Everyday Shanghai

This is just a quick post because it's late. Here's a few photos of regular places and food vendors. The one above is was taken on the ferry to cross the river from the Pudong area of Shanghai. Motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians all together.
This one is just some laundry. My dad likes to joke, "Do you like all the flags?"


Fresh veg stand. Chinese love their leafy greens.


Train station waiting room


More food vendors...

This woman was selling roasted corn and potatoes. The next one is a Muslim street vendor selling some kind of cake or bread.


Papa Johns - Free delivery

More Gulangyu

These are from our trip to Xiamen 2 weeks ago. This was a Buddhist temple on Gulangyu.





Here's a couple more shots of Chinese children. I try to be discreet, which is why I have so many pictures of people from behind. But the Chinese don't seem to mind people taking pictures.

Engrish

I like the asparagus point explodes eyes fish rice. But the Burn juice cowboy bone looks interesting, too. I'm always on the lookout for funny English translations gone wrong. A lot of times, it's not really funny, but sometimes you come across some gems. Like this bootleg copy of the Kingdom that I was watching. When you buy movies off the street, sometimes they're great. Sometimes, it's from a camera pointed at a movie screen, and sometimes it's in Russian. You get what you pay for. At less than a dollar a movie, it's not a big loss. So this copy of the Kingdom must have been translated to another language and then back in to english, maybe by a machine or something. I had to watch the first 15 minutes twice because I kept laughing. You need to have sound to get the effect.


These pictures are all out of order. These turtles were outside a Buddhist temple in Xiamen or Gulangyu.

Good Foods

There's lots of stuff on Chinese menus that might seem strange. It's not so much the duck lip that makes me laugh. It's that it's Extremely savory duck lip. And the crab dishes cardiac atherosclerosis....they must have used a medical dictionary to translate that one. haha...

One of my favorite foods (and I have many) is Lanzhou pulled noodles. I had them today for lunch (again). We go to the local eateries for these, where you can get a delicious bowl of beef noodle soup for about 60 cents. Local eateries are no-frills places to eat. They're usually tiny and dark, clean-ish, and instead of napkins they might have a roll of toilet paper. But the food is good and cheap. And you usually get to see them making food at the front of the shop. They cook the noodles in big pots out front and you can watch them make your noodles. This isn't my video, but it's exactly the same type of place. There are lots of them around.

Just like that...dough to noodles in 30 seconds. They also have knife-sliced noodles where they take a chunk of dough and flick slices of noodles directly into the pot. These are Muslim eateries, so there's no pork on the menu. China is largely atheistic, mostly due to the communist government I believe. Buddhism has the largest following, followed by Islam, and then Christianity. My brother had brought a stack of news magazines to read, and this was one of the factoids I read.

Here's a potsticker shop.


This was taken on one of the local shopping streets. For those who can't afford to go to Wal-Mart, this is where you can buy your food. Yeah sure, it's gutted on the street, but it's fresh. I like to look, but we don't buy from here (much).


Tsingtao. Cheers!

peepee dolls

These little guys are clay dolls that pee. Soak them in water for a while and pour hot water over them, and they'll pee.


Here's another pic from the fake market. For those in the market for fake designer undies.

Fake Market

This is one of the fake markets in Shanghai. My brother and I each walked away with a jacket. Mine's a North Face, which you'll see in later posts. It came out to roughly $25 I think. We probably could have bargained lower, but the girl was nice. Usually they're super pushy and I hate that. This was before the new year so business was slow. It's mostly westerners that frequent these markets, and most of them had gone home for the holidays.

I also got one of these "I am NOT a Plastic bag" totes.


There are also markets where you can go get clothes made from scratch to your measurements. Lots of people have suits made. You can pick your fabric and styles depending on which tailor you chose. The hard part is picking the right tailor. Prices vary, but I think a suit jacket and trousers runs about $50 or $60ish. My dad and I have both had wool coats made. Supposedly they're cashmere, but I don't know. They are soft though.

This was one of the large hypermarkets in Shanghai on new years eve. It was crazy busy.


I love going to supermarkets when I visit foreign countries. You can go shopping at H&M, Uniqlo and benetton in different countries, and they'll all have the same stuff. But supermarkets are always different and full of cool stuff, especially here.
The rest of these are from Carrefour, another very large (french) supermarket chain. There's a much larger selection of produce than back home, even compared to Whole Foods. And most of it is fresher because a lot of it is grown locally. Not to mention a surprisingly large selection of organic produce.



This is the fresh noodle and steam bun station. Yummy!

Suzhou

After we got back from Xiamen we made a trip to Suzhou which is 30 minutes inland from Shanghai by bullet train. With a population of 20 million plus, everywhere in Shanghai is crowded. This is one of the waiting rooms at the train station when we were leaving for Suzhou. Suzhou's city is pretty old and they have canals and many gardens. We didn't visit the city this time around, but we did visit the Humble Ambassadors Garden which is one of the largest gardens in China. Unfortunately it was the wrong time of year to experience it's loveliness.



This is the Suzhou train station. Notice the KFC signs...KFC is very popular here. I think I've seen more of them than McDs.



Same station in better weather...


When we got back to Shanghai, it was the taxi driver that informed us that Benazir Bhutto had been killed. Taxi drivers are a wealth of knowledge.

I want to try one of these motorized bicycles.

Chinese Fashion

I was actually taking a picture of this girl's hair and coat, but her fella just happened to reach down to pat her ass just as I took the picture.

Shorts and tall boots are very common. Sometimes the shorts are short and puffy, hard to explain...I'm not a fan of this look. The hair looks like hair metal band hair.



The kids here are so adorable. It's winter, so they're all wearing so much padding they look like little puffy people. And their pants are split down the crotch so they can pee and poop.

You've seen the ubiquitous little smart cars on the WII commercials. I've never seen one like this.

Xiamen Foods

I had a fear factor dinner the other night; marinated jellyfish, stir-fried beef tendon with bamboo shoots, and some chinese vegetables. This is nothing new to me. I grew up with this stuff, and I'll try just about anything, including snails (or escargot if you must).


Well, I've tried them and I don't think I like them. I don't hate them, but I'd never order them. But if I'm served them, I'll eat them. And between the four of us, we finished the whole plate of snails...along with our clams, crab, shrimp and soup. Delicious! Gulangyu is an island by the ocean, so they have a lot of seafood. We had lunch at a seafood restaurant where they had bins out front with all sorts of live clams, crabs, fish...we ordered their seafood meal for 3 people, which is how we ended up with snails.

This was one of many shops selling dried seafood...

Here's a couple shots of snacks from vendors in Xiamen. This is small squid and seaweed. The taste was good, but the squid bone was still in there so you had to spit that out.


These are delicious. They're a bit like Japanese mochi but made with pumpkin and pan-fried. They're made with rice flour, so they're soft and sticky inside. And in the middle is red bean paste. We stopped at a tea house in Xiamen and ordered a plate of these with a pot of tea. It was good.

Gulangyu Island

This will be the first of many photos of fruit and food vendors. Gulangyu is an island off of Xiamen. It's very small and there are no cars, like Venice. It used to have a bunch of foreign embassies in the early 1900s, but now they've been turned into living spaces and inns. Some are abandoned, and one is a cozy-looking HI hostel. I'm pretty sure the red fruits above are rose apples. They're juicy and crisp and they taste kind of like flowers. Like a light, rosy-tasting apple. The green ones are fresh dates...They are crispy and a bit like apples.

Xiamen, more blogging problems

I'm still having some blogging issues. I may have to start posting from Flickr. For some reason I'm having problems uploading photos to my page from my computer, but using my Flickr photos seems to work. Good thing Flickr isn't blocked! It sucks not being able to see my blog, so I can't tell if what I'm uploading is showing up. A lot of the other blogging sites are blocked, too. So at least i'm still able to post.

Here are some more pics from Xiamen. It's south of Shanghai, so it was a little warmer. This should do it for the family pictures. I'll have some cooler stuff up soon.

Xiamen

I'm having some blog problems because blogspot.com is one of the many sites that are blocked in China (as well as Wikipedia). Which means I won't be able to check postsecret unfortunately.




Anyway...I arrived in Shanghai late Friday night before Christmas. Sunday we flew to Xiamen, which is a city on an island across from Taiwan. Since it's winter, we opted to fly south. My brother only has a week and half here, so we couldn't go far. The weather was warmer there, but it rained the first 2 days.

Jetlag is frustrating. At this point I was getting tired around 2 in the afternoon. I was going to bed around 7:00 and then waking up at 3:30.

Lazy Blogger

I've been a lazy blogger...my first week here involved a few days of traveling, and my parents were moving to a different apartment, so internet access has been spotty. My brother left yesterday to spend New Years Eve in Paris before flying home. Check out the view from the new place! It is amazing!!

First post...finally!

Okay, so I had planned to start blogging before I left for my trip, but packing up my damn apartment took so much longer than expected. Plus there was that snow storm. It was a supremely stressful few days, and I'd rather not linger on it. Basically, my apartment was on the 10th floor, my car was in the garage in the basement, and the dumpster is outside. I spent all of 3 days carting crap from my apartment down to my car, packing and unpacking my car, making trips to the dumpster, goodwill and the recycling drop-off. I slept about 2 hours each night; it's amazing what a stimulant stress is. It's so frustrating when you're working so damn hard and the shit's just not getting done. Plus I had to clean. I finally I ran out of time. The apartment was clean, but I ended up throwing out a good deal of my favorite stuff, including my white board and my IKEA moon lamp :-(

I had to drive 6 hours to my brother's place in Virginia. I planned to be there Monday. I didn't get there until Wednesday, 2 hours before we had to leave for the airport. If you're planning a trip out of the country for a few months, I recommend you give yourself more than 2 hours to prepare. Luckily I had most of my stuff packed already before I moved. I did forget a few things, and I over-packed somethings in my haste. I still have a week in Shanghai to try and get things sorted.

I'm working on photos....in the meantime, here's Jake helping me move a week before I left.