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)

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.

 

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.