Gingerbread Shanghai

Safe travels Lou! See you in three weeks…

Love Harry

Photo Footprints on Shanghaiist

Photos that made it into our favorite city-blog over the last few weeks:

Live-Electronica at musky Antidote C’s last Thursday. Photo #5:

http://www.shanghaiist.com/archives/2006/09/01/photos_antidote.php

A Stroll in Sim City, posted up by Shanghaiist to accompany a byline:

http://www.shanghaiist.com/archives/2006/08/15/extra_extra_52.php#comments

Same pic at my Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alverson/213900642/

Help Our Basil!

We’re being ravaged over here. Anyone know what these guys are:

Our solution, to be implemented tonight, is the following organic pesticide:

Garlic Insecticide
Pulverize in a blender a couple of whole cayenne peppers, a large onion and a whole bulb of garlic with a little water. Cover this mash with a gallon of water, let stand 24 hours and strain. Spray daily on roses, azaleas, and vegetables to kill an infestation of bugs. Don’t throw away the mash; bury it among the plants where insects occur.

And, for your optical pleasure, the world’s cutest Flickr set: Tiny Animals On Fingers

Wikimaps

Found a fun new mapping site called wikimapia. It makes blogging maps much easier than in the past, and users can contribute their own sites. Thought, I’d post a few arials of where wer live in Shanghai:

Update: Apparently this doesn’t work as I had hoped. Attached links now instead of actual pictures. Boo.

The city area we frequently travel: (My work location is on the upper right peninsula on the east side of the river; our flat’s neighborhood is near the park area – if you can distinguish that – towards the lower left)

Close-up of our neighborhood: (Xujiahui Park lower left; intersection near our house upper right)

Close-up of our building: (long whitish building to the south-west of the intersection at the center of this photo)

Guess the next step is to post actual pictures of the flat… getting there. Just installed some panoramic stitching software

Taxis and Rubble

I spent a lot of time in cars today. It’s a good place to make observations about China, and spend time ruminating amongst second hand smoke.

On the way to work, I watched a couple of odd videos on the taxi tv (some shanghai taxis have mounted 6 inch LCD screens in the upper right corner of their windshield; typically they play advertisements). First, I was treated to a bizarre cartoon in which oversized pigs kidnapped a naked baby, complete in all his animated glory, only to be set upon by other babies with swords and dynamite. Naturally, this segued into a 4 minute clip of what looked to be Russian artillery firing against tanks. Clearly staged shots were spliced with older actual footage and all of it was set to a dramatic score. It ended with tanks roaring over the artillery trenches, and then, finally, a somber shot of tanks, artillery and human bodies burning in silence. Nice morning fare.

Last year my company made a seizure of 400,000 fake garments. Today, I was tasked with checking out that the goods were still parked safely in their boxes at their AIC warehouse (Administration of Industry and Commerce). Seized goods have a funny way of ending up back on the open market. After half-assedly ripping or crossing out labels (though leaving identifying embossed buttons and stitching) the stolen IP (intellectual property) can be “legitimately” sold in auction and ends up at various outlet stores, such as Shanghai’s popular HotWind. Today’s trip meant driving into the sticks of Pudong. It’s amazing to me how quickly the gleaming modern facade falls away to trashy neighborhoods with ugly, bare concrete low-rises, half-finished (abandoned?) building projects and piles of rubble. It’s a pretty morose sight and I thought to myself, “this country has a long way to go.”

On the way back, as we travelled down an immaculate length of road, I realized I know of no other city with an equal length of elevated hi-way running not only directly through the urban center but for miles and miles into the suburbs. Truly an incredible feat of man and machinery. And I thought to myself, “my god, what kind of harnessed energy must it have take to accomplish this?”

Shortly after our car dropped down to street level again, a firetruck pulled in behind us and flicked on its sirens. For 10 minutes our driver jockeyed for position with other cars, as one normally does around here in a casually dangerous kind of way, while the sirens continued to blare immediately to our rear. No-one pulled over or made way, and presumably, somewhere, a fire raged. And I thought to myself “wonderful, communism has created a population of uncaring and selfish union members.”

Organic is Sexy

Hi Guys – Great to hear from so many of you recently. Sorry I’ve been out of touch. I’ve managed to let about fifty messages from friends and family pile up. I’ve devoted this whole weekend to catching up, aside, of course, from our newly habitual bike ride to O-Store – China’s only organic food store [pause for memories of WholeFoods]. And, since we were there, we also stopped by Shanghai’s Third Annual Adult Toy Expo… O!

Aside from not replying to you all, I’ve been busy with a lot of fun stuff. Have a gander at these ecclectic pics for a glimpse into my last few weeks. It’s hard to offer too much by way of explanation for these, but here it goes:

- Thanks to work, and a few recent “field visits”, I managed to procure (and temporarily enjoy) a firesuit. And a Chef’s hat. You know what that means around my household

- Thanks to Mom and Dad for sponsoring a tantalizing Birthday dinner. Fully my doing on the belated side but it took a while to gather the international troops and find the right restaurant. Our group was dazzled by the fabulous courses at Li Family’s Imperial Cuisine. The set menu consists of Empress Dowager Cixi’s favorite recipes memorized and smuggled out of her royal kitchens by one of her Generals. The public’s tastebuds have been thankful ever since 1985 when his descendant’s opened a restaurant following success at a PRC Iron Chef-esque national competition. Their new flagship restaurant was opened in Shanghai this May.

- Prep for Lou’s upcomining “café” venture at Shanghai’s 2nd largest kitchen kit supplier

- Every morning we wake up to chopping sounds emanating from behind our flat. It’s one of two downsides to our otherwise incredible 2nd floor flat – the other being roaches, but those are mostly under control since we engaged in small chemical arms race. I’m not quite sure what these women were doing but it looked like they were stuffing intenstines with other intestines. Mmmm. Their meat pail has a shiny hypnotic allure. Quite planely, their partner in gastronomic crime is ashing on his vegetables. We never eat there.

- Sexpo.

Other big news, I’ll be back in the US for a grand East Coast tour with Louise from about September 28 through October 10 (just after Columbus Day Weekend). No schedule yet, but wanted to let y’all know I’ll be coming ’round the mountain, and probably DC, NYC and Cape Cod too. Hope to see you all while I’m home.