Xīn nián kuài lè!

That’s “Happy New Year” to you (新年快乐). They said it would be noisy at Chinese (Lunar) New Year, but I still underestimated. Firecrackers are far from being an unusual sound in Shanghai. They’re habitually used to celebrate birthdays, moving house, opening a new shop and can be mildly alarming when you’re cycling past that particular section of pavement at the point of detonation. At Christmas, when we were staying in a guest house near Yangshuo (near Guilin) there was a tremendous explosion of firecrackers which lasted for several minutes. On enquiry, we were told that it was to celebrate the completion of the building of a new house next door. The house in question was just a brickwork shell. Completion is in the eye of the builder.

In the days leading up to Chinese New Year, the sound of firecrackers and the sight of fireworks at night became a constant background to life. On the eve of the New Year itself the intensity increased through the evening but when midnight arrived the wall of noise was incredible. Shanghai is supposedly quiet at Chinese New Year because such a high proportion of the population return to their familial homes for the holiday. Some quiet. But it didn’t stop there. There has been a steady drone of firecrackers and fireworks day and night ever since, including a repeat of the midnight wall of noise five days into the holiday in order to attract the God of Wealth. Apparently, it is also traditional to eat dumplings to attract this particular prosperity-laden deity. Certainly beats Lent.

We are incredibly fortunate to have a such a fantastic vantage point from our apartment. In October we sat by our living room window transfixed for an hour by the fireworks display for the National Holiday in Century Park. But the last ten days have rather immunised us to this pyrotechnical wonder so that as the rockets from the car park below burst into flares of colour a few feet from our window last night, we harumphed and turned the volume up on the television so we could hear Jeremy Paxman patronise the unwashed geeks from Magdalen College.

A little trip out today took us to the Jade Buddha Temple in the Jing’An district. All very culturally fascinating until you realise that the historic architecture you’re admiring is actually 50 years younger than Stoke City Football Club. That’s Shanghai for you. One of the streets we walked down to get to the temple provided a fantastic tableau of the contrast and inequality of Shanghai life. On the pavement were women doing clothes repairs on treadle-powered sewing machines just a hundred yards from a shopping mall filled with designer clothes and shoes shops. That’s Shanghai too.

When we got home today, Arthur decided for the first time that he wanted to climb the stairs to our 28th floor home rather than take the lift. For someone who is usually reluctant to walk the first mile let alone any subsequent extra ones, this was a development on a par with Jeremy Clarkson ordering enchiladas for dinner. But he climbed the whole way. The gauntlet is thrown, David Hull arrives in April to pick it up.

A silent blog awakes

So much more to write about but so much less time to do so. Thank you to everyone who has been nagging me to start posting again – I can hardly believe that my last post to this blog was on July 18th. We’ve done so much since then, a lot of which I’d love to write about. Our holiday back in the UK, trips to Xi’an, World Expo, Suzhou, learning Chinese, boys back at school, an avalanche of lovely visitors, fireworks, and the weather at last being less mental. Oh, and Liverpool being in the relegation zone.

Grandma (Dorothy’s mum) and her friend Deb are coming to the end of their stay with us. These intrepid travellers left England on September 12th, travelling by train via London, Cologne and Moscow before spending a few days in Beijing (北京). Another train took them to Xi’an (西安) where we met them after our own overnight train journey from Shanghai (上海). We spent a fascinating couple of days admiring Xi’an and the mind-blowing wonder of the world that is the Army of Terracotta Warriors (兵马俑). We all flew back to Shanghai from Xi’an, with Deb diverting to Guangzhou (广州) to stay with her son Henry for a few days before they both joined us in Shanghai.

One reads and hears an awful lot about “real China” – it’s what tourists desperately seek and expats like to believe they’re experiencing. We all want to feel that we’ve found the reality of life in China. Of course in many ways you can’t make any distinction between what is real and what isn’t. It’s all real China, whether it’s the designer clothes shops in Shanghai’s French Concession area, the gleaming 100-storey buildings of the Lujiazui (陆家嘴) financial district, the crumbling and aromatic homesteads of the streetworkers and migrant workers, or the farmers working their rice terraces amidst the dramatic scenery of Guilin (桂林). It’s all very real, but it’s all very different. China is an incredibly ‘stretched’ place; it couldn’t be otherwise being so huge and with such a colossal diversity of ethnic and cultural influences. But the dramatic twists and turns of the last 61 years have also left it stretched socially and economically and the evidence is all around, even here in Shanghai no matter how “unreal” a part of China it may be.

Yesterday we went out to Qibao (七宝), a traditional Chinese water town that is now within the net of Shanghai’s hugely expanded metro system. We’ve been once before but it felt a lot more like real China this time – very busy, very noisy, and very Chinese. The National holiday period brings the crowds out and the narrow shopping street surrounding the bridges across the canals were jam-packed with Chinese visitors. It takes a little while to realise that Chinese faces are not necessarily locals. In fact, on a couple of occasions I have been able to help Chinese tourists in Shanghai who have looked baffled by the ticket barriers at the metro stations. Loudspeakers in Chinese and broken English encouraged everyone to pay more attention and to behave with civilisation towards others. The stretches of canals are travelled by tourist boats propelled by a single paddle from the back of the boat, and overlooked by tea houses bedecked with red lanterns. A fabulous sight and welcome respite from the overcrowding on the shopping streets. Getting a table in any of the restaurants was going to be impossible given the constraints of my embryonic Chinese, my English politeness and the impatience of the stomach of small boys. So we went in search of street food to keep us going. Most of you know that I’m pretty adventurous when it comes to food, but I’ve finally discovered something that repels me – stinky tofu. I don’t know how they make this stuff from what is usually such a bland and innocuous substance, but despite its miasma the Chinese queue to get their hands on it. Thankfully we found considerably more appealing alternatives. Nourished and energised we explored several delightful little museums which are scattered around the old streets of Qibao with exhibits covering miniature furniture, shadow puppets and cricket-breeding, before returning to the peace and quiet of our apartment and another wild late night session of Mahjong.

Bushtucker trial

Dorothy went off to a colleague’s wedding today so the boys and I reckoned we deserved a night out too. We hit the Meihua Rd soon after 5pm looking for some action, but with the temperature still at 35degC we decided one of our local restaurants – specialising in Yunnan Rainforest cuisine – was what we needed before bedtime. We’ve been there before but hadn’t noticed the house special dish. Some friends of ours told us about it, so this time we had to have it. Deep-fried grasshoppers, baby bees, and caterpillars. Yes, really. And we demolished the lot. It’s not hard to see the attraction – how many meals have you had where you can do a life-size re-enactment of the battle of the arthropods with your food before you eat it? What do they taste like? Crunchy and salty really. And will we go there to have them again? Definitely – especially when we have visitors.

“But Englishmen detest a siesta …”

This family is now a walking and cycling advertisement for Decathlon sports stores. Three bicycles, safety helmets, plus shirts, shorts, sandals and sundries galore. We ventured out for a bike ride en famille for the first time this morning, braving the oppressive heat and humidity. There’s a river that runs through Pudong from the Huang Pu river on which Shanghai sits, to the Yangtze River estuary about 13 miles from here to the East. There’s a riverside pathway for nearly its whole length which provides an excellent cycle or running route away from the insanity of Shanghai roads. The Danish father of one of Matthew’s school friends uses it for training runs as it’s exactly a marathon distance to run to the coast and back! Hmm, perhaps next week. We went out before the day got too hot, and with a bit of air movement it wasn’t too uncomfortable. Our 12km round trip was Matthew’s longest on his new bike and was very enjoyable, although we must have looked like a commercial for a family outdoor activity holiday centre. We even spotted a Great White Egret (I think) and lots of people fishing for cockles and turtles with elaborate net constructions.

The weather broke this afternoon with a dramatic thunderstorm. Our 28th floor vantage point allowed us an amazing view of the storm moving in from across Shanghai. Thunder and lightning surrounded us accompanied by torrential, tropical rain. But unlike a British summer storm the air was still thick and humid when the storm had passed. I did manage to drag myself out later for a run though. My running career is a new venture in an attempt to get fitter and carb-offset the dumplings. I’ve only plucked up the courage to move from the treadmills at the gym to the outside world this week, but I managed to run the 5km round Century Park in a personally pleasing, but publicly embarrassing, 29m47s. As I urged myself round the circuit I tried not to think of all my friends who would be way ahead of me, but instead of those of you who might possibly have been behind me or still in the armchair. I thank you for your unconscious assistance.

Tomorrow we’ve been invited to a party “In honor (sic) of the United States of America beating up the English on July 4th some 234 years ago”. I think we’re welcome.

And for those who missed this elsewhere. Arthur is playing knights and castles. The knights have just gone into the gift shop. I ask why. “Because you can’t get out of the castle without going through the gift shop.” Of course. Silly me.

It ain’t half hot, Mum.

I have in the past been known to tell people that there’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes. I would now like publicly to apologise to all recipients of that particular aphorism. Thirty-five degrees and a Great Wall of stifling humidity is, in my little red book at least, most definitely “bad weather”, which no manner of clothing can usefully mitigate. People have been warning us that it would get much hotter and stickier, and it suddenly did. So any plans we might have had (and we didn’t really) of spending every available minute zooming around Shanghai have had to be tempered to something  more bearably leisurely. It only takes a short trip to the local shop to buy a water melon (which are fantastic) to leave you needing another shower and a long sit down.

It was Matthew’s birthday yesterday. Many thanks to all those that sent Happy Birthday (or 生日快乐) greetings by various media. We had a trip to Decathlon today to pick up Matthew’s birthday present of a very smart new 20″ 6-speed bicycle. The school run will be even quicker (and sweatier) for what will be the last week of term. School finishes on Thursday and we then have to find ways to entertain ourselves without melting or going mad for six weeks. Visiting Shanghai Expo will certainly be on the agenda, and Matthew will hopefully be attending a Mandarin summer school in the mornings for two weeks in July.

On August 7th we fly back to the UK for two holidays, one in Keswick and one on Lundy (both booked long before anyone suggested moving to China!). I’m very much looking forward to the trip home for all sorts of reasons (some of them comestible), but I think we will also have achieved our objective of getting to a position where we will be happy to return ‘home’  to Shanghai afterwards. I’ve now managed to find a highly recommended Mandarin course starting in September so I’ll be hoping to catch Matthew up soon!

And I didn’t mention the football once.

Smile and wave, boys.

Some of you were with us when we went up the CN Tower in Toronto some (best unspecified) years ago which has a section of glass floor in the observation deck which allows you to look down several hundred metres past your own feet. Last Sunday we went up the Oriental Peal Tower in Shanghai (see photos in previous post that looks like something from Chernobyl) where they have just recently added a glass-floored level to their observation deck. In the CN Tower the panes of glass are of small area and visibly of great thickness. In the Pearl Tower the glass panes are of considerable area and don’t appear to be particularly thick. It takes a significant level of trust in Chinese design, manufacturing and quality control to take a walk around 263 metres above the ground. It seemed sensible to send the boys out first to test that everything was ok.

Somewhat inconsiderately Arthur’s pushchair decided to lose a wheel at the beginning of the week, making the trip to and from school (four times a day for Arthur) a bit too much for his frequently tired and permanently short legs. Getting spares was going to take months at best, and buying  a new pushchair seemed extravagant for a small person already the wrong side of 3½. So plans to buy bicycles were accelerated and I bought a mountain-style bike which looked really pretty cool for the 10 minutes before the child seat was fitted. We nearly bought Matthew a bike yesterday but decided that the 20″ frame is just a fraction too big for him to control safely at the moment, so we have bought a scooter instead with a promise to get a bike in a few months’ time.

One of the things you notice on dry days in Shanghai is how dusty it is. It’s not hard to see why as there are major construction projects happening everywhere. A lot of building work was accelerated to be ready for the Shanghai Expo which is now underway, but there is still an awful lot going on. We can see half a dozen from our apartment alone. Our route to school takes us down a main road with construction sites on both sides. When I go to collect Arthur at lunchtime after his half-day, the pavements are thick with the migrant construction workers having their lunch or sleeping in the shade under the bushes. Lunch is provided for them from convoys of tricycle trucks and the pavement is soon strewn with the detritus of pork bones, fish bones, rice, disposable chopsticks, plastic cartons, and polystyrene boxes. But in no time the overall-clad city cleaners have restored the site to the amazing level of tidiness that impresses one about the whole city. Everywhere you walk in Shanghai there are people in blue or orange overalls quietly sweeping, tidying and gardening, accompanied by their big two-wheeled barrows and their brooms made from the branches of roadside trees.

A thought experiment. Imagine you were in a restaurant in England when a family from an ethnic minority came in for lunch. What would you think if every member of the staff took turns in sitting next to the family’s children to have their photographs taken by their colleagues? Fortunately the boys are getting a little more used to this behaviour, although not yet managing to imitate the Madagascan penguins. Smile and wave boys, smile and wave.

A long time in politics

Forgive me, dear readers, I have been neglecting you. Some matters cropped up back in Britain which required my attention. The place seemed to have gone to pot since we left. I think I’ve managed to sort everything out now, but do let me know if the country stops working again won’t you?

We’ve been in China for nearly six weeks now and in our apartment for nearly four. I think the excitement of the novelty of being here has worn off, although there are still moments when I have to pinch myself that we really are living our lives in Shanghai, thousands of miles from home.  The almost seamless nature of global communication via BBC World, e-mail, news websites. and even Facebook really blurs the separation from England, and yet reading about friends who have been drinking in my pubs, ringing my bells, gossiping with my Mums, and walking in my Lake District is a constant reminder that I can’t do those things and have to enjoy them by proxy.

Arthur has started school! Not real school of course, he is still only 3, but he is in a kindergarten class at Matthew’s school from 8:00 till 11:30 each morning.  He has settled there very well and incredibly quickly. Having been deprived of playgroup for so many weeks he was certainly more than ready to widen his social circle again. Like Matthew’s, Arthur’s class is very cosmopolitan, and has both a Western and Chinese teacher so it’s a completely bilingual setting. A frustration for me is that I haven’t been able to find a Mandarin Chinese course that I can fit in around the boys’ school and Dorothy’s work. I’m exploring a couple of other options, but my Chinese is still unfortunately 不是很好.

Tomorrow is “Global Child Day” at Yew Chung school. Each nationality represented at the school has a stand with activities, food and dress from their country. Children are issued with passports which they can get stamped for taking part in activities at the various stands. The British Mum who has organised the UK stand has managed to persuade BMW (!) to let us have a Mini for the day as the centrepiece of the stand. I think scones and strawberries will be the beacon of English cuisine.

I went exploring in Lujiazui yesterday morning – the financial district of Shanghai and home to the tallest of the supertall buildings which boast of Shanghai’s prominence to the rest of the world. It was one of the clearest and brightest days we’ve had so far and I found a very pleasant, and immaculately maintained, park amongst the skyscrapers to read a book for a while. My book is set in York in 1541 so it made for quite a contrast with my surroundings.

We’ve just learned that one of the books in our shipment has been confiscated because it contains restricted maps. We’ve no idea which book it is.  The only maps I can think of are a book of Lord of the Rings maps.  Could there be some confusion between Middle Earth and Middle Kingdom?!  So that may have delayed the consignment but hopefully it will arrive sometime next week.  We didn’t put all that much stuff in the shipment, but it will be good to have more cooking stuff and Arthur will be particularly pleased to have more books to choose from.

Dorothy is away tonight – visiting the Nielsen office in Guangzhou.  It looks no distance on the map but is actually a 2 hour flight away. She should get back late tomorrow night so we’re all looking forward to the weekend.  Well, it is the FA Cup Final. Play up Pompey!

The Darling Frogs of May

Real contrasts today. A welcome dose (albeit a remote one) of the best of English followed by hard-core Oriental.

For the last fifteen years or so, May 1st has meant getting up at 4:30am in order to ring the bells of Magdalen College, Oxford as part of the traditional May Morning celebrations there. Thanks to Skype and the Oxford ringers we didn’t miss out on the event despite being over 5000 miles away. Jonathan and Chris set up up a laptop in the middle of the ringing room at Magdalen and we joined them on a Skype video call. It was great to see and chat to lots of our friends, and a complete shock to see Claire Bell moving about more than 4 hours earlier than she would normally condescend to emerge from the duvet. Hearing the College choir singing followed by the raise and Stedman Caters on one of my favourite rings of bells brought a lump to my throat and was the first time I’ve felt any hint of homesickness. But it was fabulous to be part of it again and I took great pleasure in the look of envy on Martin’s face as I beat him to the first beer of the day by over an hour by cracking open a Tsingtao live on air.

Later in the afternoon we headed across town to have a walk around the tree-lined French Concession area of Shanghai. It ought to be called the Irish Concession judging by the number of Irish bars and Guinness signs in evidence – there must have been some tension in the air when Thierry Henry cheated Ireland to knock them out of the World Cup a few months ago. On our way back home we decided to have dinner at an intriguing looking restaurant near Changshu Lu. Not a word of English spoken and no English to accompany the pictures on the menu, but everybody else was having what was obviously the house special, a great big and spicy bowl of frogs! And there could be absolutely no doubt about it – cooked completely whole with every muscle and bone clearly identifiable. I wish I’d taken a photo of one of the little chaps, looking like miniature monsters, complete with all their finger bones. And yes, very tasty too. Can’t wait to take David Hull there next year.

On a Skype call with (Auntie) Frances the other day, the video image took a while to emerge. When it did, Matthew exclaimed that she looked like a model. But before Frances could react to the compliment, he explained that the pixellated image made her look “blocky, like she was made of Lego”. Magic. Sorry Sis.

Green eggs and ham

Six days since a blog entry – I hope the withdrawal symptoms haven’t been too severe. Part of the delay has been the amount of time I’ve spent trying to upload a video I’ve taken of a walk through the apartment. I’m afraid I’m still struggling to do so. To make up for it, you can have two views from the apartment. One was the view from the living room on Saturday morning across Century Park. I have zoomed in to take it, but its still an impressive sight on the rare days when the smog, mist and haze let you see it. The nightview was taken a few minutes ago from our bedroom window (where we do thankfully have full width curtains!). The two buildings are due to open in the next few weeks – one is above a new shopping and restaurant centre (and entry to the metro), the other is the Zendai Himalayan Art Center (sic). The lights on both of them transform into different colours every minute or so.

We’ve discovered preserved eggs which make a rather nice snack. They’re much like pickled eggs you can get in the UK (particularly in the excellent Rose & Crown on North Parade in Oxford), but they must use soy sauce in the pickling to give them a more oriental flavour. What’s a bit stranger is preserved egg sausage which is a cylinder of preserved egg which for some strange, and probably best left unknown, reason is green. But it tastes ok and means that we really can have Green Eggs and Ham for lunch – much to the boys’ amusement. And we can eat them stuffed in bread, and we can eat them on our bed …

On Saturday we did the classically English weekend thing of going to B&Q, just 10 minutes’ walk away, for some more household gubbins. That was a much more familiar shopping experience than the Xin Yang Market (the “Fake Market” in the underground labyrinth below the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum (see left)) where nothing has a price and you haggle for anything. The guidebooks are right, you should be able to get things for 30% of the first price they say. It seems a rather pointless exercise and doesn’t come naturally to us reserved Brits. We bought a cloned Lego kit for the boys, and felt rather ashamed of doing so. Sure enough, it just shows how fantastic real Lego is. The kit design is poor, and the quality of the pieces is such that building with it is more akin to making a tower of playing cards than it is to playing with the proper stuff.

School sports day for Matthew tomorrow which is very exciting. Arthur and I will be helping to steward the long jump event for the first 40 minutes. Next week is a holiday here so we will hope to explore Shanghai a bit more than we’ve been able to do so far.

Blogga Mundi

Another bureaucratic hurdle successfully leapt this afternoon by submitting our applications for residents’ permits. This has to be done in person at a huge government office that feels like a modern airport departure lounge. It was very busy, apparently because of the number of people needing visa extensions thanks to Eyjafjallajokull. Thankfully we get an “express” service through Dorothy’s job so we were only there a few minutes and it was also only a 5-minute taxi ride away. So we’re one step closer to our shipment leaving the UK. Yes, really.

This photo is taken from GoogleMaps but I’ve added a large friendly arrow to show which one is our apartment. I’m sorry the placemarks on the map I posted were so shifted on the satellite image that it looked like we were living in a building site. We’ve joined the gym and swimming pool which is in the same compound and so very convenient. The boys and I have sampled the swimming pool and I might even drag myself to the gym soon and work off some Shanghai dumplings.  I probably ought to try using the stairs to the apartment too, but 27 flights of stairs is an awful lot.

Is anybody else watching “The Beauty of Maps” (BBC4 and BBC HD)? I watched the first one last night about the Mappa Mundi which was excellent and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. The good thing about having to download anything you want to watch is that you only bother watching stuff  that’s worth watching. No more channel-hopping instead of going to bed.

The area code for Shanghai is 21,  so all the phone numbers you see everywhere start 021. It feels rather like walking around pre-1995 Birmingham except that the locals are happier and easier to understand. (Yes Frances, I know.)