Remembering the former glory of Cold China - with products

February 25, 2009: As this blog nears its death-knell i think it only appropriate to return it to its glory days. And of course that can only mean products.

But this presumptuous "blog" downright bloggy enough to "link" back to its own blog posts? Hell yes, they're all down the left side... However, the hardworking folk at Cold China (so hard-working they post once a month and then change the dates back to when they should have been posted) wouldn't be so lazy as to serve up refried "fashionable" horse beans from 2007. No sirs and madames. Behold, despite their surly countenance and resistance to being photographed, your intrepid correspondent got up in the face of four BRAND NEW PRODUCTS!


First up, we can see, we're actually not talking Chinglish here, but rather Chileans and their dodgy English. Because everyone knows the Andes are really known as the Ands in Chile. And "mouthfeel" is just one of those words that doesn't translate well from Spanish. This lack of guidance as to its advantages almost ruined this rare drop, with its fine bouquet of methylated spirits and ever-so-subtle undertones of rotten grapes.



The makers of the above two products are definitely clued-up cats, globally - anyone who's been to the UK can confirm it does indeed smell strongly of petroleum-derived edible lard.


I must say, however, the Appetizing Salt Soda line of biscuits really lives up to its name, especially with a hefty smear of vegemite. A worthy candidate for rebranding as "Australia Smell Biscuit" i say.

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Getting weed in Shanghai

February 5, 2009: I met Ima as i hurried past his flatbread shop on a beer-buying errand, stopping in my tracks as he called after me, "Hashish marrrwana." (the rrr is supposed to indicate a rolled r).

Well actually, yes please.

I'd been waiting almost 2 years for this, though never expecting it to happen. He took me into an upstairs room decked out like an Arabian desert tent with middle-eastern carpets and pictures of Xinjiang, his homeland, covering the walls. There we puffed on a couple of fat joints and drank bowls of Xinjiang tea for an hour or so before i left to continue on my errand. Once i reached the street however, i was seized by the thought of getting locked up if the police noticed, and i made straight for home, which thankfully was just around the corner.

I needn't have worried of course, given Ima's willingness to shout out "Hashish marrwana" on the street outside his shop whenever a foreigner walks past. As he pointed out the next time i saw him, the police in China barely even know the existence of "Big hemp", much less know it by the names the rest of the world knows it by. Almost nobody in China would even know the smell. The smell, that is, of the buds being burned. As some of you may recall, we discovered last year, a non-potent version of it grows freely in Gansu, both in fields entirely dedicated to it and also in ditches and wasteland alongside major roads, where it is considered a kind of easy-to-grow sesame seed. (Actually hemp and sesame are both represented by the same Chinese character.)

His weed isn't cheap by Chinese commodity prices - it's about the same price as in Australia or the UK - but it's strong enough. Ima claims "everyone" (that is, everyone except all the women) smokes it in his hometown. Judging by Ima, those stuck down here in China Proper wouldn't tolerate simply being without this essential element of their culture... I imagine from now on, the second-last month of our time in China, it will always be quite easy to obtain weed, as the supply lines are undoubtedly direct from Xinjiang, and people are coming and going from Xinjiang in large numbers every day by train. It would be very easy for him to simply get whatever friend-of-a-friend who was coming down to Shanghai next to pack a pack of the green stuff, and i'm sure many, many Uighurs - or other indigenous ethnic groups who i'll call collectively Xinjiangis - have such supply lines open.

That next time i saw him happened to be my 25th birthday - today (well, it should've been today so i'm backdating it). Until then it had been quite possibly the shittest birthday ever, spent reformatting my computer and re-installing windows. Then there was Ima's weed cafe for lunch. Not only did he supply weed, we ordered Xinjiang food for munchies, the main part of which turned out to be one of the best ideas i've ever seen in cooking. It was pieces of mutton and vegetables (not particularly special but delicious nonetheless) in a deep plate of soupy sauce - and here's the crucial bit - with a flatbreat submerged in the sauce...So fuckin good - the question i have now is: Why don't more people put flatbread at the bottom of juicy, sloppy dishes? In addition to all of this, he whacked on some music video VCDs that alternated song-by-song between fascinating lute-based Xinjiangi songs of love and loss filmed among the spectacular scenes of that land, and random 70s and 80s funk/soul - not your average Marvin Gaye or anything, but real random stuff that no-one's heard for more than 20 years. He told me these songs were popular on Xinjiang radio way back when he was a kid. Globalisation ain't no new thang eh.

A glorious monument to overproduction

February 2, 2009: Kenty and Tess have come and gone, and their admirable touristic fervour led me to experience the Real Shanghai, from a foreign visitor's perspective, for the first time.

First up was Yuyuan, the Mandarin's Garden, right near my place though i'd never gone inside.

Nice fishes they've got there.

From that rather desolate collection of crazy paving and courtyards (this may be a bit unfair as the day was very cold, but with its courtyard walls it's certainly designed to receive minimum sun) we hit up the world's highest observation deck, in the World Financial Center or whatever that massive building known as The Bottle Opener is actually called.


(Its non-identical 'twin' tower, the Jinmao Building across the road, is one building i really like.)


My cheapness meant we didn't go all the way to the top deck at 474 metres, only to the 430 metre one. Kenty, who seemed keen to spend RMB in a way somewhat resemblant of foreign sailors in Old Shanghai (the analogy doesn't actually extend to cheap hookers) wanted the extra 44 metres, and Tess seemed nonplussed, so my convoluted pseudo-mathematical protestations about the exponentially-decreasing significance of additional height beyond the pollution line won out.

We got there about half-past four and the sun was still above the above-mentioned pollution-line. However the astonishingly lame, compulsory, "Intro Show" on the basement floor - which consisted of a one=metre scale model of the tower embedded with LED lights, spinning around and around - was there to save us from seeing the city in its full, sunlit glory. When we reached the observation deck the mists were rolling in and the sun had all but disappeared into the haze.




Nonetheless we had spectacular views of the Sim City known as Pudong. (For the uninitiated that's the east side of the river, which has been almost entirely constructed since the mid-90s.)


Next up came Kenty's moment of glory, the Shanghai Tourist Tunnel. I'd never even heard of it, and his introduction to the idea of us going began, "I know it's crap but...." But despite the bitter wind, my scepticism, and Tess's continuing nonplussedness, he nonetheless emphasised repeatedly his burning desire to see it, due to its being there for tourists. And despite the total fluke required to actually find the entrance, tucked away in the forecourt of some big hotel, and despite its consisting of only 2 elements - WackyWavingInflatableArmFlailingTubeMen and more of those surplus LED lights from now-defunct Guangdong factories (I guess this is what's respectfully termed "the early signs of over-production"), i think anyone who says the Shanghai Tourist Tunnel is crap just isn't opening their mind (or maybe camera lens) long enough.



Bravo kenty, for speaking out for the unpopular cause.

"Menace" the mayor and other random images

January 11, 2009: Saw this crazy reflection in the window just before we moved from the other room.

Anyway some other random images. This building was across the road from our latest Hong Kong hotel room, a 9x6 foot box in a great location downtown:

I wonder how that overhang can remain, apparently completely unsupported.

If you ever go to Hong Kong and you need the cheapest clean hotel room in town (you probably will) then look no further than Mirador Mansion.

Don't be put off by its foreboding exterior, nor the maze of an Indian shopping mall on the lower floors (you have to go up 3 different flights of steps to reach the hotel part, but if you get lost don't miss the chance to stock up on Masala Munches). There are at least 20 guest houses here in one building, right near the harbour in downtown Kowloon, and they are without question the cheapest decent accommodation in the city.

Love the random 45 degree angles - this place would definitely be derelict by now in Australia or the UK.

How did they make those flowing concrete ballustrades eh? Pure 60s genius.

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A fire in TEDA. Big one it seemed. Sunday Times ambulance-chasing instinct apparently still lies dormant within me...

I scooped the fire trucks, too.

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Lastly, it's been too long, but anyway, i've been meaning to bring these posters to the outside world since we left Thailand.

Bangkok was having a mayoral election just before we left, and despite the election being decided months ago i absolutely must express my position. Lining the streets were literally thousands of posters for the various candidates - i think i mentioned this at the time - namely, Smirky, Sofftey and Menace. But it's always one candidate's poster repeated every 30 metres or so down an entire street, which greatly adds to the effect.

Here are a couple of Smirky's best efforts:

But Menace is the one you wanna meet - this is a man with a vision for the city:

The guy on the left is Sofftey. He was only in the shot to emphasise Menace's anger. But i'm sure Menace's anger needed no emphasising when the voters elected Sofftey. We knew Thai politics was in a bad way...

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Hong Kong
Products (including mayoral candidates
Shanghai 2
Tianjin and Tianjin antics
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We never had it that bad

January 11, 2009: Just before we left on that last journey we got the chance to swap rooms - still in the same flat, but now on the other side of the building. Photos

Sweet deal - halfway point of the lease, same price, practically the same room basically but this one has a balcony instead of a bay window. And of course the view swung round 180 degrees.

The view from this side is not much less spectacular but definitely more interesting. We're looking out on a large expanse, probably the largest expanse of original Chinese city rooftops, almost certainly from the 1800s and maybe before [horseshit. obviously from the 20th century most of them] (we're in the middle of the small part of Shanghai that was here before the foreigners came--a small walled city).



They look to be in the process of a systemactic re-roofing of every house, which will ensure less people live in dank and mouldy conditions with water dripping through when it rains. The current roofs are that crazy-jumbly Chinese type that seem to use about 10 times as many roof tiles as necessary, while the new roofs are boring, Modern (yes Karl Langdon would be proud) type ones at the cost of completely ruining the visual effect for worthless foreigners like me. At least this means they're not planning to knock them all down.

Judging by the fact they're doing every house in a pretty poor area, along with the total lack of regard for aesthetics and historical value, some government authority is behind the re-roofing. So it's going to get very interesting when they get to these ones below:




Will the owners just roll over and allow their hard-earned, probably slef-built 2nd-floor shanty to be dismantled, or will there be confrontation? [they didnt get to them, they stopped after doing about 1 out of every 5.]

One place that could really do with a new roof probably won't get one though. Right below our new balcony is the worst housing i've seen in Shanghai.



It looks like it came from the same design sheet as our Minhang place but it's older, more dilapidated, and appears to be built on a kind of rubbish dump. The outside fence that faces the big, wide, modern street is decorated with some kind of fake bricks and a huge poster of gorgeous dramatic landscapes. I don't think anyone lives in the end apartment (the one with the roof missing), but still i feel very sorry for anyone who has to live there. Residents hurl their rubbish and pans of cooking grease off the balcony towards the wasteland, where an old man with a cart collects it from, and where kids joust with huge bamboo poles.



There's apparently no undercover route to the toilet - a feature always alluded to in classic industrial revolution slum descriptions. People scurry back and forth in the rain and cold, i saw one woman carrying her tissue bucket in and out. That's the bucket you put your used toilet paper in instead of flushing it cos the pipes are too thin. I didn't see any men carrying tissue buckets. I wouldn't like to see the men's room.

Even with all this though, being a relatively modern building, conditions there are probably still better than conditions in Old Shanghai under the roofs i was just ranting on about above. The ancient couple who i buy beer from run an open-front shop in a brick house somewhere in the mass of rooftops, and they still live on a wooden platform above the products, just like Carl Crow described 70 years ago.

All of this to ponder and imagine during smokos on the balcony. And as a bonus we no longer have canisters of explosive lobbing past the window every saturday morning. (Many if not most of the apartments in our complex, which comprises about 5 or so 20-25 storey buildings, are completely blank i.e. virgin concrete, never been lived in. They're not unsold, they're mostly just investments that people snapped up during the property boom with no intention of doing anything with but sitting on. In these days of real estate carnage people are actually starting to and move tenants in - or move in themselves. And of course when you move into your sleek brand new property in the centre of Shanghai, the first thing you do after you step out of your sleek brand new black Audi is banish the evil spirits. With explosives.)

Orientals vs Foreign Devils: Who is the cruelest of them all?

January 10, 2009: My apologies to anyone who might have checked this site in the last 2 months and found only the same old dog-whacking to look at. Here's some cat-whacking.

After leaving that horrific shit in people's faces for so long, i'm going to play at being a real blogger for once and follow up. I think i speculated at the time about acceptance of animal cruelty on the part of the Chinese and as such this definitely needs pointing out:

Another recent animal cruelty case to come out was about photographs of cats crammed in crates being shipped by train from Nanjing to Guangdong to be skinned and boiled in Cantonese restaurants.

A Chinese blogger, Nalan Jingmen, originally made the 'discovery', taking a bunch of photos. Afterwards, a newspaper picked up the blog entry (as Chinese newspapers often do), and an English language China website in turn reported the Chinese newspaper story.

The reader responses at the bottom of the story on the Chinese blog overwhelmingly expressed sympathy for the animals. But until some hardcore American cat lovers and Indian vegans came along, comment on the English language website was running principally along the lines of "who gives a shit?"

I remember similarly heartless responses in a local newspaper a few years ago about live cats being used as crayfish bait.