Tag: Shanghai
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A Series of Unrelated Photos
I’ve stopped being absurdly ill and have now downgraded to being only marginally ill- possibly because I only worked three hours this week (not including marking or invigilating or meetings). However, due to general exhaustion, marathon novel writing, skinned knuckles, poor posture, bad shoes, stress and whatnot, I’m achy and cricky and have muscle knots…
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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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I Hate Crowds: Travelling in China During National Holidays
I really do hate crowds. Crowds make me want to hit people or queue jump just to escape from the queue (because in China, some queues are so vast and switchbacky that to get out you have to go forward). I don’t like noise. I really like quiet, empty places. People en masse exhaust…
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The Technological Graveyard: I Kill My MacBooks
So in one fell swoop, I killed both of my computers over the course of one weekend. The newer one, the MacBook Pro I got back in Canada while freelancing for some St. Louis IT Companies in February, is technically still in a coma at the Genius Bar in the new Pudong Apple Store. I…
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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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Huh? Efendim? Ting Bu Dong: Opening Your Door to People You Can’t Understand
In Istanbul, at the last flat I lived in before we left Turkey in 2008, my upstairs neighbour- a middle-aged woman in a house dress and slippers- used to ring my doorbell repeatedly at all hours. If I was in the shower, she’d keep ringing it until I was out and dried and dressed. Sometimes…