2 November 2011
Raining
Its raining, quite a lot. Started out raining in a manner where I refuse to acknowledge that its raining, but it got heavier and darker to the point where I was the only person not carrying an umbrella (because I hate them and would rather get wet, and also am extremely stubborn).
This of course means the hundreds of umbrella sellers are quite happy to chase me down the street, failing to understand why I wont buy one.
I do my best to answer them in Mandarin, even though the main language here is Wu. Educated people speak mandarin, but I dont know what qualifications you need to stand in the rain and sell umbrellas.
So I went to a museum (global collective sigh?). It was my kind of museum, the Shanghai planning and development museum. It was full of maps and dioramas, including the sewerage system, gas system, airports, trains etc.
An update on the status of internet in China, Youtube is bloced, Failbook is blocked, tiwtter is blocked (its main use is for organising revolutions or occupy starbucks and talk about wall street protests).
Of course I can get around this, as can everyone in China, its a bit silly. Annoyingly the learn to speak mandarin lessons I watch on youtube wont stream through my VPN, so the bikini wearing Taiwanese girl PEGGYSPEAKCHINESE! has been silenced by Chairman Mao for now (second only to Chairman Kaga from iron chef on my top 10 list of chairmans).
My hotel comes with breakfast. Well they gave me the vouchers even though I specifically purchased the cheaper room with no breakfast. Since it was raining I decided to give it a go.
Sure they have bacon and eggs, but I decided to have savoury pancakes, stir fried vegetables and noodles.
Redundant photo of breakfast area of hotel is redundant.
Scoopon, cudo, dailydeals etc. Pay attention. In China there are coupon machines all over the subway stations. You can either print one by pressing the button or hold your phone against it and it electronically transfers them somehow.
Given the ridiculous amounts of money tv stations have bought coupon sites for in Australia (and the world for that matter), commercializing this in aus should be worth a 7 figure sum to someone.
The entrance to the planning and development museum
I stumbled into this part of old Shanghai.
The diorama of all of Shanghai, you cant imagine the size of it, look closely and you can see a person standing on a podium at the far end.
More diorama.
Diorama from above, they made it night just for me.
I found a noodle place with no english, took the girl out the front and pointed at the sign and what came out was a bit different but ok. Its a fairly plain noodle soup, adding chilli to the broth gave it some flavour.
The beef is mainly wood fungus or mushrooms of some sort (I hope, it could be skin!). Its been 2 hours and I dont feel sick yet.
An old man and his daughter were told to sit near me, the place was full, they were very apprehensive, but I just said 'Please, eat me' in Mandarin to them, and they seemed very happy to sit then.
My lunch was $2, this was the more expensive of 3 places on the same bit of street, also by far the busiest.