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In my own defense, I want to say that I had just awakened and was still mostly asleep. And I wasn't wearing my glasses. In my bathroom I have a rug, sort of off-white color, heavy cotton like a burlap mat. And on this mat were some little balls of dark-colored lint from the washing machine. I must have exhaled when I sat down, which made one of the lint balls scurry across the mat. I thought it was a bug so I stomped on it, and of course the resulting sideways air pressure made all the lint balls scurry across the mat in different directions. And I said, "Shit! My bathroom is full of cockroaches." So I panicked and jumped up, and in the ensuing mad frenzy I apprehended and stomped the hell out of every lint ball in my house. Then I got my glasses. It is my fervent hope that the preceding episode can be attributed to excessive sleepiness. But if, as I suspect, it's the onset of dementia, my future may be more event-filled than I would have had any reason to expect. |
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In the Western world we have an honor system for queues and line-ups; no such concept exists here. It's truly astonishing that a single square inch inadvertently left open in front of you, is instantly filled by a whole person who wasn't there a second ago. The people aren't rude; They just read someplace that nature abhors a vacuum. But that's how you get onto trains and into some elevators. Actually, I discovered an interesting alternative; I just get myself firmly in front of someone and wait. And when the train doors open, that nature behind me that so abhors a vacuum could push even Godzilla onto that train. I feel like I'm in a mother kangaroo's pouch while she hops onto the train. |
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I bought an iron today for 89 RMB (about $13), then decided I didn't feel like ironing today so I just bought another shirt. They're so inexpensive that it doesn't really matter. I May do that tomorrow too, because I already don't feel like ironing tomorrow. I need an ayi. |
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Today, I'm angry. I wanted to take a friend to see Avatar at the IMAX but the cinema was out of tickets except for the 8:45 AM movie. But outside the cinema were maybe 25 scalpers with loads of tickets - who bought them from the cinema at a discount. I wanted to shoot them all. This is a common phenomenon here. The scalpers seem to make a good living buying tickets in bulk from a cinema or other venue and then reselling them to the public. But it's not possible to know if the tickets are genuine, and there have been many cases of fake reprinted tickets being sold. I recall people selling tickets to the F-1 Race here, which tickets had clearly been produced on someone's HP printer at home, complete with smudges. I was surprised to see people buy them, and even more surprised to see some of these people gain admittance to the grounds with them. |
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Shanghai recently experienced a total solar eclipse - the longest one to be seen in this century. This is an awesome thing. Try to imagine the black disk of the moon slowly sliding onto the sun, and in the space of a few minutes covering it completely while the whole world suddenly becomes totally black like the darkest moonless night. And imagine the sun's corona visible around the perimeter of the moon for several minutes, with plumes of white-hot light spurting intermittently in all directions, some of them equal in length to the diameter of the sun itself. Could you imagine all that? Good, because that's what I had to do. The morning of the eclipse, it clouded over and rained like hell and we saw nothing. |
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April 4. Summer seems to be here. If that's true, then Spring was only one week long. It seems like last week that I was complaining about evening temperatures in my apartment being too low, and all of a sudden the days are +25 and rising. This morning at 8:00 it was already 20+. Shanghai doesn't get all that hot except in August, but I may be praying for cold pretty soon. |
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In the realm of unimagined blessings, I realised this morning that there is no Calgary Stampede here. I will not see 25 million Chinese dressed in jeans and cowboy hats. The streets will not be full of straw and horsebleep. There will be no Stampede breakfasts of yucky pancakes and liver-flavored coffee. We will not be treated to the sight of aboriginals holding pow-wows in the dumpsters. |
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Strange experience the other day, getting a haircut. I went downstairs to the mall, to a place that looks expensive, and expected the worst. I mean, if I have to pay RMB 110 for a half pound of coffee and 50 for a thing of whipping cream, and 25 for a coffee at Starbucks, the haircut in this place ain't gonna be cheap. Well, someone shampooed my head and gave me a head massage, then a neck massage, then a shoulder massage, then moved me to the sink to wash off my head. Then they leaned me back and cleaned out my earwax. Come on, would I make this up? Then, a very good barber cut my hair and shaved the top of my head so I looked like Jean Luc Picard, then back to the sink to wash off the hairs. Then blow-dried, then combed. All the time this was going on I was having this little dialogue in my head about how much I'd be willing to pay for all this attention. At various points I could have asked the price, but it always seemed that I was already in too deeply. Then the bill. 18 RMB. It's the only cheap thing I've found in this city, and I need one only every three months. |
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One current bit of news, however. I have taken on a tenant (sort of) in my apartment, a girl who is renting my third bedroom - and encroaching on the rest of my house. She's a friend I've known for a year or more and needed another place to live so I offered mine. I don't charge her much; she just helps pay for the utilities, but it's really nice to have company and a woman's touch around the house. We have flowers now, and candles - and hair all over the bathroom. I have two bathrooms here, but I get her to use the shower in my suite because it has a lot more hot water, and we just use the other one for drying laundry and stuff like that. I mention this latter only because it's had unexpected consequences. I've discovered that a healthy woman of breeding age showering in my bathroom can be surprisingly distracting. If this woman doesn't agree to marry me soon, I may have to kill her. |
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The other morning we had fog like I've never seen before. From my window, I could make out only dim shapes of the street level of the surroundings. Everything else was gone. Just like being in a cloud. But it dissipated in a few hours and the day was sunny. |
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Here in Shanghai, much of the city is as clean or cleaner than anything I have experienced in Canada. Certainly, some parts of the city are older, where the streets and sidewalks were built 50 or 60 years ago, as were the buildings, and these parts look about the same as they'd look in Saskatoon or Edmonton. They aren't filthy slums like in Detroit's inner city; they are just old and wearing out. The city is usually busy demolishing them and building new things. There are many street stalls here selling food which I am not tempted to sample. I doubt the conditions are as sanitary as those to which I am accustomed, and I have no need for adventure. There are tiny restaurants where I wouldn't eat for the same reason, but that's true in Moose Jaw too. For the other restaurants of all sizes and price ranges, I have no hesitation whatever about them, any more than I had in a Chinatown in North America or Europe. I think it's generally true that the little eating places everywhere may not have the same standards as the larger and more expensive places. I imagine some of these are worse, and there may be a layer of eating places where the standards are measurably lower than in the West. My experience in all the cities I have visited is that there seem to be questionable standards in the street stalls, but I never attend them and have just ignored that part. In terms of general cleanliness, Shanghai (and Hong Kong, too) are probably cleaner than Calgary or other cities in Canada. In HK, if you toss a cigarette butt on the street, you could be in big trouble. It's not that bad here, but Shanghai has battalions of street sweepers with their brooms and big dustpans that are constantly sweeping up everything. I seldom see much debris of any kind anywhere, even on the little side or back streets where foreigners never go. This is a clean city, and Hong Kong sure was as well. Guangzhou maybe not as clean but still not bad. Beijing is the same. I've said before that my building complex has troops who spend 7 days a week wiping off imaginary smudges from glass walls and polished marble. So do all the malls, and many of the metro stations - at least those that I use. My building complex is every bit as clean as any 5 star hotel. So is the mall and the supermarket below, the metro station and all the restaurants in the mall. In fact, my whole mall has staff who spend the entire day from 8:00 AM to 10:30 PM, just walking up and down all the corridors with brooms and mops, wiping up stuff that hasn't had time to fall yet. I walk down small side streets every day going to work, and in that part of the downtown the buildings and so on are very old, but the streets and sidewalks are pretty clean. I have never encountered rotting anything or unbearable stenches or things of that ilk in my travels so far. I don't know what the apartments or living quarters would be like in these areas, and am not inclined to ask. So far as the pollution is concerned, Shanghai is better than Calgary, and a hell of a lot better than Toronto. In Calgary, wehre we really do have too many damned cars, my eyes begin to burn after 10 minutes out on the streets in the downtown, and they don't stop burning until I've been back inside somewhere for maybe ten minutes. And in Toronto's downtown, I smell gasoline everywhere - almost like standing near an open pail of it. That was true even 20 years ago when I travelled there a lot, and it hasn't changed. There is a gasoline stench that permeates everything outdoors, at least in the downtown portions that I inhabited. Shanghai, by contrast, seems fine. I can't say there is no pollution here, but it's a lot better than many cities in North America. We have streets full of cars, but my eyes don't bother me and I don't smell fumes. Or anything else. |
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My Chinese cleaning lady is a darling sweetie. She does not only the usual things, but has taken it upon herself to set a schedule for changing and washing my bedding, and she does lots of extra little things like fluffing my comforter and lining up all my shoes. I think she's in love with me. I'll know for sure if I find little chocolates on my pillow. I take my shirts downstairs to the laundry, but it's rather expensive. They charge 12 RMB (almost $2) to wash and press a shirt, and that's a lot considering I may have paid only 45 for the shirt in the first place. So I had a great idea. I would wash the shirts myself and, since I despise ironing, get my cleaning lady to iron them. But she said, "I don't know how." What kind of cleaning lady doesn't know how to iron shirts? |
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I'll be taking more photos of the city soon. I just need to figure out how to recharge my camera batteries. My recharger is 110V and the system is 220V. I brought a 110V surge strip that I could plug into the voltage adapter, but the strip has a 3-prong plug and the adapter has only the two slots. Which means I could just plug the charger directly into the adapter, but the charger has the wide prong/narrow prong set and the adapter is just two narrow prongs so it won't fit. I guess I could just .... Oh, never mind. |
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I've discovered that the bacon here is as good or better than that in Canada, and I was surprised to find it because in Chinatowns in Calgary there is no such thing. And the bacon here isn't all fat like it is back home. Maybe I'll post a photo. I can't believe I wrote that. "Hi. I live in Shanghai. Would you like to see a photo of the bacon?" I think I need to rearrange my priorities. Or get a life. The sunflower seeds here are different from those we buy in Canada. The seeds are blacker and much longer, and the taste is different. Took a few samplings, but now I quite like them. The pistachios are the same as anywhere, the peanuts too. Potato chips are both the same and different; the regular Lay's or whatever are the same as in Canada, but there are local chips with rather different tastes - not bad, and not too different, except for the crab monkey-brained flavored ones. KFC here is very different from that in Canada; the nice spicy skin is gone. The taste is ok, but it's just fried chicken, some with hot spices and stuff but not KFC. McDonald's is the same everywhere - hot greasy cardboard. French fries are the same everywhere. McDonald's fries are excellent. Coke and Pepsi are the same. Beer is good; lots of local beer, some Japanese, and you can buy most well-known foreign beers here too - at 2 or 3 times the price of local stuff. Beer is much cheaper than coke. Chinese brandy and hard liquor are plentiful and cheap, and I don't drink the stuff. The supermarket gave me a free large bottle of Chinese brandy as some kind of promotion. I tasted it and am saving the rest for company - to let them know when they've stayed too long. When I came here, I brought two bottles of Remy Martin to give away as gifts because someone told me that it was horribly expensive here and would be a treasure to a local. Good plan, except Remy is cheaper here than in Canada. Ended up opening one bottle for me, and the second will suffer the same fate eventually. Chinese grape wine is available here in great quantity and is excellent, without the harshness of the table wines available in Canada. I pay about 15 RMB ($2) for a bottle of wine that would cost $20 in Canada or the US, and this is better. For 50 RMB ($7) you can have a really excellent bottle of wine. I haven't explored the expensive stuff. The ones I buy for table wine (a glass with dinner) are nicer than the French or Italian ones I used to buy in Calgary for 8 or 10 times the price. These people know how to make wine. Some of it is blended from various vintages to keep it consistent, and some is sold by vintage, and there's lots of choice. |