Category: Shanghai Detritus
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Chinese New Year II: Explosions, Bunnies, Shuttered Doors
So the incessant festive explosions of last night continued until very very late, late enough for me to have filmed several chunks of an hour’s worth of explosions around midnight and still had time to upload, edit, save and upload to YouTube and then add it to yesterday’s post before it was calm enough outside…
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Chinese New Year in Shanghai: Bunnies Gone Wild
As a Rooster, Doug’s mortal enemy in Chinese astrology is the Rabbit. And lo, come tomorrow, we shall be fully immersed in the Year of the Rabbit. There are bunnies EVERYWHERE. It’s like Donnie Darko with lots of red and gold and glitter. There are sparkly cutout stickers of bunny silhouettes on department store glass…
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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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Meat and Mops- My Parents’ Journey to Qibao
So we went to Qibao yesterday, our first grand excursion in a week or so, as I’d been busy with stupid school stuff and having my jaw sledge-hammered, and my mother was battling her semi-inevitable post-flight cold. Doug and I had gone there about two years ago when we first moved to Shanghai, back when…
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School’s out for…um, Spring Festival (insert Alice Cooper tune here)
Classes finished nearly two weeks ago but the final exam for my course was scheduled only for the very last possible time slot. This means I’d spent the first week off hauling my parents around town and drinking absurd amounts of coffee, sitting in the living room in my awesome new high-tech thermals (thank you,…
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Good Times: Getting Your Wisdom Teeth Yanked Out Away From Home
I have evil, appalling wisdom teeth, the kind that come in at all the wrong angles. I have a dentist who would help me with this, as this is where I go in Lafayette for every dental issue. But this time, I could not. Or rather, I had evil, appalling wisdom teeth. Over the past…
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Short film: Shanghai Museum and the Former French Concession
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A Series of Partially Related Photos: Walking With my Parents in Shanghai
They arrived yesterday and they are jetlagged. However, I was a cruel daughter and we went on a veritable Long March around Shanghai until they screamed for mercy. Here are a few covert phone photos. First of all, at the corner of Fuxing Lu and Xiangyang Lu, en route to coffee, there was a masterful…
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The Chinese Christmas Party Post! (Part 2)
Remember how my students organized a Christmas party in a tea house at the side of an eight lane ring road, under the shadow of a spider’s web worth of overpasses? Where I feasted on *sigh* everything that features heavily in my almost-but-not-quite worst nightmares? The grinning whole fish with the staring eyes and the…
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Shanghai is Tropical, Part 2
Remember that delusional law that says every city south of the Yangtze River is Tropical and therefore needn’t have, say, indoor heating in public buildings or properly insulated flats? Yes, that one. I would like to take a moment to show you a few scenes from tropical Shanghai on the first day of 2011. Temperature…
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Ain’t I a Bear? Gerald the Bear Tackles Authenticity and Place
When I was first introduced to my co-blogger, Mary Anne, who is also the owner of this blog, she looked at me dubiously and said, “You’re not a panda”. We were in a tea house in North Shanghai, surrounded by hundreds of Chinese students and teachers and wait staff. On the ceiling were red lanterns…
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Christmas Day Odyssey in Shanghai: A Quest for Doug’s Destiny
So remember how I said my next post was going to be all about the Christmas Party at the tea house, and how it would contain all my much-better camera photos rather than my crappy, grainy phone photos? Yeah. I lied. My bad. Unfortunately, we went out today. And when I go out, I tend…