hello!
posting on this blog has been scarce, and gently replaced by other tasks… here’s a bit of what has been going on:

- i’ve been keeping things running more or less at anita na china and hanzillion, while studying chinese and learning new characters like a mad woman. i’ve finished my first textbook and we’re moving on to a harder one, which uses characters all the way for the texts and exercises. it feels really good to read them now, in full sentences! but i am still too shy to strike up conversations in the street, on the elevator or even with our ayi… which is slowing my learning process a lot, says my teacher. i have to agree, things would go faster if i made the effort to use the language i am learning - must work on that.

- meanwhile, i’ve discovered the wonders of taobao, the chinese ebay site, on which i am now completely hooked. it feels like an online version of my dearly missed mama mini, a shop where you can find the most amazing treasures or everyday items for a small percentage of the price. oh! and all with the chinese convenience of things being delivered to your doorstep on 24 hours, for one euro. :) it’s perfect, and it’s working as a big chinese learning motivator.

- after considering guilin, sanya and thailand, we’ve set or heads on malaysia! we’ve been planning a trip to redang island, which will include lots of sun, sandy white beaches, coral reefs (and some sharks!), blue turquoise sea and snorkeling every day. looking forward to escaping shanghai for a while, especially now that the much dreaded steamy summer season seems to be here to stay, with 30ºC temperatures already!

- i’ve been fighting distractions… and headaches. daily headaches and some dizziness that sent me to the nearest pharmacy, to get checked on my blood pressure. “too high!”, said my mom on the phone. so we’ve been reducing the caffeine & salt intakes to nearly 0. not as hard as i thought it would be. the headaches persisted for a while (lack of caffeine?) but now they are gone and that also seems to be the case with my caffeine dependency too (not that i was that dependent). so how about that? a blog called meia de leite (café latte) written by someone who doesn’t drink coffee anymore! :P

anitanachina.com é um projecto novo: uma foto por dia durante o ano do rato, para ajudar a mostrar a (nossa) vida na china nos dias que correm. vem na sequência das muitas vezes que nos fizeram a pergunta “como é a china?”, e da vontade de a mostrar, de forma mais coerente e explicada, aos amigos e família.

é ao mesmo tempo um exercício fotográfico (para me obrigar a saltar da cadeira e ir fotografar) e uma maneira de me obrigar a escrever em português - tarefa complicada nos dias que correm.

o nome surgiu de um comentário no flickr, pela joana. :)

anitanachina.com is a new project: a photo a day for the year of the rat, to help portray our daily life in china.
it’s a photographic exercise, but at the same time, it’s written in portuguese because i miss writing in my mother tongue (a task that is becoming increasingly difficult). english readers should find it quite easy to navigate though.

the name “anita na china”, literally “anita in china” is a play with some portuguese child books that used to feature a character, anita, discovering the world around her: anita in the train, anita goes to the farm, anita in the theater, etc. the idea for the name was given to me in a flickr photo comment, by joana. :)

“whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. boldness has genious, power and magic to it. begin it now.”

goethe

“TechCrunch answers to no one. Your complaints fall upon deaf ears oh puny startups. We will select five of you to put on our pedestal, but only those five who will wash our feet and … you get the idea. We don’t need to stick to deadlines, yes we said the 17th, but it could be today, tomorrow, or a week from now and there is nothing you can do mwah ha ha ha.”

an ironic comment on the crunchies awards blog, after 2 missed deadlines (17th, 19th dec) for the release of the nominees. no explanations given, whatsoever.
not pretty, if you ask me.

ps - it’s not the fact they haven’t released the nominees yet. it’s the fact they had 82k votes and dare to miss 2 public deadlines without an explanation - knowing they have all those people waiting on them.

october. november. december.
the rest of the year is stretching on sight now as the final trimester is here. i was going to write about how the weather has completely changed and now settled into a summer-autumn interlude, with nice temperatures and less mosquito bites - but today, there’s actually lots of rain (krosa was supposed to miss shanghai, yet, it’s making more damage than wipha, few weeks ago).

nevertheless, i like the rain and the wind, even if i get all soaked on my bike, while my yellow raincoat floats around me. autumn is my favorite season, for the colors and weather, and the creativity flows.

on other news, we’ve moved to a new house, slowly, on the 31st floor of the building next door. after a few days, the cats are still scared at every noise and hide below the couch most of the time. we’ve thoroughly cleaned it and we have managed to buy the contents of our previous apartment to the landlord - a difficult task, involving a couple of hours of discussing prices of items in our basic mandarin, but we did pretty well and in the end, managed to get a decent price out of the lot.

on a small remark, i can’t explain how proud i am that we haven’t given up on chinese classes, unlike many other expats i’ve seen here. no matter what they say, i still maintain that it makes a lot of difference whether you speak the language or not, in the way people treat you and on what you can achieve or understand about this culture. besides, no one can possibly convince me that learning the most spoken language in the world is a waste of time.

speaking of which, it’s been six months since we set foot on this land. maybe i should have blogged more, while things were still fresh, but first impressions are not always the most reliable, at least on this side of the globe.
through it all, i can say that i really like what we have here right now, and how shanghai is turning out to be. never mind the frustrations: the surprises have far outcome my initial expectations, though i think you have to live here for a while to understand what i mean. it’s like finding beauty in the randomness, or the chaos.

it’s not easy, but it sure is rewarding. the same thing can probably be said about the whole china. as josh puts it:

Where else is life a road that can veer off in any direction at any time? Where can you head to one of the biggest cities in the world and end up in an antiquated hotel surrounded by rice paddy fields? Where else can you wake up each morning and think to yourself, ‘something crazy is definitely going to happen today?’

rfc: what would you like me to blog about, regarding china? any questions or hidden doubts? i am by no means an expert in asian issues, but i’ve answered a few emails in the past few months of curious readers, so if you’ve been lurking and itching to ask something, go ahead and leave a comment! :)

photo by lifesucker, on flickr.

today is the 15th day of the 8th lunar month of the chinese calendar, which is the “middle autumn festival”. it’s a day when families in china gather and eat traditional mooncakes by the full moon. i had never heard of it before, but the story is quite nice, and the mooncakes (like those 2 above, kindly offered by my company) are not that bad. :)
here is the tale that originated this holiday, according to wikipedia:

Houyi himself was an immortal, while Chang’e was a beautiful young girl, working in the Jade Emperor’s (Emperor of Heaven) Palace as the attendant to the Queen Mother of the West (wife of the Jade Emperor), just before her marriage. One day, Houyi aroused the jealousy of the other immortals, who then slandered him before the Jade Emperor. Houyi and his wife, Chang’e, were subsequently banished from heaven, and forced to live by hunting on earth. He became a famous archer.

As of today, the hare is still pounding herbs, trying to make the pill. As for Houyi, he built himself a palace in the sun as “Yang” (the male principle), with Chang’e as “Yin” (the female principle). Once a year, on the 15th day of the full moon, Houyi visits his wife. That is why, that night, the moon is full and beautiful.

happy mid-autumn festival!

no matter how much vla i ate in the netherlands, there were still no “natas” nowhere to be seen - and i missed them dearly.

so, the last time i was in lisbon, to take care of the passport/visa issues, i made a point in going to belém and eating a “nata” with an expresso. my little ritual consists of taking the expresso spoon, dipping it into the nata filling and slowly eating it, while drinking the coffee. only in the end i eat what is left. natas go well with expressos: both are hardwired in my brain as “portuguese flavours”.

little did i know by then that the chinese are great fans of these “egg tarts”, as they call them! some of them know these are portuguese (some think they are from macau) and they enjoy them just as much as we do. of course, they don’t taste exactly the same - the filling is more pudding-like, i would say. but still, we’re quite pleased. :)