beijing, it is the hutong, which has been the mainstay of residential design for about 800 years.  The hutong is formed by a sequence of courtyard houses, where the central open space (or ‘siheyuan’) of each house links with that of the neighbouring residences.  As the buildings around the courtyard are arranged to maximise sunlight access, hutongs generally run east-west, and this pattern of development has defined the inner city of Beijing. 

Originally, hutongs were concentrated on both sides of the Forbidden City, which lies at the core of Beijing.  Their east-west orientation would have facilitated movement to the City, especially for aristrocrats and noblemen who lived closer to the centre (with merchants, other workers and general riffraff housed in more distant, as well as more informal, hutongs).  The term ‘hutong’ is a Mongolian word, meaning ‘water well’, and I guess this relates to the important community role of these spaces.

In modern-day Beijing, hutongs are well and truly under threat – either being demolished for development, or transformed to the extent that their original scale, usage and character are entirely lost.  The drivers for change are numerous and mostly understandable – from a general lack of infrastructure and hygeine in hutongs, to changes in societal structures and the relentless push to create a city of global influence and identity.  But, nonethless, it represents the loss of a significant cultural asset of the city.

At the northern edge of the inner city (as defined by the second of Beijing’s many concentric ring roads), Wudaoying Hutong is a hutong at least by name, and a little by nature.  Several hundred metres long, it houses a mix of retail spaces, cafes and bars, housing blocks and small offices.

    

While it has obviously undergone extensive rebuilding over time, change has been incremental, meaning that the hutong itself has retained its original scale (and not expanded to allow for a six-lane road or Metro station or something).

    

And within a relatively consistent scale and proportion, each building has adopted its own personality.

    

It was also home to a great collection of quirky vehicles.

    

And, the main reason for our visit … a vegetarian restaurant called Veggie Table (food trumps architectural history any day).  They opened earlier this year and seem to be going great guns, with a yumbo selection of burgers, salads, curries and ‘health’ shakes (I’m a little dubious about the health tag… mine was chocolate).  It was perfect fuel for an afternoon wandering about the city.   And it got me to thinking … if hutongs are being turned over for the sake of food like this (not just mega-malls and apartment towers), I can almost get behind the change.  Almost.

Beijing / Where Mao meets factory meets subversive art

The Dashanzi Art District, or as it is normally known, the 798 Art Zone is an amazing cultural precinct in the north west of Beijing.  It was originally an electronics factory complex, a joint venture between China and East Germany, built 50 years ago and  decommissioned in 1980s.  The precinct has since found new life, resisting government suspicion and developer pressure to become a thriving centre for the art community.

It is a wondrous place for the amateur photographer, full of amazing old buildings, crayzy artworks and wacky peeps.  So, this post best be more pics, less talk.  Heck, I might just do captions!

The factory complex was home to up to 20,000 workers, and provided a hospital, orchestra and sporting and social clubs.

The main “street” through the complex …

… and a quiet little courtyard.

A modern architectural tack-on, a cafe that envelopes a tree and has a pile of rooftop eating areas.

The courtyard outside one of the main factory buildings.

Factory becomes fantastic art space.

A bit of scary refurbing going on, like this unhandrailed glass stair.

Remnants of the industrial past, including old machinery and Maoist slogans painted on the factory walls.

And maybe remnants of a more distant past…?

A lot of the art is surprisingly cheeky …

… and surprisingly loopy – this guy was dressed up like a hospital patient and asking people to sign his bandages …

… and surprisingly subversive – the posters in the window were from a series that suggested that China’s key public operations (rail, television, etc) were rubbish.

But all very engaging … people just loved being part of the show.

Industrial and cultural side by side …

… although industrial on its own was captivating enough.

Buildings and pipes and galleries ….

… and what I like to call a little bit of “accidental art”.

Beijing / Laying a golden egg

It looks a lot like a half-submerged egg or a UFO that has landed in downtown Beijing and is often referred to by either nickname.  It’s actually the National Centre for the Performing Arts and it has, due to its unique and singular architectural identity, become one of Beijing’s best known landmarks.

It’s pretty easy to spot on an aerial photograph, distinguished by its scale and material from older residential buildings to its west and the cultural icons of Tian’anmen Square and the Forbidden City to its east.

This photo doesn’t really explain much about the building or its location, but I managed to capture an amazing costume on the left … flouncy woolly blouse, leopard print tights and fur-topped heels, with lace parasol.  Inspiring stuff.

    

The NCPA is somewhat simpler in design and execution.  It is a huge titanium and glass dome sitting in an artificial lake.  One might wonder about the futility of creating a big reflective building in Beijing (given the general lack of sunshine and the maintenance that must result from the relentless air pollution) but it is still an effective gesture.  The building’s architect, Paul Andreu, wanted to create a contrasting, yet subtle, response to the surrounding historic context, and I think it works.  The comparative lack of people is a real relief also.

Entry into the building is a via a submerged lobby that connects to the dome under the lake.

    

Parts of the lake have a glazed base, allowing sunlight to flood into the submerged building.

Inside the dome, three performance facilities (for opera, theatre and music) take up most of the space, with left-over areas used for circulation, hanging about before and after performances, and for general inspiring of awe.

    

There is also an exhibition that shows the history and development of the building, and a huge array of photos of celebrity visitors, ushers learning how to gesture people towards their seats (left) and “a foreign kid excited by the exhibits” (right).

But, of course, anything exciting is also a bit scary, and the NCPA is no different.  The building has courted controversy galore, from its design to its cost (about $500 million) and over-runs in construction time (due in part to an re-evaluation of the design that occurred after another of the same architect’s buildings partially collapsed).  Perhaps to counter this criticism, 70% of seats to performances are sold at a rate that is supposedly within reach of the average Beijinger.

A study has calculated that the per-seat cost of the building is about $100,000 and that the ongoing maintenance costs for the building will be somewhat huge.  As such, the government will be required to subsidise the facility for its entire life, to about 60% of its operational costs.  The government seems to not mind too much, saying that the building was never intended to be a money maker. Perhaps this is true … nowhere in the exhibition did I see a photo titled “senior government official excited by building operational budget”.

Beijing / Closed for business

This week is National Week in China, which means that everybody gets a whole week of public holidays … well, not a whole week really, as we have to work both days this weekend to allow for the rest of the week off.  That makes sense, right?

So, we took a trip to Beijing on the new super-express train … well, not a super-express train really, as it takes 5.5 hours to get between Shanghai and Beijing, not the four hours promised prior to the opening of the service.

Anyways, Beijing is a very popular October holiday destination, as the weather is great and lots of locals feel compelled (nay, obliged) to visit the capital during the national holiday period.  And like the locals, we were keen to see some of the city’s iconic sites, both historic and contemporary, while we were there.

Nice idea, shame about the reality.

First stop was the Forbidden City, where we discovered the entry plaza absolutely teeming with people.  They have a saying here to describe huge crowds – “people mountain, people sea” – and it was an apt way to describe the scene.  The line-up for entry tickets was incredibly long and slow moving and everyone in it looked pretty grumpy, so we cut our losses and headed to the next stop …

     

Tian’anmen Square.  We are fast learners, so were not at all surprised to encounter another mass of humanity that I would describe more like a “people glacier”.  The square itself was ringed with layers of fences, manned by thousands of police officers directing and halting the enormous crowds.  We even needed to join the end of a 10 minute queue to cross the street.

While we did get into the square itself, it was hardly a relaxing experience, navigating the crowds under the watchful eye of Chairman Mao, countless security personnel and cameras, not to mention our fellow tourists (the constant staring and pointing, badly-concealed photographing and requests for photos do wear thin pretty quickly…)

And forget about actually visiting any of the museums and memorials … bummer.  I was kinda keen on catching a glimpse of the Mao’s mummy, which is on display in a special Memorial Hall.

    

At this point, it was clear that we might need to focus on some more specialised tourist activities.  So, we hopped in a cab to the CCTV building, the headquarters of China’s state television network, designed by the master-of-archi-wackiness Rem Koolhaas.  It’s a great building, with forms that twist and cantilever in a thoroughly delightful way, but as an urban designer, I was mostly keen to see how it integrated with, and enhanced, its surrounding context.

Not long after the CCTV building was completed, a second Koolhaas building (a 30 storey hotel) was constructed next door.  During pre-opening celebrations, some wayward fireworks ignited the building, totally destroying it, killing a firefighter and injuring many others.  In a show of … lets say, resilience … the hotel is being rebuilt in identical form.  Which means that when we visited, the entire site (CCTV building included) was wrapped in hoarding and not accessible, least of all to a couple of frustrated tourists.

      

Nonetheless, we got to walk around the block (and what a huge block it was), checking out the building from all angles.  You can see why it has been given the nickname “the pants”.

And then there is the other modern architectural wonder of Beijing … the National Stadium.  And, if you have been paying attention, you would know how this chapter of the story ends. The whole Olympic site appeared to be closed, to the confusion and dismay of the crowds of people who had trekked to the northern edge of the city for a visit.

    

So, we took a two-hour walk around the site, searching for bridges across massive motorways and sneaky ways into the stadium.  Alas, we were only left with distant views across lanes of traffic and the heads of thousands of people.

People sea, car river, frustration tsunami.

The writing on the wall

I don’t know the reasons  – perhaps it’s due to the threat of harsh punishment, or a restricted supply of spraycans, or it’s just not the done thing – but you don’t get to see a lot of graffiti in the streets of Shanghai.  So, although I wouldn’t call myself a fan of the texta arts, it has become enough of a novelty to warrant my attention  … not to mention a whole blog post.

    

As luck would have it, my very own neighbourhood appears to a hotbed of random street scribbling.  I blame the teenage children of expats, attracted to – and later, disinhibited by – the many small bars of the area.  What better way to polish off a night in the pub than to deface some poor street vendor’s trolley?  And what better target for your pre-adult angst?

The real focus for graffiti in Shanghai is Moganshan Road, a street where industrial sites are slowing being transformed into art galleries and studios.  In an uncharacteristic move, the government has surrendered a very long wall on one side of the street to graffiti artists.  Supposedly, a lot of the art contains anti-government sentiment, but artists use foreign languages to avoid detection.

    

Occasionally you see some very nice stencil and poster art too.

And some very cute artistic expressions by the younger members of the street art fraternity.

A more common sight is the display of telephone numbers on the walls of houses and shops and factories.

    

I’m told that these are just spruiking the most mundane of products – hardware and farm machinery and stuff.  But their unknown meaning (at least, to my foreign eyes) and scrawled randomness lend them a sort of artistic merit.

Another common sight is the government community service notice.

You would be excused for not realising … but this very special work explains the certain pathway from snorting cocaine (or perhaps, having a particularly runny nose …) to joyfully begging in the streets to stealing handbags (fake Louis Vuitton, for sure) to getting stuck in a barrel.

    

I am looking forward to a similar series on the evils of graffiti.  And that would be as close to ironic as China gets.

Rui’an / A shop for everything

Here is a popular mode of transport in the city Rui’an.  I don’t whether to call them a covered rickshaw or tri-shaw or tricycle with lid … but for about a dollar, you can hire one to take you somewhere.  Or, like we did, you can negotiate a fee for a few hours sightseeing around the city.

    

Our ride took us through the older part of the city, which was packed full of crumble-down buildings, themselves jammed full of the most amazing variety of shopfronts.  There were all the typical convenience stores (if the excrutiatingly slow service could be called a “convenience”), fruit shops and vegetable shops (in China, the two are NEVER combined) and noodle cafes.

     

But, also squillions of shops selling all sorts of other stuff … hardware and pots and clothes and …

    

furniture (including chairs thoughtfully road-tested by the shopkeepers) and lanterns …

    

… and fabric rolls and mobile phones and anything else you might need.

Side by side, a small office and an internet cafe.

    

It was quite a task photographing the shopfronts, as we were moving at a pretty hectic pace and often swerving around obstacles (objects and people).  And, as the streets were filled with shoppers and retailers and other people just hanging around, I found it hard to get shots that weren’t messed up by people.

And speaking of mess, I have no idea what was going on here.  But, here they are, both shutters wide open, produce (literally) spilling onto the street, ready for business.

You call that 4 stars??!

I recently took a business trip to the city of Rui’an – a less-than-enthralling 5 hour train trip from Shanghai.  For a smallish city (1 million people), Rui’an is a booming economic centre, having been a centre for business for hundreds of years and one of the first Chinese cities to open up to international trade.

We stayed in what is supposedly Rui’an’s only 4-star hotel.  The room, while comfortable enough, hardly screamed “first class” (as the hotel ranking system defines it…)

And while the hotel itself can’t be blamed for the shortcomings of the surrounding cityscape, the view hardly inspired feelings of luxurious appointment.  In addition to making the view even less appealing, the satellite dishes were tuned only to Chinese language stations, leaving me plenty of time to explore the 4-star features of my room.

Firstly, the “mini-bar”. Two glasses.  No alcohol, no food.

    

The bathroom, in lieu of those cute little bottles of perfumed toiletries, had a two-button shower dispenser (one for body foam, one for shampoo – suspiciously similar in colour and fragrance) and a rubber ducky family.  Weird.  Check out the expert tiling work, by the way.

And this lovely artwork, likely mass-produced and on the verge of mouldy meltdown.

    

The guest manual outlined some of the other features of the hotel, from their peculiar food to their thorouge safety system (wow! straight outta the 1970s! with multiple monitors and a guy in a uniform!)

And an advanced communication system, also known as a telephone.  You can call locally and internationally, which is quite handy.

Especially if you are visiting town on business.  Rui’an’s speciality is the manufacture of car parts, which would explain why, instead of a phonebook, my room had a 2-part directory of local car and motorcycle parts manufacturers.

My favourite touch, however, were the very special hand-made padded clothes hangers (perhaps this is Rui’an’s other manufacturing speciality).  In black, no less.  I’d normally expect a lovely floral pattern.

It’s 4-star arts-n-crafts-chic at its very best.

August Update / Fun with Food!

The Fun with Food! gallery has just been updated.
Check out these crazy handbag snacks!

To view the gallery, click >> here.

10 Things I Love About Shanghai

Just yesterday, as I was riding the very long up escalator at my local Metro station, I spotted one of my favourite Shanghai things – something from which my feeling of happiness is not derived from a sense of irony, bemusement or desperation.  So, it got me to thinking about things I like here.  Things that are 100% good.

The Baby Split-pant
Babies anywhere are cute.  Babies in China are super-cute.  Babies in China in split-pants might be the cutest thing ever.  The split-pant combines practicality (the ability to toilet in any gutter or planter-box you wish) with comic potential (accidentally exposing your bot-bot to the world).  This baby is wearing a double split-pant.

    

The Food of the Minorities
Some of the outer edges of China have amazing foods.  I particularly love the cuisine of Yunnan (in the same family as Vietnamese and Thai) and Xinjiang (the western, almost Middle-Eastern, autonomous region).  Both have amazing breads, fresh salads and great noodles … which means that they have now become a popular choice for the urbanites of Shanghai.

   

The Bottle Opener
As yet, I haven’t tired of Shanghai’s tallest tower, even though it continually pops in view all over the city.  Especially compared to some other buildings, it is a very elegant structure.  It has an observation deck at its highest level and a crayzy light display each evening.

The Time It Takes to End a Phonecall
There is a strange habit here of extending the process of saying goodbye on the telephone.  I take it as a sign of respect, that the other person doesn’t want to end things quickly.  A typical conversation may go something like this …

A: We’ll get the contract signed and sent to you right away.  [it’s a business call]
B: OK.  Thanks.
A: Great, talk to you later.
B: OK. Bye.
A: Bye.
B: Hm, thanks, bye.
A: Byebye, ah, bye.
B: Ok, bye.  Bye.
A: Bye.  Ah.  Bye.

Using the Footpath to Full Potential
Most cultures could learn a things or two about using, and sharing, the footpath as they do in Shanghai.  It’s business meets family meets pleasure meets cooking meets meets walking meets meeting meets washing up meets eating meets everything else.

    

Shanghai’s Amazing Art Deco Architecture
Shanghai reputedly has one of the world’s best collections of Art Deco architecture, due to the economic boom of the early 20th century and the influence of foreign designers.  It’s something I didn’t know about before I arrived, and continues to delight and surprise me.  That’s the front door to our apartment building on the bottom right.

The Long Sound of Intrigue and Confusion
Imagine, if you will, that you are in a taxi and you encounter a street that is blocked for no apparent reason, or another driver that is attempting something strange or dangerous (u-turn across a median strip, for example).  Without doubt, the driver will respond with a unique exclamation – a drawn-out “hmmmmmm” noise that starts low and rises, suggesting a question but also sounding like an observation; a cross between intrigue and confusion; with a tonal style inspired by Scooby Do.  If you’ve heard it, you’ll know exactly what I mean.  It never fails to make me smile when I hear it.

Cats that Own the Street
The cats of Shanghai would have to be the most confident felines in the world.  They just sit (or lie)on the street or footpath, they draw attention to themselves by miaowing loudly, they approach any person they wish.  Scaredy-cats they are not.

The Shanghai Pyjama
People are most happy to wear their pyjamas in public.  Lots of people … and not just when they are caught short of a dunny roll.  People will walk far from home and undertake a series of errands still wearing last night’s PJs.  There are abundant theories about why this is so prevalent and so specific to Shanghai.  Some say it is like the older Chinese habit of wearing silk clothing as a means of displaying your status as a person of leisure (not some dirty worker).  Or, that it is a washday thing – given most Chinese don’t have loads of clothes, there aren’t many wardrobe options while you are waiting for your clothes to dry.  Or that it is a way of expressing that you are a real local, not some visitor from a less desirable suburb.  Whatever it is, it’s one of my favourite Shanghai sights.

     

Annamaya
Of Shanghai’s many good vegetarian eateries, Annamaya is king.  Housed in a little yellow building quite close to our place, Annamaya serves up a range of healthy and yummy foods, including delicious vegan deserts.  Every time we go, we wonder why we don’t eat there more often.

It’s Personal. July Edition

I bring you the latest personals for this month…

I think the phrase “Let’s get tanned” could catch on.
To see the latest stories of love and love lost, click >>>> here

Lanzhou / moving mountains (literally…almost)

China can lay claim to all sorts of world’s-best titles … the biggest population, the fastest train service, the oldest panda (perhaps not a surprise) and the longest human domino (10,267 people in Inner Mongolia last year).  It is also home to what is often deemed to be the world’s most polluted city, Lanzhou.  It’s a place that (luck abounds!) I now have a project, so I have become a regular visitor over the last few months.

   

Located at the geographic centre of China, Lanzhou is an industrial city, housing hundreds of factories and processing facilities and power plants.  Geographic conditions don’t help.  The city has developed along the Yellow River, hemmed in by steep mountain ranges on either side of this major river.  It lacks air flow.  It also lacks rain, meaning that the mountainsides are mostly free of vegetation (resulting in regular dust storms) and that toxic air just tends to hang around.  On many days, the air quality is poor that the mountains just adjacent the city cannot be seen through the haze.

The journey to the city from the airport (oddly enough for a smaller city, located 70 kilometres out of town) is pretty desolate.  A new motorway weaves through the bare mountains, lined with massive power cables and outcrops of colourful advertising billboards.

     

Dotted through the mountainsides are hundreds of holes.  According to our driver, these have been created by the shepherds who need to spend nights outside with their herds.  I didn’t see any sheep or shepherds, but perhaps it was out of season.

     

Closer to the city, the mountains have undergone more significant modification. Their sides have been cut into terraces, creating a series of horizontal platforms on which vegetation has been planted.

But plants need water to grow, so millions of litres of water are being pumped to, and sprayed over, the mountain sides.  It’s a huge, not to mention environmentally frightening, undertaking.

But, I guess it is an improvement on the previous solution being supported by the Lanzhou authorities – to demolish a number of mountains next to the city.  Just like opening some windows to allow the breeze in, they said.  This idea was tested, yet failed.  Now the focus is on reafforestation, as well as programs to reduce air use, use cleaner energy and relocate polluting industries.

Some of the hillsides are getting greener.

Flying out the city, you can clearly see how the river system defines the areas that can support vegetation, and by extension, agriculture.  You can also see the enormity of the re-vegetation program being undertaken … and the probable futility of trying to change something that cannot be changed.

July Update / Huh Wot!

Today, I also updated that old favourite, Huh Wot!
More Chinglish, linguistic and visual!  And this tummy warmer …

To go there, click >>> here

Update / Now, That IS Crayzy

Today, I’ve updated the Now, That IS Crayzy gallery.
It’s full of photos of the weird and wonderful things I encounter in Shanghai.

To get to the gallery, click >>> here

More wheels; extra crayzy

Since my last post about crayzy bikes (like here), I’ve continued to catalogue the weird and wonderful vehicles I see in the streets of Shanghai.

    

There are plenty of these old style bicycles, refurbed to support a tray for carrying around stuff – from timber palings to construction waste and refrigerators to styrofoam.  There are also motorised versions – not so environmentally friendly, but obviously faster and easier for the driver.

I’ve been seeing quite a lot of this hotrod lately, as it is often parked in my street (when it is not being ridden by its eldery owner at great speed and with little regard for the safety of pedestrians and other motorists).

    

This type of motorbike also often gets spruced up to create a modern-day rickshaw.  These guys hang around tourist attractions and ferry wharves, hoping to pick up some passengers for a short trip.  Despite the allure of the fancy curtains and cushion cover in the one on the right, I am concerned by the lack of seatbelts, the flimsy metal frame (I see them being made every day in a shop across the road from our apartment) and the assumed driving style of the man up front.  Have not been brave, or drunk, enough to take a ride in one yet …

While visiting a construction site one gloomy day, I happened across this little treasure.  It’s made up of a conventional motorbike, extended to include 2 wheels at the rear, and supporting a metal framed box. 

    

Inside the box were two bench seats, facing each other and accessed via a rear door.  I imagine it was used to transport construction workers to the site each day.

    

I also discovered this tractory machine … purpose unknown.  Like the site workers, it was taking an extended break out of the rain, so I didn’t get to see it in action.

A walk around the main lake of Nanjing yielded a number of vehicular interactions, from this attention-getting bicycle/trolley hybrid …

    

… abandoned (?) wheelchair … and these commonly-spotted minibuses.

    

They are often used in new development zones, where the grandeur of the master planning vision has lead to unfeasibly long walks between the different buildings (just think Canberra or Brasilia).  For a few kuai, you can jump a ride to the next temple, cultural museum, Starbucks or toilet block.

And this little guy.  It was so cute, I wanted to take it home … but the journey back to Shanghai, along 300 kilometres along freeways, seemed a little out of its range.

It’s Personal. June Edition

I’ve been trawling the personals again and bring you this month’s top picks.

And there’s another one featuring architects!  Woot!
Click here for the updates.

Wuzhen / discovering special places

Although the whole town of Wuzhen is a great visit, some places there were really special.

One of the local industries is the dyeing of materials, especially blue calico (not pink boots, despite the stunners in the photo above).

    

Large courtyards are fitted out with timber frames for drying the material after dyeing.  The traditional process uses a range of natural ingredients, including blue grass and mulberries, and in some places, this practice still continues (although is now heavily marketed as an “eco-industry”).

And when you get enough similarly-dressed people into one of the courtyards, it can look something like a Ralph Lauren photoshoot.

The laneways of Wuzhen are home to hundreds of tiny little shops, mostly selling tourist trinkets and cold beverages.

It was a nice discovery to find this little barber shop.  I guess it is for the locals, although after our long walk, a bit of a sit down would have been nice; the haircut a bonus.

    

At the end of the day, the barber closed up shop by gathering together a bunch of slats that he then inserted, one by one, into a track across the shopfront.   It’s a daily ritual carried out by all the shopkeepers across the city, and has been for possibly hundreds of years.

     

Down another laneway, we found the Sanbai Wine Workshop.  This brewery was set up in the Ming Dynasty (meaning that it is at least 450 years old), still operating, and handing out free samples of its very pungent wine.

I am guessing that Sanbai means “three white”, as my research tells me that the wine (55% alcohol content) contains not only white rice, but also white flour and white water.  Don’t ask me what white water is, apart from something you go rafting in.

    

In a space a bit over 1000 square metres, they produce more than 200 litres of wine every day, using traditional methods no less.

I didn’t really dig the wine (maybe it reminded me too much of forced drinking sessions with clients) but the building was really charming.

Wuzhen / putting on a show for the tourists

Wuzhen is a little town with quite a long history.  Settled about 1500 years ago, it’s location (within the ‘golden triangle’ formed by Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou) pretty much guaranteed its success as a place of trade.  And now, its proximity to Shanghai guarantees that every weekend, it will play host to thousands of weekend tourists from the big smoke.

     

It is the quintessential water town, with a network of natural rivers and artificial canals, criss-crossed by a multitude of bridges and laneways.   It’s sometimes called “the Venice of the East”, but it seems that this moniker is attached to pretty much any water town in China.

Small in scale and free of cars, it makes a very pleasant change from Shanghai.  The central part of the town is its main attraction, and thus you need to pay an entry fee to get in.  As long as the main share of the money goes to retaining and upgrading the old building stock, rather than the overzealous gate guards, I don’t paying for the privilege.

It’s easy spend a few hours there, just wandering around the water edge and snacking and looking at stuff.

    

Amongst all the visitors, a whole bunch of people actually live here too.

The traditional houses open straight to the waterfront, which is also the focus of the public domain of the town.  The scattering of artefacts of everyday life – washbasins, pot plants, clothes drying in the sun – contribute to the character of the place.

 

And the architecture is defined (as it should be) by climate, local materials and function.  I am very fond of these operable timber awnings.

     

As we were gawking at people, people were gawking right back at us.  Wuzhen is definitely a destination for local tourists, so we were met with much interest.  All day, whispers of “waiguoren!” (foreigner) and pointed fingers were directed towards us.  Huge tour groups would stop in their tracks just to stare and take photos of us, usually not bothering to conceal their purpose.  Things would often descend into a mutual paparazzi situation, which seemed to make everyone amused.

Perhaps to distract the tourists from each other, there were lots of traditional performers throughout the town.  Wuzhen is most famous for shadow puppetry (the theatre was outside the gated area, so we couldn’t go there without surrendering all rights to re-entry) and a local version of opera (even less melodic than the Western version).  But there were also these guys doing some martial arts with swords and sticks, on a boat of course.

    

And this guy, who climbed out onto a long stick of bamboo to do some acrobatics.  It was most skilful and quite scary to watch, but he didn’t really draw a crowd.  Perhaps he was the one doing all the watching … spotting waiguoren from on high.

 

Huh Wot! May Update

The Huh Wot! gallery has been updated.
I thought this ad might have been for a law firm, but it seems to be real estate agents (same diff, maybe) ….

Click here for the latest updates.  7 new images!

Fun with Food! May Update

13 new images added to the Fun with Food! gallery, including this crayzy vegetable and jam combo …

Click here for more!

5,164 steps into unbearable pain

The glossy brochure actually says “5,164 steps into history”.

Last weekend, I joined a bunch of my colleagues running the Great Wall Marathon.  We didn’t actually do the marathon … thankfully.  Our 10 kilometre run was challenge enough.

It was a beautiful day … not too hot, not too cold …a Goldilocks level of ‘just right’.  The sky was actually blue!  There were green mountains!  And finally, after over a year here, I got to see the Great Wall.

In fact, lots of the Wall.  The 10 kilometre course (like the other race distances) weaved through a small village for a few kilometres before taking to the wall itself.  I wanted to travel light (I was actually trying to make a good time, seeing I had bothered to start training a couple of months ago) so I didn’t carry my camera.  Fortunately though, we were joined by our very own company photographer (it’s a full time gig but he does find plenty to do …) so the whole event was captured well.

The views were pretty spectacular, into the valley that the village nestled into, as well as across the mountain tops and ridge lines that the wall run along.

But yes, getting to the top of those mountains was quite a task.  I had wondered whether the 5,164 steps were just an estimate of the number of strides you take completing the race … but soon realised that it was in fact a very accurate count of the number of stairs you needed to scale along the length of the wall.   Stairs that varied in height and material, went up then down then up again, sometimes became ramps, often only 1 metre wide with a sheer drop to the edge.

“Run” became “walk” very quickly.

    

There was plenty of huffing and puffing and cursing.  Some people were literally crawling up the stairs.  I noticed a few stretchers stashed away at key points of the course and I wasn’t at all surprised.

After a few kilometres, we left the wall and from there, it was a gentle slope (albeit 5 more kilometres of running) back to the village and the finish line.  I did OK, finishing in top 20% with all the fit-freaks.

I don’t think I have ever pushed myself so hard before (a head cold lingering from earlier in the week certainly didn’t help).  But I didn’t really get to enjoy the view.   Next year, I might just walk.

 

Let’s (sort of) talk about sex

It appears that China is undergoing a kind of sexual evolution.  I would have popped an R on the front of the last word in that sentence, but feared that it could be an overstatement, not to mention the best way to draw the attention of people who like to scan the internet for words like that.  Hmm, anyway …

I was a bit surprised to find that it wasn’t uncommon to see shops like the one above, or like the one in my neighbourhood that has a lovely big window display full of “lifestyle products”.  And these are just regular streets in regular neighbourhoods (I am yet to see what could be classed as a red light district).

In most hotel bathrooms too, you will discover a basket of cheeky personal products, some overtly sexual in usage and others I’m not sure of.  It seems that Chinese society is quite upfront about this stuff, although only in recent years.

The name of these condoms translate (I think) as “I can”, a coy but supportive message to the user, although a little diminished by the English subtitle: “like fire to one’s heart’s content”

Traditionally (under Confucian law), sexuality was strictly regulated.  Promiscuity and adultery were harshly punished, the latter resulting in jailtime for the lady and total castration for the gentleman (or should I say, soon-to-be eunech).  A good example of the punishment and the crime being a little disproportionate.  That said, eunechs could always look forward to a startling career as the emperor’s confidant – that’s what always happened, right?

This pack contains both a “vibrated” and a “condom”.  Huh wot?

For much of the 20th century, sexuality was greatly repressed … primarily because one’s personal desires were meant to be sacrificed for the dream of societal togetherness.  From the 1980s onwards though, as economic policies shifted, so too did the social stances of government.  Sex was returned to the personal sphere.

This is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers starring a giant banana.  Confusion would surely abound: “Right, so we have to stretch this thing over your upper body…”

A key change was the reworking of marriage laws in 2003, which simplified not only the process of marrying, but also unmarrying.  By necessity, this also removed the requirement that before marriage, a woman would need to prove herself (via a physcial examination) to be a virgin.  A general modernisation of a many social policies also occurred.  Interestingly, one of China’s most restrictive social policies – the one-child policy – has lead to some expansion of personal rights.  Implied in this policy is the separation of sexual behaviour and child-production … that the former can be pursued purely for reasons of pleasure. 

Some kind of washing product, a “pure Chinese medicinal” supposedly.

Of course, there would be many more factors at play here.  The internet now provides ready access to all sorts of information and entertainment.  China is more global, with people inetrested in seeing, if not adopting, Western ways of doing.  A growing middle-class, focused on personal rights and fuelled by increasingly higher disposable incomes, have both the desire and means to push some social boundaries.   And, like much of the world, sex-related disease and crime have forced a more frank discussion of some critical issues.

These panties (both for men and women) are 100% Fashion Sexy and have Good Air Permeability.  This would make them easily rippable, rather than aimed at gassy botbots (not so sexy).

It’s all very new still.  Much of the stuff I read online suggests that while people are apparently more comfortable discussing the topic, they are not necessarily becoming better informed.  There are lots of amusing stories told by counsellors and health professionals, like the college couple, prepared to take the “big step” and having bought the right precautions, having no idea about what goes on what, or in what.  But, also less amusing ones about women  use abortion as their primary means of “contraception”, unaware that there are other options available.  

“Competitive men’s socks”.  I am sure they are just socks.  For putting on you feet under shoes.  But without buying them and opening them up, I can’t rule out that ‘sock’ is just a euphemism.

Hopefully the gap between “talking about” and “being informed about” will close quickly.  Along with the sex shops and readily available contraception (on the counter of every convenience store, not just in hotels), universities and schools are introducing education programs and better social support for students.  And the internet, despite attempts at controlling it, must also be giving plenty of teenagers a pretty good education as well.  I guess evolution is never a steady process.

An amazing expanding towel, irresponsibly without a warning about placing the uncompressed towel in one’s mouth (like the ones I have seen in Australia).

“Antique” being a relative concept, of course.

If ever there was a place where “buyer beware” was a useful phrase to keep in mind, it’d be the Dongtai Road Antique Market.

    

This market is located in the old town of Shanghai, with possibly hundreds of stalls stretched along two streets, selling all sorts of stuff.  Antiques, though, they are not.

    

Nonetheless, it’s a pretty interesting place to visit, just to see the crayzy amounts of stuff on sale.

    

While the stallholders were mostly happy for me to photograph the goods, they weren’t so keen to be in the photos themselves.  I don’t whether this is Chinese humility or paranoia, but the transition from in-yer-face salesperson to shy photo-model was stunningly swift.

    

Having been around for many years (and in that time, gaining a reputation for its dubious claims about the antiquity of its products), it is also surprising the market is still peddling the whole “you might be the lucky one who discovers a priceless Ming vase under a pile of junk” line.  It seems the product-suppliers are experts in making things look old … smearing everything with a bit of dirt and ensuring that they are displayed as randomly as possible.

    

This stall was particularly random, piled high with old cameras, mannequins, maps and paintings.

    

After a bit of wandering around, you just start to see the same stuff.  There are lots of old-style cigarette adverts and picture calendars, which (if they actually existed in the old days), would have been quite raunchy for their time.

    

Lots of old watches and clocks and figurines and bangles.

    

Paintbrushes and chopsticks and boxes and (at the centre of the lower image) little folding things emblazoned with drawings of people doing naughty physical things.  When I took one of my Aunties BS (and others) here for a visit, she purchased one of the little red boxes, only to discover later that the inside of the box contained some of the same naughty drawings.  Hadn’t noticed that before, she claimed …

    

Old coins and bottles and statues and multi-lingual copies of “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung” aka the little red book.

    

It’s a place where Communist imagery meets blatant commercialism … possibly best expressed in this fetching Obama T-shirt.

The market is famous for hard bargaining … itself a fakery of a sort.  Buyers come here expecting dramatic cuts to the asking price, and sellers jack the prices up accordingly.  Negotiations occur through rapid-fire price offers, sighing and guffawing, hand-wringing and money-flashing, even fake tears (it’s true: I have seen it).

But, in the end, both emerge winners.  One has extracted a good sum of money for a mass-produced “antique”.  And the other, knowing full well that this was the case, has a cheap souvenir and a good story to tell.

A new page – and It’s Personal

There is a free street mag here called Enjoy Shanghai and within which, is a page devoted to connecting people.  I’m not sure how many of them are legitimate listings, but invariably, there will be many that are sweet or absurd or unsettling or any combination of all three.   For instance …

To check out some more amazing examples of love potential, click here or on the new menu link (It’s Personal) above.

A New Life for the House of Death

As I get to know the multitude of functions of my new camera, I have been on the search for subjects that are both breathtaking and simple to photograph (no point having a new camera if you can’t show off some good photos). 1933 scores on both accounts.

It began life as an abattoir (part of a chain, of which the others, in London and New York, are long demolished) and after several changes of function, is now used as a complex of studios, restaurants and retail spaces.

The building has been stripped back to its Art Deco functionalism (that could well be an oxymoron…), exposing its original architectural features and celebrating its original usage. In a city where people cross the road so they don’t have to walk past a hospital, it’s a brave step on the part of the developers.

The building itself is an amazing mash-up of concrete and voids, soaring bridges, ramps and winding staircases. It’s like Escher on Mushrooms, but surprisingly very functional.

The whole complex is basically a circle inside a square.

My research tells me that (yukkies ahead…) the cows were forced up the 3 levels of the building via a series of ramps at the periphery – the square – stopping to feed in a number of rooms (at least they were given a final meal).

Bridges of varying width would then sort the cows into different sizes before funneling them to the inner circular tower, where they would descend (gravity-assisted) to their final gory fate on the floor below.

To ensure that beast and man would never meet – getting emotionally attached can make that killing part a little hard – a multitude of tiny staircases was provided for the workers.

     

In the refurbishment, the outer feeding halls and administration areas have been converted to offices, restaurants and retail, while the inner tower is used as an exhibition space.

A glass-floored events space has been created at the top – as if the feeling of discomfort wasn’t pressing enough already.

The rooftop is a pretty nice place to take in a view of the city.

After a spend of over 100 million RMB, the developers might be wondering why 1933 hasn’t taken off yet. Perhaps it’s the sordid history or the inflexible configuration of the building (‘cows to the slaughter’ is not such a good metaphor for a retail centre) or its relatively inaccessible location or the lack of interest from decent tenants (aside from the Ferrari Owners Club of Shanghai and a few steak-themed restaurants).

    

That said, it has captured one market very effectively … a weekend army of amateur photographers, armed with big cameras and the desire for an easy ego-boost.

 

Tianjin / many ways to cross a river

When you find a city on a river, you expect to see bridges.  Funnily enough, there are only two bridges over the Huangpu River in the centre of Shanghai (both are humongous – to let big boats under, I guess) with most cross-river traffic using one of the many tunnels under the river.

Tianjin has lots of bridges.  For at least a hundred years, the two sides of the city have been linked over the Haihe River and these structures has become a kind of landmark for the city.  In fact, a few years ago the government decided that they would go a bridge-building frenzy, all part of connecting and renewing the different parts of the city.  No surprise: things got a bit wacky at times.

On first seeing the Jintang Bridge, I just assumed that it was quite a convincing replica of a historic steel bridge, well-proportioned, well-constructed and complete with a section that allows it pivot open (presumedly fake too…)  It was in fact built in 1907 and was Tianjin’s first steel bridge.  Still the domain of pedestrians only (its proportions would not allow vehicular traffic, thankfully), the bridge connects the Ancient Culture Street and the Italian Quarter of the city.

You know what they say … lie down with fake dogs, you get up with fake fleas.

Of a similar vintage, the 100-metre long Jiefang Bridge is a bascule (drawbridge) type with the whole middle section hinging open for boats.

This one (the Jinggang Bridge) is surprisingly old too.  First constructed in 1920s, it was augmented in 1992 with a steel arch that supports a second bridge level above the original.

Double deckers bridges don’t really make pleasant urban spaces.

OK, so no prizes for guessing that this one is NOT from Renaissance Europe.  Though, I was surprised to find that it is almost 40 years old.  Seems that this transposed European historicism has been going on for a while!

Some of the bridges from recent years are really quite eye-popping.

    

The Jinbu Bridge, while not so magical from side-on, creates some interesting spaces and junctions at a closer scale.

     

And the Dapu Bridge is very elegant.

But my favourite is the Yongle Bridge.  What bridge? you ask.  Surely that is just the world’s 4th largest* ferris wheel I see?! (*at time of construction)

But no.  At some point in time, someone imagined something wonderful – a contraption that would bridge and ferris at the same time.  And if such a contraption was to be built, it would only be in China.

I wonder if that same person stands at the base of the Yongle Bridge, watching as its 48 capsules make their 30 minute journey from a base station cleverly integrated into the underside of a 4 lane municipal road, split to accommodate the turning wheel, and thinks to their inwardly-smiling self: “I just KNEW this would work.”

Tianjin / fakin’ all over

While it has a long and interesting history and is fast becoming an vibrant and attractive city, Tianjin is a little short on places for sightseeing.  It has always been quite a practical place – located between Beijing and the China Sea, a point of interchange between China and the world outside. 

One of the main visitor attractions (according to Wikitravel at least) is Gǔwénhuà Jiē, literally Ancient Culture Street.  I could take issue with all elements of the name – it is less a street than a precinct; the activity is shopping (which I admit, is a culture of sorts); and it is far from ancient.  In no real surprise, Ancient Culture Street is a mostly faithful reproduction of a traditional market place.

Beyond the flagrant fakery, it’s not too bad.  It’s loaded full of little shops selling clothes and fabric, ceramics and wood carvings, jade and jade-like jewellery, kids toys and postcards.  I’m sure I was the only lao wei there, so I attracted my fair share of attention, from prolonged stares of passers-by to the relentless sales pitching of the shopkeepers.

But, of course, Tianjin is used to lao wei like me.  While informal exchange of goods and people has existed here for centuries, it was not until the mid 19th century that the city officially opened itself to international trade.  Tianjin was particularly well placed, with a large seaport and rail lines connecting it to many parts of China.

    

As the foriegn population of the city grew, so did inter-racial tensions and as a response, the city government ceded parts of the city to its trading partners.  These “concessions” (like those found in many of China’s big cities) became semi-self-contained parts of Tianjin, where foreign communities built schools, hospitals and community facilities as well as businesses. First the French and the British (the experts of colonisation at the time), followed by the Japanese, Germans, Russians, Austrians, Belgians and Italians.  For once, the Americans didn’t try to take over something, politely joining the British within their concession.  All up, the concessions covered a large part of the city and controlled much of the waterfront. 

    

Perhaps through homesickness or cultural insensitivity or pure habit (or a mixture of all three), foreign corporations and governments set about creating buildings and spaces in the image of their home countries.  Many have been demolished over time, as the city renews itself, as buildings fall into disrepair, or as public policy seeks to eradicate uncomfortable phases of a city’s historic development. 

But now, in a slightly confusing act of self-reference, the European history of Tianjin has become the preferred source of historic meaning in new developments.  The riverside is crowded with new buildings, styled with heavy masonry walls and fluted columns, dormer windows, mansard rooves and cupolas.  It’s like the architectural equivalent of a Furbie: cute and unsettling at the same time.

    

Even in a country that shuns religion, new churches are popping up.  I’m not sure what these are used for, if anything. 

    

The main shopping street is also Euro-style – the street lamps are a giveaway.  On close inspection though, the trick is revealed … one side of the street is almost just a facade, with tiny shops fronting a very large construction site (likely to be huge towers sitting in landscape, a bit like European urban fantasies of the early 20th century).

There is an area of the central city entitled Italian Style Town.  I don’t take issue with this name: it is a pretty honest appraisal of the development.   The Italian Concession interestingly was the last foreign concession in Tianjin, closing (or rather, opening) its gates in 1947, which may explain why this quarter still retains some presence.

    

It has all the ingredients of the traditional European town, but apart from a few holidaymakers and wedding parties, it was pretty empty.  A bit like Shanghai’s Thames Town or New Holland Village.

    

And then, just across the road, I spy some structures that could well be the real deal: buildings that were actually built during the official European occupation of the city.  To be honest, after seeing so many good fakes, it is getting increasingly hard for me to sort the wheat from the chaff.  Besides, a knowledge of architectural history has never been my strong point.  Nonetheless, these buildings are as good as abandoned, falling apart while the new stuff next door struggles to take off.

And more of the same is on its way up.

Tianjin / I do like to be beside the riverside

Tianjin is found on the Hai River (literally “Sea River”), a major river of northern China, or rather, a confluence of many waterways, both natural and artificially constructed.  The Hai River – called the ‘mother river’ of Tianjin – is of course, the reason for the city’s being.  Tianjin is the nearest port to Beijing and thus has always been a key centre for trade, within China and internationally.  It is China’s fifth largest city and one of four self-governing city-states.

In most Chinese cities, the river forms the basis for the urban skyline – Shanghai is a great example of this, with the Bund comprising a line of historic stone buildings on one side of the Huangpu, while the crayzy-modern skyscrapers of Pudong stretch along the riverbank on the opposite side.  But, the river itself is mostly functional space, a well-sailed path for the movement of people and goods alike.  Chinese cities just haven’t reach that stage of development where waterside restaurants are more valuable to the economy than barges transporting cement and construction scrap.

Even the buildings sometimes have a strange relationship to the water.  To ensure access to sunlight, there are very strict orientation regulations for residential buildings – meaning that in some cases, buildings present their skinny edge to the best view (a principle that would confound, if not infuriate, even the most open-minded of Australian property developers).

In Tianjin, there has been a huge effort by government to create an accessible and attractive waterfront for the city.  A generous pedestrian and cycle (and occasional motor vehicle, of course) path runs along the water edge, providing a transition from street to water through ramps, stairs and terraces, and jammed full of trees and landscape.  For the sake of comparison, here is what a lot of the Shanghai waterfront looks like.

And jammed full of people too.   You can actually get very close to the water, so that means people end up engaging in all sorts of activity – even if the signs suggest that you shouldn’t.

There is plenty of fishing, as well as the subsequent selling of the catch.

I am sure that in some landscape architect’s mind, these large stone terraces were wondrous places that would accommodate civilised contemplation and conversation … not bright tubs full of undersized fish and distressed turtles.

Nor, taxi drivers washing their hub caps.  Still, as a place of community activity and interaction, it functioned perfectly.

It was heartening to see loads of older people using the spaces along the river.  This guy – 70 years old at least – passed me so quickly on his rollerblades that I didn’t get a chance to take a decent photo.  He had just shouted a few ‘zaos!’ (‘mornings!’) to bunch of people practising their waltzing.

These guys were braving the slightly chilly conditions to go for a dip in the water.  The skinny one was taking his time psyching up to jump in, attracting a crowd (along the river bank and up at street level) who seemed to hand out both encouragement and ridicule.

And there were all the usual tai-chi-ers, sword dancers, head-tappers, backwards-walkers, top-of-the-lungs vocal-exercisers and aimless strollers.  Oh, and guys fixing wooden boats.

At one point, I crossed a bridge to find that the other side of the river was vastly different – a narrow footpath, minimal landscape, buildings pushed back behind a four lane road.  It was a good reminder of what most cities are like along their waterfront and to be thankful that in Tinajin, at least they got it half right.

Life at 350 kilometres per hour

Yowsers!  It’s been a long time between posts!  The Doctor has been busy … getting some projects finished off, making a trip home and then hosting some of the Bullshit Clan for a while.  While the family were here, we took a trip to Hangzhou, the preferred weekend destination of the Shanghainese (and a good percentage of the 20 million were there when we went, it seems).  The quickest way to get there is on the newish express train – covering the 180 kilometre journey in about 40 minutes.

Such a fast speed – 350 km/h for most of the journey – does not lend itself to photography (not with my soon-to-be-replaced low-end camera at least).  Nonetheless, I sat lens-to-window, documenting the landscape as it rapidly changed before me.

Don’t be misled by the use of the word ‘landscape’ though.  The two cities are basically joined, with vast stretches of housing, industry and intensive farming between them.  The transition from one to the next can be quite abrupt, with multi-storey residential buildings overlooking vege crops or nestled against coal-fired power plants.  The housing towers are pretty monotonous, with row after row of identical structures.

Similarly, lines of greenhouses and cultivated land have an almost hypnotic affect, flicking past at great speed.  Big cities have big appetites I guess.

All types of human activity were on display.

And as you’d expect, roads as well as rail lines – multi-stacked interchanges and highways, complete (some strangely empty) and under construction.   Through much of the journey, we were shadowed by a major highway, marked by massive billboards, and carrying traffic that moved at a relative snail’s pace.

And, on the edges of Hangzhou, typical Chinese suburbia.  These buildings – some single dwellings – seem to be inspired by both Chinese and European architectural traditions.  We used to call this post-Modernism, right?

And in no time we arrive. And in no time, this will all change.  In a year or two, the same journey will be completely different.

 

2 wheels, good. 3 wheels, crayzy.

China and bikes go together.  Well, at least, they used to … Just like most places undergoing hectic development, in China the joys of cycling are being eschewed for the supposed joys of motorised movement.  Where once the streets teemed with bikes, cyclists now jostle for space beside trucks and cars and electric scooters.  No wonder, then, that congestion and air pollution are sharply on the rise.   That said, there are still heaps of bikes here, used by the young and old, for commuting or just getting around.

Coming out of winter, I can understand the lack of interest in cycling sometimes. Imagine how cold one’s botbot would be on these bikes.

These hand warmers are pretty a pretty common sight, especially on scooters.  Many people fashion their own version, usually from sticky tape and cardboard scraps.

Here is a typical Chinese bicycle, sitting outside the front door to our apartment building.  This style is still being made, despite its heavy frame and slightly dodgy braking mechanism.  Where once it was safe to just leave bikes sitting around, people are now very conscious of locking their bikes to something.  Supposedly there is a lot of targeted theft – mostly from foreigners – especially as the socio-economic inequality of Shanghai widens.

    

Bikes are still used a lot for deliveries.  The one on the left has a refrigerated section for cold stuff.  The one on the right is actually from Seoul (and it is a scooter, of course) but I’m pretty sure it is the biggest pizza storage thingy I’ve ever seen.

They are also used for waste collection.  Every morning you can hear them doing the rounds, using a loud-speaker to blast out a recorded list of collectibles … computer parts, electronics, Styrofoam …

The Styrofoam guys are kinda famous here and you see loads of tourists running along the street to take their photo.  Their stacks can grow to ludicrously large volumes, at least double the amount in this photo.

Folding bikes are pretty popular too.  And some of them are tiny.

    

And, hire bikes are increasingly popular too.  I guess that as general bike usage drops, people require less committal access to bicycles.

    

There are some pretty amazing cycle contraptions here.  This guy had a modified wheelchair/cycle, with hand pedals and steering wheel.  He spent a good amount of time circling around so he could gawk at the group of people I was with, so I didn’t feel bad peeling off a few shots of him in return.  (Please note the Shanghai Pyjamas on display in the first photo as well).

And this one is something else … That’d be an office chair strapped to an electric bike.  Built for comfort, not speed.  While I am not fond of the aesthetic outcome, I am loving the ingenuity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Unfinished City

A city never gets finished.  It keeps getting built and rebuilt, piece by piece, changing to reflect the people who live in it.  For me, it’s a really exciting (not to mention humbling) thought.

As you’d expect (given my residency in China as well as my field of work), I get to see loads of construction sites.  To seems that almost every street in Shanghai has a massive construction effort going on, and if it doesn’t, it’ll have in the next month or so.  Buildings are knocked down and constructed at an amazing pace.

Here’s a good example – a hotel that got built last year in Changsha – 15 storeys shot up in 6 days.  An amazing video (click on the image above for the link).

Mostly though, it seems that things are getting knocked down quickly.  Just on the end of our street, most of a block has been demolished but as yet, there is no sign that anything will be built there.

Interestingly, a number of the small apartment buildings across the site have been retained and appear to be inhabited still.  I am hoping that the plan is to keep these older buildings and integrate them into the new development, but I am probably being naive.   They are in pretty bad shape and I can’t see developers seeing much potential in keeping them, especially when they can easily be replaced with a few high-rise apartments, an income-generating Starbucks and a windswept plaza or two.

It is a shame though, as in this area at least, historic buildings are valued by many.  That is, ex-pats looking to live in “authentic” Shanghainese digs for a while …

It’s pretty common to see people living in the midst of construction sites.   As the government commonly moves people out of their homes to make way for redevelopment, I guess many residents aren’t quite ready to relocate.  Rather than be dislocated from their established social networks or favourite wet market or place of work, they stay living amongst the stacks of reinforcement rods and demolition refuse for as long as possible.  A fervent disregard for common-sense safety is not uncommon here either.  I like to call it NoH+S.

Sometimes, you get quick a good peek into sites, like this one in Hangzhou.  I am wondering what was going on with the structural engineer.  That is some crayzy beamwork, my friend.

The good news is that some of the historic facade is being retained, reinforced so it doesn’t collapse (by accident or otherwise) during construction and will be integrated into the finished product.  Even though this is pretty rare, there is very little waste generally, with all materials carefully divided into type, reused on site or picked up by recyclers.  At least the third R is being embraced!

Not so for this building … Seeing it carefully shrouded in (bamboo) scaffolding, I wondered whether the plan was to keep and refurbish it.  It was quite tall (8-10 storeys) and in good condition, and by my use of past tense, it obviously was demolished soon after I took this photo.  Proof, at least, that I can be a little naive at times.

Oh yeah, in case anyone is in doubt, they do use steel scaffolding here too.

A few times I have been fortunate (?) enough to got onto some construction sites.  They are pretty captivating places … swarming with hundreds of workers (except the exact moment that I took this photo…) and speeding vehicles and huge piles of construction materials and demolition waste.  I visited this site by accident, looking for my client’s office which was on the other side of the site – a short 15 minute walk away.   I would have loved to hang around and take lots of photos, but we were running late for our presentation at that point and there was a family of angry-looking dogs blocking our path.

The same client took us to another one of their sites.  Set on the edge of town as well as the edge of a mountain, it was tagged for residential development.  All the existing buildings (farmers’ cottages) had been torn down, except for the home of a family who remained on site as pseudo-caretakers/security guards.  Along with another angry-dog family.

They were actually very welcoming to the clipboard-carrying foreigners, even though we were part of the redevelopment process that was taking them from their land.  They had just finished their annual peach harvest, and after picking and offloading 300 tonnes of stone fruit, were happy for us to grab whatever we wanted from their orchard.

I asked our client whether they planned to keep the little house in the photo above.  His slight smile made me realise that once again, my naivety was getting the better of me.

60+2 hours watching The Wire

With wintry weather of late, indoor activities win out.  In the last month, we managed to get though all 5 seasons of The Wire … that’d be 60 hours of staring at the TV.

But I’ve also been spending quite a bit of my spare time staring into the sky.

It’s not that I’ve lost my mind (least I think not) … it’s that the trees have lost their leaves so there’s a lot more sky to be looking at.

The lack of foliage has also revealed the buildings of the city, giving the streets a whole new character.

I am also noticing a lot more in the way of cables.  Yeah, yeah, a different kind of wire …

I spent most of a recent Saturday morning just wandering around framing photos of naked trees and power poles.

It was an hour to two well spent.

The undirected nature of the morning contrasted well with the typically hectic outcome-focused week at work.

… a little like the capricious quality of the plane trees against the taut lines of the wires.

And, along with sleeping and eating, walking is one of my favourite things.  It’s a good break from sitting around looking at a screen (at both work and home).

But best of all, the crisp blue sky reminded me that the house-bound days of winter will soon be ending.

My first year in Shangers

I am just about to reach the end of my first year in Shanghai.  Time has flown … thus is the curse of being too busy and being too old …

Here is a highlights package of Year One.  I have themed it around the colour red.  Red is – most of the time – a colour of good fortune in China, so its often appears around the city.

Around this time of year, people sometimes wear red to bring good luck.  But, to be humble about it, it is often red underwear.  I have red longjohns that I have been wearing all winter (for warmth, not luck of course).  I was inspired by the man downstairs from our apartment, who would hang his very fetching LJs in the stairwell.  After weeks of looking, I finally found my own pair.  I am wearing them right now!

For my blog post about our stairwell (yeah, the one with dead chicken) … click here > Our new apartment (1) and Our new apartment (2)

For many Shanghainese, the last year has been all about Expo.  I got to Expo once for a couple of hours and never made it back.  My own lack of organisation reflects the importance of planning, just like the Expo theme (Better City, Better Life).

For more, click here > My first trip to Expo  or for the one about Expo’s wacky mascot Haibao > Give Praise Unto Almighty Haibao

For me, the city was the real event.  These red things spell out the name Cool Docks, a new and kinda unsuccessful development near the old city.  Cool Docks is an exemplar of the ongoing tension between economic development and historic preservation in Shanghai.  See more here > Goodbye Docks! Hello Cool! as well as this post on Xintiandi > The Fine Art of Fakery

I am always looking for special times where elements of the city compose themselves into an interesting photo.  I call them Jeffrey Smart moments and I have been compiling a gallery here > Now, that IS crayzy!

I also made other galleries devoted to funny buildings > Small Man, Big Hair and food > Fun with Food … as well, the most popular of all, Chinglish > Huh Wot?

While we haven’t done as much travelling as I would have liked, we did get to visit a few places closer to Shanghai.  We did a weekend trip to Nanjing and saw lots of amazing old buildings, including this Hall of Scarifice.  The Nanjing posts > The other great wall and > A nice place to spend eternity and > Avoiding the Tiger Summer

    

Suzhou is another nearby city, full of canals and old buildings.  The candles are from the main temple in the city centre.  Suzhou stuff > Canals, gardens and silkworms > It could hardly be called humble… > Suzhou Museum: it’s all-white

These hire bikes are found all over Hangzhou, which we just visited last week.  Stay tuned for future posts on this city, often referred to as “Heaven on Earth”.

    

And a few trips to Hong Kong … catching up with friends and family and renewing visas.  This is the pulling mechanism of the Peak Tram which gave us the amazing view included in this post > City, nature and nothing in between

And not to forget the ever-fascinating Macau which I had a bit of trouble working out … It’s like the Portugal of China! > No, no, the Disneyland of China! > No, actually, the fake Venice of Asia!

And speaking of trams and stuff, here is a shot from Line 10 of the Shanghai Metro.  The red seat is for the mobility-impaired.  I cannot talk enough about how amazing the rail system (Metro, heavy rail, fast rail) is here.  I did a few posts about transport > High Speed Rail? China Has It. > My Walk to Work (2) > Another Crayzy Motorway > The Rules of the Road > but must do more.

And to finish off, here is what some workfriends and I wore to our company’s annual (Chinese New Year) dinner.  I was concerned that our interpretation of the theme “Your Chinese Best” as the uniform of the Red Army may have been risky, but everyone loved it and there was much clapping and laughing when we arrived.  Here are some of the ways I celebrated the various festive seasons > Festive celebrations / let me count the ways and > Carpet-bombing in the new year

It’s been a great year and I have enjoyed remembering all the crayzy things I have seen since I arrived.  Hope you have enjoyed hearing about it all too …

Onto Year of the Rabbit.

Thanks to everyone for your readership and for your comments over the last year.

x The Doctor.

Suzhou Museum: it’s all-white

I.M Pei is probably the only famous Chinese architect of the modern era.  He won the Pritzker Prize (they call it the Nobel Prize of Architecture) and is best known for designing the glass pyramids in front of the Louvre in Paris.   I am not really fan, but to find one of his buildings in the middle of Suzhou’s historic canal district got me a little excited.

Pei is, like, really old now and this was his last commission before retirement.  It must have been a very meaningful one for the man himself: his best known Chinese project and in his family’s home town no less.   It is obvious that the building was inspired by its surrounding context (or perhaps by restrictive planning guidelines), creating an ensemble of courtyards and pitched roofs and white painted walls.

It’s an unfair comparison I know, but I prefer the older and more authentic parts of the city. Here’s a little compare-and-contrast …

Roofscapes

Courtyards

Waterways

Walls

Corridors

Doors

The internal environment was warm (yay! aircon!) but the building itself left me a bit cold.

I don’t mind modern buildings.  In fact, I like them a lot.  I just found that Pei’s approach is to focus on the replication of colours and materials, rather than the quality and feeling of spaces.  The building is good, but not amazing.

It could hardly be called humble…

Suzhou is famous for its gardens and the big daddy is the Humble Administrator’s Garden.  At almost 52,000 square metres (13 acres) and just reaching its 500th birthday, it is considered one of the four great gardens of China.

The garden was built by Wang Xiancheng, an imperial envoy and poet of the Ming Dynasty.  Planning his retirement from public life, and in the midst of a corruption investigation, Wang appropriated an existing temple and set about making a big garden within which he could live out his later years.

He was inspired by passage within Pan Yue’s Idler’s Prose that translates something like: “to cultivate my garden and sell my vegetable crop is the policy of a humble man”.  If he required over 5 hectares just for his vege patch, Wang must have had the biggest carbon footprint in the whole of the Ming Dynasty.  Not humble.

And it seems that a lack of humility could be genetic.  Wang’s son had to sell the garden after racking up too many gambling debts.

Like all Chinese gardens, within its perimeter wall, the Humble Administrator’s Garden contains a central lake surrounded by hilly terrain, with a scattering of small buildings and pavilions linked by pathways and corridors.  The lake was frozen when we visited.

The garden is arranged in three distinct sections, an arrangement which facilitated the subsequent subdivision of the garden.  After a range of different owners, the garden was reunified and restored in the mid-1950s.

While out visit was kinda rushed and absolutely freezing, the garden provided a very enjoyable environment to wander in, with a variety of spaces, inside and outside, and lots of places to take in the surrounding landscape.  As such, the pavilions and gardens have all sorts of magical names, including the Hall of Drifting Fragrance, the Listening to the Sound of Rain Pavilion, the Think Deep Aim High area, the Pavilion of Leaning Against the Rainbow, the Magnolia Hall, the Orange Pavilion, the Stay-and-Listen Pavilion, the Hall of 36 Pairs of Mandarin Ducks and the With Whom Shall I Sit? Pavilion.

This one is the Celestial Spring Pavilion.

And this is the Looking Far Away Pavilion, perched on a hilltop and intended for … looking far away.

With all these spaces for contemplation and looking and sitting, I wonder how Wang got any gardening done.  But I guess he had a big workforce, cultivating his garden and selling his vegetables and keeping him on the path of a humble life.

Carpet-bombing in the new year

Let it be said (and I am sure I am not the first to do so) that lunar new year in Shanghai is crayzy.

Deceptively so … a few days before the year ends, the city becomes almost empty, as people make the trek back to their hometown to celebrate the holiday with their family.  Shops close.  Work pressures give way to long lunch breaks.  Streets and footpaths become pleasantly roomy.

But then, as the new year is just about to tick over, things go totally bananas.  Every street in the city looks kinda like this …

The custom is to get out in the street and let off fireworks – another good occasion to scare away those bad spirits.

Generally, it’s low fuss.  People just pop out (often wearing their bedclothes) to light some eardrum-bursting crackers and to throw some sparklers around.  Streets are given over to the activity with cars and buses having to carefully navigate around the fireworks as they explode.

We were at a pub in the evening and a few of the staff (and some very drunk patrons) did the honours on the footpath outside.   No lost fingers, no spilt drinks, thankfully.

When you account for millions of people doing this, the cumulative effect is pretty huge.   People often liken it to a bombing campaign – deafening blasts and flashing lights all over the place, followed by a toxic haze that descends over the city.  I couldn’t get the taste of firecracker out of my lungs for hours …

And the streets are filled with the debris of all this fun-making.  Boxes (containing up to 100 ‘shots’ that hopefully have all exploded) and shreds of red paper lie scattered everywhere.

I got up earlyish in the morning to take some photos of all this mess but was amazed to find that thousands of people had been out in the street cleaning while I slept.  The streets were spotless.

I did however find that my neighbours had been burning money again.  Fake money, obviously…

And we made a trip to the local fruit shop (one of the few businesses that stayed open for the night) to buy a new year gift for our gateman and his family.   A box of oranges (certainly not chocolates) is the done thing here.

 

Welcome to the year of the rabbit!
It’s one of the better years, apparently.

A city full of ghosts

So, I was recently putting together a proposal for a project in Inner Mongolia – one of China’s ‘autonomous regions’, shown in orange on this map.

I stumbled across quite a few articles and galleries about Ordos, one of IM’s main cities.  In fact, due to major coal and natural gas extractions starting in the early 2000s, Ordos is also a very rich city.  It has the second highest GDP per capita in China.

To prepare for, or possibly harness, the city’s economic boom, the government set about expanding the city.  In the new district of Kangabashi, housing, services and infrastucture were quickly constructed to allow for an additional 1.5 million residents.

But right now, Kangabashi is pretty much empty.  Almost every street, every apartment block, every retail centre is devoid of people.

    

Funnily enough, much of the property has been sold; people have just never moved there to live.  It’s a ghost city that never had real people to begin with.  

    

This is the main library and the Ordos Museum – still under construction.

    

In fact, much of the city is still under construction, despite its apparent failure.  Looks like China can outshine the world when it comes to the size of your property bubble too.  I’d love to visit this place … but it’s a long way to go to see nothing …

The same is happening in Zhengzhou New City, where huge public buildings and public spaces (not to mention the ubiquitous grand lake) have never been used.

   

It’s sad to think that the aspirations and energy of so many people go into making something that is never used.  I hope I am designing for people, not ghosts.

Snowing me, snowing you

My journey to work was slow today.  We got another big dump of snow last night so I have to tread carefully (for fear of slipping) and stop to take lots of photos. 

This is the view from our living room. 

And just outside the front door.  At this point, I was considering a sickie.

And the street outside.

On my stop-off for coffee on Anfu Road.  I was hoping for better framing but my fingers were snap frozen and I was balancing camera, coffee cup and umbrella.

And another yellow vehicle.  I say: if you come equipped with a scoop and it’s snowing, get on the road and do something useful…

Julu Road, just near the Metro station.

And proof (via the crayzy Nanpu Big Bridge) that I am actually in Shanghai.

We even have a snowman welcoming people to our office.  He seems to be smoking one of those pen-cigarettes.

The insect market, it was buzzing!

The name says it all.  Shanghai’s Flower, Bird, Fish and Insect Market is of the most interesting places to visit in the city.

Dozens of tiny stalls, jam-packed into an old building that you hardly notice from the street, are selling all sorts of animal life … equally jam-packed into tiny cages and tanks, and likely not enjoying life too much.

There are cats and dogs, mice, fish and turtles, and birds …

The screeching of the caged birds is almost deafening … which may be a fitting revenge on their captors.

The most fascinating (and perhaps less challenging) aspect of the market are the insects – specifically crickets.  Thousands of crickets, all shapes and sizes, are displayed in individual boxes and containers.

The large crickets are purchased as noise-making companion pets.  They are stored in jars with perforated lids so that people can preview their chirping abilities.  They cost 30 yuan (about 5 dollars) and live for 8-10 weeks.

And the smaller ones are bred for fighting.  Cricket fighting dates back at least 1000 years to the Tang Dynasty and is particularly popular in the south of China.  Champion crickets could become quite famous, receiving elaborate funerals upon their passing.  Fighting championships are still organised in some cities.

Crickets are well cared for, often receiving veterinary care and being kept on a special diet.

This diet includes ground fish, worms and water chestnuts, which are all available for purchase in the market.

Cricket trainers spend a long time selecting their warriors.  Firstly there is a quick visual check of each of the boxes to select a short list of good specimens.

The fighting potential of each cricket is then tested by placing it in a small cup and teasing it with a thin bamboo stick, provided by the stall holders.

And when a purchase is looking imminent, a test fight between crickets is sometimes arranged.   This usually draws a small crowd of onlookers.  You can tell by the look on the faces of these guys what a serious process, and business, this is.

One way to please your parents …

Yuyuan (Yu Gardens) is one Shanghai’s most visited places.  It was built over a period of 18 years during the 16th century by Pan Yunduan, a wealthy government officer of the Ming Dynasty.  It was specially built for his parents, so that that they could enjoy a quiet and relaxed old age (“yu” meaning peace and health).

The Chinese word for landscape is “shuishan” which literally translates as “water-mountain”.  And just as much of China’s natural landscape is defined by these two elements, so are the constructed landscapes of the country.  The traditional garden replicates the randomness and irregularity of nature, with a central lake ringed by rocky formations, and a scattering of small buildings and pavilions that each house a particular function or activity.

And unlike Western landscapes, Chinese gardens were very much lived in, with daily rituals and gatherings, art and performance, late-night drinking sessions, and discussions about philosophy and politics.

After centuries of private ownership, ransacking by the British and the French, destruction and rebuilding, Yuyuan became open to the public in the mid-twentieth century.  It attracts thousand of visitors daily, but I think the cold weather kept most of them away when I visited.  Which made the exploration of its multitude of spaces, passageways and quirky doorways all the more enjoyable.

Discovering Shanghai’s Jewish history

It was John Safran who first alerted me to Shanghai’s Jewish population – in his TV show Race Relations, within which he sought to reconcile his desire for Asian women with his mother’s insistence that he marry within the Jewish faith. Landing himself one of these “Jewrasians” was apparently the perfect solution. Nonetheless, the Jewish history of Shanghai, although relatively short in Chinese terms, is another fascinating layer of the city. We recently did a tour of Jewish Shanghai, along with some visiting friends, guided by a guy with endless knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject.

The first significant wave of Jewish arrival in Shanghai was during the mid 19th century, from Persia and Russia (mostly traders and businessmen, but later many fleeing the Russian Revolution of the early 20th century). The Baghdadi Jews were particularly successful, especially the cotton-trading Sassoon family, who arrived in Shanghai via India. By the turn of the twentieth century, the family had moved into real estate, owning almost 2000 properties, including much of Nanjing Road. The grandson of the original settlers, Victor Sassoon, was renowned as one of Shanghai’s bon vivants (read: pants-man) and as the developer of the famous Cathay (now Peace) Hotel at the intersection of the Bund and Nanjing Road. It’s the one with the pointy dark roof, from this photo in the 1940s.

Many of the family’s employees also became successful in business. The Kadoorie brothers set themselves up in real estate, banking and rubber, later relocating to Hong Kong where the family still owns the electricity system and the Peak Tram. Another, Silas Hardoon, also in real estate, owned one of the largest personal estates in China, where he and his Eurasian wife (Luo Jialang) raised a multi-cultural family of 11 adopted children. This house has been turned into the “Children Palace” where under-privileged kids can hang out and have fun.

Many Jews arrived in Shanghai in the late 1930s as “stateless refugees”. Having established an International Settlement area in the city and acting under mostly autonomous rule, the city allowed the relatively free (no passport required) arrival of people from anywhere in the world. As the rest of the world closed their borders to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany, Shanghai became a safe haven.

World War Two lead to more restricted movement of people out of Europe. The Chinese Consul General in Vienna, Ho Feng Shan, secretly issued exit visas to thousands of Austrian Jews up until 1940 – perhaps as he was willfully acting outside his role, his status as the “Chinese Schindler” is not widely recognized here. Better known is the Japanese Consul in Poland, Chiune Sugihara, who approved thousands of visas to Japan to Jews, knowing that they would stop their overland journey short in Shanghai. Shanghai’s Jewish population grew to about 30,000.

With the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in 1943, the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees (aka the “Shanghai Ghetto”) was established in the northern part of the city. Initially, people were free to move in and out of the sector, but were subject to a curfew, and suffered through poverty, food shortages, crowded housing and disease. 

   

As the war continued, the Japanese rule of the ghetto became more oppressive and violent. Although Germany started to apply pressure on the Japanese to hand over the Shanghai Jews (to allow their execution), the Japanese resisted. After the war, most Jews left the city. Businessmen sought the greener pastures of Hong Kong and other cities, and others relocated to places such as Australia, Canada, the US and South America.

On the tour, we visited the house where our friend’s grandparents lived before they moved to Sydney.

We also visited the Ohel Moshe Synagogue. Built in 1907, it became unused only about 30 years later, and has now been converted into a Jewish museum. Last year, it held its first bar mitzvah in 60 years.

Huoshan Park is the only public memorial to the Ghetto. 

It was a fascinating tour …. it lead me into parts of Shanghai I had never seen and into histories I never knew existed.  And it was great to share it with a friend whose personal history is part of the story.

Festive celebrations / let me count the ways

In China, but especially in a large cosmopolitan city like Shanghai, there will always be many and varied ways to celebrate something.  Each year (the international year, that is…) culminates in a number of celebrations, taken from both Chinese and Western traditions, from the religious to the commercialised.

Dongzhi Festival
Dongzhi, literally meaning “arrival of winter”, occurs on the Winter Solstice and is one of China’s most important days.  It marks the point when days start to become longer, a shift that relates to the ideas of balance and harmony (yin/yang no doubt). Families get together to eat food – of course! In the north, it is usually dumplings, in the south Dongzhi – rice balls, often coloured brightly, in a sweet soup.  Must be hot to ward off the chills of winter.

Speaking of warding off … Dongzhi Festival is also the day that all the ghosts come out (it is the longest night of the year, afterall).  So, people take to the streets to burn fake money – the theory being that the burnt money will travel to one’s deceased ancestors, keeping them satisfied in the afterlife and away from real-life.

All over streets and footpaths (like outside our apartment) are the remnants of this activity…

To avoid any unsatisfied ghosts wandering the streets after dark, it is also tradition to also leave work as early as possible.  No comment…

Christmas Lead-up
China has certainly embraced the tinselly side of Christmas, with many parts of the city adorned with flashing lights and baubles, and electronic advertising screens given over the festive greetings.

In our office, we had a Christmas tree and did a Secret Santa.

On Christmas Eve, we all gathered around to watch – one-by-one – as people carefully unwrapped their gifts.  None of the frantic paper-ripping from home …  We also ate foods, a mix of Western (chips and beer) and Chinese (tofu and Pocky) snacks.

My Secret Santa gift was two figurines, a rabbit (looking a little Donny Darko-esque) and a dragon.  My anonymous gift giver explained, by way of a note, that they represent the coming lunar year and China itself.  They are now resident on my desk.

Ping An Ye
On 24 December, many people celebrate Ping An Ye.  This translation of “Christmas Eve” also sounds a bit like the word for apple (ping guo), so people get together to eat apples.  This is meant to bring good luck and good health for the coming year.

Christmas Day
While recognised by many, Christmas itself is not such a big deal.  Our company has a day off, but it is not an official holiday.

We met up with friends for lunch, at a classy hotel nearby.  The hotel gave us little gifts, a fruit pudding in a red bowl … it’s like a Christmas microcosm of east-meets-west.

It was close to freezing on the day, which was a weird sensation for Christmas.  But, we ate a lot of food, then retreated to the warmth of our house, wherein I enjoyed a long afternoon nap.    Just keeping some traditions alive …

 

Nanjing / Avoiding the tiger summer

Nanjing’s main tourist attraction is Zhongshan Mountain National Park, located on a hillside to the city’s east and containing an array of historic buildings and sites.  Like all tourist attractions in China, the weekend brought thousands of people.  It was also a stinking hot day (a ‘tiger summer’ as the locals call particularly late summer heat) so we appreciated the protective cover of the forest.

But, the people and the heat also made for a slow day and we decided to bypass one of the main attractions, the mausoleum of Dr Sun Yat-sen, a political leader of the twentieth century. But when you see the number of unshaded stairs one has to take to get there, it was a wise choice.  Again, something to go back for…

Sticking to the main shady attractions, we visited the Linggu Temple, first constructed in 515, then relocated brick by brick to its current location, where it was destroyed then rebuilt.  It has fewer steps than the mausoleum but plenty of people still.

The most impressive structure here is the Wuliang or Beamless Hall, a beamless hall (obviously).  Constructed in 1381, the hall (22 metres high and 54 metres wide) contains not a single piece of timber nor a single nail, just bricks and bricks.  Given the scarcity of older masonry buildings in China, it must have been a real feat of construction for its time.

It was originally enshrined to Amitayus, the Buddha of Infinite Life, whose Chinese name also happens to be Wuliang – I’m sure pronounced with different tones, and thus a different meaning, to ‘beamless’.  Later, it became the memorial hall to soldiers who died in the War of the Northern Expedition.  It was also pleasantly cool inside.

The same soldiers are also enshrined at the Linggu Pagoda, which lies further into the park.  About 100 years old and standing about 60 metres tall, it nonetheless a striking building.  The pathway to the pagoda is via a lengthy axis, which is broken halfway by a green space and curved wall, forcing you to divert either left or right.

The pathways converge again, reforming the axis and giving a direct line of access to the pagoda.  Again, too many stairs and too many people meant that we stayed on the ground, enjoying the building in the relative comfort of the shade.

 

Nanjing / A nice place to spend eternity

The Ming Xiaolong Mausoleum has been confounding people for centuries, myself included.

When it completed in 1405 – as the final resting place of the recently deceased Hongwu Emperor, the founder of the great Ming Dynasty – legend has it that 13 identical funeral processions were simultaneously conducted, to keep the exact location of the tomb secret and to prevent any future looting.  The actual construction took almost 20 years, with 100,000 labourers toiling under a military guard of 5,000.

At one end of the tomb lies the Sifangcheng (Rectangular City) Pavilion, a large stone building that still stands, mostly.  At its centre is a column inscribed in honour of the Emperor and standing atop a giant stone tortoise – about the size of a typical car.  At some point in time, though, the roof collapsed.

From the Pavilion, the gently-curving Sacred Way extends 1800 metres through the landscape, with pairs of carved figures guarding the tomb.

Twelve pairs of animals are present, each demonstrating a difference aspect of the Emperor’s influence and character.  Lions show stateliness  and honour.

Camels, symbol of desert and tropical regions, indicate the vast territory of the dynasty.

And elephants show the value of stability and steadiness in the Emperor’s rule of the people.

There are also a number of mythical creatures, such as griffins and unicorns, perhaps suggesting the importance of a good imagination and a strong horn.

Further along the Sacred Way the pathway is guarded by pairs of minister and generals, providing the tomb with strength of mind and body.

The main part of the mausoleum contains a collection of stunning red buildings, laid out around a central axis and terminating on a small mountain peak beyond.

Linked by a sequence of arches and doorways, small courtyards house a number of pavilions and structures, each with a specific ceremonial or symbolic role.

This is the pavilion for sacrifice (presumedly non-human animals only).  The red wall colour may have been a practical choice …

And at the rear of the site, nestled into the mountainside, is the Baocheng, or Precious Hall, a construction of breath-taking scale.  From the entry plaza (actually a really wide bridge over a waterway), a small (relatively speaking) archway leads to a steep stair that give access to the upper level.

I think that the actual tomb may lay behind this building, hidden in the mountainside (please note use of ‘think’ and ‘may’).  Perhaps the tomb’s location is a secret still held, or maybe I just couldn’t read the map properly.  Hey, it was hot and I had just walked up all those stairs!

The Ming Xiaolong was the first Ming Tomb to be built, and also the largest.  Its elements – the Sacred Way and its guarding pairs, the turtle-topped column, scared gateways and pavilion – formed the prototype for the tombs in the Ming Dynasty, a legacy that stretched many centuries.

Nanjing / The other great wall

 Nanjing is one of China’s most significant cities, having been the capital of China during six dynasties (Nanjing literally meaning “Southern Capital”) as well as the early part of the twentieth century, and as a modern economic and cultural centre (second only to Shanghai within China’s east).  Goodness, I feel like I am writing the introduction to one of my reports at work…

Perhaps the secret of Nanjing’s historic success is its ancient city wall.  Built about 600 years ago, the wall was created to consolidate the city’s position as the national seat of power, as well as the sovereignty of the sitting Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang.  It took 21 years, 200,000 labourers and 7 million cubic metres of earth to build the wall, which at over 10 metres high and 30 kilometres long, is the longest urban wall in the world.  While this map does not really illustrate the location and scale of the structure, it is a nice old map and I like nice old maps.

 

Even today, most of the city is encompassed within what remains of the wall.  Its looms high over the city, a constant reminder of what people needed to do in the old days to keep their city safe. 

The 13 gates still act as beautiful entry points into the city (albeit via the motor car not the horse).

 

The longevity of the wall relies as much on its physical strength as its symbolic power.  The materials are a mixture of granite and limestone, packed with smaller rocks and gravel.  The joints were set with a lime mix that contains oil and cooked glutinous rice, supposedly an effective coagulant.  Oil and sticky rice … yum!  I guess the size and strength of the wall may have foiled more recent attempts to demolish it for the sake of “progress”.

 

Section of the top of the wall are publicly accessible.  Unfortunately, we chose a point where access is pretty limited … at other location, you can walk along large sections of the wall, with sweeping views across the city.  Always good to have something to go back for …

 

The older city is riddled with waterways and canals.  The area around the Qinhuai River houses many historic relics, as well as the contemporary retail heart of the city.

 

And with water, there are lots of boats … from the traditional punt … 

… to the faux old-style tourist craft …

… to the modern day junk (geddit?)

Snow. Shanghai has that too.

Shanghai really does have everything … crazy buildings, a good Metro, an interesting history, and snow.  Before I moved here, snow wasn’t part of the image I had of the city, but then again, many things weren’t.  Anyway, it snowed today.  It wasn’t particularly heavy, but it was constant, so by the end of the day, most things were covered in white.  I am glad I bought a new coat on the weekend.

These photos are of my office, taken by our in-house photographer.

I also called Mr I.E. and asked him to leave the warmth of our apartment to take a few shots around the ‘hood.

My phone described the day as “partly sunny with flurries” whatever they are … It also suggests we will have a 20 degree temperature jump over the next few days.  Sunday will be sunny, no flurries, no worries.

 

Tripping the Light Cheesetastic

Lonely Planet’s website lists it as the 4th worst “thing to do” in Shanghai (just ahead of a restaurant that apparently forgets to bring your meals). It is derided by locals and visitors alike.  It has come to symbolise the worst of Chinese “creativity” and “innovation”.  But I reckon it’s OK!  Yeah, I am sure you are all surprised to hear that….

The Bund Sightseeing Tunnel is a 500 metre long tunnel below the Huangpu River, linking the two halves of the city. It is in fact the only way for people to get between Puxi and Pudong without the aid of a motor car or Metro carriage.  There are two bridges further south of the city, but pedestrians are banned from one and are required to buy a ticket to cross the other (via its structural arch, like BridgeClimb in Sydney).  The Tunnel links the Bund with the Pearl Tower … approximately at least.

When Mao Xiao was visiting, she was keen to experience the Tunnel, so we planned an evening (dinner near the Bund and cocktails in the Jin Mao Tower) around using this handy form of transport.  And it was an experience like no other.

The journey is made in little capsules that trundle along a fixed rail at a steady pace, but not so steady angle.  The show begins as soon as the capsule doors glide closed, with an intense strobing of lights that I am sure is aimed at filtering out anyone prone to seizures or second thoughts.

And then onward, through 7 minutes of flashing light effects and projected images, accompanied by kooky music and voice-overs, announcing random ideas – “meteor shower!” “lava flow!” – in soothing tones.

The overall effect is simultaneously amusing and disorienting, finished in very little time, yet somehow tedious.  Totally cheesy, but not quite cheesy enough.

In some ways, I feel bad revealing what it is like, because the best part of the experience for us was not knowing what to expect (and kinda having low expectations…)   Luckily we didn’t buy return tickets.   But then, after a few cocktails (or something a little stronger), the ride might be a whole lot better.

Suzhou / canals, gardens, silkworms

We’ve just had a visit from my big sister and brother-in-law and were keen to show them something outside Shanghai.  People go on a bit about the canal towns, so we jumped on the fast train to Suzhou (in case anyone is wondering, it’s pronounced like “su-jo”).  I mentioned our deluxe train ride in an earlier post.

Suzhou is one of China’s best known ancient cities, the capital of the Wu Kingdom for 8 centuries and a key part of the historic development of the modern Yangtze River economic zone.  It is famed for it’s network of canals, historic gardens and as a centre for silk production.  Limiting ourselves to a day trip (and starting late due to a little sleep-in and issues getting train tickets) didn’t give us a lot of time to explore and understand the city.

But, what we saw was great.  We spent most of the time walking around the old part of the city, through historic streets and along the canals, over old stone bridges and past delightful little buildings.  We walked for ages, but I feel like we barely scratched the surface – we only got to see one garden and no silk worms (there is a whole bunch in one of the museums).

But we got to see lots of tiny streets …

… and canals …

… and bridges …

… and people just doing their thing …

… and buildings, old and new(ish), falling apart and spruced up …

… and just not enough time …

I am already planning a return visit!

I Heart Bobo

So, some workfriends and I went to see a play the other day – an adaptation of Hans Christian’s Andersen’s Snow Queen.  I had forgotten that HCA wrote kids’ stories, but I guess that explains why at least half the audience was under five and loudly saying all sorts of things like “That’s his nipple!” and “Are they real cherries?  Are they … REAL … CHERRIES?!!”

One of our group arrived just as the show was about to start, and after she had found a spot for herself and her oversized handbag, another of our workfriends leant over to me to whisper three magic words: “Bobo is here”.  That phrase helped me through the next two and half hours of amateur theatre.

Meet Bobo.  Bobo is quite possibly the smallest and cutest dog I have ever met (with apologies to Herman and Merlin and Teddy and all the others…)  Bobo could almost fit in a teacup.

I think that Bobo has more changes of clothes than I do.  This is a widespread phenomenon in Shanghai, where dogs are treated better than children.  I’ve seen all sort of doggy sweaters and pants, hats and scraves, even mini-Converse shoes.

This is what Bobo wore for Halloween this year.  It’s a pumpkin suit, in case you didn’t realise.

    

This is Bobo’s preferred means of transport.

And here is Bobo deeply contemplating the meaning of something, perhaps life, perhaps the next costume change.  Bobo’s sense of focus got her through the whole of the Snow Queen without a yelp or attempted escape from her carrybag.

And the name, you wonder?  ‘Bo’ means wave, ‘bobo’ is like a sine wave, which apparently is like the shape of a lady’s chest, especially an ample one.   Which for a small fluffy dog makes sense, doesn’t it…?

I guess some things just don’t need to make sense, hey Bobo?

Notes:
Thanks to Bobo’s Mama for the photos!
I will remove any comments that poke fun at my little friend and/or question the value of making this post, OK!

Another one for the trainspotters…

The trains here are something else.  I’ve posted before about the amazingly fast and fast-growing rail network across China: click here for more.

A few months ago, they opened the fast train service to Nanjing, just over 300 hundred kilometres west of Shanghai.  As I have a project in Nanjing, I’ve caught it a few times – a mere 70 minute journey.

And last weekend, we hopped on the train to get to Suzhou, one of the nearby canal cities.  In the rush to buy tickets (they were selling out fast), I selected Deluxe Class – still cheap at about $12.  As it turned out, they were the Mostest Deluxe Possible – the first four seats on the train, positioned directly behind the white-gloved, highly-focused driver.  I guess everyone could see him, so clean hands and a sense of focus were important traits to display.

We got a great view straight down the tracks and travelling at over 350 km/h, it was quite an experience.  Had things gone horribly wrong, I imagine we would have had little time to realise, so it was easy to place oneself in a state of fatalistic calm.  Besides, the trains and so roomy and clean and comfortable and they even hand out free drinks (in the Deluxe section only, of course…)

The building infrastructure for all these new trains is pretty amazing too.  The stations are vast, like airports, teeming with thousands of travellers, packed with shops and services, and connected with multiple Metro and elevated roadways. There are three main stations – Shanghai South Station is probably just a few years old…

and this one, at the Hongqiao Transport Hub (containing dozens of platforms for high speed trains and interchanging directly with the Metro as well as Hongqiao International Airport) opened just last month.

I guess all this infrastructure doesn’t always create the most attractive urban environment.  This is the Maglev that connects to the other airport (Pudong International) at a speed of 430 km/h.

Next year, the Shanghai-Beijing Express opens (a year ahead of schedule).  Journey time between the two cities will be cut from 10 to 4 hours and it will carry up to 80 million passengers a year (that’s around 200,000 a day).  It also just set a passenger train speed record – see this Herald article for more –  and I’m sure to the typical trainspotter, it looks pretty sexy too.

A daytrip to Wee Britain

There seemed to be many reasons for me to visit Thames Town.  I really enjoyed my trip to Holland Village (despite the emptiness and facadism).  I had another urban designer friend – let’s call her Mao Xiao –visiting and I thought she would appreciate seeing another side of the city. It reminded me of Wee Britain from the brilliant Arrested Development (appearing in Season Three, but for those who haven’t seen it, I totally recommend watching all two-and-a-half seasons).  Plus, I just like weird things.

Like the other nine new city centres of Shanghai, Thames Town is located on the outskirts of the city, not too close to public transport and themed around an international style.  Thames Town of course is modelled on a kinda-Victorian-era English township.

As a replica, it’s pretty good.  As with Holland Village, the streets are smaller and more friendly than the typical Shanghai street.

There are cute pitched roof houses.

There are little courtyards and plazas.

There is a Main Square with little shop fronts (albeit empty, again similar to Holland Village) with vaguely English names.

There are red phone boxes.

There are rendered bricks and chimneys (not sure if they work or if they need chimney-sweeps, which would be TOTALLY British).

There are even a scattering of statues of famous English people.  I saw Winston Churchill lurking outside a shop in the main square, Mary Poppins down at the waterfront, and in the most prominent position of all, Harry Potter.  I imagine that in China, he probably is the most recognised English person.

The whole place would be Prince Charles’ fantasy.  Google “Poundbury” if you don’t get what I am saying.  Alas, like Poundbury, like Holland Village, Thames Town is a great example of failed planning.  Disconnected from transport, overly sterile and stylistically forced, the whole place is lacking in persons as well as personality.  It seemed that no-one lived there, with only a few shops (convenience stores and real estate agents) operating and relatively few people in the streets.

As if to reinforce the whole ‘theme park’ vibe, Thames Town has become a popular backdrop for wedding photos.  In China, wedding photography is huge.  Before the actual ceremony, couples spend days getting photos taken, using many elaborate costumes and different locations, then Photoshopping the results to within an inch of unreality.  Sometimes thousands of dollars and hours of anxiety are spent completing the task.

So, the streets of Thames Town were littered with dozens of young couples, photographers, video crews and costumers in tow.

They pose against the buildings and spaces of the city.

They smile and pout and smoulder.

They saunter past each other without acknowledgement, except perhaps for a sideways glance to compare costumes or future partners.

They fill the church yard (the ‘church’ I think may actually conceal a huge exhaust stack for the public car park below – the upper ‘windows’ are metal louvres).

     

They like bright pink apparently.

I had decided that I would make it my mission to visit every one of the nine new cities, only to recently discover that the government has canned the whole exercise (apparently after the failure of Thames Town and Holland Village).  Sad for lovers of theme parks, but good for the city I guess.

In any colour, as long as it’s fluorescent pink

As you would naturally expect, Shanghai is home to the world’s only Barbie Superstore, housed in this seemingly innocuous 6 storey building on Huaihai Road, Shanghai’s premier fashion street.

Inside, it’s a world of pink.  Really bright, eye-burning pink.

Shelves and shelves of every Barbie model known to man … um, woman.

Not to mention, clothes and shoes (for adults, mind you), a bubble-tea cafe that has a catwalk for fashion shows, a Barbie restaurant on the top floor and a Barbie salon where you can model yourself around your favourite Barbie.

Or, if you are short on time (but not in stature), you can make yourself into Barbie in an instant.  Actually, you can only be one of her sidekicks.  Only Barbie can be Barbie.

You can also purchase the new Barbie VideoGirl, exclusive to Shanghai and perfect for any crusty old man who wants to get a video camera into a young girl’s bedroom.  Classy.

Pride of place is the central staircase, spiralling 3 stories high and surrounded by a hundreds of Barbies encased in perspex boxes.  Just like Barbie herself, it’s the perfect representation of female liberation, is it not?

Anyway, maybe she deserves it … turns out that Barbie is a fur hag.

It does seem odd that Mattel are making a big push into China.  Barbie is tall, blond and has big bazoongas … three traits that Chinese girls may have trouble identifying with.  But I guess Barbie has always been about dreams, about believing that “I can be…” even if genetics and economics and social circumstance are fighting against you.

It will be interesting to see how long the bright lights of the Barbie Mansion stay switched on.

Animal, vegetable, unidentifiable…?

Qibao (literally translating as “Seven Treasures”) is an ancient canal-side town, once lying to the west of Shanghai city, but now absorbed into this ever-expanding megalopolis.  It is at least 1000 years old, dating back to the Northern Song Dynasty and becoming a bustling centre of activity during the Ming and Qing periods (several centuries mid-millennium).

It is packed full of traditional Chinese buildings, clustered around canals and tiny laneways, and connected by old arched bridges.

Surprisingly, Qibao doesn’t feature too heavily in tourist publications, but it does attract many local visitors.  And, I mean many … the little lanes and spaces take forever to navigate.

There is a newer commercial area, no less hectic than the older parts, but at least with a bit more room.  The whole area is closed to cars, which is somewhat unusual and a tiny bit pointless, given the large number of speeding delivery vans, scooters and bicycles.

I am loving this mural … for a minute there I thought I had been transported to a mountainside in the country (with air-conditioners and windows…)

Qibao is renowned for its old-style handicrafts and food, which make it a favourite for the locals and a surprising place for the internationals.   Besides the traditional brewery and carving museum, you can come to Qibao to pick up some amazing hand-crafted goods.  Wooden buckets – sized for a bath or just a foot-spa- seem to be popular.

    

But, the food is the really amazing stuff.  Huge stacks of freshly-steamed corn…

and these delicious-looking fruit skewers.  The kiwi fruit were massive, about 10 centimetres in diameter.

People were also strolling about munching chunks of meat off timber skewers about a metre long.  (Given the confined spaces, I imagine that skewer injuries are not uncommon here.)  Similarly, bamboo sticks were a popular snack-and-stroll item.  Although the hard outside layer was peeled off, I am surprised that bamboo could be soft enough for this kind of consumption.  But as Mr I.E. tells me, there are 800 types of bamboo, so I guess one has to be chew-friendly.

These appeared to be some kind of sesame desert.  At least, I think it was desert.

And these …?  I am putting my bet on lotus root, cooked and stuffed with some kind of gluggy white thing.  They do kinda look like some body part though.

Not so much as these though.  I think they were knuckles, delicately tied together with string and placed under a red light to give them a real glow.

Or these. These are just gross.  A whole small bird (perhaps a pigeon or half-grown chicken), cooked and skewered via the head, ready for instant consumption.  And, popular they were … with many people grabbing one to sustain them on their shopping journey.

I am told that in Qingdao (a city north of Shanghai), the local version consists of a whole rabbit head, ears included, deep-fried and mounted on a stick.   I’ll just stick to the bamboo, thanks.

Update / Fun with Food! 09 November

I’ve made a new page devoted to one of my three favourite activities in life (the other two being walking and sleeping).  Look out for regular updates…
https://doctorbullshit.wordpress.com/fun-with-food/

 

Update / Huh Wot? 09 November

A bunch of new images added today…
https://doctorbullshit.wordpress.com/huh-wot/

Showing off a bit of flesh…

You can walk seemingly forever in Shanghai and not run out of things to look at.  Last weekend, we did loads of walking around the Suzhou Creek area, just to the north of the city.  While it’s easy to get lost in the crooked streets of these older neighbourhoods, the city’s skyscrapers pop into view even so often to remind you that you are indeed in the centre of a major metropolis.

Qipu Road is renowned for cheap clothes shopping, including massive department stores and shopping malls, and a very hectic street market.  They say that to find cheaper clothes in Shanghai, you would need to front up at a textiles factory (and then, you’d also have to bargain with the seamstresses).

It attracts a lot of people…

… not to mention the usual variety of transport vehicles …

… and all the stuff (delivery carts, motorcycle taxis, bins and brooms) required to keep the place functioning in a relatively civilised way.

One of the architectural “features” of Qipu Road is the White Horse Shopping Mall, obviously the place for ladies’ intimates.  It attracts a substantial number of men, just hanging around outside … perhaps just waiting for their wives, who are picking up a few pairs of cheap knickers …

… or maybe these his-n-hers patterned wool robes.  Am thinking with winter coming on …

A few blocks away, we discovered another market street – the more regular local food market, tucked into a row of old residential buildings.  The opposite side of the street had already been demolished to make way for a modern residential complex, complete with blank wall and widened footpath to the street.  It’s sad to think that soon, the older buildings will be torn down too, realising the vision of a bigger and blander street.  That’s progress!

The markets were particularly meaty, so we rushed through at a pretty fast pace (Mr I.E. was not happy).  The Master of the Map managed a few quick-draw photos on his more fancy camera, so much credit to him for these snaps…

It’s duck duck …

Goose!  Just after this photo, poor Goosie managed to lock eyes with me as if to say “Please just buy me and end this undignified life-in-a-cardboard-box”.  He really was out of place in this green vegetable display.

Mr Fish wasn’t too impressed with the camera work.  Less so was Mrs Chicken a few doors up, who stopped mid-beheading to give the Master a prolonged death-stare and a move-along-please expression.

No wonder … I think there are bad things going on here.  How much per kilo for the kid, do you reckon?

Exploring Shanghai’s Nether regions

Sorry, I just can’t avoid the fake stuff.  After Xintiandi, Cool Docks and Macau, you would think that I’d had enough.  But, The Master of the Map came to Shanghai for a visit and he likes to see weird urban places, like motorway interchanges and fake Dutch villages.  Shanghai has loads of the former, and thankfully, just one of the latter.

The Shanghai government is the process of creating nine new town centres at the periphery of the city, to house a growing population while responding to the lifestyle aspirations of a burgeoning middle class.   As Shanghai is an international city, it was deemed a good idea to style these new centres around other parts of the world … Thames Town (aka Wee Britain) is complete and quite successful, German Town is underway, soon to followed by Spanish, Italian, Scandinavian and North American equivalents.

So, we took a day trip to Holland Village.  It’s quite a journey – an hour on the motorway, or a 45 minute Metro journey plus a half-hour walk.  Already, it was feeling suspiciously unEuropean.  Europeans have dense cities with good public transport, right?

The Village is half complete, with a main street, apartments, parkland and lakes already built, and semi-attached big houses (they call them villas here) under construction.  The original master plan was done by a Dutch firm and, according to the marketing material, modeled on Kattenbroek, a suburb of Amersfoort in the (real) Netherlands.

Master of the Map was kind enough to provide me with this aerial comparison:

This is the original Kattenbroek.  Note large circular road.

And, crayzytimes, here is Holland Village.  I guess I can see the similarity … from a plane at least.  The main street runs kinda north-south between the circle and the lake, with apartments to its east, with expensive villas contained entirely within the circle (well, almost-circle).  Just to heighten the sense of exclusivity (nay, separation), there is also a 3 metre high fence, topped by an electric wire, and a canal running along the inside edge of the circle road.  No such barriers in Kattenbroek, I’d reckon.

We managed to catch a glimpse into the villa enclave.  Note vaguely Dutch stylings.  Note security fence.  Note marketing billboard showing stereotypical Dutch countryside scene.

The villas are selling for RMB35,000/sqm, which would equate to about USD1.5mn and is top of the range for Shanghai.  Interestingly, very few have garages.  Parking is on the streetside.  I guess, with the bland monotony of all the houses, one’s car may become the only way to express one’s financial health (or perhaps I meant individuality…)

The main street is probably as close to Dutch as you are going to get in Shanghai, and it’s actually not a bad place.  The building height:separation ratio is good, the footpaths are wide and it’s stacked full of shopfronts.  It’s just very empty.  Retail spaces were mostly unoccupied, with the few businesses closed on the day we visited.  Granted, it was a holiday weekend and a gloomy afternoon weather-wise, but according to the sales guy we spoke to, this part of the development is fully sold-out.

Although each building is identical in plan, they have managed to create a typically wacky Dutch style, with stepped gables, mansard roofs and silly cornices.

Sometimes it gets a bit too wacky, with one building starting to overlap onto the next one.  Now, THAT is kinda European!

It is all a bit skin-deep though.  This building seems to be missing its roof.

I was pleased to see, despite the centralised approach to planning and the consistency of the building design (all very European), that the Chinese spirit remains indomitable.  Bricked-in windows and external air-conditioning units would never be allowed in the real Holland!  At least they revealed that indeed, someone was living here.

At the end of the main street sits this grand structure.  Government building? I asked the sales rep.  No, no, shopping centre, of course.

And next door, a church, but I forgot to ask whether it is used for churchy uses or something else.

And of course, a windmill.  Holland Village has become a popular backdrop for wedding photos and the windmill is now used as the office of a specialist photographic business.

Apart from that, Holland Village really seems to be struggling.  Perhaps the European sensibilities of social diversity, public interaction and transport integration don’t match the aspirations of the target market (ie the upper middle class).  Or perhaps, people are wary of the blatant superficiality, wondering what lurks behind the slapped-on building facades and the promise of a better (European) lifestyle.

As we trudged back to the station, we passed through Gao Qiao, a vibrant (Chinese-style) suburban centre, full of restaurants and bars, markets, cars and motor scooters, people and the odd lap dog.  By distinct contrast, Holland Village sits (literally and otherwise) empty.

 

Crayzy bright things in the park

The other day, I popped on my new Feiyues (an old-school Chinese sneaker brand that translates as ‘flying forward’, once standard issue for school kids but enjoying a second life as a slightly ironic fashion piece) and went to look at some sculptures.  For 2 months, a park in Jing’an (just near our place) has become an outdoor art space, perhaps coinciding with Expo, but certainly showcasing a bunch of sculptors from around the world.

The park contains a Japanese-style pavilion … all precast concrete and timber beams, its quite a lovely building and a great space for some of the more contemplative scultpures.

These massive metal pieces slowly turn in the breeze (above head height, of course…)

And speaking of heads …

As I have observed before, the local artists seem to tackle a variety of ‘izzues’ with their work.  This was a little person blowing up a foot with a few too many toes.

And – OMG! – a few too many Doctors!

This one was pretty spectacular, like a huge blob of metal hovering above, and oozing onto, the footpath.  It also had a little shiny bear perched on top.  It spoke to me, but  I am not sure what it was saying…

Naughty Boy, however, was giving some clear messages.  This 8-foot infant was balanced upon a row of metal Pepsi bottles and brandished an equally shiny machine gun.  I have cropped these from the image, lest I glamourise two very bad habits.

The centrepiece of the park was a bright and brilliant piece, aptly named Red Beacon. 

After all this walking, I discovered that my Feiyues had been hard at work, creating a humungous festering blister on my heel that is forcing me into thong-wearing for the next few days.   Red, oozing, disturbing … it may just qualify as modern art.

Confucius say: new temple just as good as old one

Hidden among the market laneways of the Huangpu area of Shanghai is the Confucius Temple (or rather, 上海文庙 or Shanghai Wen Miao), a significant cultural site of the city that had, until recently, not registered on my sightseeing radar. 

The temple was first built in the Yuan Dynasty (700-800 years ago) when Shanghai was a mere fishing village and became the most important place of teaching for the surrounding county.

Confucius is probably China’s foremost thinker and educator, with his writings of 2500 years ago creating the foundation for the country’s social development.  During his life, Confucius was a successful public figure, becoming both Minister of Public Works and Minister for Crime, but subsequently was exiled after upsetting the wrong people.  

His later writings (known as the Analects) were not recognised until a few centruies after his death, but were quickly embraced as the gateway to better living.  Among other adages, Confucius pioneered the ‘do until others as you would have do unto you’ principle, which seems to have been borrowed by a number of subsequent religious figures.

Shanghai Wen Miao contains a complex of buildings, including temples and classrooms, and spaces for meditation and interaction.  It has been rebuilt several times over its history, and having been mostly destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, was most recently reconstructed in 1995.

The city has grown up around it too.  In place of the the small school within the temple, a large contemporary campus has popped up next door. 

 A pair of lions guard the entry into the original school.  One clutches a ball (the daddy), the other a lion club (the mummy), they are engaged in a frightening stare-off that is broken as you pass through the entry. 

 Although it is primarily a tourist site now, many people still attend the temple to pay respect to Confucius, but also to ask for his blessings.  These are written and attached to the trees around the temple. 

 

As our tour guide suggested, people may ask for “good luck, good exam results, or maybe a good body”.   Or like this one, the ability to “live a good God-fearing life”.  Confucius say: relax, life isn’t meant to be scary. 

 

This Buddha ain’t jumping over no wall

Of all the wonderful and confusing names for food in China, my favourite has to be Buddha Jumps Over the Wall.  Originating in the southern part of the country, it is a soup that contains all sorts of meat products, a variety of seasonings (up to 30 if you are doing it properly) and shark fin (which, yes, is one of these aforementioned ‘meat products’, but is also so horribly produced, that it is worth mentioning specifically).  According to legend, BJOTW smells so wonderful that Buddhists monks have been known to escape the confines of their monastery (as well as the confines of their vegetarian diet) to sample the stuff – so good that Buddha himself would leap a wall to get it.  Just further proof that all vegetarians are carnivores in need of a good slap and a well-done steak.

Luckily for me, Shanghai is a city of options, including very good vegetarian versions of BLOTW – packed full of fake meats, including mushrooms that supposedly emulate shark fin.  I am glad that I need not succumb to the lure of the fish head and the pork chop.  Perhaps a better name would be Sam Neill Jumps Out of the Tree, though to suggest that he is in any way similar to Buddha would be a mistake.

SNJOOTT (left) with some fake-pork-gluten thing.  Sweet and deliiiicious!  And here is a roll call of some other amazing vegetarian foodstuffs I have sampled here.  It really is quite abundant and very yummy!

Generic green veg (L) and ‘sword beans’ with tapioca balls – yeah, like the stuff they put in bubble tea drinks.  This is from 9 Dragons, a Hong Kong restaurant.  These are a godsend – there are lots of them, they do good vegetarian and their menus are usually translated into English.

Similarly, Taiwanese restaurants do good veg and good English.  Just the other night, we went to an all-you-can-eat vegetarian buffet.  All corners of the planet were represented, from pasta to sushi, steamed buns to French fries … all converted to meat-free bliss.   The thing in the top picture with the paddle pop stick was a ‘purple blood cake’ and I guess it actually wasn’t that nice.

This is another plate stacked from the bain-marie of a veg eatery … part of the Loving Hut chain.  For the uninitiated, this chain is supported by the Supreme Master, otherwise known as Ching Hai, a Vietnamese entrepreneur who advocates animal rights and has her own cable television station.   Anyway, the food is great.

Here is some more crayzy fake meat – not really sure what it was made of or what it was trying to be, but the consumption of the noodle soup revealed a very special (and maybe offensive?) message to yours truly…

There are some local delicacies that I am really getting into, like these deep-fried corn cakes.  (Of course, I also am getting into the amazing little vegetable sculptures that sometimes appear in the food).

Here is another, lording over some steamed vegetables and an omelette.  Eggs are pretty popular here too.

And great food from stalls … steamed buns, tofu kebabs and shallot pancakes (above).

I was very excited to see some black sticky rice, topped with some gelatinous thing and served in a little cane basket.

Not to mention, my old favourite, roti canai.  To quote my good friend Mr I.E.: “The roti has gone global!”  And local … we have a very good Malaysian cafe near us, which is pioneering a new creation, the peanut butter roti.  I am in clogged-artery heaven!

Even in convenience stores, hungry vegetarians need not fear.  On every street corner, one can find neatly-chopped-and-packaged tofu blocks and sliced vegetarian sausages.  The sausages were packed full of spice and MSG, making them delicious upon consumption, but somewhat challenging on expulsion.  Sorry, too much information.

So, lots of reasons for this Buddha to stay on his chosen side of the wall (and to become a little Buddha-like in shape, unfortunately…)  With vegetarian delights like these, who needs to be eating stuff like this ….

Unidentifiable meat ball, served in greasy meat sauce.  With the deepest Buddhist willpower, I resisted.

Macau / No, actually, the fake Venice of Asia!

I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.  This is the Venetian Casino (owned and operated by the Las Vegas casino of the same name).  It is by far the largest casino in the world and Macau’s main gambling attraction.  Its floor area is a million square metres, making it the world’s fourth largest building (behind the airports of Beijing and Dubai, and a flower market in the Netherlands).

Outside, it is styled around all of Venice’s famous places – Piazza San Marco, St Mark’s Campanile, Ponte Vecchio and the Bridge of Sighs (or maybe that was just me, muttering about the stupidity of it all).

This is a fake version of a trompe-loeil, so might qualify as a fake-within-a-fake or a double-fake. 
And here is the inside.  The gambling area (no photos allowed) is also the largest (of course) in the world.

The casino is attached to (among other things) a shopping mall, where presumedly mum can shop for expensive handbags while dad hopes to make enough money for said handbags.  It is a wonderland of Venetian shopfronts, canals and gondolas, with a sky so fake, it almost looks real.  As Mama Bullshit has been known to say, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Macau / No, no, the Disneyland of China!

Well, Hong Kong has a Disneyland already (only just turning a profit after 5 years of operation).  And Shanghai is getting one soon – after years of rumours, the government finally announced late last year that construction was well underway for a 2012 opening, confirmed by a visit to the site by Barack Obama the following week.

And being China’s gambling den, Macau could easily be mistaken for another Disney-constructed world.  Gambling is outlawed in the rest of China, so there is a constant flow of mainlanders into Macau, attracted by the neon lights and dreams of untold wealth, and supported by cheap direct flights, relaxed customs laws and mega-hotel-casino conglomerations.  Since gambling licenses were opened up to foreign investment in 2002, the sector has boomed, now accounting for 50% of all of Macau’s revenue (and 70% of government revenue), as well as employing 10% of the population (not counting many more who are employed by associated retail, hospitality and entertainment sectors).  Macau now easily outstrips Las Vegas in terms of cash turnover, and many of that city’s casino operators have set up in Macau. 

Scattered through the city, one finds an array of crayzy buildings, each trying madly to attract and retain punters.   Along the waterfront, there is Fisherman’s Wharf (I saw no wharf, and certainly no fisherman), a replica European-style street … that is, if the street in Europe contained some kind of weird Egyptian temple and an American style food court. 

It must the only street in the whole of China that is devoid of people.  Many of the resturants were closed or vacant. 

Next door, there is a huge colosseum and “ancient” “ruins” – apparently a shopping centre, but apparently also a commercial failure (being now closed for business).

Next door lies a half-scaled Italian village snuggled into the side of a volcano (inactive, of course…)  The helpful sign identifying “Aladdin’s Fort and War Game Arena” didn’t really help to clarify the function of the buildings, but did confirm, that indeed it too had failed to attract the punters.

 

 Surprisingly, blatant pulling at nationalistic heartstrings also seemed to be a failed strategy.  This massive “ancient” “temple” also sat unused.

More susccessful (operating, at least) was this familiar-looking building.  Google “Beijing Watercube” if you don’t get what I’m saying…

One casino that is an inarguable success is the famous Grand Lisboa in the Macau downtown.  It’s like a shiny ball with spiky leaves mounted by a humungous golden lotus (in the same order, a huge casino with grand entry structure mounted by a massive hotel that looms over the historic heart of the city).  It was packed full of tourists, happily gambling away their cash and smoking away their healthy lungs.  It is grossly overblown and tacky and I guess I don’t need to say much more than that.

Macau / It’s just like the Portugal of China!

Macau is somewhere I didn’t really know that much about … just vague thoughts about casinos and thinking that the name sounded a bit like a tropical bird.  So, being just 60 kilometres away in Hong Kong (just one hour on a sea ferry), we took a day out to visit this City of Mystery (that title was invented by me, not the tourist bureau).  Macau is pretty tiny, occupying a peninsula and a small island, and pretty much all city, with no arable land or forests to speak of.

But, I gotta say, those marauding Europeans colonists certainly got around!   Macau was overtaken by the Portuguese in the 16th century and only recently gave it back to the Chinese, part of their Great Colony Offload.   The centre of the city is undeniably European, with historic collonaded buildings, cosy plazas and laneways, lined with the squirly black-and-white mosaic tiling so loved on the Iberian peninsula.  There are loads of cafes, serving good coffee and Portuguese tarts.  The city centre is very well preserved and listed by UNESCO as one of the world’s important heritage cities.

Added to this are the colours and rituals of Chinese life, creating a unique cultural overlap (at least one I hadn’t seen before).   There are lots of great market streets selling all the ususal things – postcards, cheap umbrellas, bubble tea, pork sheets …

And, at the top of the hill, Macau’s most beloved historic site – the aptly titled The Ruins of St Paul’s. 

The church was built in the early days of the Portuguese colony.  The main facade (overlooking the staircase and city centre) has an intricate carving completed in the 1620s by a group of Japanese Christians, living in Macau after being exiled from their home country.  Don’t know about anyone else, but exiled Japanese Christians hadn’t really popped up on my radar before…  The carvings are a mash-up of different influences, with Jesuit and Oriental mythology, including hydras, Japanese characters and the typical biblical heroes.

In the early 19th century, much of the church was destroyed by a fire that broke out during a typhoon.  Residents were hoping for an earthquake as well, just to complete the golden trifecta of disasters, but alas, God was feeling a little lazy.  Only the front facade survived, but it too, came under threat from those worried that one day it would topple over (a very valid concern, all things considered).  Recently, the whole site has been refurbed, with interpretative stuff marking the outline of the original building and a steel structure that braces the last remaining wall. 

From here, you can get a great view over the city – both old and new  quarters – and the people who gather to gawk at the church facade.

 Next to the church is old city fort, again a great vantage point.  From here, Macau looks much more the typical Chinese city – with modern office towers looming over swathes of scrappy residential areas.

This canon seems trained a smart target – the Grand Lisboa casino, a much disliked building in the Macau skyline.  I will attempt my own demolition job of this one in a future post…

Macau was officially handed back to China in 1999 but is operating under a ‘one country-two systems’ policy (similar to Hong Kong) for the next 40 years.  In 2049, it becomes part of China and I imagine that there are strongly held views on which ‘system’ should bend to accommodate the other…  Given the pace of change in this part of the world, 2049 will no doubt be a different world.

Hong Kong / City, nature and nothing in between

One thing I like about living in Shanghai is being able to get to Hong Kong easily (that was not meant to be a downer on Shangers of course…)  Last weekend, I got to meet up with the Senior Clique of the Bullshit Clan, who were heading home after a few weeks poking around Yīngguó.

The weather was pretty rainy, as it is in September.  But, as luck would have it, a change in the weather made the last day perfect for a trip up The Peak.  This stunning Honkers skyline panorama is yours! Click on it for a larger view (as with all images here, of course…)

It’s pretty cool how such a dense city sits within such a beautiful natural environment, and that the division between the two is so sudden.  No buffering of the CBD with seemingly endless suburbia, where little pieces of nature (if you can refer to backyards as such) are divided up and guarded by Colorbond fences – Sydney, I’m looking at you!  In Hong Kong, nature is preserved for the good of all.  People share space, not own it.

I know, I have heard all the arguments about why apartment living is so inferior (in fact, many of them from one of my weekend companions…) but consider the advantages of a dense city like Hong Kong – great public transport, you are close – if not literally on top off – everything you need and everyone gets a good view.

Plus, you get to keep a lot of nature.  From The Peak Tram station (just a 10 minute ride from Central), you only need to walk 10 minutes to cop a view like this… 

You’d hardly know you were so close to 8 million other people.

My first trip to Expo …

I have finally made it to Expo.  In hindsight, I should have gone when it first opened, when only 300,000 people were visiting each day, not the 600,000 I got to share the expereince with.  My tactic was to buy a night ticket (entry after 5pm) to avoid the hot weather and long queues.  Unfortunately both were out in full force.

When I was a youngster, I went to Expo 88 in Brisbane.  I remember it being quite an experience – a revelation of different cultures, with interesting buildings and people and events. 

Just like the Brisbane Expo (which I have to point out was – unbeknownst to most people in late-80s Australia – classified a ‘second tier’ Expo, as opposed to Shanghai’s ‘first tier’ Expo), the main focus for visitors is on the pavilions of each country.  The pavilions are arranged into geographic regions, with Asian pavilions clustered around the massive Chinese pavilion, and by increasing separation, Oceania, Europe, the Americas and Africa (perhaps ‘geo-political’ regions is a more accurate descriptor…)  I only got to see some of the latter regions, as I plan to go back to see others.

Arranged along one bank of the Huangpu, each pavilion is tasked with not only expressing the theme of Expo (the awkward “Better City Better Life”) but to draw the highest degree of interest in that individual country.  This attention seeking behaviour – as with people – creates buildings that are invariably colourful, often a little undignified (nay, tacky) and occasionally breath-taking. 

There are more sophisticated (ie simple) pavilions like the Canadian one…

and the Russian pavilion, which doesn’t seem too Russian in style though …

 

And the less sophisticated, like the giant-apple-with-a-piece-eaten-out-Ecopolis offered by a country I can’t recall … maybe Romania?…

And probably the worst of all, the Dutch pavilion, an unappealing mess of buildings and ramps.  I guess it did have a relatively short queue.

 

But the best pavilion by a wide margin is the British one.  Its “Seed Cathedral” is made up of 60,000 acrylic rods that house a collection of seeds from around the world, allow light into the pavilion and create an amazingly unique architectural sculpture.  The Cathedral sits on a folding ground plane, representing the piece of opened wrapping paper around a precious gift.  The pavilion is more about the importance of nature, and specifically biodiversity, rather than a marketing exercise for its home country (as most pavilions seem to be).  After the Expo, the seeds will be distributed to schools across the country.

The pavilion looks great from all angles. 

 

It has, however, one of the longest queues (around 5 hours) so I chose to enjoy it from afar only.  Here are some pics from the web of the inside.

 

Oh, and for anyone wondering, here is the Australian pavilion.  OK, I get it … we like the desert.  How that relates to “Better City, Better Life” is beyond me.

Our new place – front door to jamban

Inside, our new apartment is pretty styley but also a bit odd.  Some good points: timber floorboards, old metal windows and doors, great natural light and cross ventilation (not that we have tested it during these crayzy summer days).  The furnishings, I have to admit, are not really to our taste (the apartment came fully furnished).  A strange hybrid of French provincial and Chinese historic.  The landlord is probably having an each way bet on potential tenants – either a wealthy local or a romantic expat.  The sofa is way too big and quite ugly.

One feature is the fancy drinks cabinet (perhaps it has a proper name, but I don’t know it …)  From its closed position… 

one simply pushes the front panel …

to (ta da!) reveal a very generous amount of alcohol storage.  More than we would ever need anyway…

We also have a Grandfather clock.

And this mushroom sculpure thingy.  While we are going to ask the landlord to take anyway the sofa, the ashtray stand and a few other items, we are definitely going to keep this one. 

The main bedroom has a good view over trees.

And the kitchen looks over the adjacent gardens and neighbouring building.  The buildings are much closer than in a modern complex, but the landscape and thoughtful placement of windows allow for a sense of privacy.  The other day, however, I did spy one of our across-the-courtyard neighbours watering his balcony plants – in the “old style”, if you know what I mean…

The bathroom is kinda Parisien.

All the way down to the toilet, which has been fitted with a crayzy water-spurting lid.  Like a poor man’s bidet – a poor man who doesn’t mind bum grime getting trapped in all the gaps created by the badly fitted seat.  Way too European for my liking …

Our new place – street to front door

I gotta say, our new place is pretty cute … It’s located on the northern edge of the French Concession of Shanghai, within 10 minutes walk of 3 Metro lines, 4 vegetarian restaurants, a wet market and loads of other great stuff.  More on the neighbourhood in future posts…

It’s on the second level of a small Art Deco building that overlooks the street.  I guess officially it’s a complex, as it has a gatehouse and security wall, but the former is manned by a very friendly couple and their baby (they actually live in the tiny gatehouse) and the latter shrouded by landscape and punctuated by a number of shops including a tailor and dry cleaner.  It’s also much smaller the typical modern complex and feels part of the neighbourhood, not trying desperately to shield itself from the outside world.

Through the gate and along the driveway, we turn right and enter our building from the rear.

I’d guess that the building is about 80 years old, and I think some of our neighbours are about the same.  The rest of the building is full of older locals, who live a pretty traditional existence – riding rattly bicycles, waking up at 5am, stinking up the whole building by cooking odd foodtsuffs with all their doors open.  We really are the freaky ones, with our funny shaped faces and newly refurbished apartment.

This is the door to the stairwell.  I like the window a lot.

These are electricity meters in the stairwell.  I must check these regularly, as I hear that sometimes, the locals meddle with the system and trick the Westerners into paying for the whole building’s power usage.

The stairwell is very much a public place – more an extension of one’s living space than somewhere to rush through on your way home.  Thus, it appears, that it is not unusual to find items there that one might usually consider ‘private’.  In our first week here, we encountered two items carefully hung in the stairwell by one of our downstairs neighbours.  Freshly washed underpants I can handle.  But a chicken, washed and gutted, splayed open and hung to dry, I am not so sure …

After running the gauntlet, we are home.  Our doorbell demonstrates that indeed it is a place for Westerners, or at least those with a Western “style”. 

I am really liking this new place (pickled chooks aside) – it’s in a great location and has heaps of character.

Our old place (bland but clean)

So we have found a new place to live.  But first, a short memorial to the old apartment.  For all my complaints about Pudong (roads too big, everything too far apart, not many fun places to hang out), the apartment was pretty good.

It was in a typical modern Chinese apartment building, about 35 storeys tall and in a complex of about 8 similar buildings.  Like all complexes here (or as I prefer to say “compounds” – it just sounds meaner), the buildings are set back from the street and bounded by a high security fence.  An active streetscape it does not make.

Our apartment (17th floor, 2 bed, 2 bath) was simple and clean.  Probably it’s best feature, though, was its view over the adjacent gardens and between buildings to the river and city beyond.

Targeting the Western (as well as the Westernised local) market, the layout was typical pattern book stuff and the furnishings all IKEA stock standard.

The only quirk was that the kitchen had no oven – something that is typically missing in Chinese homes.  Benchtop cookers are pretty popular.  I used this to cook toast (oh yeah, toasters are pretty rare too).

Anyway, not much to say.  These pics attest to the neutrality of the place (and my neutrality of feeling towards it…)

My Walk to Work (Version 2)

While the office has moved, my home (the company apartment) has not.  This means that my journey to work has changed somewhat – from a mostly pleasant stroll through Pudong to a multi-modal cross-river journey.

This means I now catch a ferry each morning.  Ferries are a critical part of linking the two halves of Shanghai – while the Metro and major roadways run under the river, there are no bridges in the main part of  the city.  Bicycles are banned from the Metro, as well as the road tunnels (along with motorcycles and scooters, and apparently, most public buses).  Generally, where major streets dive below the river, a ferry service is also provided to carry people from one side to the other.

It’s a nice way to see the city each morning and evening.  Shanghai is very much a skyline city – with the buildings of the Bund and Pudong stretching along the two sides of the river.  The ferries are pretty low-key, flat-bottomed and open-sided, with huge steel gates that are slid open manually by one of the many shiphands.

The majority of passengers arrive by motor scooter, some by bicycle and a few like me on foot.  There is always much jostling for the best position by the scooters, so that as soon as the gate opens at the end of the journey, they can be first out of the ferry.  As the ferry starts to dock, scooters are switched on and revved, horns blasted and complaints muttered – it really is quite deafening in such a (semi-)enclosed space.

From the wharf on the Puxi side, it’s a 20 minute walk to the office – fine most of the year, but in this week’s 35+ degrees weather, it’s a little rude!  Running parallel to the river, Waimu Lu is an old industrial street – presumedly it once buzzed with dockside activity throughout the day, but is no somewhat desolate (the peace only broken by a stream of scooters disgorging from the ferry wharves every 10 minutes).

Unfortunately, the river side of Waimu Lu is fronted by buildings and/or massive concrete walls – for water retention (as explained in the previous post) or to protect more sensitive uses along the water (ranging from yacht clubs to waste treatment plants).  There are plans to redevelop the waterfront, to make it publicly accessible and more attractive, so it is likely that the street will change dramatically and rapidly.

But, hopefully, some of the older building stock will be retained and reused.  I think their scale and materiality is really appealing.

I fear though, that in the rush toward progress, Shanghai is not quite ready to place a value in this kind of ‘heritage’.  Just like every other place in the world, I guess…

Goodbye Docks! Hello Cool!

As many a mother has said to an upset teenager: if that group needs to call themselves the “cool group”, they obviously aren’t that cool.

With the office moving, I am finding many new places to visit, like the Waterhouse and it’s neighbour Cool Docks.  Or (by its Chinese name) Lao Ma Tou – literally translating as Old Docks.  At least that is just a statement of fact, rather than hopeful marketing spin.

Cool Docks is part of the transformation of the riverfront south of the Bund, until recently packed with docks and cheap worker housing.  Like Xintiandi, Cool Docks is mostly made up of new buildings designed to look like old buildings, full of restaurants, bars and commercial suites – targeted at tourists and expats – arranged around courtyards and laneways …

But I guess you can’t hide everything …

Since opening, Cool Docks has struggled to attract people, possibly because of its relatively remote location and down-at-heel neighbourhood.  Even at lunchtime, you’d be lucky to see a dozen people lurking around.

Perhaps further compounding the limitations of the whole development, is the fact that it doesn’t really connect with the water.  Potential viewlines are blocked by even newer buildings along the waterfront, where ongoing land reclamation is making the disconnect even worse.

And where the view extends to the waterfront, it only reveals one of Shanghai’s key issues.  Most of the time, the level of the river sits above that of the adjacent land (a situation that is worsening through water level rise and the sinking of the land) and thus, most of the riverside is fronted by a protective retaining wall (which is the main function of the Bund).  As a result, from street level, the river is entirely hidden.

As I poked around Cool Docks, I found some buildings that had been spared the developer’s touch (for the time being).  I particularly liked this row of old houses, with their relaxed and lived-in condition standing in contrast to the stark emptiness of the central part of the development.

On each of the doorways, there were remnants of the notices that were used to advise the previous occupants that they were being moved on …

and in some cases, friendly reminders …

but it appeared that some of the houses were still being occupied.  Although, as the property market continues to prosper, I imagine it won’t be for long…

Switching to Team Puxi

I guess that it is no secret that I like the (older) Puxi side of Shanghai a bit better than the (overblown instant futuristic cityscape) Pudong side.  Well, now we are looking for a new place to live, we are embracing the opportunity to switch to the correct side of the river.  We are focusing on the area around Changshu Lu Station, at the northern end of the French Concession (ie the area were most of the Europeans were corralled early last century).

The streets in this area (unlike those in Pudong) have an intimate scale and are lined by plane trees that were planted by homesick Europeans.  You can actually cross the street without risking your life, as the scene above – ie minimal cars – can attest to.  The heavy foliage helps to cool these streetscape, meaning that Puxi can be a few degrees cooler during summer.

And instead of huge residential compounds, the French Concession has a mix of lower scale villas and apartments, focused around laneways and small courtyards.   The buildings engage with the street, with small shopfronts and office spaces, awnings and overhangs.  In Pudong, it is endless security fences, broken by the occasional boom gate (actively protected by security guards) to allow vehicular access into a basement carpark.

Puxi also houses a lot of Shanghai’s wonderful Art Deco architecture.  (supposedly, it has one of the world’s best collections).

The whole area is full of magic little moments of everyday life, like a  lovely doorway into an older apartment complex…

or crazy wiring along every street …

some kelp hanging on a makeshift drying rack (a stick balanced between a signpost and an electrical box) …

this sweet little stained-glass window (jutting into the footpath at head height, but whatever…)

an odd piece of graffiti (or advertising…?) on the side of a convenience store (I am sure it is quite innocent, but the spacing of letters suggests otherwise … Expo becomes Sexpo, and the aids bit at the end suggests it is something that’s a bit how’s-your-father?)

and this little Puxi resident, mouth pressed against the crack of the door to a beauty salon, apparently overwhelmed by the staleness of air-conditioning or the scent of nail polish (and I thought Pudong compound living was a bit stifling…)

Waterhouses and bomb shelters

Last week, I popped into what will become my new favourite place to take visitors, the Waterhouse.  It’s a newly completed boutique hotel, located just up the road from work, nestled into the warehouses and decrepit housing of the area.

Housed in a refurbed older building (somewhat unusual here…), the design is impeccably executed.  Many of the historic features are retained and celebrated, with the new work reflecting the robust industrial character of the surrounding buildings.  Supposedly, they exhausted the city’s supply of corten steel during construction.

I have also heard that the design was based around the idea of ‘peeping tom’ (seriously!), so there are ample opportunities to see and be seen.  Reflective window shutters allow you to catch a glimpse of other people’s rooms.  In one room, there is a glazed floor panel through which you can see a room below.  And there are plenty of bridges, platforms and openings that allow for displaying oneself.

Alas, no such shenanigans for me.  I was there for the rooftop – which has a bar and an amazing view over the Pudong side of the city.  For their opening (or rather, a series of ‘soft openings’ over a week, which is how they launch things in Shanghai), there were giving away free drinks.  Next week, they will be charging like crayzy.

Later in the night, the lure of further free drinks lead us to a very different social haunt.  Shanghai Studio is housed in an old bomb shelter (necessitating a confusing walk under ground along a very long ramp and through many doorways) and is a favourite of many of Shanghai’s gee-ay-whys.  It’s also a bit ‘peeping tom’ in its styling, but no quite as subtle as the Waterhouse.  And given the subterranean location, the only views are of other people (as would be desirable, I guess…)

The journey in can be treacherous…