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The 15th day of the 1st lunar month is the Chinese Lantern Festival and also the first night of the new year to see a full moon. The celebration generally consists of displaying many kinds of lighted lanterns though the details variy from city to city. Some friends and I attended the main festival in Shanghai at Cheng Huang Miao (Cheng Huang Temple), which is also the site of the Yu Garden and the huge market. The temple is in the center of the area, largely enclosed, with lovely traditonal architecture, fish ponds and a 9-corner bridge. Facing the water there is a tea house that is a charming and peaceful place to have tea and visit with friends. The enclosed area is rather small, and the crowd huge, so navigation is not easy but the shopkeepers are more than happy. Each small side street contains lanterns of a different kind, one of them a large set of numbered lanterns containing riddles; if you can guess the correct answer you can go to the office and collect a prize. I have a few photos here. | ||||||||||||
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A strange thing I've noticed is that there often is rain in one part of Shanghai but not in other parts. I suppose partly it's the size of the city, but often there is no rain at my home but rain at my destination only 5 minutes away by subway. | ||||||||||||
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I didn't go to the F1 race this year, and good thing. It rained a lot and everyone at the race was a drowned rat. No rain at my home, though. Haha. Also, they raised the ticket prices this year, and that put me off so I watched the race on TV. The Shanghai circuit is not great for spectators unless you're in the stands by the pit lane. Beyond that, the other seating is somehow strangely detached from the rest of the venue and you feel very remote, as if you're not a part of anything. It's really like you are sitting on the side of a country road somewhere, watching fast cars go by. Weird. Also weird, and this is really true, the highest priced tickets for the F1 race were - take a deep breath - 1,600,000 RMB. That's about $250,000. Can you believe that? One of my friends at the office has a friend who was selling the tickets, and people bought them. I think you get to sit in a glass box beside the pits, and maybe you can talk to the drivers after the race, but geez...... "Nouveau Riche" (the newly-rich, for those who don't speak French) has an entirely different meaning in this city. There are so many people here who are so rich that the money really means nothing to them. | ||||||||||||
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I knew it. I told you. We went from Summer to Autumn in one day. Ok, two days. Until the Oct. 1 weekend, the daytime temperatures here were in the low 30s and we were still definitely in summer. Then on that weekend we caught the tail end of a typhoon - nothing really, just some rain and a bit of cool wind - and after that the weather never warmed up again. Now the daytime temperatures are in the mid-20s and 15 to 17 at night. I went from needing the air conditioning to thinking about heating in one weekend. | ||||||||||||
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Steak, pork chops, bacon, beef ribs, pork ribs, fried chicken, barbecued chicken, duck, pork, oxtail soup, chicken soup, mashed potatos, rice, french bread, great buns and pastries, cheese, spaghetti, every kind of fruit you have heard of and some kinds you haven't heard of, same with vegetables, same with fish. Milk, butter, whipping cream, coffee, tea, orange juice, grape juice, Big Mac meals, KFC meals, pizza, smoked salmon sandwiches, fried and scrambled eggs, toast, and Chinese food - most of which I have never seen before and is really really good. Also iced coffee with rose petals, brandy and ice cream in it. | ||||||||||||
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Ten or so years ago when mobile phones were much larger, my Motorola phone had a vibrator - a serious one, too - it would vibrate itself right off my desk, if I weren't careful. It also caused other unexpected problems; for e.g.: Here's the sequence of events: | ||||||||||||
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I've inadvertently discovered how to make spring-loaded scrambled eggs. I'm not sure how this happened, exactly, but small pieces of toast overloaded with scrambled eggs must contravene some basic law of nature. Take one bite, and the eggs jump off the toast onto the computer keyboard. And into my shirt pocket too, as I discovered later. I'll have to see if I can duplicate this and find a use for it; there may be a patent here. | ||||||||||||
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Going anywhere by myself is always a bit of a challenge, partly because my sense of direction has various genetic defects which we won't discuss here, and partly because the Chinese words for "This way to North Korea" look almost the same as "To find a taxi, use Exit No. 2." | ||||||||||||
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Autumn has come to Shanghai already. I realised that Spring comes late here and lasts only a short time. It was cold in February and even in March, and then on almost one day Spring appeared and everything was green and covered in flowers. Autumm seems to be the same - July was quite hot with many days at 35 to 38, but August has been a bit cooler and yesterday I noticed leaves on the sidewalks that had turned quite brown and had fallen. I'm surprised the seasons appear to arrive earlier than in Canada, and Spring was shorter than I would have expected, though I'm told Autumn can last until late November. | ||||||||||||
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The weather here is changing. It seem like in only a few weeks we have gone from summer to Autumn; the air conditioning is off, heat not yet required. The days are in the low to midlde 20s but it seems strangely cool. In Canada, I'd be walking around in shirt sleeves, but here I wear a light jacket. I think I've just been spoiled, and have acclimatised too well to the warmer climate. I used to laugh at my friends in Hong Kong who would be wearing ski jackets in the fall or winter when the temperature was in the 20s, but now I can understand why. The weather is much cooler than in the summer, and it feels appropriate to dress up more warmly. Funny. I'm told that the Autumn here is the best time of the year for pleasant weather - not too hot and not too cold. The weather history suggests average temperatures for Sept. Oct., Nov. and Dec. of 75, 65, 60 and 55, respectively. January is about the same as Dec., but Feb. is the coldest month here - and that was my experience this last year. The temperature wasn't that low, but Feb. seemed surprisingly cold to me and my apartment heat was on almost all the time. And then in March there was a radical change and we were into a short Spring, and all of a sudden we were into Summer and the temperatures were high. The seasons seem to change quickly here, much more so than I'm accustomed to seeing, and Spring disappears quickly but Autumn seems to linger for a long time. I don't really understand why that would be the case. Also, the days are definitely much shorter now than only two months ago, by at least one hour, and it seems so noticeable because dusk is already at 6:30 and daylight doesn't come until maybe 6:00 AM. In July, it was fully bright at 5:30 AM and dusk was after 7:00 PM. No big deal, but different. Autumn is here; temperatures are in the low to high 20s and the weather is lovely. We'll have a couple of months of this now before it begins to get colder. Perfect weather, perfect everything. | ||||||||||||
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I have this new ayi who is a study in slow motion. Being paid by the hour has a particular meaning for this woman, and work magically expands to fill all the time she plans on being paid for. She tells me she just wants to do a good job, but I have my suspicions. I've watched her iron my shirts before, but today my patience wore a bit thin and I told her she had a maximum of 5 minutes to finish one short-sleeved shirt. She argued like hell that she needed at least 10 minutes, but she didn't know that I knew how to iron shirts. Three minutes flat. Big surprise for her. Then silence, then she broodingly finished all my shirts in less than 5 minutes each. Well, not all silence. She grumbled quite a lot, actually. And on the way out, she suggested she could iron my shirts for a flat rate of 5 or 10 RMB - which, she said, was the arrangements many of her friends had. Haha. Sorry, but the 'flat rate' is 5 minutes. Bye now. | ||||||||||||
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In keeping with my attitude of serving my public wherever possible, I have conducted some experiments on your behalf and am pleased to report the results. Airline myth #1 - "In preparation for takeoff, please ensure that your table trays and seat backs are in the full upright position." When the stewardess wasn't looking, I put my table tray back down and reclined my seat. After taking careful measurements, I am able to confirm that the takeoff performance of the aircraft was not affected by the position of my table tray nor the angle of declension of my seat back. Airline myth #2 - "Be sure that all your electronic devices, especially mobile phones, are turned off and do not turn them on again until the aircraft has come to a full stop at the terminal building." My phone has a GPS and I wanted to know how fast we were going when we took off, how fast the plane accelerated, and how quickly we gained altitude. So I pretended I was listening to music on my ipod while I surreptitiously watched the GPS readout. I can confirm that my phone did not affect the navigational instruments and did not make the plane crash. It also did not improve the quality of the food, and the coffee was still Nescafe. | ||||||||||||
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Shanghai is an unbelievable city for scale. We have a new deep-water port in the city, on the Yangtze River, that will be able to handle the largest container ships in the world. This new port needs lots of workers, so the City of Shanghai is building an entire new city for 800,000 people at the port, to house everyone at the port location. Houses, parks, transportation system, shopping, everything. A city within a city, just to accommodate the marine traffic at the port. I can hardly conceive of something like that, but they just make a decision and do it. A new city of 800,000 people just rising out of the mud on the waterfront, complete with parks, a little inland lake and whatever else they can think of. And they just do it. Decide today, and tomorrow you have 600 backhoes and 400 dumptrucks and the ready-mix people are already lining up to pour foundations. It'll be finished and occupied within a year. I love one-party government. | ||||||||||||
