Tag: china

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in china

the snow

snow berries

“the snow outside looks like someone is sprinkling powdered sugar on this pancake world“.
the phrase is not mine, but it fits perfectly to the kind of weather we have been enjoying here in shanghai. white skies, soft snow, freezing cold and icy roads and bridges. it’s fun for us, while the power supply is still stable and we can use the ac to (mildly) heat the house.

today though, when we entered the elevator, it didn’t move! instead, we heard a guy talking above us… no idea why the elevator wasn’t out of order if someone was fixing it, but it managed to scare the hell out of me – i’m not too fond of malfunctioning elevators.
we managed to get out, i calmed down and we walked the 31 floor downstairs since the other elevator was quite busy and frankly, i didn’t really feel like using it.

from what we hear though, all around china the weather has been giving people a much harder time – especially now, on the week before the chinese new year, the most important holiday week on the mainland. it’s the time of the year where migrant workers return to their home villages to spend the holidays with their families (their “christmas”), so it’s kind of sad that this is stopping people to get where they’re headed. adding to the usual seasonal shortage of train and bus tickets, there are also people stranded in train stations and airports all around china, because of delayed or cancelled flights/trains.

and it has just started snowing again…

Categories
foooood in china

wagas

the wagas we usually go to, on nanjing road, is a small cozy place hidden down on the basement of citic square (a rather expensive looking mall). don’t let the location or the (fake?) eames chairs + fancy wallpaper scare you though, the place is good – the kind of restaurant you wish for on a weeknight, to just wind down in a comfortable surrounding, with good food.

w23

yesterday, i had the roasted pumpkin spaguetti, with spinach, pinenuts and feta cheese, and p. chose the pasta du jour, a bacon, asparagus and cream mix. for drinks, we always choose the same here: the honey-ginger-lemon tea for me and the indian spiced tea (kind of chai) for him. now look at that:

indian spiced tea   ginger, lemon and honey tea

roasted pumpkin pasta   bacon and asparagus pasta

doesn’t everything look so yummy and colorful? easy, relaxed food for uncomplicated dinners, i say!
they also have quite a selection of wraps, salads, smoothies, muffins and all kinds of healthy food. oh and illy coffee… and discounts on evenings and breakfasts… and free wi-fi… and quick friendly service…

wagas6
info:
wagas
LG12A, citic square,
1168 nanjing xi road
near jiangning road

ps – we were introduced to wagas by some portuguese friends in our early weeks in shanghai, and i think the experience was nothing less of a turning point in our dining routines. this was probably the first restaurant where we realised that dining out well, affordingly and in a nice environment was not difficult in shanghai – we had probably just been searching in the the wrong places.

since then, we haven’t looked back on our plan to test-taste as many restaurants as possible (well, within our budget anyway). this series of posts has only made me more curious to try new places and spread these flavours and sights to the world out there. i’m in full blogger-reporter mode here, happy, excited and inspired. :)

today as we were leaving to work, i saw p. looking for some cables on our cables nest/bucket. “what are you looking for?”, i asked. “the camera battery charger”, he said. “you don’t want to run out of battery when we go out for dinner, do you?”

:) :) :)

Categories
in china just life traveling

bali

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:

bali card

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

Categories
in china links and ideas

the king and the sparrow

i stumbled upon this story on wikipedia the other day. it sounds like one of those stories you’re told when you’re a child, the kind that you’re supposed to figure out the “lesson” in the end. i leave that bit to you.

The Four Pests campaign was one of the first actions taken in the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.

The campaign was initiated by Mao Zedong, the first President of the People’s Republic of China. Sparrows were included on the list because they ate grain seeds, causing disruption to agriculture. Additionally, Mao was annoyed one morning when a sparrow stole his toast as he was eating breakfast outside. It was decided that all the peasants in China should bang pots and pans and run around to make the sparrows fly away in fear. Sparrow nests were torn down, eggs were broken, their nestling were also killed.

Initially, the campaign did improve the harvest. By April 1960 the National Academy of Science issued that sparrows ate insects more than seeds. Mao declared “forget it”, and ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows. By this time, however, it was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward and adverse weather conditions leading to the famine. From 1959 to 1961, an estimated 38 million people died of starvation.

Categories
in china

baby steps, people, baby steps.

times are changing. just last week, from on day to the other, china announced the law that portugal dismissed a month ago: the ban on plastic bags.
from june onwards, there will be a tax on plastic bags at supermarkets and all thiner bags will be banned. tibet regional government wants to go a little bit further and ban all kinds of plastic bags in the region.

the planned outcome?

“With the right enforcement — that’s always the tricky part — and education campaigns, the upshot in China could be huge: China Trade News estimates that the country of 1.3 billion people must refine 5 million tons, or 37 million barrels, of crude oil every year to meet demand for plastic bags, which are used at a rate of 3 billion bags every day. Three billion. If that estimate is right, that means China uses as many bags in one month as the U.S. uses in a year–or that would mean that every day each Chinese citizen uses twice the amount of bags that each American uses.”

or “To put that into perspective, it would take Iceland about five years to use that much oil, but the USA would use that much oil in less than two days.“

which is huge. australia came to the same conclusion and is studying a similar measure to the one planned for china:

“Australia is also considering a plastic bag ban, for implementation in 2009. But as Planet Ark founder Jon Dee points out, “the fact that China desires to do it in less than six months, I think is a sign that … we could do it faster than that.”

He continues: “The fact that the biggest country in the world, the biggest users of plastic bags, are moving to ban them … is extremely important, because if it can be done in China it can be done in any country in the world.”

quotes from treehugger, shanghaiist and china time blog.