lately, p. and i have been talking a lot about bali, more exactly, about spending a week or so there, in the sunny beaches.

anything to take our thoughts away from this cold weather. i don’t know who told us shanghai would be cold and dry in the winter but so far, it hasn’t been true. there’s cold allright, but there’s also a sort of silly rain falling every now and then, just to keep the levels of humidity high enough. our stomach might have already adapted itself to the food but our body is still struggling to understand this permanently wet new weather, with little aches here and there…

anyway, i digress. what i wanted to say was that today i got this card, sent to me from a taiwanese girl living in malaysia who spent her new year in bali:

so bali again, gently sneaking into our lifes. sounds like a good omen. :)

today was my second time on ginger café, a little cozy place tucked away on the end of a little tunnel on fuxing road.

the drinks in this place are quite something. i had a lemongrass, orange and mint tea which was delicious, and i’ve had their ginger and honey tea before - strong, but oh so good!

the menu has a wide range of dishes and a quite a few are vegetarian. my little portion of spinach and pumpkin quiche looked a bit disappointing though, but p.’s spicy chouriço pasta was well served. both tasted good.

   

overall, i feel this is more the kind of place that you go for mid-afternoon drinks, or to read a book while sipping on a latte. the bright walls and the decoration have a sort of “asian treasure-chest” ambience to it, quite inviting for a nice chat on a rainy sunday…

info:
Ginger
299 Fuxing Xi Lu, No. 1
near Huashan Lu
(there’s free wi-fi, but we didn’t get the chance to take our laptops out - it was quite crowded).

some people have asked what do i eat everyday here in china, so i think a series of posts on “what can you eat in shanghai?” are in order. a brief disclaimer:

1. if you’d like to find out how dogs, cats or rats taste, you’ll find the series disappointing… the strangest thing i ate here were frog legs - completely by mistake (no menu translation available and the dish looked like chicken on the picture…)

2. i do eat chinese food most days, at lunch, when i have someone to help me order it. i have a few favourites which i’ll try to cover. mostly though, shanghai is such a big and international city that we don’t feel the need to stick to noodles and rice. i hope i can show you why.

3. i’m not being paid to do this.

that said, meet moon river diner!

moon river diner is a an american style restaurant with a very typical/cliché look-and-feel, hearty burgers, maccaroni and cheese, tacos and salads, apple pie, sundaes, all day breakfast (pancakes, waffles …), bottomless mugs of coffee, smoothies and lemonade! isn’t it just like in the movies?

ah, and there’s even a jukebox and a popcorn stand - popcorn is served as the appetiser for the meal.

we came around for today’s dinner, i ate the waffle breakfast (with fruit, egg and ham or maple syrup) and paulo had the mushroom burger (with hash browns and salad). here are the obligatory pics, which you can click for larger:

   

   

they were absolutely delicious and decadent. :)

nice bonuses:
* the service is cool and the waiters don’t “hover” you.
* the music is ok (nice volume and selection) as long as you don’t sit too near the stairs, where one can hear the music from upstairs as well as the one from the floor where you are :S
* they have wireless - it isn’t terribly fast, but it works.
* the place is huge but quite cozy, with a deli on the ground floor (sandwiches, bread, etc), and a sort of bar/lounge on the last floor. i heard it has a patio, but i’ve never been there.

so there you go, this is the place we go when we feel like pretending we’re in the states. :)

info:
moon river diner (jingan)
66,77 yuyao lu, near xikang lu
the new factories, building #1

you know tones, right? the way we rise our voice in the end of a question, for instance? that’s a rising tone. mandarin has tones too, 4 of them plus a neutral one. and they use them in every single syllable!
it might be hard to understand what i mean. so here’s an example:
* bīng (spoken with a flat and slightly long ‘i’) means frozen
* bǐng (where your voice ‘i’ starts in the middle of the tone, takes a dive and then rises) means cake.
* bìng (spoken with a sharp falling ‘i’) means sick.

the consequences? a foolproof recipe to (a funny kind of) frustration. you want to say chicken and you say “how many” (jī and jǐ). you want to say country and you say fruit (guó and guǒ). you want to say fish and you say rain (yú and yǔ). *sigh*

speaking chinese is like playing a memory game. is this the word i want? did i remember the right tone? naturally, they don’t understand you if you don’t pronounce words correctly (except in specific contexts). i mean, why should they - to them it’s a different word!

we have a little game going on: saying our street name so perfectly that the taxi driver understands without us having to repeat it. which is a hard task, even after hundreds of taxi rides. this is the tipical scenario when we enter a taxi (dialogue without tones, too much work!):
us: nihao! (hi!)
taxi driver says: nihao! qu nali? (hi! where to?)
us: dong xin lu, wu ning lu. (dongxin road, wuning road)
taxi driver confused: wuning lu… shema lu?* (wuning road… what road?)
us: dong xin lu. dong xin lu. dong xin lu. dong xin lu. dong xin lu. dong xin lu… (dongxin road! dongxin road, dongxin road… - all spoken with minimal tone variations, each time slowlier…)
taxi driver: ah! dongxin lu!
us: dui! (yes! with a very happy face)

and off we go, feeling more or less proud according to the number of times we had to repeat it. one day we’ll be as good as dashan, just wait and see!

* wuning road is very big and easily recognizable. dongxin road is not.

we hear that sentence everyday.

you turn on the tv, and *pouf!* the new stadium is completed, the torch is now somewhere being carried by somebody else, the theme song is released. the logo itself is omnipresent in every advertisement, on every metro station, on the most unexpected places, including milk cartons and name cards.

(if you’re portuguese, you probably remember we went through the same thing when we had the expo98, or when we hosted the euro2004. )

and that would be ok, if things weren’t touching the surreal. examples:

* thousands of babies have been named “olympics”

* the air quality headache

* migrant workers being persuaded to return home during the games

* the the tickets fiasco

* breaking the spitting habit
* Smog and Mirrors: China’s Plan for a Green Olympics, on Wired

just to link a few headlines catching my attention. for me, the cherry on top of the cake is this movie from cctv (removed the video player because it seemed to be crashing in IE, weird).

and what is that, you might ask? it’s a sketch teaching “olympics etiquette” to chinese people, being regularly broadcasted in the state television. a sort of “how you should behave next year when all the foreigners flood the streets of our country”.
it seems quite inoffensive, but to us it’s very amusing because none of what is being taught there actually happens.

for instance, i’d still be at the crossroads if i were to wait for cars to stop to let me pass - even when the light is green for pedestrians! (try this video for the real picture of what happens at a crossroad in china).

and the other day i felt off my bike just at the entrance of my home complex - stuff in my bag all spread on the floor around me (luckily i got away without a scratch). do you think any of the guards standing 5 meters away came to help? right… i guess they haven’t seen the ad yet!

seriously, i believe people coming to china are in for a big eye-opening surprise… which is good.

ps - by the way, someone came up with a cartoon to explain the way the olympics logo was created :D

ps2 - i can’t wait for the 2010 world expo craziness here in shanghai! “better city, better life” being the theme. *insert pollution-induced-cough here*. how appropriate :)

(rant prompted by joão ’s post on the 2008 olympic games’ other side).

this is the view from our living room, at 8 am in the morning.

it’s hard to forget there is a problem when you have this kind of daily reminder.

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.