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Aye folks,
no stories this time, just...stuff!
Shopgirl is doing a design contest for her blog banner, my entry:



I've been posting some of my photos on DeviantART.
My flatmate Elliot post his artwork there.

I've read Only Hope by Vanessa L. Fong,
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker,
Human Resource Management in the Harvard Business School Cases series, which only costs 38RMB in the Chinese reprint version!
also reading Restructuring the Chinese City by Laurence J.C. Ma and Fulong Wu,
and enjoying Bilingual Time magazine, China Review, Fortune, Zing (a Xintiandi production), That's Shanghai, BusinessWeek, The Economist, City Weekend, Forbes Asia and ShanghaiTalk.

Movies I liked recently are among others:
<The Perfume, The Story of a Murderer>, although the novel was more explicit and thus better :-) , <Blood Diamond>, <Idiocracy>, ...

Chinese New Year

According to the Chinese Calendar, on the 18th of february 2007, the year of the Pig has begun. The begining of the new year does not coincide with the solar calendar, so it's 'on a diffent day' every solar year. Also called Spring Festival, this is the most important of the Chinese holidays and festivals.
Days before, one could already notice that something big was going on. For example, it became more difficult to have food delivered from little restaurants in our neighbourhood, one of the many services provided by migrant workers.
Thousands of people were going back to their hometowns, as it is traditionally imperative to spend this festival with one's parents and grandparents (拜年 bainian). In a gigantic country like China, where labor mobility is booming due to liberalisation of the market and huge geographical inequality , this means a great pressure on traffic.
So me and Ting went to Wuxi for 4 days. Every day there was at least one family dinner in a restaurant or at someone's home. I met most of her extended family (+-6 tables of 5-10 persons in a restaurant).
so...pictures:

taken from the train on our way to Wuxi:



and in the train, a new model resembling to the Eurostar, with a little cantine in one of the wagons:


The night of the last day of the chinese year,
we went to the 1000-years-old Buddhist temple in Wuxi, which is surrounded by shops and guarded by a small army of policemen.




the Zhang family


burning lots of incense in front of the temple


fireworks everywhere, so much in fact, that I hardly got any sleep the first night in Wuxi.


we also did our part


and oh, should firecrackers be stored safely and handled with caution?
Factory explosions are not uncommon in China.


Ting's parents' new appartment is fully furnished and more than inhabitable now :-) ...and cozy




playing 麻将 majiang / mahjong
on Ting's grandma's automatic mahjong table.



food food food


Shopping mall


KTV(karaoke and general entertainment) lobby


view in Wuxi


tax policy taking physical shape




smart strategy to truely make shopping malls the centres of public life


Tom's world, a game arcade



funny reminder to the past, on the back of the taxi drivers' seat

"For public safety, please cooperate in the City Exit registration. Thanks for your cooperation!"
-Police station, traffic department

When I got back to Shanghai, it seemed as if the city was in civil war. EVERYWHERE you could hear and see fireworks. I can't explain how extreme it was. Come to China during Spring Festival, and you will see.

Just some stories

So E. gets back from Hong Kong, where he slept in the airport for 2 days, and changed his visa from a student visa to a tourist visa, so he could have it changed into a business visa on the mainland.
We go to the local police station, after succesfully looking for the 'pink paper' and the other papers. He has to pay a fine because he didn't go to the police station within 3 days of 'entering the country'. But he can pay less and they can make some changes to the paperwork.
Appearantly it's hard to change one little thing, even when you're already registered.
Some very friendly pregnant lady is helping us in the police station dining room. She sends us to the bank, right across the street, to pay the fine.
In the bank, there is no system with numbered tickets, so they have an employee responsible for making sure that people sit in line properly. It takes a long time and several cigarettes before it's our turn.
We wave the paper to the clerk, and he starts yelling that they can't do this type of transfer here, we have to go to another part of Shanghai. I ask him why, and tell him that we were sent here from the police office right across the street. He says that it's a parking ticket, we can't do that, .... I tell him it's not, but he won't listen.
We go back to the police station dining room, where we find the pregnant lady and some police officer. We tell them about the bank, and they go there with us, and tell the bank people to let us pay the bill. We are taken to a seperate counter for business transactions, where the first employee doesn't know what to do with it. He passes it through to someone else. That person types in some numbers and stams the paper. We take the paper to another counter, where 2 clerks start stamping it some more - by this time the poor little peace of recycled paper is soaking with ink- copy 12 digit numbers into their computer, print some other papers that we have to sign and they have to stamp.
After paying the 100RMB (10euro) fine, we go back to the police station.
There, both me and Elliot have to sign 12 papers, and then I have to write a note in Chinese, stating that I'm Elliot's translator, we both have to sign it and write down the date, which was the date of 2 days before.
The police chief comes over and says: "Hey, you're 2 of those 4 guys living here right, there's one from Lebanon, right?" then to the plice officers: "I also want to sign some of these papers."
....
(sorry if I messed up the tenses in the above passage, in Chinese there are none so I'm not used to focusing on them anymore)

A few days ago I got this flew-type of illness, not so bad though. But anyway, my muscles were feeling sore so I decided to go for a massage. After searching for a parlor in the area where they actually do massages ( ;-) , I get a full body oil massage, and then they talk me into doing this thing where they put cups on your back. They heat the air inside first, so when it cools down there's a strong vacuum effect. It kind of hurts in the beginning, but then it feels so good. This is how i looked afterwards.



Then me and Andre, and our girlfriends went to a very fancy Italian restaurant, where they serve small portions on huge plates. (the 'dining fashion' world here seems to have discovered Nouvelle Cuisine, which is not good news if you ask me)




Last week the weather in Shanghai was suddenly very good, it was warm outside and the smog cleared up so you could see the sky. I walked around on the Bund a lot those days, and really started appreciating it. It's good that we live so near it.



Oh and these are a few pics of Yi messing with Andre's hair.

2007

So what have I been up to...

Indoor Rock Climbing

d

Taking wonderful panoramic pictures in the streets of Shanghai



Christmas:

Dinner with lots of people from the dorms, in fact most of the ones that hadn't gone home for the holidays or forever.
Funny detail: this is an Uygur restaurant, muslim in other words. If you don't understand why that's funny, travel some more.







Oh and in the restaurant there was a traditional Uygur dance show, but later on the evening they started playing very bad house music, and all the 40-something housewives, still completely covered by cloth, dances to that... and some of us jumped in and danced with them.

Then there was a Christmas party at someone's appartment.







New Year's Eve











I have many friends here, so I am obliged celebrate many birthdays









Karaoke





I know I know lots of people pictures... can't help it































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I've spent most of my energy on finding a new appartment and moving into it the last month.
I live with André, Chahin and Elliot. The are from Sweden, Lebanon and Kentucky. None of them speak enough Chinese to get things done so I do a lot of interpreting, which I really like.
And I'm from belgium, as you can see in this picture.
It also reflects the degree of nationalism of each person, and you must know that Andre bought me the belgian flag because he just couldn't believe that I didn't bring it to China.



Some pics of our place before we really moved in.











Our residential area



goes by the name of Bundfield Club. Don't like the name but what to do about it :-)



As soon as we moved in, we had our first visitor: Dieter, my Belgian classmate. We (me and Andre) cooked a delicious fusion dish: typical European winter stew with...rice.
This would be a precedent (yes, I can already say that) to many other fun cooking adventures.



Andre calls this 'bread-pizza' :D







A peek into my study room,
originally a dining room, that's why it's round and has a huge window area...that means lots of light! I had curtains placed to seperate it from the kitchen, and a closet also helps to maintain an acceptable degree of privacy.



My bed(room). It's a very small room, with a single person bed as opposed to the King size (not Queen size) beds that my friends have, but then again...
I built an extention to the bed, used 6 thin matrasses and lots of pillows, covered the walls in red cloth, etc. So now it's more like a huge triangle-shaped(with one curved side), huge bed that has a door. I love it.



And most of all I love this pretty lady...




Of course we had a so-called house-warming party:

Elliot, Me, Andre


Chahin










And finally 2 attempts to show the living room in 1 picture.





Those freaky colors are projected on the wall with a projector that Andre had his dad take with him to China when he was coming here for business.

Today, we finally installed wireless internet so we can all withdraw in our own rooms and keep ourselves busy for hours with futile activities such as writing blogs and what not... this post took sooo long, it's 5:30 in the morning now, just had to get it over with.