Category: 101 Things About Shanghai
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(101 Things About Shanghai) The Bund, reformatted
Although I’ve been living in Shanghai for about a week shy of two years now, I’ve only been to the Bund 4 times. The first 3 times were fairly pointless as it was being renovated, just like everything else in Shanghai. The first time I went, I was on the Pudong side looking across and…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) Self-Medication
I’ve had a bad cold for about a month now. I blame my students entirely. They have been coming to class with such dedication that the absentee rate is nearly nil and the cough-cough-hoark-hoark-sneeze-snort rate is very high. The desks and floor are littered in crumpled tissues, eyes are watery, noses snuffly, brains foggy, heads falling to…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) Provisions
As I am gearing up for the improbably overambitious NaNoWriMo, I’ve had to scale back on actual thoughts about reality in Shanghai. This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped being horribly invasive with my mobile phone camera. I’m now up to 601 poorly focused pictures in my barely year-old phone. I intend to keep going until I…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) More Things I Don’t Need
Reflexology shower gel bath gloves and socklets for those days when you don’t have time to visit your friendly neighbourhood blind masseur. Sorry for the photo being a crappy mirror-image Photo Booth thing but I actually have to, like, go to work or something today and can’t spend all morning faffing about setting up a…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) The Mrs Mu Home Shopping Network
For someone who has an incorrigible habit of packing up and moving every year or so (and sometimes even more often), I also have some terrible lingering pack-rat habits that have followed me from my much younger, more geographically stable days (like, pre-1993). I buy stuff. I buy really stupid, pointless stuff that I never…
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(101 Things about Shanghai) Mops and Kibble Buffets
It’s Monday evening and I’m tired from a semi longish day trying to persuade my students to engage in the learning process so I’m offering another instalment of Mops of Shanghai. This first set of mops is from just at the entrance to our building. There are usually a few there, balanced atop one another,…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) The ShiLiuPu Fabric Market Part 2
I got my stuff. Oh, god but it’s lovely. Everything here was made by Shirley in shop #216 in the fabric market at 168 DongMen Road in Shanghai. She’s awesome.
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(101 Things About Shanghai) The Fabric Market
One of the more precarious aspects about living abroad has been finding clothes to cover my body. In Turkey, I discovered that my arms, legs and torso were significantly longer than the average Turk of my hip-waist measurements so all my shirt cuffs ended about an inch shy of my wrists (mighty cold in…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) 2 Mops and a Mobile Florist
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(101 Things About Shanghai) Summer Nights
Shanghai summers are deeply unpleasant. Temperatures tend to hover in the mid 30s, with weather forecasts adding ‘feels like 45+’ just below the technically correct temperature. Humidity has been around 85% lately, which, really, honestly, is pretty freaking awful. We have the dehumidifier running nearly non stop in the living room because if we…
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(101 Things about Shanghai) Work/Learn/Chocolate
Things have been somewhat unsettled here on the Eastern Front since getting back from Myanmar. Aside from the unnervingly deafening death rattle of the cicadas everywhere above you in the trees, the heat has been hovering in the late 30s with a bazillion percent humidity. We bought one of the top 5 small dehumidifiers,…
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(101 Things About Shanghai) Fake Books
One of the things about living in faraway lands that can be frustrating for a nerd like me is the frequently limited access to English books. In Turkey, they were quite pricey but I bought them anyway. A girl has needs, you see. I had to leave 75% of them behind when I left (there…