Eating Dumplings In Pajamas

Forgot to give you guys the latest tadpole news! Well, finally, they are now frogs. Here’s a photo from about a two weeks ago:

Well their tails resorbed in the few days after this was taken and on Tuesday M and I went back to Century Park with the four surviving little hoppers. (Yes, there had been five. There was some unpleasantness involving one of them. Let us speak of it no more.) We went to the lake and looked for a good spot at the edge of the water. It was not too hard to find; we looked down and there were about a hundred little froggies just like ours happily hopping about, so we opened their container and off they went. Everyone sing: Born free, as free as the wind blows…

So, speaking of madness and boxes of frogs – today was M’s class trip.  I found myself at 9am trapped on the highway in a bus full of overexcited, sugared-up four year olds heading for I don’t know where (the itinerary was in Chinese, all I knew was ‘somewhere in Minhang’). Oh and I hadn’t had any coffee. It was like being mauled to death by fluffy kittens. Completely adorable and absolutely killing me. Anyway, turns out we went to a park with a big crazy playground, the kids ran around like they’d been shot from cannons, and then we had a picnic.

After that, we got back on the bus and went to another playground, this time a big indoor playground, inside of a cake factory.  First we got to walk past the bakery floor and watch the workers going about their business of making cakes whilst being stared at by a thousand kindergarteners. then we went upstairs to the superhumungous play area. I was kind of wondering why we’d driven all the way across to the other bloomin’ side of Shanghai just to go to a play area, even one where you get to stare at bakery workers, but my skepticism proved unwarranted, as soon we were brought to this room

where the kids got to decorate their very own cakes!

Our finished product:

Here’s an incident (or series of incidents, depending on your point of view) that happened today that are a pretty good example of an “oh yeah, I’m in China” kind of day:

I went to B&Q (this is like Home Depot, for my US readers) today because I was going to another store nearby, in an area of town I don’t often happen to be in, and G wanted a small tub of spackle or joint compound to fill in a bit of a hole he made drilling a hole to hang one of our big framed prints. Now first of all I went in knowing that I would have to hope that I could find some labeled in English. Usually this is not too difficult; many products do have both English and Chinese.

So I go and I’m looking for the area where they have drywalling stuff, because this is where G says I would find the joint compound. (Because what do I know about this kinda thing.) Can’t find anything of the sort. I walk around the entire store. Seriously, how do you hide drywall? But I can’t find it. OK

So I call G and ask him, “Are you sitting near any Chinese people in the office right now, who I can maybe stick on the phone with one of the shop workers to ask if they can tell me where this stuff is? Cuz I cannot find it.”

He says, “OK, Jane is here, let me ask her.”

As it turns out, Jane has no idea what on earth G means by this strange phrase ‘joint compound’ and appears even more bewildered by the word ‘spackle’. She in turn consults someone else, whilst G pantomimes the act of applying joint compound. The rest of the office decides to join in this game of charades and pretty soon everyone is working on solving the mystery.

This carries on for what feels like about a year(I was still on the phone) whilst the group attempts to reach some consensus as to what exactly it is that G wants to buy, and how one might go about saying it in Chinese. Honestly G and I were willing to give up and say ‘you know, it’s just not that important’ but by now so many people had invested so much time and energy in the project, it seemed unkind to tell them to just forget it.

Eventually there is some indication that an agreement has been reached and G hands over his phone to Jane, and I pass mine to a fellow working on the shop floor. He and Jane speak for what seems like quite a long time. He hands the phone back to me, signals for me to wait, and then calls over three other guys. They converse for a short time. He asks to speak to Jane again. They confer. He hands the phone back. He and the three other guys discuss it a bit further. I wait.

Then we all walk together to the furthest back corner of the shop. Turns out they have none. Well that’s not quite true, they have giant 25 kilo bags of powdered joint compound that needs to be mixed with water in some special mixing machine. Which I do not have, nor do I want to have. So, mei you.

So there’s like an hour of my life that I’ll never get back again.

In case you were thinking of dropping by.

Busy week! Lots going on – Mother’s Day, sick kid, other kids’ birthday parties,  my own kid’s birthday party, playdates, trying to work on writing stuff that might actually someday help me earn some damn money, trying to do work for my job back in England which I still have some responsibility for, and so on and so forth and life and stuff. So I can’t get my head around writing about a coherent subject here just this moment so I thought I’d just throw in a handful of photos I’ve got from recent weeks that haven’t fit in anywhere else for your perusal.

I have no idea who these people and their littel dog are. But they're, like, kinda fabulous, right?

Genuine Barborey sheets! Classy.

Refreshing honesty.

Lovely flowering fruit trees outside the entrance to my apartment building that made me smile every day for several weeks.

Sunset over Puxi

Cool funerary mask thing at the Shanghai Museum

Ceramic figurines at the Dongtai Lu Curiosities Market

Pearl Tower, as seen from Yu Garden

Lane of shops at Taikang Lu

Statues for sale at Dongtai Lu

The Jinmao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Center

Ack. Ack! what a day.

OK so I wrote here a while back about how M has done some test shots for modeling. Since then we have been approached by other agents as well, when we are out and about – they just love the way she looks. Well of course who can blame them, right? (Not that I am biased in any way.) Well anyway, we went for an audition for a TV commercial on Wednesday, and she did really well. Was a little shy about talking on film but apparently for this commercial she won’t need to, so the agent showed her clip to the client and she has been asked to do the spot. Yay, right? Except the commercial is probably going to be shot in Shenzhen in two weeks. For those of you unfamiliar with the geography, Shenzhen is about a 3 hour plane ride south of Shanghai, near Hong Kong. Now this isn’t really such a big deal – they will fly us down, put us up overnight, and we return the next day. It’s actually a good practice run for the (much longer) flight to the US we have coming up in June, so OK.

Now here’s the issue: I got a call yesterday from a different agent to do a catalog shoot today. Well as it happened we didn’t have anything else on so I asked M if she fancied going to take some more pictures and she was happy and excited to go. So, we went.

And she was a complete brat. Threw a massive strop almost as soon as we got to the location, refused to put her shoes on, wouldn’t let anyone brush her hair, cried and moaned about the clothes they needed her to wear for the shoot, had a hissy fit at the photographer for ‘looking at her’ (!?), I mean she was a total nightmare. I guarantee this agent is never going to callus for another job!

The thing is, of course, although I was really disappointed in her behavior, I have said that the only way we’re going to do any of this modeling stuff is if she is happy to do it and she wants to carry on, so whilst she was having her little diva strops, I felt like I had to walk this really fine line between making it clear that the way she was acting was unacceptable, and yet not being manipulative and coercing her into doing something she really didn’t want to do. It was really difficult. There were a few moments where I came very close to just saying “Right, get your own clothes back on, we’re out of here,” because I don’t want to force her – but by the same token, she had said she wanted to, and all the way there in the taxi she had been happy and practicing her ‘posing’ and talking about wearing different clothes and whatnot, so I didn’t want the lesson she takes away from this to be “just have a big fit and you can get out of what you said you were going to do.” But, she’s, you know, 4.

Anyway, to bring this back around, now I am rethinking the Shenzhen thing because it is going to be really freakin’ embarassing if after they fly us down there and put us up, if she goes into the studio and has another major meltdown.

But, maybe it will be fine. The craziest hing was, once she FINALLY decided to get dressed and strut her stuff, we had just finished her photos (which were, ultimately, great) when two more kids came in, and it turns out they are friends of hers, neighbors actually. It was actually the younger one, S, who is close to M’s age who was shooting and so M waited whilst S got dressed and did her first shots and then the photographer was able to take some photos with the two of them together, chasing each other around and jumping up and down and being generally silly. I’m told that for the commercial thing they will basically be filming a small group of kids playing, kicking a ball around and building with blocks and such, so hopefully in that setting she will be fine. I hope.

If it’s not, and she has another supafreakout, then that’s it, that’s the end of this modeling lark; I will just have to conclude it’s not for her.

Well out of the experience though there was one really cool thing, which is that the building where the photographer’s studio is located is this really excellent-looking work-in-progress artists center, with lots of galleries and workshops. It’s not finished yet, but it looks mostly complete and many of the units are already occupied and it’s just a really neat space.

This is the big gallery on the ground floor; as you can see it is just this huge big open space spanning basically the width of the building, really really great showcase for large works. Lots of light coming in from above, as they have glass panels in each concrete ‘box’ section.

This is the second floor, you can see the glass tiles here that let the light through to the gallery below, as well as some of the unfinished bit on the upper floors of the building. The wall with the wood paneling is mirrored on the opposite wall (mirrored as in, they both have the funky woody thing going on, not that it has, erm, mirrors.)

The girls thought the fact that you can stand up on the glass and look down at the people below was just FANTASTIC. And really, they’re not wrong, are they.

My oh my. Sorry for the HUGE gap in posts – we’ve generally been having a spell of rather good weather here FINALLY FOR A CHANGE so I’ve been trying to do stuff like, oh, get out and enjoy it and live life away from the computer screen and that sort of thing. But in all of this getting out and about I’ve seen and done lots of fun things that are worth writing about so hey ho, catch-22, what can you do.

So anyway, last Saturday it was a gorgeous day, so we decided to go to Fuxing Park. Many people out enjoying the lovely day, so there was lots of activity. There were lots of people singing, in various small groups about the place, which was in some cases quite nice to hear a few notes wafting over on a breeze, but in other cases just really loud and annoying, but there you go, you gotta take the rough with the smooth, and it was all part of the scene.

kind of nice

kind of annoying

M had a blast over in the kiddie amusement park section – she spent forever in the bouncy castle and made some new friends, then we all went on the bumper cars (or ‘bumping cars’, as she prefers to call them) and she alternately screamed in terror to be let out and  laughed her head off every time we rammed somebody. I spotted this perplexing image decorating one of those mini-coaster type rides:

Seriously, how does that happen? How does Santa end up with carousel horses? I can see if it was a) on a carousel, and/or b) Christmas time, but just as a random graphic, what’s up with that?

But hey, nothing here has to make sense or be in context or anything really. For example, can anyone explain these?

There was also some kind of crazy dance drama thing going on, with people in costumes (traditional dress?) enacting some sort of… something:

A common sight in many parks (as well as some local housing complexes) are groups of people gathering to read the newspapers posted on the board, and maybe discuss the events of the day with their neighbors:

After we left the park we took a little walk down Fuxing Lu and visited a few shops. En route we spotted this information poster in a bus stop:

I am certain this would make more sense to me if I could read Chinese, as for the time being I have to assume it says something to the effect that this crossing is for little girls and members of ska bands (or possibly the Blues Brothers, or the cast of Reservoir Dogs) only.

The past weekend, G,M & I went for a short stroll along part of the newly refurbished Bund promenade, the walkway along the Huangpu River which features a number of historic buildings built in Shanghai’s previous golden days in the early 20th century. I don’t want to spend too much time explaining about the Bund, because much has been written about its history and its buildings by writers far more knowledgeable and eloquent than myself. Here’s some info from good ol’ Wikipedia if you fancy learning a bit more about it.

It’s well worth reading about, if you want to understand anything about the history of this city, but the salient point for the purposes of this post is that about 10 months ago (not long after we’d moved here), the Bund was closed so it could be rebuild and unveiled all nice and shiny spanking new for Expo. I only went there once before it closed, and I’ll be honest: it was shite. Hot, dusty, nowhere to sit, nothing really to recommend it at all. Now, in all fairness, they were already starting to demolish sections of it, so it’s perhaps not fair of me to say that’s all it was. However I have talked to other people who had been there before it was starting to close down, and they also said it was entirely underwhelming.

So with much fanfare, it reopened a short time ago, maybe 2 weeks ago, after its 500 million rmb facelift. We hadn’t planned to go over there specifically, but on Saturday  it was a nice day and we didn’t have anything else really on, so we took the ferry across the river and had a short stroll.

It was pretty boring. I mean, it’s OK for people watching, I guess, but so is anyplace else in this town really. But, it was a nice day, so we found a spot on the bench and had a little rest and watched the people.

Now, we only walked a very short bit of it, so perhaps it is vastly more exciting in other sections, I don’t know. But the bit we were on was just, like, nothing. Lots of people, yes, but that’s about it. I know the bulk of the money went more towards building a traffic tunnel, to ease congestion along the waterfront, but as for the walkway, it was pretty dull. I guess I wanted it to be a place more like South Bank in London, with performers, varied seating, a tree here and there, cafes and such along route – but it is not like that at all, just a big stretch of concrete. But again, I have not seen all of it. Maybe it’s better in other parts. God, I hope so.

As I said though it was a nice day, and for me there was a good deal of entertainment to be had when G dozed off for a bit, and I got to observe the series of locals that would come by and study in great detail the giant unconscious foreigner. He was quite the attraction for a while there.

Spotted today in a shop that sells baby clothes, toddler toys, stuffed animals, etc:

Because the kids, you know, they love their cannabis.

You may remember a little bit ago, I posted about our goldfish Leo who passed away a scant three days after joining our other fish Penelope. Of course this meant we needed to find a new companion for Penelope, so we went back to another pet market to find her a new friend – whom M has named Fabio. Yes, that’s right, Fabio.

Although M has firmly decided that he is a boy, she also likes to point out that he has orange lipstick and eye shadow. Very postmodern and liberated little fellow, he is.

I decided I also fancied having a couple of smaller goldfish for my desk, so we picked up these two

which have been named Blaze and Lady Marmalade.

Now unfortunately, the past few days our First Fish Miss Penelope has not been looking so good. She seems to have some sort of a sore or ulcer on one side, and her tail is starting to flake off a bit from finrot. You can see her boo boo in this photo:

and she generally seems a bit down and un-perky. So I had a look online to see what I can do and I found a few sites with lots of advice.

One piece of advice was to  give her a bath in .6% salt water for 5-10 minutes (this is 6 tsp per gallon, apparently.) So OK, I can do that. Then after that I am supposed to dab a nit of Neosporin or other antibiotic ointment on the sore.

Seriously, have you ever tried to put Neosporin on a goldfish? You know, it’s not like having a dog who need a bit of medicated creme or something, where you can put them in a headlock  with your knees and slap it on there. IT’S A FISH. Out of water. Flopping around. Well, I had a go and I did my best. I picked her up in the net and tried to gently smush a gob of the stuff on there. While she flipped and flopped and slimed all over the place. And I’m sure it totally stressed her out, which can’t be good if she is already, like, ill, right? But anyway I did what I could. Now she is in a separate bowl (my salad bowl, actually) in  .3% salt water, and I have to change the water like twice a day so it stays more or less pure, and we do this for a few days, until she either gets better or dies.

There is also supposedly some sort of medicated food I can buy to give her but I haven’t the first clue how I would ask for that in the pet market. If they even have it, as I feel reasonably certain that if I went to the market and said I wanted to buy medicated food for my goldfish, they would look at me like I was insane for wanting to buy expensive food for a sick fish, when I could just buy a healthy new fish for 1 kuai. (That’s, like, 10p, or a dime.) And to be honest, I can’t say that thought didn’t occur to me too as I was trying to smear neosporin on a slimy moving target that I hoped was not about to flip out of the net onto the kitchen floor.

Hopefully the salted water will work, and we can all go on with our lives.

In other news: Tadpoles. We are down to 5 out of the original 13. However these five have now been going strong for a number of weeks, and have all developed adorable little froggy legs out their backsides!

As you can see they are not black anymore, more a dusky brownish-grey and in part translucent; at the right angle with the light behind them we can see some of the developing organs, which is interesting (probably more so to me than for M, but whatever). Have put gravel in their container now so they have a bit of a ‘beach’ and they seem to like to swim up as far as they can, rest on the rocks and poke their faces (they have faces now) out for a few minutes at a time.  Also, when they swim around the container now, they no longer stay ‘upside up’, for lack of a better way to put it; sometimes they will float on their backs  – which was freaking me out because I’m would be like “Oh no, it’s dead” and then suddenly it will flip over and swim away.  Cheeky buggers.

Ok so as some of you know, my birthday was this past Thursday. I am not 64, but I am now 41, which is a) that much closer to 64 than I’ve ever been, and b) a bit of a drag as it now means I am truly “in my 40s”. (Somehow just being 40 didn’t seem to count as much, because a ’0′ is just, well, it’s zero, it’s nothing, right? But a ’1′ is a thing and so it’s for real.) Yes I know, suck it up and get on with it, age is only a number and blah blah blah blah and all that other stuff we say to old people (like me) so they don’t feel so bad about being old (like me).

Well anyway as birthdays go, it was really rather a good one! My friend Dru took me out for lunch at a fab little place called Closed Door, where we had some verra verra nice sangria

and I had some mucho delicioso linguini with clams and courgette and chorizo

and then finished it off with a banana and chocolate tart that I can’t think about too much because it was so good it makes me feel like crying that I can’t eat one every single day.

I had promised M that after I picked her up from school, we would go to the bakery around the corner and pick out a small cake of some sort to share that evening, because she was utterly distraught at the thought that it could be someone’s birthday and there might be no cake. Gus was out of town at the time (arrived home very late that night) so it was just the two of us girls. She chose the Strawberry Princess Cakewhich I could not stop her digging into before I managed to turn the camera on but hey ho. Two desserts in one day for me, woo hoo!

Last year, when I turned 40, I didn’t really get to have a proper party, as we were, you know, moving to Shanghai, and so the focus at the time was really more on that than all about ME ME ME. (We did have a lovely going away party though, and on my actual birthday my wonderful friends Teila and Andrew had M and I over for pizza and a movie and it was all good, so I shouldn’t moan really. BUT I WILL.) So this year I decided to have the party I didn’t have last year and threw myself a big 40+1 bash at a fun club in town called Brown Sugar last night. It was great fun, I just invited basically everyone I’ve met in the past year, about 20 people turned up and we drank us some liquor and danced to the music and played dice games and had a jolly nice time of it. The End.