This gallery contains 8 photos.
“Why would I want to live in a huge city and chase money when I can be here, get up late every day, listen to live music and serve drinks to people I like every night?”, said the young barman … Continue reading
Gruss Gott, the Cityshop supermarket is having a special week-long celebration of German food, complete with educational insights into the cuisine. This is hilarious, from their website:
“Germans love meat, especially pork. In addition to eating three square meals of pork each day, they sometimes even have a pork snack for tea break.”
Three square meals of pork a day and a pork snack on top of that? It’s a marvel that they can build all those cars and save the euro considering they have to down tools and eat schwein every few hours. Stereotyping rocks. The culinary overview goes on to say that many places in Germany have week-long festivals in honour of the potato. Four years living in the country and I never knew about the spud festivals…gutted!
There’s the big China news, then there are these small stories in the local press that make me go hmmm. Two things caught my eye this morning. The first is a report that expats are tearing around town on souped-up electro scooters, unaware that they’re breaking the law. The first part is likely true, the blissful ignorance…I doubt it. Electro scooters are a complete menace in general, silent assassins that sidle up behind me when I’m cycling and freak the life out of me. I know there’s always one beside me, just outside my peripheral vision. I was out in the wilds of Pudong last week at an eco-farm and one of the farm workers gave me a lift to the bus stop (I always travel in style) on his electro-scooter. It certainly wasn’t a souped-up one, I could have walked faster, but it was nice to be the silent terror for once. I cackled as we crept up behind unsuspecting cyclists and beeped them out of the way with our shrill little horn.
Meanwhile over at Siemens HQ in Beijing, a public protest about dodgy fridge doors. A Chinese blogger and some of his mates dragged three fridges over to the Siemens building and proceeded to smash them up. Luo, the blogger, wanted Siemens to publicly admit that the fridges had faulty doors, and Siemens responded that they had sent repairmen round twice to fix the door and they were refused entry. I’m hardwired to believe the Germans somehow.
It’s my favourite skyscraper. It makes me think of Ayn Rand somehow. It’s right outside the Huangpi Nan Lu metro stop.
magnificent
Hairy crabs, the Shanghai autumn gourmet delight.
The real hairy crabs should come from Yangcheng lake. There are a ton of pretenders, quelle surprise in the global center of fakery. At nearly 40 euros a crab, I choose to believe ours were the real, hairy deal!
There are some excellent restaurants that specialize in the hairy little buggers, we chose Ling Ling Ge in Hongqiao, top floor of the Petland pet shop building, all private rooms, lit like a landing strip and free of all atmosphere. I’m not a fan of the private dining room.
Crabs come in male or female. There was only one female left, very much like China’s male-to-female ratio, so we ordered her and 7 strapping boys please. A flotilla of waitressess arrived to crack, open, gut, and present the crab meat. I once spent a summer as a waitress in a restaurant (the infamous “Captain Moules”) near Biarritz, and the staff lunch every day was a bin bag of crabs, so I was ready to get down and dirty myself, somehow it adds to the experience. The roe has a scrambled egg consistency that dries out the mouth, the female is sweeter than the male. It’s tasty, and I want to say more than that, but I really can’t. It’s really tasty.
the boys
Yesterday was a big day here. The date, 11-11-2011, is regarded as an auspicious day for singles, called “Bachelor’s Day” or “Divine Single’s day”.
Hordes of unmarried couples decided that the best way to celebrate singles day was to get married at once, as all those ones in the date also signifies “whole-heartedness” and it is therefore an auspicious wedding date. It was also a good day to break off a current relationship, move house, who knows what else, all this lucky/unlucky numbers business seems to be quite flexible to me.
Around 5,000 couples got married in the Shanghai yesterday, compared to c.a. 250 on a normal day, according to the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau. Queues of couples determined not to miss their lucky chance began forming outside registry offices in the early hours of the morning.
Not much was heard from the “divine singles”, they were probably out having too much fun to be bothered about all these couples hijacking their day for mass marriage. According to the local paper, Metro Line 11 organized a single’s day train at 11:11am but only 10 people turned up. Maybe meeting your soul mate on the underground isn’t auspicious…can’t the bounder afford a taxi?
…may no longer be a coffee and a marlboro red, but rather a bucket-sized bowl of wonton soup. I finally made it to the food corner outside the apartment for breakfast today, 20 kwai (around 2.50 euro) for two giant bowls of soup, a punchy option with pork and kimchi wontons, and my less tasty order: wontons filled with “three vegetable delight”. As the world’s worst breaker of the fast, I was impressed to find myself up, dressed and sitting with a steaming bowl of broth as my first meal of the day. The shop’s called Gill Wonton, so it’s been calling my name for a while.
Three vegetable delight. Simply add your own stock powder and chili oil and slurp on down
The day's meat delivery is lying over there in those open carboard boxes by the bin
Hairy crab season is here and there are crab tanks everywhere. I still haven’t tasted them, something I will remedy this week and report back. Here’s a step-by-step on how to eat them from CNNGO.
Crab cleaning on the pavement
If he's alive, he's waiting to make a run for it
All bagged up
Shanghai’s 22 million residents create quite an outrageous din, with their honking, beeping, screeching at the tops of their voices, hollering into phones, hoiking up phlegm and generally being themselves. While this is all part of life here and shouldn’t be such a big deal, after four months without a break I had officially crossed into a place of facial twitching and frustrated muttering to myself.
Moganshan to the rescue. It’s hard to fathom that just two and a half hours away from Shanghai there is a place of tea terraces and blue-misty bamboo forests and fresh, delicious air. We took a train to Hangzhou, 50 minutes, then boarded a bouncy little minibus for the 1.5 hour trip into the hills. Moganshan was a getaway for foreigners living in Shanghai in the 1920s and you can still see old, crumbling country houses dotted around the place.
I interviewed the naked retreats company about their naked home village for an article a few weeks ago, and was intrigued by the sound of their new naked stables private reserve so we decided to take a villa and go for it. No point in half-relaxing, I needed the full monty, including a huge bathtub at the end of the bed with a view of the valley and an outdoor jacuzzi on the terrace for some extra decadence. The reserve is still in the soft opening phase, so the horses hadn’t arrived yet and things were still being finished off, but the upside was that there was a bit of a discount going on, hence the 3-bedroom villa just for us two. The space, the silence, the views, the birds, it was divine.
I’d like to say I went hiking, but anyone who knows me would spot that blatant lie. I was so desperate to get outta dodge that I forgot my camera but here’s a few iphone shots from the reserve…
Autum's here
Villas in the Mist
Romantic, secluded plunge pool and some blokes loitering in their wellies
