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My birthday was on Sunday and some friends and I went to a karaoke bar for a party. We had dinner and birthday cake and sang songs and generally had fun. That was only my second time at a karaoke place but I could get to like them. At first it seemed like an odd way to spend an evening but it's actually quite pleasant when you're with a group of friends. | ||||
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Last night was the Chinese Mid-Autum Festival - a day of Moon Cakes and visiting with family. I was fortunate to have a friend invite me out for the evening with a whole group of her friends who have no family in Shanghai. So we had a little party and went to someone's home for dinner and had a lovely time. | ||||
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There are supermarkets here that cater mostly to foreigners or to people who must think that spending outrageous amounts of money on groceries is a sign of intelligence. The Carrefour across the street used to sell large bags of Lay's potato chips for about 4 RMB, or $0.50, until they had a fight with Lay's and changed brands. Now the only stores that carry them are asking 70 and 80 RMB - about $10 a bag. And people buy them. There's a Japanese supermarket here that sells nice large Fuji apples for 50 RMB each - about $7.50. I've seen nice cherries at 300 RMB for 500 gms. - almost $100 a Kg. And people buy them. Either I'm the only one who's crazy or there are a lot of people here with far too much money. | ||||
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I had a friend from Chengdu come to visit me for the weekend so I planned a grand tour of Shanghai. The Wai Tan (Bund), the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, shopping on Huai Hai Road, people-watching on Nanjing Road East, meals at restaurants that even people from Chengdu would have to admit were good, Cheung Huang Miao in the evening with all the beautiful lights, walks along the HuangPu River in the moonlight, taking the little ferry across the river to walk the concourse to see all the lights and buildings from both sides ..... Didn't do any of those things. Went to a really boring cocktail party sponsored by the Canada-China Chamber of Commerce, where we met nobody, went for a long walk in the evening, ending at an English tavern that served mostly Mexican food (don't ask; this is Shanghai) and had great fish and chips, went to see an apartment that was available for rent, had a great lunch at a Portuguese restaurant in Lujiazui, had a pizza from Papa John's and watched King Kong on DVD. My friend managed to get off the train at the wrong stop - the People's Square subway station, which is not a great place to get lost. It covers many city blocks, has 12 exits that can lead you very far from where you want to be, and must have 100,000 people in it at any time of day. But mobile phones combined with lots of yelling, screaming and crying eventually saved the day. All's well that ends well. Did go to Cheung Huang Miao and had tea in the temple, then took the Maglev to the airport and had a surprisingly good late lunch. Great weekend, though I can't imagine why. Must have been the company. | ||||
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There is a very curious difference between English and Chinese that always causes confusion and makes for some humorous exchanges. In English, we often ask questions in a negative vein such as, "You aren't going shopping, are you?", when we expect a negative answer like "No, I'm not going." But Chinese don't do this. If you ask a positive question like, "Are you going shopping"?, they will answer 'yes' or 'no'. But when you ask in the negative, they will respond in a way that means, "I agree with what you said." or "I don't agree with what you said." So, my friend Ya Nan came home tonight and said she hadn't had dinner. So I said, "Are you hungry?" "No". "No?". "Yes". I still don't know if she was hungry. Once in Canada when I changed apartments I asked the building manager, "They didn't turn off the electricity, did they?" And he answered, "Yes." Well, yes what? I didn't know what question he was answering. I asked several different ways and was more confused every time. I finally gave up. | ||||
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My computer blew up last weekend. Really. The power supply went. A loud electrical crack like the sound you get when you break a piece of dry wood, then sparks, flames, smoke, all circuit breakers in the house blown, and one electrocuted PC. Fried everything. It had done something a bit flaky and I thought it might have been overheating so I opened the casing to clean out the air vents. And no, I didn't touch anything. Then when I plugged it back in, boom. Big surprise and startled the hell out of me. My main concern was my hard drives because I had huge numbers of files that weren't backed up except on each other. I'd installed two hard drives, using one for file backup, on the theory that two hard drives will never burn out at the same time. Faulty assumption. A bad power supply can fry unlimited hard drives at the same time. I had the drives checked and they were indeed fried. That meant all my correspondence, email addresses, most of my files, all my photos, financial records, everything gone. But I took my main drive to some IT people and they found a firm that repaired the drive well enough to let me copy all my files. So all is well. So I bought a new HP Pavilion desktop, not super but big and fast enough to do everything I need. And I got a new HP printer as well because my old one needed a serial port connection and the new computers don't have them any more. Anyway, the printer was only 300 RMB, and both together were 3,500 RMB. I got almost a 50% discount from the shop. Maybe they were clearing an old model, but I'm happy regardless. Cheap at half the price. The only residual excitement is that now my computer is running Chinese Windows, and clicking on buttons and menus carries some more than negligible risk for the illiterate, of which I am one. I did save my English Word and Excel, so I have at least that, and can always compare menus. | ||||
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The size and scale of the apartment complexes here, is startling at first. There are many complexes here with maybe 40 buildings each, all with parks and pools and playgrounds interspersed, and sometimes there are 10 of these complexes in close proximity to each other. The buildings in Canada or the US look mighty small compared to those here. But the really striking thing is the scale and volume of housing construction that occurs here. Each year, China builds enough new homes for about 25 - 30 million people - which means more or less an entire Canada is being created in new housing stock every year. And the city of Shanghai alone probably builds as many new homes and apartments (more apartments, actually) as are built in Canada in a year. Similar for Beijing, Guanzhou ...... It staggers the imagination to contemplate such a vast scale. China has more than 100 cities that have a population of over 1 million people. And everything works. Services and utilities are fine, transportation is great, the developments are full of shopping centres that make Chinook look like a baby toy, and the stores are full of people. We have single department stores here that seem about as large as some of Calgary's shopping centres - like a 10-story Hudson's Bay equivalent that fills a square block - and several of them all next door to each other. | ||||
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Shanghai is definitely in a different latitude than Southern Canada. It is fully bright here at 5:30 AM and is dark by 7:30 PM. The twilight lasts for only maybe 30 minutes. It begins to get dark at 7:00 and by 7:30 its night already. None of the 4-hour twilight we're used to in the Canadian Prairies in the middle of the summer. | ||||
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I have a lot of trouble understanding some prices here, because they don't seem consistent relative to each other. For e.g., I can't fathom why a coffee would be more than a Big Mac Meal or why beer would be much less expensive than a coke. Also, the retail stores mark things up here much higher than I am used to. In Canada, a typical retail markup would be 100%. But here, they buy it for $1 and sell for at least $5, and sometimes $10 or more. Partly, there are just too many people here with too much money, and who seem willing to pay anything. I was in a men's high-end clothing store that had men's Italian suits priced at RMB 29,000. That's about CAD$4,500. Well, for that money, you could fly to Italy, buy the suit, have a week's holiday, and come home with money left over. The suit was nice, but not exceptional - the same as those I bought at Harry Rosen or wherever for about $1,000. I saw other Italian clothing with much the same prices - where it would be cheaper and more sensible to just fly to Italy for a week to go shopping. People tell me that the newly rich here don't know how to spend their money. Maybe, but almost everything here carries a high price. Part of the cost of living in a very big city, and the salaries are much higher here as well, to compensate. I'm told things are much less expensive in smaller cities. | ||||
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First, you must make your reservation through Air Miles, not with Air Canada, and Air Miles has only a limited list of flights and seats available at any given time, including many blackout periods. And that means you usually can't fly when you want or where you want. And then the number of air miles you need to go someplace is really high. If you don't have enough, you can pay for the extra miles to complete a ticket but the cost is so high you might just as well pay for the entire trip. And worse, you can often use the Air Miles only for a single-leg trip, but all flights to Western Canada stop at Vancouver to clear customs, so the journey to the final destination is a second leg. And that means we can use Air Miles for the return trip Shanghai-Vancouver only, and must pay cash for the other part. But the ticket price for that second short leg is almost as high as the entire return trip through Air Canada. For example, a typical return flight Shanghai-Vancouver-Calgary costs $1,100, but you can use air miles only for the SH-YVR leg. And Air Miles will charge you almost $900 for the Vancouver-Calgary leg, so you might just as well save 70,000 air miles and buy the entire ticket. The whole program is just a scam. | ||||
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Learning to speak Chinese is difficult for foreigners, for several reasons, lack of intelligence not least among them. Another is all the regional dialects - which never seem to give locals too much of a problem, but are incomprehensible to me. One difficulty is that Chinese is an ideographic language, so that we cannot look at a word and 'see' how to pronounce it; we must memorize the sound for each ideogram, each character, each word. Another problem is that Chinese is a tonal language, and the tones are important because they change the meanings of the words. We use tones in English as well, but only for emphasis, so this requires adustment. And in fact, it is like learning two languages. It isn't so difficult in practice to memorise the sounds for words in a sentence, but then one must also learn the tones for each word. And, in practice, it seems easy enough to remember one or the other, but not both. | ||||
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