Sunny Breaks

all the memories of everything that I wanted to mention about the recent trip to Shanghai and surrounds is blending in to nothing, so I better try and write it now, with fotos.

First the food. I really like food from the different parts of China. I feel like I’m over Korean food. I guess it’s just a thing of mass. China is massive and made up of a bunch of different cultures that have their own food. Maybe it’s the result of being in Korea for some time now, but the Sichuan style of food, (spicy) is probably the kind I like best.

In this particular night we went to the appropriately titled Sichuan Restaurant. On the right is a kind of fried potato dish, lending further weight to my theory that chips are universal and that you could go to Mars and they would be eating chips there too. On the left, according to girlfriend with e-dictionary in hand, is a dish entitled, ‘an excess of saliva’, which we’ll shorten to ‘drool’ for the purposes of this blogpost. It was chicken in a spicy -hot oil. It really did make you drool! Very tasty once you get over the not-so-western style of chopping—they cut straight through the bone rather than filleting or sectioning the way folks like me are used to.

I did several of the touristy things the first time around when I was there in late Feb but there was one that had eluded the tackyness-magnet. There’s an underground train that runs under the river which was like Journey to the Centre of the Earth meets Star Trek: The motion picture meets Boards of Canada’s album, Geogaddi.

I think it’s worth noting down that weather-wise, late April was a perfect time to be in Shangers. It was warm but not humid and the nights were just nice.

For a day or two we got out of the central city to a place an hour na a half away on the bus, Xitang. It’s a small place and not as on the map as Hangzhou or Suzhou. Xitang’s claim to fame is that a few scenes from Mission Impossible 3 were shot there. In several of the restaurants and shops you can see fotos of Tom Cruise and cast standing around.

Personally I found it interesting to see how the place filled up with the new Chinese Upper-middle class on Saturday morning. there’s all these people with money in their pocket in china and now all they need is Disney Land.

In any case, Xitang was a nice little place and the canals didn’t smell.

I felt like being daring and upgrading the wordpress installation to the latest version. (just press the button it’s not rocket science!) Sunny Breaks had been using the very old 2.01, a technological laggard more’s the pity, but the last attempt at a big upgrade resulted in flipping out the HostCentral server. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.
Also the theme, or ‘look’ if you will. Cutprice is not just a theme, it’s a platform. Also, they rent trucks. It will be modified to look a little less mundane in the near future. We’re even intending to reopen comments—after about five or six years of not caring what you think.
Lastly, note the “tags”. This is a clever device THEMAN has invented to get The Kids to do their own indexing.

*Update:* Comments n’ pings are now enabled. Comment til ur little hearts are content. Comment til you can comment no more. Comment like it’s going out of style.

I have a week’s intermission at work and so have come back to Shanghai. I didn’t bring the appropriate cable so any fotos will have to be inserted post-trip.
Girlfriend, Je, has made friends with some of the locals and so we have been meeting with them. An ‘Aunt’ invited us to her family home a bit further out in the ‘burbs. It was a huge meal. I counted and there was 15 plates of food on the table. There was just the mother father and daughter, plus us two.
Without knowing it I ended up eating dog, and then I ate pigeon too and that was just for breakfast. Before I knew it was dog I thought it was some kind of beef, and the pigeon tasted like bad chicken.
The family were very nice and the dad cooked it all so it was one of those situations where there was no real way to say no.
Although there was a couple of times where Je stepped out of the room, and the people couldn’t speak any english so it was a bit awkward, but I couldn’t help but think how great it was – this precariousness, and how many ways there were that I could do something inappropriate or weird or offensive to a level of being kicked out of the house. I was envisioning being kicked out of the house.

Doing a little shopping in Carrefour supermarket at Zhongshan Park on Saturday night and Je said it seemed unusually quiet. Mostly it looked like young people in there, which may have had something to do with it being a saturday night. In any case, some of the chinese people are boycotting because France <3’s Tibet. We’ll be going back to Carrefour today because it’s so much nicer to shop when it’s not so crowded.
I had been thinking about going to see some of the Olympic Games for no other reason than girlfriend may still be here then, and it’d be interesting to see if the whole shithouse goes up in flames, as Jimbo Morrison would say.

Went to a restaurant last night that had english translation on the menu. Here are some of the more choicer dishes:

• The Beijing onion explodes the fat cow
• The cotton rose one is fragrant
• burns the beef (I had this – beef and potato curry – very good!)
• Characteristic cowpea
• Burns the pigeon
• blood is flourishing
• Heineken
• Fried icecream
• Chaozhou style understands stove fish

Plus the above title of this entry, which is what I think I will call my band when I finally make a band.

It’s worthwhile noting that while some people may well be afraid of Roumanians, for some reason we just can’t seem to let them go. Blackula, Count Chocula breakfast cereal and Sesame Street’s The Count.

(ref The Count & cookie monster.)

One thing I always wondered about Cookie Monster was, Where do the cookies go? Is there a hole there or something? And what kind of biscuits are they, because they break pretty easy.

I was watching the (1992) Francis Ford Coppola version of Dracula last night. It seemed rather dated. Where is Winona Ryder these days? Where is Keanu Reeves these days? They are, as it is so succinctly put, ‘past it’. In four years, 1992 will be twenty years ago. That’s alarming because to me 1992 seems like Not That Long Ago. The 70s— now that was a long time ago, it’s okay for things from the 70s to seem dated but not 1992.

The second thing that occurred to me when watching this movie, billed as ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, was how badly it sucked. What a fucking travesty of a retelling. Stoker was rolling in his grave in 1992. He’s still rolling!
Rolling.
Rolling, rolling, rolling.

Rolling.

I was going to write about how being back studying and dealing with the academia was reminding me of how out of touch with reality they all are. What set that off was finishing up reading Dracula and Carrie and then reading some of the analysis pieces as well as the other students’ discussion on the board. In relation to Carrie someone said, ‘uh yeah, it’s about feminism’, to which I scoffed at my computer screen, It was just about a guy hacking out some pulp to get a bit of money to pay the bills.

Of course, I was right, but it’s also about other things, but feminism isn’t one of them. Dracula is about a lot of things. one of them being how Roumanians want to marry your daughter and make little Roumanians — in England.

A message to Googol: work your satellites, update your images. According to the above image, my current workplace hasn’t even been built yet. That makes the image over two years old.

Another reason not to doubt the cosmic order of things: I just looked up obscure early nineties Kiwi indie band, StraightJacket Fits on BTJunkie. It had no leads but offered me the suggestion, ‘did you mean straightjacket fist’? No, but thanks. Everyone will get what they deserve. The members of Straightjacket Fits are probably selling Holdens in Dunedin these days, and so need the money. I’ll probably buy their self-titled album from some obscure Kiwi music web-shop.

The rather sinister ‘Mystery Man’ from Lynch’s movie Lost Highway.

The rather sinister Samsung Chairman, Lee Kun Hee.

The same man???

I went out and bought a mac book pro. In the last six months I’ve given away three laptops. But the philanthropic feeling wore off pretty quick and left me with the condition of mobilelessness.
The hardware itself is okay I guess. I remember back to when they changed from the Powerbook to the MBP and was not impressed with the new design. The Tibooks looked great. I thought to myself that I would pass on getting an apple laptop til they changed their look again.

However, since I got the mac mini 18 months ago, the software OS X has slowly grown on me as I got used to it. Windows has been digging its own grave for several years ago, and those smart-arsed what if Microsoft designed … things are funny because they’re true. When I got the sony vaio it was a neat looking little computer but was weighed down with a whole bunch of rubbish from companies like Norton anti-virus. It’s insulting. Even on the mac I find iTunes a little too in-my-face. And as far as I’m concerned Linux still isn’t ready to be used by normal people living normal lives.

After a couple of days of using the mbp I’m enjoying the built in webcam (great for talking to that overseas g/f on) and the quietness. I’ve d/loaded a couple of things and they’ve come screaming through (metaphorically) in that typical S.Korean way yet the laptop has made none of those ‘I’m getting busy!’ noises. The key depression depth is greater than the old sony — that’s something I’d become used to but this is nice too. The size is about the size as a normal keyboard. When it gets a bit dark in the room the keyboard starts glowing. Welcome to the 21st century.

Most of the time I’ve found trackpads on laptops to be pretty difficult to use – the one on the Vaio certainly was, so there would always be a mouse plugged into the side of it. The old jelly-bean style iBooks had really comfortable trackpad/mouse button combinations, although I never really got used to there being no right-click. The white iBooks were a step backward, the mouse button was difficult to click, and if I was only ever using someone else’s, as was the case, it’s not kosher to go messing with people’s mouse configurations. If I could’ve I would’ve set it to tap, which is what I’m doing here now, but then the mbp mouse button seems a bit easier to click anyway.
I like the multi touch idea. The two fingers for scrolling is very handy but so foar I haven’t had much need to be rotating or zooming images.

The last thing is that the socket where the power cable connects is on the left hand side which feels altogether wrongo. It is as if it was designed by someone who sits on the left hand end of the couch, who sleeps on the left hand side of the bede. For the rest of us this means having the power cord snaking around under our feet, and the (“it’s a feature too!”) power-cord slipping out of its socket rather easily. When it does come out it says there is 5 hours, 52 mins of battery power — not bad. I bought it on Wednesday April 2.

I’m studying again this semester, just one subject; English Literature. It’s looking at popular fiction and the first assignment in on horror fiction. After reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula ten years ago, I reread it last week. There seemed to be a lot I didn’t remember. Like all the sex scenes, where did they come from?
Will watch ‘Dracula, Dead and Loving it’ starring Lesley Neilson tonight to see if that will add anything to the literary critique.

I’m watching the tv series, ‘Heroes’. It started off a bit lame but started to pick up after the point where the cheerleader attempted to vehicular-manslaughter the quarter-back. ‘Owever it does make me feel a bit inadequate because I am just a normal person with no super power. Every new character introduced seems to have something going on in that dept. As for the characters, I think I like Hiro Nakamura the best. It was pleasantly surprising to see that they kept with the two characters speaking japanese and use of subtitles. Also, the tall blonde woman because she’s so damn hot, but it’s questionable whether or not multiple-personality disorder is a superpower.

I’ve never been one for business & economics but I must say it’s a little odd to look at the calculators and see that 1000 South Korean Won is presently worth the same as 1 Australian dollar. for once I don’t have to do mathematics in my head which leaves it free to imagine. I imagine what it would be like to be some sort of shit-kicking internal mail-boy for a rocketship shaped BHP building in the middle of Melbourne, and to still be earning more than I am now.
Or like yesterday when I was out looking for a new pair of slip-on dress shoes for work. I came across a spanish made pair. They were a touch too big but if the price was right I could’ve padded them in or found some other solution. They were W148 000.
“Can I get a discount?”
“I er um. No.”
“What about if I pay cash?”
“I’m sorry”
“Ah c’mon, just a little discount.”
“We can’t”
Obstinate Fucker I thought while saying thankyou and left without the shoes. Usually they’ll give some sort of discount even if it was only 8 out of the 148. And after getting home that night and seeing the 1:1, I’m thinking that pair of shoes would’ve been a whole lot more in Melbourne.

A few last things about the Chinese in Shanghai. I thought it was odd in that they’re noticably faster walkers than people here but they’d walk-walk fast through the subway then get to the escalator, get on it and then stand still. Maybe it’s still a technology that they’re getting used to and it’s considered uncouth or barbaric to continue walking when the escalator could be doing all the work for you.

TV: on the first night I watched a bit of TV. As you can imagine, TV in China suffers from a bit of fascism, however they did show 80s family-sitcom ‘Growing Pains’. It was dubbed. Expect a rash of Kirk Cameron hairstylings in the Middle Kingdom soon.

Also I got vox-popped by ICS, a newly opened foreign-language TV channel in Shangers. I watched a little bit of the TV channel and it seemed quite good. They do their own news reports and lifestyle shows. I don’t watch TV in Seoul but I’m sure there’s nothing that diverse on the telly here. I’m guessing there’s still not much more than Steven Segal movies.

As happens, I have not set aside the time to write regularly, and now I am starting to forget all the other stuff that happened – when I went to shanghai, nearly two weeks ago.
All up, the taxi drivers are not good. The photos from the whole thing are up at the Flickr site, minus those of my girlfriend who shall forever be unphotographed here.
The first night I stayed in a Hotel 168 (which is a chain there apparently) near Chi feng road subway (flyover) station. It had a glass wall in the shower so you could lay on the bed and look in at the person in the shower, or vice versa. Despite that, it wasn’t so great, so I changed the next day.
The manner in which people speak chinese can often seem a bit much. For instance, they often yell. talking, at yelling volume. The upside is you can do it too if you want — try it, just start talking to your buddy at normal vol. then halfway through go to yelling. It feels great.

I ate a lot of chinese food and most of it was really good. the girlfriend, je, who is korean brought several korean eating habits to the table, such as 1. ordering a lot 2. always wanting soup 3. always needing rice. This made for a lot of uneaten (wasted) food, but whatever, it’s not like anyone on the planet is starving or nothing.

We were fully armed with three shanghai-city travel guides. The chinese one (je speaks chinese) and the korean Lonely Planet soon got dropped for the English Lonely Planet, which due to being printed this year, was actually useful. At first we only looked at it sporadically, but then je got into it a lot more, choosing places to eat, shop and so on, according to the book. We’d get to a restaurant, she’d say “what does he recommend?” and order something according to the book. ‘He’ referred to the collective of people that write these kind of things. Man – that guy knows everything!

I can’t much go into specifics of what and where was good to eat because I left the book with her – who is still there studying. There was one place in the north of the city that was Uighur food, which was really cool. All these strange and way-interesting dudes and families sitting around on big circular tables. There was entertainment, including this Uighur dude going at it with a Uighur guitar.

Also see a short clip of it.

The French Concession area was really nice. Came across a few good cafes, delis — that kind of thing – the kind of thing it’s basically impossible to find in Seoul. Seoul only has chain stores. As far as China goes, Shanghai is pretty expensive but it’s not really the kind of thing a Westerner or someone on a 1st world income notices.

We did everything the guide said including getting a massage from some blindies at Lulu, walking around the backstreets to find the old Russian church and visiting the chinese sex museum. It was pretty heavily over-rated and next door to an aquarium that actually smelled of dead fish. But as they say, sex sells (as do smelly fish).
According to the pervs on Flickr, this sordid scene was the most popular. It’s of some dodgey bloke having it off with a blind man’s wife, while he holds the kid, oblivious to what is going on.

One place we stopped into that’s not in the book was the local branch and national headquarters for ‘wall street english’ — and english-teaching place. Je had been thinking about signing up for some courses to keep her speaking going, and more than anything, as a way of meeting chinese people (she’s just new there). when they say me there, tagging along, they seemed to feel the need to go the hard sell — as if I was the ‘rich uncle’ or something.
I’ll say this – they must have a huge profit margin because that was a big place, with a lot of people learning there but they only had four native speakers on the books. It’s all done with computers, they said – which would never work in this country.

Anyway, I’ll be going back to Shangers. Mostly for the girl, but for the food too.

First thing was leaving the airport, which can be done in several ways. The best one is taking the new maglev train. If you check out that site and look at the little flash animation on the right, titled ‘virtual travel’, that’s exactly what it’s like, including jerking music.
I could post a picture of the view from the train, but it’s rather ordinary and despite zipping by at 431kms per hour, the scenery didn’t blur on the camera. I was kind of surprised that the whole thing still vibrated quite a bit — I would have thought that the Lev as in levitation part of maglev would have solved that.
It did speed up rather quickly, without it feeling like it was. The whole thing was over very fast, ten minutes in fact. I kind of thought that in order to really savour the experience of being on the world’s first hispeed-maglev train, they should’ve slowed it down for a bit.
What’s it look like to the naked eye, going at that speed across land? One way to find out is to stick your head out the car window and down towards the ground. Keep stretching and eventually things will buzz by in roughly the same fashion.

Hi. Last week for the week I was in Shanghai. I have been meaning to start putting things down about it, but there’s so much. Expect it to come out in fragments. Here is a couple. The plane ride over was delayed and late in several ways. From now on, when going on these short haul Airbus A-300s, sitting near an emergency exit is no longer fun or preferable. The fact that the plane was fully booked made me realise that it’s been well over a year since I was on a plane where I didn’t have empty seats next to me.
Accordingly, for on the way back, I asked for an aisle seat near the front, and got it. Much better. First to the Immigration window! One way or the other, I’d dead-glad I didn’t see this until after I got back. Can you imagine the amount of screaming going on inside that cylinder? I can.

Architecture is something there is plenty of in Shanghai, The Pearl of the Orient is one of the modern stand-outs. The spheres look a bit like ET the Extraterrestrial’s spaceship, I fancy.

I’m very much missing warm air, wet sand and salt water. Winter has been long. It is almost over, or so it would seem. It has this way of giving you a week’s worth of hope then plunging back. It the weather report!

Go check out http://squarepusher.net/ playing his bass like a crazy man. I love those English people — when they speak and behave they seem so English.

Project “Curtains” is under way. It is about curtains. All the curtains I saw available looked shocking. Thus, with the help of a friend I got some material ordered off the Internet. You can order anything on the Internet here.
It’s red velvet. I always knew I would have red velvet curtains one day in my life. I just didn’t realise it would come so soon. I am unsure of the quality of the velvet. I may end up just cutting it to size with scissors and attaching it to the wall with heatable-glue hooks.

The time has come. I am going to become a lead guitarist. that will be my profession. I’ll get a band and all the members will be adequate. They will do their thing, and I will look keenly to the other guitarist, with my Vol. turned to 1, I’ll play maybe every third or fourth chord — whatever I can manage. Then at about 3 fifths of the way through the song an opening will be made. I’ll go Whaaaa, whaa-whaaa… … .. . .. Whaaa. It’s the modest leadbreak. Nothing fancy.
I am in the midst of compiling a list of modest leadbreaks. ‘Cinnamon Girl’ by Neil Young may or may not be on there depending on what else shows up.

I would also just like to say that the character of Anton Chigurh in the movie No Country For Old Men was one of the most impressive I have seen in years. Totally evil and totally impressive.

Hi. I was just reading this thing about blowing on laptops and it reminded me of a minivison I had on the bus on friday while in theta-cycles. Moving songs around on iTunes will be like pouring water from one cup to another.

Tonight I watched Juno (2007). At first I was sceptical. I thought it was going to be too cute, trying to hard but it turned out to be really nice. There was some really nice scene in there.

cat is a 70yo man

The last three winters I have been here, I haven’t been here for all of it. I got a three week reprieve from it this year too, but it doesn’t feel like it. Ze Vinter is really dragging out. I am tired of the feeling tenseness when stepping out.

I am liking the Depeche Mode. It is interesting that they were so big — I didn’t know that. They sold, like, 100 million records. Listening to some of their smash hits now, like, ‘Enjoy the Silence’ and there’s a lot more guitar than I thought there was in their music. I like that guy’s vocals.

Not just one country, or one group of countries but the whole damn planet. [“I’m a whole damn town!”]

The people’s of the whole planet spread out evenly across every patch of arable land. Salt water was made fresh. The deserts were greened. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was occupied with farming.
Then one day all the thoughts of the world’s peoples turned to tomatoes. Singularly, completely, without aberration, the people began to grow tomatoes. Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes; Black Russians, cherry tomatoes, hydroponic tomatoes — but mostly the normal kind.
They started to pile up but the people kept on with the growing.

I could see all this from my platform in geosynchronous orbit. It happened steadily and in not much time at all. A planet where blue, greens and white once predominated became red.
In the first few weeks after the red became noticeable I would ring people to let them know what they were doing was probably a mistake.
To them the incoming number would show up as starting with 001 so they thought I was Skyping them from the next farm-collectorate. “Ur pulling my leg”, they would say.
“No! I’m really in space!”
They didn’t believe me when I said everyone was growing tomatoes either. Each thought they were the only ones with such a bright idea.

After a week I gave up and instead would ring random numbers and start singing the David Bowie classic, ‘Starman’. At a ratio of about 1 in 10 (pretty good really) the person would stay on the line and listen to the whole song. I liked floating in zero-G, singing into the phone and I liked to imagine the other person down there, phone to ear, listening quietly while a stranger sang to them.

Sunset. Retreated into bedroom dragging essentials. Essentials include: computer. Psychological impact of larger spaces in house is beyond my coping-ability. The other rooms have windows. The windows have no blinds, curtains, shades or drapes. Feel like I am being watched. (I am being watched.)
Considering subletting the other two rooms to help cover cost of additional psychotherapy sessions.

Moving went extremely quickly and smoothly. Curly, one of the cleaners, decided to help me. I said, no, no it’s okay, I can do it, but she would have none of it and did all the trolley work. The little man driving the truck was much nicer than the one that I had help me a year ago, however I feel that I am still paying too much considering how short the trip was.

In any case, I am here now, as I was this morning, vaguing-out. I sat here waiting for KT Man to arrive and marvelled at the trees (at this point dormant) outside the window and a certain amount of mountain peak at the top of the W-SW window.

Things that one can immediately like about the place

• balcony
• jumbo-sized fridge. Could fit at least 3 adult bodies in there.
• 3 burners on the stove (gas!)
• bookshelves & closet space up the ying-yang
• heated towel rack (kooky. hope it doesn’t cause fire)
• a real toilet bowl. I think I’ve mentioned before how disconcerting it is to “bomb the beach” instead of “going damn-busters” like the rest of the civilised world does.

In between moments of vagueness I tried to get my head around the concept of living in a place that has more than one room. For a lot of people, one room in this country is the standard, but the little bungalow that was my last abode in HOJU was the same, albeit long and carpeted. The last two places in three years here also featured one room, totalling 5+ years of one room. I don’t know how I break my stuff up across the three rooms here. It’ll be strange for there not to be a computer one roll and a bit of a stretch away from the bed. Suddenly, I feel like I don’t have enough furniture.