Slums of Shaolin

Visiting Sichuan: Emeishan and Chengdu

2009-09-01T22:55:00.011+08:00

Far too long ago, I wrote an update about visiting the really-quite-impressive Buddha statues of Leshan and Jiajiang. Really, the Big Buddha of Leshan was the impetus for the trip - my sister was visiting China, saw a picture of the Buddha, and knew she wanted to see that. However I was also happy to have a look at Sichuan while there - I have a lot of friends from Chengdu and Sichuan, and they've really talked it up a lot, and Chengdu in particular has an excellent reputation.

I'll start with Emeishan, or Emei Mountain, which is one of the famous Buddhist Mountains of China, dotted with ancient temples, there's also tribes of monkeys to contend with. My sister, a former resident of India, was a lot less excited about that latter prospect than I was. But truth be told, I never even saw a monkey, I only heard them off in the distance. It's because I mostly ended up hiking around the lower reaches of the mountain, rather than doing the normal tourist thing and taking a two and a half hour trip to the top and then walking down. If it sounds like I missed out on scenic views, Sichuan's climate was pretty much on par for the course, and was too foggy to see all that much.

I almost planned for a multi-day hike and I'm glad I didn't. Generally the mountain views weren't much, and so for the most part what I saw was this:

It's a non-descript picture, but it was a non-descript environment, a whole lot of the trail looked like that. The main thing to notice is there's a whole bunch of concrete stairs going up and down, and most of the trail involved walking up and down concrete stairs, which really killed the legs. Hikes in China are all paved over like this, it's a lot less fun than being in California, where I got really into Bay Area Hiker last time I was around, and went on a number of amazing dirt paths through redwoods and so forth:

There were Buddhist temples, although they weren't of ancient construction and were of the cheesy tourist-oriented kind, something like smaller but better versions of Jing'an Temple. Many of them had restaurants serving simple Chinese-Buddhist-style (vegan) meals, I had one and it was pretty good. As corny as they could be, the temples were a colorful break from the hiking.

I ended my short trip in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. It's famous for the spicy food and for the beautiful women. However, my sister's vegetarian and we didn't get the chance to try the normal local eating options, and we looked around and I swear the women didn't really look much different than in Shanghai. Later I heard that women there are considered more beautiful mainly because they're whiter.

Perhaps my expectation were too high, but I just didn't think much of Chengdu. My favorite was Wenshu Temple, which had a lot of older locals just lazing about doing their thing. I also ran across a Tibetan area with a decent Tibetan restaurant. However for the most part it felt like a standard, poorly-constructed Chinese city, with the tourist sites being expensive and uninteresting. I'm told that it's a great city to live in and enjoy a laid-back atmosphere, but as a tourist just there for a couple days, I admit I didn't much care for it. Also, as a city of four million people without a subway or even elevated highways, the traffic at rush hour was about the worst I've ever seen in my life, and I've had a daily commute from Oakland to Palo Alto! I don't want to end on a sour note, so here's a picture of a nice old-style gateway:

Decent Western Food in Jing'an

2009-07-08T22:38:00.004+08:00

I love talking bad about the foreigner food in Shanghai. That’s just what I do. OK, the food has it coming; it’s none of it very good, and really I don’t think there’s any foreign restaurants that would make it if they were based back in San Francisco. But partially I just like complaining about restaurants, and really I could whine on and one about even my favorites.

But I’m going to take a break from the trend with this update, and talk about a couple Western Restaurants that, while not perfect, I’ll give a qualified recommendation. They’re both reasonably tasty, reasonably inexpensive restaurants that are worth casual visits.

The first is Munchies, a American Restaurant in the modus of Shanghai’s other American Restaurants, where in addition to a psychedelic Pac-Man logo, there’s a menu full of hamburgers and hot dogs. I mean I guess back in America I’d eat hamburgers and hot dogs every once in a while, like at ballgames or on the 4th of July, but it’s a little strange how it’s the staple of nearly every single American Restaurant in Shanghai. But I have given both of them a try at Munchies, and they’re both good renditions.

It wins points for having a side of a decent cole slaw (or French Fries or various salads), but really hamburgers are boring, who cares. Most interesting is that they have Cincinnati Chili. I’ve actually never heard of that before, and was only vaguely aware of the idea. It’s a Midwestern variation of Chili, with cinnamon and all-spice, and not any heat at all. Instead of dumping it on rice like anyone sensible human being, they dump it on spaghetti! It also comes in different 'specials', where maybe they’ll also dump cheese or onions or beans on the spaghetti. This is a five-way special:

Except for the hamburgers the portions are more of a snack than a meal, and the desserts are just cake and ice cream. Regardless, go for the chili, and if any gentle readers can say a word about whether it’s authentic, that would be appreciated. Actually I’d recommend searching some Cincinnati Chili down, even for those in the US - Amazon has mix packets of Skyline Chili, maybe they’re worth it?

Munchies is on 974 Wuding Lu, near Changde Lu, about a ten minute walk north of Jing'an Si Station. Meals cost somewhere around 50 kuai per person, about $7.50, and it's open from 10 until late every day.

The other place I'll mention here is Wagas, a chain with numerous locations wherever white people congregate. I tend towards the branch on Jiaozhou Lu and Xinzha Lu, about a five minute walk north of Jing'an. I’ve known about Wagas for years, but just as an annoying Café. OK I’m not a café person and so I can’t claim expertise, and their black coffee does seem pretty decent. However the several times I had gone before, it was over-run with office-away-from-office people, all on their computers and loudly talking business on their cellphones. Since I go to cafes to chat or study, it’s kind of not the atmosphere I go for.

However I found out that after six at night they have a deal where their pseudo-Italian dishes get priced down to 33 or 40 kuai, that’s about five or six dollars. It’s a pretty good deal: some of the pastas are really excellent, I haven't had them all, but my favorite has been a pasta with pumpkin, spinach, and feta cheese. Additionally the meals come with a small salad and a few pieces of very plain bread.

It’s not all perfect: Wagas’ atmposphere just isn’t as relaxed as a café should be, and I guess the computer nearby my food shows I’m guilty of treating Wagas as an office, as well. It’s also strictly a restaurant to visit by yourself, and between the bad atmosphere and the dog-bowl-like serving plate, I’d strongly recommend taking someone out to even Saizeriya, before Wagas.

Also, a simple can of soda costs 20 kuai, the equivalent of three dollars, which makes sense for a café but is kind of absurd if you’re there for inexpensive pasta. A few of the dishes are horrible, one pasta dish is literally noodles, thin chicken strips, and a quarter of a lemon for you to squeeze on top. So, order with a degree of caution, and things generally aren’t perfect, but on the other hand, excellent 33 kuai pastas make it all worthwhile.

I’ll end this post with a semi-apology. I have very strong feelings about what’s happening in Xinjiang, and I feel a little silly writing a China blog and talking about a couple semi-competent Western Restaurants. Adding on to the absurdity is that this blog is censored in China, and my counter-censorship service is also being censored, and I'm doing weird run-arounds to get this blog posted.

However from the beginning I’ve given myself rules for this blog, it’s not a personal account of the awesome party I went to over the weekend, it’s non-political, and so forth. I'd surely break the rule if I had a wonderfully informed opinion or any special information, or perhaps if I went to a particularly bouncing party over the weekend, but that's not the case. I do encourage everyone to inform themselves about what’s happening, even if it’s just a quick look over Wikipedia entry on Xinjiang.

The Other Side of the Great Firewall

2009-07-01T15:06:00.012+08:00

Blogger and Blogspot are still blocked within China, which really should motivate me to transfer this entire blog over to a private server, but really has just motivated me to sign up for Freedur's free one-month trial. It's a service that essentially re-routes my browser through Texas, so I can use websites that aren't normally viewable from within China. It's actually very simple and easy to use, and I'd recommend it, although a friend of mine gave good marks to the similar Hotspot Shield, which is free. Update 9/1/2009 - The company was stolen by an employee, and the original company now offers the Freedur service for free.

Just as how from within China computers can't normally view Youtube or Blogspot, computers from within the US are blocked from many of China's vast resources of online pirated music & video. Granted, just walking down the street there's plenty of bootleg DVDs available, but most of the people I know have moved over to online bootlegs in the last few years. And even at Internet Cafes, a whole lot of people are just there to watch movies on the 17" screens...maybe they go for all the cigarette smoke...

As shown up top though, it's very easy to turn the Freedur proxy service on or off, if it's off then one can see the same web connection as any other user in China. For example, I can go to Baidu, China's most popular Internet browser (maybe 50% more popular than Google), and with a couple of clicks come to this:

Which is a list of Michael Jackson's most popular songs. From within China, clicking on "Billie Jean" brings up a list of songs that can be listened to or downloaded:

Where yeah, clicking on "listen" brings up the song at full quality, it even has karaoke lyrics alongside!

Meanwhile, going over to the American side of the Great Firewall of China, suddenly Baidu says (in Chinese) that it can't find any search results...

It's not just topical results, like Michael Jackson or Billie Jean. Looking up "Beatles" from China's most popular search engine will yield 20,000 MP3s, while looking up "Beatles" from America will yield none.

It's not just music, movies and TV shows are often bootlegged on Chinese video-sharing sites, such as youku. Looking up the popular ongoing HBO show "True Blood" on youku shows a number of results, the first of which is the entire show, up to last week:

Just like Youtube, it's a simple click to watch the episode, with an hour-long episode fit into a single clip. Quality is somewhere between Youtube's normal quality, and Youtube's HD quality.

Whereas clicking on the video from the American side of the Great Firewall of China brings up this:

This blocking is being done by the companies in question, not any American government task force. I imagine it's to keep off the radar of the large companies and their lawyers, in nations where IP rights are actually enforced.

I can't claim innocent; I and probably every other person in China watches bootleg TV and movies. In fact it's essentially impossible to buy legitimate versions of most DVDs or CDs, and even seemingly legitimate stores sell pirated videos.

On the other hand, I really think that massive bootlegging largely explains why Mainland China's movies and music are universally so very very awful.

From the Roof of the Post Office

2009-06-28T01:01:00.010+08:00

The International Post Office is the Volvo of Shanghai's colonial architecture: boxy but good. While it's actually a very large and well-known building, on the corner of Sichuan Lu and the Suzhou River, just about every single picture of it focuses on one particularly attractive corner, with a clock and some bronze statues:

Not so long ago I blogged about the street it's on, Sichuan Lu, and I've had a number of posts about the area. Suffice it to say that the post office is in an interesting area and on an interesting street, and while the Postal Museum may not in itself be a highlight to Shanghai, it's definitely worth making the Museum part of a larger wandering. I'd also like to give special credit to Delongguan Xiaolongbao. While this branch of the chain lacks much class, it's truly excellent xiaolongbao, and just a few minute's walk away. It's also interesting walking around all the older buildings and seeing the occasional river traffic, with the Post Office on the far right:

I won't go into much detail about the Museum itself. It's located one floor up and it's crazy extensive. I'm no stamp collector, but there were a couple interesting bits: a short take on the very early history of delivered messages, from thousands of years ago, and then a collection of Communist era stamps. They often looked like Chinese Propaganda Posters, only done in miniature. However a whole lot of the museum was given to old Postmasters or 1930s company tennis teams or what have you. Anyway it's all free and the boring bits are quite skippable. At the end strangely enough there's even an old railroad car and suspended propeller plane.

The best part is that after the museum, there's an elevator to the rooftop terrace. There's actually not much to the rooftop itself, except for some astroturf and a number of the worst Engrish signs in Shanghai, all collected in one place:

There's a beautiful sweeping view over both the Bund and Lujiazui. The pollution when I took this picture turned the distance into some kind of watercolor:

While it's also possible to turn and look over at Sichuan Lu and a more typical slice of Shanghai:

Shanghai Arts and Crafts Museum

2009-06-24T12:29:00.000+08:00

The Shanghai Arts and Crafts Museum is another tourist-oriented place that I think is worth dropping by, even for those who live in this fair city. It's located on 79 Fenyang Lu & Taiyuan Lu, which is near-ish to the Changshu Lu subway station. It's in a pleasant area with a lot of musical instrument stores nearby. The building and grounds are themselves very pleasant - it's a large mansion originally built in 1905 for a French government official, and it sort of resembles a miniature White House:

Really it's a small complex of buildings, and I gather it acts as some government-sponsored master class for teachers and apprentices of traditional Chinese handicrafts. Most of the mansion is dedicated towards display rooms, where these arts are shown. It's mostly what one would expect, for example a number of examples of carved jade:

There's also carved wood, and to honest I found those examples much more impressive, some of them were unbelievably finely detailed. This wasn't the most impressive example, but it's always fun to see artwork featuring angry proletariat:

I think I've put off talking about one big negative to the whole place too long: it doubled as a well-done shopping center. A lot of the art had price tags attached, and there was a huge gift store downstairs. That said, it was easy to ignore the price tags, there was absolutely no pressure to buy anything, and really it seemed like a good if not-cheap place to buy those kind of handicrafts. It certainly didn't have the feel of one of the (too many) places where they take tour groups and try to hustle them into buying corny souvenirs.

Moving on, there were many other varieties of Chinese handicrafts, they didn't get as large displays but they were also interesting. One favorite was Gu embroidery, where the artist takes a transparent gauze and then "paints" a scene onto the gauze using extremely fine silk threads. This isn't the best photograph, but the best examples shined with a beautiful sheen to them:

Another examples is figurines made out of dough. Actually there was also an artist there working on these when I visited, it was fascinating seeing someone work with what's essentially playdough to make actual art:

Visiting Sichuan: Leshan & Jiajiang

2009-06-21T12:43:00.002+08:00

I've long wanted to visit Sichuan, if for no other reason than because I have a number of friends from the area, and they kept talking it up! I ended up making a very quick trip out, and while I wasn't entirely impressed I'll start out on a high note by talking about some carved Buddhas.

OK that maybe sound horribly boring, especially if you happen to not be me, but the Leshan seated Buddha gets a special pass for being two hundred fifty feet high - the largest Buddha in the world, ever since the Taliban blew up the standing Buddhas carved out of a cliff-side, not so long ago. It really is an impressive sight, especially as one can walk right up to and alongside the Buddha, which also happens to show the sense of scale. Those people on the far side look tiny!

One doesn't just walk around up top, there's also a thin path down, right alongside the Buddha. When I went it was pleasant except for a heavy fog (which is on par for Sichuan), but I've heard it can get horrifically crowded, and there were even Disneyland-style barriers set up, so the lines would have to snake left and right. I could just skip right past them. Anyway it's interesting to go down the cliff, there's all sorts of different views. The Buddha faces a river, and it's also possible to get a view from a boat or a nearby sand bar.

Leshan is a couple hours away from Chengdu, and it's a no-horse town where I get the idea you just have a look at the Buddha and then go on somewhere else. Jiajiang is much the same, only worse. Jiajiang's one claim to fame, for a tourist anyway, is the Thousand Buddha cliffs. That said, all the Buddhas are pretty impressive. Therels really hundreds, or perhaps even a literal thousand Buddas tucked away:

The site was probably a lot more impressive forty or fifty years ago, before the Cultural Revolution came to town. About half the Buddhas had their head knocked of, and I wouldn't be surprised if their were other Buddhas that were destroyed altogether:

Additionally, these Buddhas were really all there were to the area. OK, I don't want to complain too much. If the site was located in Shanghai, it would be a must-visit. On the other hand, Jiajiang itself is out of the way, and then from Jiajiang Bus Station it was a weird local bus ride, where after driving a few blocks, everybody got out of the bus and walked a couple blocks over and changed buses. I'd recommend a taxi, on the other hand it's probably impossible to catch a taxi from the cliffs, so it's best to hire one - no idea how much that should cost. Additionally, although Jiajiang tries to play up the whole cliffs area as a sprawling tourist area, really the cliffs is it. I have nothing more to say so I'll end this with a picture of a flower my sister took:

Dragon Boat Racing

2009-06-17T12:58:00.002+08:00

Dragon Boat Racing, like restaurants putting Soy Sauce on every table, is one of those things that I just assumed would be big in China until I actually arrived here. It figures into plenty Hong Kong movies, and in Oakland they had a pretty big annual competition near my apartment, here's a picture:

In Shanghai, people are aware of Dragon Boat festival, but it's not a big deal at all. It's much more popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Perhaps because of the history: Dragon Boat Racing is associated with the traditional Duanwu Festival, on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese calendar, and the holiday was suppressed for many years by the PRC, because of its feudal history I guess. It wasn't until 2007 that it became an official holiday again.

So even if it isn't all the big of a deal, it is a colorful sight to watch. The dragon racing I saw was on the Suzhou River, very near Zhongtan Station.

Actually while the grounds to the side were small, they were extremely crowded with onlookers. It was a bright sunny day, a lot of women were carrying umbrellas to beat off the sun:

Just the tiniest bit more on the holiday: it's a traditional holiday, that's now generally associated with Qu Yuan, a poet from 2300 years ago, although the holiday predates Qu Yuan. People also eat zongzi, a rice ball very strangely depicted to the right, and drink a special alcohol, all supposedly in remembrance of Qu Yuan. Even with my limited knowledge of Chinese poetry, I knew Qu Yuan through a Jack Kerouac poem I like: "O Chu Yuan! No!/No suicide! Wine please wine!"

In addition to international teams, there were teams from local school and universities. I'm not a dragon boat festival expert, but I found it was kind of disappointing that the dragon boats were all the same, and kind of ugly. I thought one of the parts of dragon boat festival was making the boat looking all distinctive and cool!

Chinese Acrobatics Show

2009-06-14T13:09:00.003+08:00

My sister visited Shanghai not so long ago, and it was a nice opportunity to play tour-guide. I ended up going to some places that I've long wanted to visit, but hadn't yet been able to rationalize a reason. I'll have a few relevant updates about these places, the first will be the Shanghai Acrobatics shows.

There's different acrobatic shows, but I went to the one on 57 Maoming Lu. It's a convenient location, very near the Huangpi Lu subway station, and right near Jinxian Lu, which has a number of restaurants that, while not upscale, vie for being the very best in Shanghai. It all takes place in a fancy old re-purposed movie theater, with a 1930s ambiance:

The show is one crazy stunt after the next crazy stunt. Some of the stunts involved people who were just amazingly flexible, to the point it was a little difficult to watch them. I couldn't stop thinking how much pain I would be in if I even tried those kind of moves:

And there were also freakish examples of balance. This lady later climbed up onto a see-saw and started swinging around, with these glasses still piled on:

Speaking of see-saws, there were the stunts where people get thrown into the air, flip around three times, and then land on someone's shoulders:

And finally, an insane balancing act of women doing handstands on chairs while balancing themselves on other women doing handstands on chairs. The safety lines took away from the sense of danger, but it would have been insane not to use them:

Much as with gymnastics, these acrobatics are impressive enough on television, but are mouth-dropping crazy to see up-close and in real life. I'll stress on the up-close. The Lanxin Theater isn't all that large, but you don't want to be in the balcony, and I'd say try to be in the first five rows or so, or don't bother going! There's a second ticket box office near the American Center on 1376 Nanjing Road, between Jing'an Station and Nanjing West Station. The actual show is daily from seven thirty until nine.

The cheap tickets are around a hundred kuai, and the good tickets are twice that. A bit much, but as far as it goes for things that only tourists do, it's cheaper and more fun than M on the Bund!

Holiday in Cambodia: More pictures of Angkor Wat

2009-06-10T12:25:00.010+08:00

To go back a little bit, I earlier posted updates about Cambodia, a country which isn’t terribly expensive to get to and which has direct flights from Shanghai and which is totally amazing and which basically everyone should visit.

However, my visit to the Angkor Wat temple complex was touched by truly terrible weather. For all but a few hours, it was dark dark dark and grey. The pictures from my digital camera just weren’t up to snuff. I finally got the negatives from my film camera digitized, and I was happier with those pictures. So, I’ll take this opportunity to post a few more pictures from Siem Reap and the area around Angkor Wat.

I encourage everyone to hop into the nearest jet and fly right over!

Shanghai Botanical Garden

2009-06-08T17:02:00.013+08:00

I recently went to the Shanghai Botanical Gardens with a local photography club. Although we went in terrible weather, I ended up finding it very, yes, picturesque. There were indeed a whole lot of flowers, and in general it was a nice park grounds.

I don't have a macro lens or extension tube that would allow real close-ups (although I've resolved to get one,) but I’ll quickly show a few photographs of the many flowers there:

The park is in the far south of the City, but it’s not terribly inconvenient: take the #3 line south, all the way down to Shilong Lu Station, which is one station before it comes to an end. From there, walk about five minutes south down Dongquan Lu, to the Park’s North Gate. It’s 15 kuai to get in. There’s also a more expensive ticket that grants entrance to special exhibits inside, but it makes more sense to just pay at the exhibit gate – the park is so large, I can’t imagine also going to all the special exhibits.

Although the grounds just go on and on, I thought the most impressive display of flowers was right at the north Entrance. There were also playgrounds for the kiddies, small bamboo forests, an atrium, Chinese-y pavilions that were popular with wedding photographers, and small ponds. The ponds were interesting, because people were out in force, fishing for crawfish!

Crawfish season is probably over by now, but it was crazy how it works. It was generally done as a two person job. The first person would hold chicken intestines from a rope on a stick into the water – and it was always chicken intestine, maybe that’s the cheapest meat, maybe it just stays on the line the best? The crawfish go after the meat, and a second person comes with a net and snags them. Although the fishing spots seemed over-crowded, some people were sporting huge bags of crawfish.

For those with an interest in hunting crawfish, my friend later told me, a better technique is just to use a flashlight at night, crawfish are attracted to the light. Fortunately for the crawfish, the park officially closes at 5:30, although the guards seem pretty relaxed about getting people out by then.

Back Like Disco

2009-06-08T10:57:00.005+08:00

Blogger and Blogspot are still blocked in China - I guess Blogspot's long history of initiating riots is being held against it? Anyway I finally broke down and got myself a proxy, so expect to have updates coming soon, hopefully later today. I'll try to get back on a regular schedule.

I'm still contemplating getting a separate host for the blog, like hostgator. I hesitate, because I'm pretty much 100% happy with the blogspot software, and converting the blog over would be a huge time-waster, and ha ha I don't want to spend the money! But of course this is a China blog, and if it can't be accessed in China...

Finally, I'll probably roll out a separate blog about modern Chinese literature, in the next couple weeks.

San Mao Translation - The Child Bride

2009-05-26T10:04:00.001+08:00

This blog is on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China, which prevents me from doing my normal updates. While I can't post pictures, I have set things up to allow me to send text-only updates. So let me take the opportunity to turn this blog into a text-based one, until either I set up a new server or blogspot is unblocked...

This is a translation I made a few weeks ago, just for fun. It's a short story by San Mao, from her autobiographical collection Tales of the Sahara. San Mao was a Taiwanese author and remains one of the most popular authors in China, but hasn't been translated into English. I think this story is interesting, although as fair warning it's a straightforward discussion of the story title, and can get ugly. Some more information on the author can be found at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmao_(author)

Additionally, San Mao's nom de plum was taken from a pre-Communist comic that I've blogged about before:

http://slumsofshaolin.blogspot.com/2008/06/sanmao-zhang-lepings-cartoon-look-at.html

The Child Bride
By: San Mao
Translation by: Jeff Rutsch, jeff oaktowncrack com

I first met Guka around this time last year, she and her family lived in a big house near my small apartment. She's the oldest daughter of Fudi, a police officer. At the time, Guka was combing her thick hair, and wearing a long flowing African dress. She was barefoot, without a veil or burka. Outside of my room she'd often call out to her goats, with her clear and lively voice. She seemed like a happy little girl.

Later she would come to study with me. When I asked her how old she was, she told me "You have to ask Fudi, us Desert Women don't know how old we are." She and her brothers and sisters never called Fudi 'father,' they simply called him by name. Fudi told me she was ten, asking me at the same time "You're also ten-something years old? You and Guka get along so well." I couldn't answer this absurd question, I just forced myself to smile.

Over the next six months I became close friends with Fudi's family, and nearly every day we'd drink tea together. One day I was drinking tea with Fudi and his wife, Gebai. Fudi suddenly declared: "Our daughter will get married soon. Please tell her, when you can spare the time." I swallowed my tea, and with difficulty asked, "You mean Guka?" He said "Yes, ten day after Ramadan she'll get married." Ramadan is Islam's Holy Month, and it was just about to begin.

I drank some tea silently, and then couldn't help but ask "Don't you think Guka is still too young? She's only ten." Fudi very casually said "Too young? My wife was married to me when she was only eight." I remembered that this was Saharan Desert custom, I shouldn't be too judgmental and criticize this sort of thing, so I didn't say anything. "Please tell this to Guka, she still doesn't know," Guka's mother requested of me. "Why don't you tell her?" I asked them, amazed. "This sort of thing shouldn't be too direct," Fudi condescendingly answered me. I think the two of them can be very pedantic.

The next day after math class, I told Guka to stay behind, and to light a charcoal fire to boil some tea. "Guka, this time it's your turn," I told her, at the same time as I handed her some tea. "What?" she asked. She didn't understand me. "Silly girl, you're getting married," I told her, directly. She was obviously surprised, her face flashed red, and with a small voice she asked "When?" I told her "Ten days after Ramadan, do you know with whom it might be?" She shook her head, put down her teacup, and said nothing. That was the first time I had ever seen her look worried.

A few days passed, and as I was buying a few things in town, I ran into Guka's older brother and another youth. He introduced me, "Abudi is a policeman, working under Fudi. He's my friend, and he's also going to be Guka's husband." When I heard that this was Guka's future husband, I looked him over. Abudi wasn't too dark, he was very tall and handsome, he spoke politely, his gaze was gentle, and he gave a very good first impression. When I got back I searched out Guka, and told her "Don't worry! Your future husband is Abudi, he's very young and attractive, not rough or crude. Fudi chose well for you." Guka heard what I said and lowered her head shyly, but from the look in her eyes, it seemed she had already accepted that the marriage was going to happen.

According to Saharan Desert custom, the dowry when a daughter married was a huge transaction. Before there was no coinage in the desert, so the bride's family expected flocks of sheep, camels, rolls of cloth, slaves, flour, sugar, tea, and those sorts of things. Now it's civilized some, and while they still maintain the same basic concept, money has become the replacement. The day Guka's dowry came, my husband Hexi was invited to go out and drink tea - I'm a woman, so I stayed at home. In less than an hour, Hexi came back and told me "Abudi gave Fudi two hundred thousand Spanish pesos. I didn't think Guka was worth so much money!" (Two hundred thousand pesos was worth more than one hundred thirty thousand Taiwan Dollars.) "That's simply human trafficking!" I stated flatly, at the same time in my heart I was a little jealous of Guka - when I got married, my parents didn't receive a single lamb.

During this month, Guka's clothing changed. Fudi bought many new clothes for her, not in black but a drab blue. Because the clothes were dyed so poorly, the color all came off onto her skin. Guka used these deep blue clothes to wrap herself entirely in blue, it had an other-worldly atmosphere. Although she was still barefoot, she had a pair of gold and silver anklets. She started to do up her hair, and she used a pungent home-made perfume, to muddle the scent from not bathing throughout the year – it all made her seem like a Woman of the Sahara Desert.

On the last day of Ramadan, Fudi took two of his sons to get circumcised, and of course I ran over to see what was happening - Guka was very rarely leaving the house. I went inside to have a look, but the carpets were still dirty, and the only things new were Guka's clothes. I asked her "After you get married, what will you take with you? There's no pan and there's no oven!" She said: "I won't leave, Fudi will still have me live here." I was surprised, and asked her "What about your husband?" She told me, "He'll also come to live here." I really was jealous of her. "How long can you live here?" I asked her. "The custom is, up to six years." No wonder Fudi wanted such a large dowry, the son-in-law would be living at their house!

The day before Guka was to get married, the bridegroom's side of the family came. I gave an imitation-jade bracelet to Guka as a gift, it was something she had always wanted from me. The evening before she was to get married, Guka's auntie came. She was a very old Saharan Desert Person, Guka sat before her and was made up for the wedding. Her hair was twisted into thirty or forty small braids, and on the top of her head was placed a small wig, a little similar to traditional Chinese palace maids. A small colored bead was attached to every braid, but there was no make-up for her face. When her hair was finished, Guka's mother brought in some new clothes. After putting the clothes on there were many fold and creases, and her mother just used a black cloth to tie it up. It made Guka's fat figure look even fatter. "So fat!" I gasped out loud. Her auntie answered me "Fat is beautiful, that's what we want." Wearing many clothes,
Guka quietly sat down. Her face was very beautiful, and the beads in her hair gave a brilliant color to the dark room.

"All right then, let's go!" Guka's auntie and other relatives took her outside. She would stay at her auntie's house for the night, and then return the next day. I suddenly thought of something - wow, Guka didn't take a bath, even for her wedding she still wouldn't bathe?

The date of the wedding, Fudi's house was a little different. The filthy grass mats were nowhere to be seen, the goats had been chased out, and there was a slaughtered camel by the front entrance. In the main hall was spread out a number of red Arabic carpets, and most interesting was that in the corner of the room was a big sheepskin drum, it looked like it was at least a hundred years old.

As dusk came, and the sun set below the horizon, the vast Saharan desert was dyed blood-red. The sound from the drum started. It sounded mysterious but monotonous, droning on loudly. Unless one knew in advance about this wedding ceremony, the mysterious rhythm would actually be somewhat scary. I put on my sweater as I walked over to Fudi's house, fantasizing that I was entering into 'A Tale of Arabian Nights.'

When I entered the house the ambience was terrible, inside the main hall sat a group of Saharan Desert People, all of them smoking. The air was disgusting. Abudi was pressed inside this group, if I hadn't seen him before I would have never known he was the bridegroom. In the corner of the room sat a woman who was as black as charcoal, she was the only woman to sit with the men. She didn't have a head covering, and over her shoulders was draped a black cloth. Her head was facing upwards, and she was absorbed in beating on the drum. She would often stand up and rock her body, and scream out in a high-pitched, primitive voice. It was reminiscent of an American Indian. She was the most remarkable person in the room. "Who is she?" I asked Guka's older brother. "She's a slave my grandmother borrowed from a village neighbor, she's famous for playing the drums." "She's really an amazing slave," I cried out in admiration.

At this time three old women came in to have a seat, and sang along to the beat. Their singing was in a drone and the melody sounded like crying. All the men started to clap along. Because I'm a woman, I could only look at this all from outside the window, all the younger women were pressed outside the window. Their faces were covered up, and only their beautiful eyes could be seen. Two hours quickly passed, the sky was already black, the sound of the drums was still the same, and the clapping was still to the same melody. I asked Guka's mother, "How long will this go on for?" She told me "It's still early. You should go get some sleep." I asked Guka's younger sister to come wake me before the bride was to be given away.

At three in the morning the desert is calm, but the cold makes people shiver. Guka's older brother and Hexi were in the alleyway outside, talking about cameras. I pulled on an overcoat and came outside, Guka's brother casually asked, "Oh, will she go too?" I immediately demanded I be allowed to go, and was finally allowed. Women never have any pull in these kind of situations.

The street that we lived on was covered in Jeeps, both new and old. Because we had some prestige amongst Fudi's friends and family, we were allowed in the car that went to go fetch the bride. This long line of cars drove around honking their horns, and the men would all yell out towards Guka's auntie's house.

It's said that in the past the custom was to ride a camel and fire a gun, then go into the tent to fetch the bride. In modern times, the Jeep has replaced the camel, and honking the horn has replaced firing off blanks, but all the loud noise and commotion is the same. The most infuriating thing about the custom was that as soon as Abudi got out of his car, a group of young people burst into Guka's room, and without even a greeting, seized her arm and dragged her outside. Everybody laughed, but Guka kept her head down and struggled against them. She's quite fat, so Abudi's friends also helped to pull her out. This made her start to cry. I didn't know if the tears were real or not, but looking at this rough gang of youth forcing her outside upset me greatly. I bit into my lip to look at this farce, it all made me so upset.

When Guka had been pulled past the door, she stretched out her hand at Abudi's face to scratch at it, leaving long lines of red blood. Abudi didn't back down, he grabbed her hand and twisted it away. Suddenly everything was silent, and only Guka's occasional gasps of tears unsettled the silence of the night.

As they fought, Guka was still being dragged to the side of the Jeep. I was so worried, I yelled at Guka in a loud voice: "Silly girl, get in the car, don't fight it!" Guka's older brother smiled and told me: "Don't worry, this is just the local custom. If there's no struggle, other people would laugh. This sort of scene is the mark of a good woman. If she didn't struggle, it would be like they weren't really getting married." I sighed. He continued.

"Later in the bridal chamber she'll have to cry out and scream. You'll see, it's remarkable." It really is remarkable, but I don't like this traditional style of marriage.

We finally returned to Guka's house, it was already five in the morning. Fudi had slinked off, but Guka's mother, siblings, and friends still hadn't gone to sleep yet. I sat with Guka's and Abudi's friends in the big hall, and started drinking tea and eating the camel meat. Guka had previously been sent to the small room off to the side, and was sitting there by herself.

After eating a little, the sound of the drum came again, and the male guests started clapping. I hadn't slept all night and was very tired, but I couldn't bring myself to leave. "San Mao, you go back home and sleep, later I'll come and get you," Hexi told me. I thought about it, but the wedding ceremony hadn't reached its peak yet, so I didn't go.

There was singing and clapping until the break of day. Then I saw Abudi stand up, and as soon as he got up, the drumming suddenly stopped. Everybody looked at him, and his friends started teasing him.

As we waited for Abudi to go to Guka's room, I started to worry and feel extremely uncomfortable. I thought back towards what Guka's brother had said, "In the bridal chamber she'll have to cry out and scream." I thought that all of us waiting outside, including me, were the worst sort of people, all letting this happen just because of the excuse of local customs.

Long after Abudi had pulled back the cloth covering to the door and entered her room, I was sitting and daydreaming, thinking we were in a different century. I then heard Guka yell "Ah!" and cry out in pain, afterward there was no sound at all. Although the custom is for the woman to shout out, this shout sounded painful, sounded real, sounded hopeless and sad. I sat quietly, and my eyes started to moisten. "Think about it, how is it possible for a ten year old girl to go through this, it's so cruel!" I told Hexi, angrily. He raised his head towards the ceiling, and didn't say anything. We were the only Spanish-speaking foreigners there.

When Abudi brought out the blood-stained sheets, his friends all started to yell out and celebrate, the sound was hard for me to reconcile. From their point of view, it was expected to violently take a woman's virginity by force, on the night of the marriage. I thought this perspective was sad and ridiculous, I stood up and walked out without even looking at them.

The marriage celebrations went on for six days, and every night starting at five guests would come to Fudi's house to eat and drink. People would sing and play the drums until past midnight.

Because every day was all the same, I didn't come again. On the final day, Fudi's other daughter came to speak to me, she asked me "Guka is looking for you, why haven't you visited?" I changed my clothes and went to see Guka.

For the celebrations, Guka was kept apart from the others, in the small room. Guests weren't allowed to see her, without exceptions, and only her husband could enter. But I was a foreigner, so when I went to Guka's house I ignored the custom, pulled back the curtain, and entered her room.

Inside, the room was very dark, and the air smelled rancid. Guka sat in the corner on a pile of mats. She was very glad to see me, she climbed up to me and kissed me on my cheeks, and told me "San Mao, you can't leave me." "I won't go" I told her, "Let me just go get some things for you to eat." I ran out and brought back some meat for her to chew on. "San Mao, do you think I'll have a child soon?" she asked me, in her clear voice.

I didn't know how to answer her, I saw that her previously plump face had become thin over these past five days, and her eyes had sunk. My heart shuddered, and I just looked at her stupidly.

"Can you give me some medicine? That sort of medicine where you won't have children?" She requested it in a hurried, quiet voice. I looked at her, and she was still that ten year old girl to me, with a ten year old girl's face.

"Yes, I'll give you some, don't worry, this will be a secret just between the two of us." I slapped the back of her hand. "Now go get some sleep, your wedding is over already."

An Unexpected Hiatus (Great Firewall of China Problems)

2009-05-22T04:07:00.002+08:00

I'm going to have to take a break from writing this blog. The wise old men who rule the country from a secret bunker have put both Blogspot and Blogger on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China. And unlike earlier blockings, there's no free & easy way to get around the block and access these sites from within China.

I very much enjoy writing this blog, and I'll look into moving the blog to an independent server, I'd also want to transfer my entire collection of posts. While hopefully the blogspot censorship is just temporary, even so I think I should move the blog to its own server. I won't abandon this blog whatever happens, but expect updates to become extremely irregular until I work something out.

Oh! And considering this blog is named after a throwaway line from the first Wu Tang album, it behooves me to mention that Ghostface Killahis coming to Shanghai on June 14th, Zhijiang Dream Factory! I am so down!

Any advice or just saying the what-is-up is much appreciated. jeff oaktowncrack com.

Longhua Temple

2009-05-13T18:45:00.014+08:00

For a city of more than twenty million people, it's somewhat eerie how few respectable Buddhist Temples there are. The very few that do exist are more recently-constructed tourist attractions than temples. Really, there's substantially more impressive Buddhist temples in San Francisco or Honolulu, not to mention any city of Japan or Thailand.

The most impressive of the lot is Longhua Temple. It's quite large, and it has a lengthy history, and unlike some of the other Buddhist temples with lengthy histories (such as Jing'an Temple, or Xiahai Temple), it has the feel of a restoration, rather than a wholesale reconstruction.

I don't want to get all Wikipedia with this update, so I'll just give a few basic facts and show the pictures. The temple dates all the way back to 242, and the oldest surviving building is the pagoda outside, which dates to 977.

Most of the other buildings are re-constructions of that period's style, but as opposed to the goofy concrete buildings of other Shanghai temples, these re-constructions feel more authentic, and are often quite old themselves.

The busiest and best time to go is on the first or fifteenth of the Chinese calendar, it corresponds to the new and full moon. For those curious, here's a handy Western-Chinese calendar converter, with an ugly interface. There's a number of worshipers to be seen around Longhua, often bowing before Buddhas:

More popular is lighting incense, there's a lot of bowing and facing different directions that goes along with that. Here's an incense holder, the buckets nearby are actually to hold all the excess ashes:

It's probably stretching the definition of worship, but there's a few visitors who seem inordinately concerned with throwing a coin inside the stupas. The guy in the red shirt was at it for about ten minutes.

It's a Zen Temple, but that doesn't mean as much as it would in the Japanese tradition - the layout and iconography of the temple is basically the same as every other Chinese Buddhist temple. The grounds are pleasant, and the surrounding area is a bunch of tourist streets and shops that make for nice enough surroundings, although still best ignored. There's a cheap vegetarian restaurant inside the temple.

All in all, this temple is impressive if not amazing, and honestly I think it's the only Buddhist temple in Shanghai that's worth a look. It's not entirely convenient to get to, the closest subway is line #3's Longcao Lu, and from there it's about a fifteen minute walk east. It's probably best to go to Xujiahui or the Indoor Stadium, and then take a taxi. There's also the 933 Bus, which goes past Hongkou, Taikang Lu, the Xing Guang camera mall, and then on to a stop across the street from the temple.

Saizeriya

2009-05-10T11:54:00.000+08:00

I've said before that Chinese people never eat foreign foods. However, while that's not exactly a lie, that's not exactly true, either. There exists a fraction of a percent of Shanghai's Chinese population that enjoys popping into Shanghai's foreigner restaurants from time to time. And there's a much larger percentage, although still a small minority, that enjoys eating the few styles of foreign food that Shanghai has most taken to – basically that's American fast food chains, Japanese food, and to a lesser extent, Italian food. Ill have to talk about Shanghai's Japanese food some othet time - it's localized so strangely. This is about the Italian chain restaurant, Saizeriya.

Saizeriya is not anybody's version of fine dining. Even judging on a cheap-restaurant graded scale, every dish on the menu would get somewhere between a D+ and a B-. That said, there's a few things that can be said in its favor. While the food wouldn't be confused with something in Italy, it's not a totally Chinesed-out interpretation either, and is about as authentic as might be expected at an American-Italian restaurant. It's relatively cheap, most of the dishes cost about ten kaui. It's spacious and clean, whereas many Chinese restaurants are dirty and cramped. But most importantly, it's the only semi-decent restaurant in the Kerry Everbright Center, near the Shanghai Train Station. For a while I found myself frequently having to eat dinners there, so I went to Saizeriya far too many times, and I've tried a sizeable percentage of the menu. It's not something I'm proud of.

For me, the highlight of Saizeriya is that they serve large salads that, while basic, are of a high quality, and only cost six to ten kuai. They come heavy in salad dressing, so I usually get the dressing on the side. And in general the pasta dishes are all competent, I like the pesto spaghetti - the only one to watch out for the risotto, which basically amounts to a rice with cream sauce on it.

They have pizza, and ever since Hello Pizza massively raised their prices a couple years back, it's the cheapest pizza in town, costing around twenty kuai for enough to make a meal for one. They're a whole lot of cheese, and not much sauce.

The obvious weak point is at the end of the menu, with the unappetizing hamburger steaks and especially the grilled chicken, that tastes rubbery and weird. The desserts, while not bad, aren't as good as they should be – really there's no reason to get a dessert at Saizeriya, when all the locations I'm familiar with have a Beard Papa right nearby.

There's all-you-can-drink mugs for six kuai, with sodas and juice and hot chocolate and the like to choose from. The mug is small, so I end up making a lot of trips to the drinks area.

There's a few other local Italian restaurants chains I can think of, in Shanghai – Gino's and Babiya being two that stand out. They're more expensive, and while Gino's might be a little better, Babiya is much worse. There's also a number of higher-quality, expensive places that target expats. Anyway, while I don't particularly recommend Saizeriya, it's cheap, it's decent, there's locations in malls and shopping areas all around town, and if you're looking for a foreign-food fix you could do a whole lot worse.

Sichuan North Road

2009-05-06T12:40:00.014+08:00

Sichuan North Road is a street that extends from Suzhou River to Hongkou. That's a longer stretch of road than the other streets I've spotlighted on this blog, it takes at least half an hour to walk the distance. It's also generally not a street to stroll on its own merits. However, I find that the street manages to pass by some of the most interesting spots to Shanghai – there's a number of nearby places that I've either blogged about before, or plan to blog about in the near future.

Sichuan North Road's Southern end starts at the Suzhou River and the North of the Bund area. There's also Zhapu Lu nearby, and a number of interesting neighborhoods in the area to the East, some of which haven't even been torn down quite yet! I've been to the international post office building a number of times, usually to post mail, and I only recently discovered that on weekends and some weekdays it has a huge, very well-put-together museum dedicated to the history of China's and Shanghai's postal service. In some ways it puts Shanghai's vastly over-rated Museum of History to shame, in other ways you can't help but wonder why there's such a large museum dedicated to a subject that's so boring. Anyway, it's free, and there's also a very nice rooftop garden that can be accessed once you make it through.

Just a few blocks to the north of this is Wuchang Lu, a top food street. Walking to the west, almost immediately there's popular food stalls and smaller street-food restaurants. After a short block, the road is completely given over to these small snack stalls. It's almost, but not quite, the second coming of Wujiang Lu, which really is getting shuttered very soon, to make way for a mini-mall. A little past the food is a series of clothing stalls that have the reputation as one of the best places to buy cheap clothes in Shanghai, with a minimum of bargaining needed. Fair warning: if there's one place in Shanghai where you want to hold on to your wallet, this would probably be it.

Going along Sichuan North Road, there's a number of side streets that are given to interesting older buildings, they're worth making a small detour for. One of them is at Kunshan Huayuan Lu, slightly North of Wuchang Lu, with a labyrinthine, brick apartment complex. I'm sorry for the cheesy old v. new photo here, but it's hard to avoid when the building is surrounded by skyscrapers:

Continuing on, there's a nice little park alongside Sichuan Lu. It's mainly interesting for the large artificial pond, with irregular barriers that are obviously meant to bring to mind the irregular terracing of Chinese hillside farms.

Around this area is a lot of larger shopping malls, generally they're modern but none of them are particularly elite looking.

Additionally, there's a lot of older apartment buildings, two or three stories tall, where the first building is used for small shops – generally it's clothing stores, either discount stores or Chinese chains. This is an attractive old building, it doesn't deserve to be covered in billboards for a mediocre shuijiao chain.

Continuing North can be seen the Southern gate to the Duolun Lu Area, which is a very interesting preserved area of older buildings and shops. This area of Sichuan Bei Lu, and the immediate surroundings, was a top spot in pre-Communist Shanghai. It forms the setting for much of the literature of the time.

It would be tempting to just cut through Duolun Lu and skip out on Beijing Lu, but don't! Just a little farther is Tian'ai Lu, translating to “Sweet Love Street.” It's right near the large, terrible Japanese noodle chain, Thousand Taste Noodles – Sichuan Lu darts left and right wildly around here, so it's easy to get a little lost. Anyway, keep an eye open for “Sweet Love Street,” because right around the corner is Wanshou Zhai, a great hole-in-the-wall place to grab some xiaolongbao and noodles, and then it's worth continuing along Shanyin Lu to have a look at the older houses.

Slightly past this is the Northern Gate to the Duolun Lu Area, which is itself adjacent to a branch of toy-camera store Snaps Shop, and an insane public sculpture to soccer:

And then there's Lu Xun Park, which is probably the most interesting park in Shanghai, alongside the more central, smaller Fuxing Park. Like a number of other parks, it has fairground-type rides for the kiddies. I'll have an update about Lu Xun Park in the near future.

And the adventure ends just a little past this, at a corner on Zhongshan Yi Lu with a decent beergarden-type pub, it can't be missed because it has about fifty signs for Tsingtao Beer, in both English and Chinese. When the weather's good, it's a fun place to get a huge mug of Tsingtao.

It's right across Sichuan Lu from the line 8 subway station, with line 3 right nearby, and the top restaurants Guo Yuan, Delongguan, and Xinjiang Style are all within a short walk.

Nanxiang Steamed Bun Restaurant

2009-05-03T12:53:00.007+08:00

I have love for the gentle readers of this blog, and I'm strangely proud of my xiaolongbao review section. With an afternoon free, instead of doing something really interesting like studying, I went to Shanghai's cheesy old town shopping complex, and got in line for some Nanxiang Steamed Bun xiaolongbao! Nanxiang Steamed Bun Restaurant is the most famous xiaolongbao in the city, at least with tourists. Due to the location and a long line, it's also a place that is apparently exclusively frequented by tourists – or in my case, when my friends or family visit the city. It's easy to find, right next to the 9-turn bridge and the entrance to Yuyuan Gardens.

Somehow it's on the checklist as a must-do for visitors to this fair city, alongside that viewing platform on the Bund. On a nice day around lunchtime, the line can be expected to last somewhere around an hour. The line tends to move in bursts, as a fresh batch of xiaolongbao gets ready – so frustratingly enough, there's no moving at all, for maybe ten minutes at a time. You do a lot of looking at the xiaolongbao getting steamed:

So how do the xiaolongbao rate? I don't think they're worth a trip to Yuyuan Gardens, nor do I think they're worth waiting in line a long time for, but they're pretty good, certainly better than average. The skin is soft, if a little spongy. The meat is tasty, but dense and too chewy, it's a little like a sausage with wet bread around it. There's no soup inside – that's one of the basic components that makes xiaolongbao be xiaolongbao! Compensate for the dryness by pouring on extra vinegar, there's a big pitcher of vinegar by the counter.

There's not any specific dining area, so people try to get a seat at the nearby benches or steps. The xiaolongbao are sold by a basket of 15 or so, for 12 kuai/basket, that's about $1.80. It's quite a lot of xiaolongbao, more like a small meal than a snack. Currently, after 5:30 they switch to crab xiaolongbao, for 20 kuai/basket. I understand there's also a crowded upstairs dining area with tables and a shorter wait, where the xiaolongbao costs more, but I've never been.

Really the best bet is to visit one of the other xiaolongbao restaurants I've rated – with the exception of the mediocre Din Tai Fung, which has a branch and a whole lot of advertisements nearby. Oh, and there's no business relation to Shangweiguan Nanxiang Xiaolongbao - Nanxiang is the suburb of Shanghai where Shanghai-style xiaolongbao was supposedly invented, it's sometimes used as an adjective to describe local-style xiaolongbao.

Holiday in Cambodia: Sleepwalking the Mekong

2009-04-29T12:16:00.011+08:00

After visiting Siam Reap and the Angkor Wat, I rode a small wooden boat to the city of Battambang. I was taken by surprise: I basically didn't know anything about the Mekong or the people who live on it, and found the journey completely fascinating. The Mekong is a river that also flows through Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. In Cambodia, the water level varies immensely depending on the time of the year, routinely flooding vast areas in shallow water. So small villages and houses are built on stilts, or more commonly floats, to accommodate the change in water level.

While the river was pretty continuously populated, there were parts that, as far as I could tell, had absolutely no land anywhere in site. There was a fair amount of green from brush and trees and water-plants, but no solid land at all, the only place to set foot would be the small groups of floating houses.

In fact, there were small boats just for the livestock to live on. Usually this was chicken, although I saw pigs as well, with special floating pigpens.

As could be imagined, there were boats everywhere, usually just small hand-paddled canoes. While it may not look it from the small picture up top, the boat to Battambang was about half tourists, half river people. Our boat didn't dock for these river people, or even come to a full stop. Instead, their family would pull up a canoe alongside the boat, and they then hopped overboard. It all happened surprisingly quickly.

It's impossible for me to fully imagine living like this. For one thing, there's not going to be much to eat besides fish, and maybe water-vegetables? Actually there were a number of trader-boats going up the river, selling oil, bananas, and basic staples – it can be seen a little in the following picture:

Also, life there must be so immensely boring. Basically every single kid waved at our boat as it passed by, there was a lot of mutual gawking going on. I imagine that larger boats passing by is about as eventful as things get:

The river changed character as it got closer to Battambang, narrowing substantially. Much of this area was the center of village life, with small shacks on both sides of the river.

There were still constant small boats going from one side to the other, and a lot of people in boats were net-fishing or going about other business:

So, that's an amazing journey that everybody should do sometime in their life. Battambang itself isn't a highlight of Cambodia, and basically the whole town is lights out by 8:30 pm, but there's things to enjoy. For one, a few nice temples:

And there's a very interesting wet market, in the center of town, they also sell snack foods and the blended fruit drinks I love. After a positive experience in Chiang Mai with a one-day cooking school, I tried one again, from a restaurant called The Smoking Pot – it wasn't nearly as good a school, but it gave a fun chance to explore the market, and I'd recommend it. Here's some vegetables, very colorful:

And here's a lady skinning frogs, for our class! The secret is to cut the head off first, then just peel the skin back.

That's all I'll have to say about Cambodia for now, but visiting was a great experience. I really hope to go back and explore the country more thoroughly.

Red Town

2009-04-26T12:04:00.009+08:00

Red Town is the name of an art-park/museum/shopping area immediately off Hongqiao Subway Station, at 568 Huaihai Xi Lu. Hongqiao is a district in the Western part of town, it's a popular area for expats to live, particularly expats from Japan or Korea – many Japanese like to live in gated, Japanese-only communities! I haven't been to the area very often, mostly because there's nothing much exciting to the area except the airport and some expat-oriented restaurants, and Shanghai's expat restaurants are a total joke. Furthermore, the subway doesn't go to the most interesting food streets of Hongqiao, and I'm not motivated enough to take a taxi.

Red Town, by contrast, is located just a couple minute's walk west of the Subway station. As I mentioned, there's an art-park, one of several art-parks located around Shanghai, mostly in expat areas. Basically, they're parks with outdoor sculptures set up. I'm not a great judge of sculpture, but I find these to be lightweight fun:

These sculptures continue on in a free sculpture museum adjoining the park. The sculptures there are in much the same whimsical vein, maybe they're a little more fragile and couldn't be kept outside:

There's a couple of cafes in the complex, as well as small shops selling things like art supplies or art books. There's also a club called Sugar, I've never been a visitor, but I went inside and had a look while they were shooting cheesecake promotional pictures:

Red Town can't be called a highlight of Shanghai, but it's convenient to get to and it's worth dropping by the sculpture museum, which is open 10-5 every day but Monday.

Fude Xiaolong

2009-04-22T11:23:00.003+08:00

I'm on a spiritual quest to find the best xiaolongbao in Shanghai, and like all spiritual quests, it never really ends. I started out thinking Fu Chun was the best xiaolongbao to be found in Shanghai, but ever since first visiting Delongguan, I sort of waver between which of the two has the best xiaolongbao. Well, for now I have a new favorite, and that would be Fude Xiaolong, in the east side of the Hongkou District.

That wouldn't be the most central of locations. But really, it's just a ten minute walk from line #4's Dalian Station to get there – walk three blocks northwest of the Station, to Dongyuhang Lu, then walk four blocks southwest, a little past Gongping Lu, to 862 Dongyuhang Lu – it's maybe a little quicker, walking south from #4's Linping Lu Station. But that would require skipping Dongyuhang Lu - east of Fude Xiaolong, the road is totally crazy, a packed super-local market street that I love. Also nearby are the old Jewish ghetto, a bunch of old houses, and Xia Hai Temple, they're OK and I'll probably have a later update about them, but they just can't compare to this:

The restaurant is definitely on the hole-in-the-wall side of things, in a hole-in-the-wall sort of area. But given that, it's actually pretty spacious, large, and clean. In addition to the xiaolongbao, at six for four kuai (about sixty cents), it serves noodles and won-tons and the like. There's no drinks, so get them at the convenience store on the nearby corner.

The xiaolongbao are my current favorite, and I've had more than my fair share of xiaolongbao! The skin, if not delicate, isn't spongy, and dissolves in the mouth. The meat inside, while more substantial than I usually prefer, is still so very smoothly ground and so very tasty. And best of all, the insides are totally swimming in soup! There's no sweetness to any of it, and the vinegar is of a good strength.

Holiday in Cambodia: Angkor Wat

2009-04-19T13:30:00.002+08:00

While I wasn't in Cambodia for as long as I'd have liked, of course I had to visit Angkor – with the famous stone temples that are the only remnant of the sprawling capital city of the powerful Khmer Empire, from a thousand years ago. It was a bizarre but interesting bus ride from the capital city of Phnom Penh. Two lanes the whole way through, the road seemed to be some kind of center to Cambodian village life – it passed through village centers, frequently punctuated by wedding ceremonies held directly against the road. Also noteable were all the water buffaloes, even directly across the river from Phnom Penh's city center. There were occasional rest-stops, which were just big dirt fields with local bazaars set up, for all the busses.

I won't have much to say about the actual temple complexes. They were stone and beautiful. The scale of it all was crazy - in particular, the central Angkor Wat is amazingly large, and furthermore is surrounded by a quarter-mile-wide moat. They're located somewhat apart from each other, maybe a five minute to half-hour drive from one to the next. The thing to do is to rent a tuk-tuk driver for the day. Anyway, here's a few favorite pictures – it was really dark and grey for most of my time there, which certainly didn't help for photographing old stone temples that tended to be dark and grey.

Siam Reap is a city nearby to all these temples, it's evolved as the jumping-off point. It's obviously a total tourist spot, and usually I hate that sort of thing, but maybe having been in Shanghai for so long I appreciated the conveniences – there were great import groceries, foreign bookstores, foreigner bars, and a selection of both foreign and Cambodian restaurants, aimed at clueless foreigners. One I went to had a free dance show. I'm sure it was totally cheesy if you knew anything about Cambodian dance, but as a casual tourist I enjoyed it.

Jinxian Lu

2009-04-15T13:06:00.009+08:00

Jinxian Lu is a short street in downtown Shanghai that, all things considered, is the best street in Shanghai. It's located a few blocks north of the Huangpi Nan Lu Subway station. I suppose it's also possible to get there by walking south along Maoming Lu from the Nanjing Xi Lu train station, for ten or fifteen minutes.

The quite obvious highlight of the street is the food. Some of the restaurants I've talked about before, like the homestyle Shanghainese restaurants Chun and Lan Xin, which are two of my favorite restaurants in Shanghai. And some other restaurants I hope to talk about in the future – say, the Shanghainese restaurant Hai Jin Zi, or the foreigner favorite Southern Barbarian, a Yunanese restaurant tucked inside a strange art mall. However I imagine there's others I'll never get around to. I'll mention them briefly, but really I recommend people go to this street whenever they feel they might be hungry, and just try everything.

At a quick look, the street isn't entirely impressive. There's lots of hanging laundry, and older medium-grade apartment buildings. While there is an art mall, for the most part the buildings are underwhelming, and the storefronts are small & recessed, occupying the first story.

I've heard the bottom dropped out of China's art scene recently, and maybe that explains why currently about half the stores in the street's art mall seem to be vacant - or maybe not, the art always seemed so cheesy, I have a hard time believing it was ever a part of any genuine art scene. Southern Barbarian is tucked away inside this mall. Surpringly enough, there's also a store which openly sells a lot of marijuana pipes, and there's a mysterious smell...these people are begging to get sent off to a re-education camp!

While I mention the restaurants, there's also a large number of fashion design boutiques along Jinxian Lu. They look whimsical, and perhaps it's not the most prestigious address for clothes, but I'm guessing they're worth a browse. Personally, I'm too tall to seriously consider buying clothes in China, and it kind of falls outside my radar, anyway they're mostly for women.

A number of stores sell old Shanghai antiques, mostly furniture. It would be really fun, if really expensive, to have a house decorated like some 1930s movie set:

There's a few European-type restaurants: the OK café/restaurant Bliss, the well-reviewed but expensive Italian restaurant Osteria, and the café/restaurant Citizen. I go to Citizen occasionally for a drink before or after a meal. The drinks aren't anything special, but it's a pleasant place to get a coffee or a cocktail, with a kind of lounge-ish atmosphere. They also serve Italian food, which I haven't tried.

Pier 39 sells food of a reasonably authentic North-Californian variety. It competes with Hai Jin Zi as the best-rated (by taste) restaurant on the street, according to Chinese foodie website dianping.com. Personally I think that's crazy, but I won't deny that the sandwiches are good, I particularly like the different breads which can be chosen from. They also have very good pastas and salads, and a clam chowder which is a little weak, but comes in a lunch special, alongside a sandwich, for around sixty kuai. It's a small restaurant, and I've heard that recently it's become extremely difficult to get a table.

Qing Mai Heaven describes itself as Thai food, and similarly, a pizza with ham and pineapple on it might be called Hawaiian food. But despite having almost no relationship to the sort of food found in Thailand (I'd call it "whimsical Chinese"), I still think the food manages to be decent. Additionally, the service is friendly, and the interior is incredibly packed but attractive. For a group of people wanting a good meal, they'd be crazy to pass over Chun or Lan Xin, just across the street. But for an individual diner, the lunch specials are about 30 kuai and worth checking out, although unfortunately the lunch specials menu is only in Chinese. This place will often have a line of Chinese customers.

While Lan Xin, Chun, and Hai Ji Zi are, once again, three of the very best restaurants in Shanghai, there's three more small home-style Shanghainese restaurants, in the 50-100 kuai range: Mao Long, at #134, Rui Fu Yuan, at #221, and One Family, at #128.

Finally, there's a branch of Lomography at #126, it's a company that produces or promotes toy cameras (called “idiot cameras” in Chinese), and then sells them at inflated prices – it's cheaper to buy off the Internet, or at Snaps Shop. The idiot cameras they sell are still a lot of fun, with the Holga N being the pick of the litter. There's a small gallery upstairs, and sometimes I'll have a look around. They also sell ISO 800 film, which is very difficult to find in Shanghai.

Just around the corner from all this food, on Changle Lu near Shaanxi Nan Lu, is foreign-language bookstore, Garden Books & Cafe. It's a good place to browse, and their excellent ice cream & sorbets sell at nine kuai, as a takeaway price. Mysteriously enough, it's much more expensive if you want to eat inside. Sometimes I'll get a scoop after a nice meal. There's twenty flavors or so, my favorite is when they have the ginger ice cream!

Ruan Lingyu's Home

2009-04-12T13:53:00.000+08:00

Ruan Lingyu was a silent-movie star from Shanghai's 1930 cinema - she's the most well-known actress from the era. She injected drama into roles that were honestly usually very silly and slight, and she stood up to the task when she starred in "The Goddess," generally recognized as one of the best films of early Chinese cinema. She's also well known for her sad life, which led to her eventual suicide at the age of 24 - really a lot of actresses from the era ended up as tragic figures.

I've brought up "The Goddess" before - it can be watched freely off the Internet, I think it's worth a look. Still, while I think she was a good actress and I enjoy watching older Shanghai movies, I never considered myself an obsessive fan. At the least, I'd never considered making a pilgramage to sights associated with Ruan Lingyu. Still, that's exactly what I did recently, and I'll post a few pictures.

The site was her old house at #9 Xinzha Lu, it's inside the Qinyuan Village apartments. Ruan Lingyu lived there from early on in her stardom, until her eventual suicide. The apartment is nothing spectacular now, certainly it doesn't look like the residence of a film star, or of the many other prominent artists who lives there. However, it must have been more impressive back in the day - for one, the apartment has since been sub-divided into multiple living spaces, like a lot of older Shanghai residences.

It's still an interesting, if unspectacular, place to look around, with a few architectual flourishes.

Getting there isn't too difficult: It's a five or ten minute walk north from the Plaza 66 mall, on the north side of Xinzha Lu, between Changhua Lu and Jiangning Lu. Despite being very central towards downtown development, there's a number of other older-style buildings in the area:

Holiday in Cambodia: Phnom Penh

2009-04-08T12:49:00.000+08:00

While I live in third-world China, and had previously been visiting third-world Thailand, Phnom Penh was an immediate third-world shock. While the small airport was really quite modern, clean, and efficient, the drive to the city proper, and my hotel, took me on a bumpy garbage-lined road through a progression of small dirty shacks. It felt like being back in the shantytowns of Bombay, granted with about one tenth the population density.

That may sound superficial or ugly, but it's honest. While I ended up very much enjoying both the city and the country, it was in spite of all the garbage, the poor infrastructure, and the aggressive touts. Those negatives are at the beginning of this update, and similarly they were the first thing that stood out about the city, but really the rest of my impressions of the city were much more positive. The city center is relatively compact, and although of course the reasons are tragic, a lot of the old French colonial buildings are still standing, they're beautiful:

I'm not one to shop, and all I bought for myself was a couple travel necessities and Sinn Sisamouth CDs, but really the market bazaars of Phnom Penh are a lot of fun. There's a number about town, with a bunch of smaller competing stalls inside. Different markets sell different products, and are open at different times, and there's both outdoor and indoor markets. It doesn't seem very efficient, but they're heavily used by the local population, merchants will bargain fairly with foreigners, and some of the markets are interesting locations of their own right, like the old art deco stadium that's now the Central Market.

Phnom Penh seemed to be maybe 25% Chinese – most hotels and small businesses were Chinese-owned. Surprisingly enough, they usually spoke Mandarin Chinese – I say surprisingly, because Mandarin is a Beijing-government-invented language, Chinese emigration pre-dates its (still only partial) implementation, and I'm not aware of any other foreign Chinese communities that speak it. I used to have a Chinese-Cambodian friend, and she told me that as a child in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, she wasn't allowed to speak Chinese at all, even in private – maybe afterwards, the local Chinese re-learnt Mandarin?

Despite some misgivings, I ate Cambodian street food, and I ended up falling totally in love with it. It's better than the street food in China, or maybe even Thailand. Here's two of my favorites: barbequed pork skewers, eaten alongside French bread (sweetened with condensed milk) and lightly pickled radishes. It may sound weird, but if they had them in Shanghai, I'd eat them every day of the week!

Secondly, while I understand fruit shakes are basically a tourist thing in most of SE Asia, in Cambodia everybody drank them: fresh fruit, blended with sweetener and ice. What made Cambodia's stand out from the crowd was the fresh tropical fruit, but also the secret ingredient: raw egg! In fairness, I used to make Juliuses as a kid with raw egg white, it's basically the same thing. Many places didn't give raw eggs to foreigners, so I made a point of going to local-style places and then asking for them specifically.

Part of what contributes to Phnom Penh's strong colonial flavor is that foreign NGOs are everywhere in Cambodia, and these foreigners dominate the local economy. It can seem that what visible economy does exist, is either just a step above being a flea market, or services foreigner's various needs. That goes alongside low import taxes, and there's a huge amount of very good foreign restaurants and import grocery stores and the like, in both Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. They're far, far better and cheaper than anything available in Shanghai, and I varied between local style restaurants and foreigner restaurants. There's also similarly shoddy copyright protection, but with a looser control on the published word, and so Phnom Penh's foreigner areas have bookstores full of English novels, both second-hand and Xeroxed.

What else? There were several temples and the King's palace. Impressive, although I admit I found them to be a less-impressive take on similar structures in Bangkok – even though Phnom Penh's were often the original model.

Just walking the streets was interesting, there was a lot of activity. Motorcycle taxis and tuk-tuks were easily available for a dollar or two (literally – Cambodia uses American money) and they all spoke English, so I could just walk around until I got tired of walking or lost my way, then hail a taxi back. On the downside, in central areas people would yell “hello, taxi” at me every few seconds.

I thought the Tuol Sleng Museum, at a former school that had been converted into a processing station for the genocide of Cambodia's Cultural Revolution, was an interesting and illuminating site:

All in all Phnom Penh was a low-key but interesting and inexpensive city. I don't know if it's a destination of itself, but as part of a larger exploration of Cambodia or SE Asia, it's definitely worth having a look around.

Wu Yue Ren Jia Noodles

2009-04-05T12:41:00.002+08:00

The foreigner shopping complex of Taikang Lu is fun, I've written about it before, and there's a few stores within which I hope to write about in the near future. At the same time, despite having a whole lot of restaurants, none of them look particularly appealing to me. I'm perfectly willing to believe there's some place I haven't been to yet that's actually really good, but a cursory look around makes it seem to be a bunch of typical foreigner restaurants, over-priced and unexceptional.

When I'm in the area, my favorite place to get food is the nearby Wu Yue Ren Jia, a branch of a local noodle chain restaurant. While in the US “chain restaurant” conjures up the image of McDonald's or Olive Garden, in Shanghai many of even the most upscale restaurants will open a few branches around the city. Wu Yue Ren Jia is not one of the most upscale restaurants – however while many of the branches are just a step up from any other cheap noodle joint, the Taikang Lu branch is pretty fancy inside, clean and spacious and generally new-looking. They even play traditional Suzhou music softly in the background, I like that.

The “Wu Yue” in the name is a reference to an ancient state in Southern Jiangsu and Northern Zhejiang, the geographical surroundings of Shanghai. While the noodles themselves are just basic Southern Chinese noodles and nothing fancy, the accompanying meat or vegetables are mostly local specialties. They're generally very good - they're served alongside the bowl in a smaller plate, and can either be eaten separately, or placed in the soup bowl. Personally, I think the soup broth is too bland without adding at least some of the sauce.

The noodle dishes are fairly cheap, but on the small side. Here's a look at their selection of noodles, although the menu is only in Chinese:

It's probably worth getting a side dish to go along with the noodles. Again, most of the dishes are local specialties, I've had about half the menu and I have to say I've enjoyed everything. They're not substantial enough to make a meal out of them alone, to my mind, but one could certainly try. My favorites are probably the si xi kaofu (spongy tofu) and the wu xiang niu rou (five fragrance cold beef). The second half of the menu is to the right of this paragraph, although there's also temporary specials and the normal assortment of drinks. Here's a picture of their cucumber. It's quite nice, although cucumber is so basic that it would be hard to do wrong:

All in all, Wu Yue Ren Jia isn't a destination restaurant, the way the other Shanghainese Restaurants I've mentioned so far are. The food just isn't as good or as ambitious. However, it's casual, it's thoroughly local-style, it's perfectly normal for a person to visit by themselves or as a group, and it's a good place to go if you find yourself nearby. The bill might come out to twenty or thirty kuai per person, the equivalent to three or four dollars. The Taikang Lu branch is at #5 Taikang Lu, right where Sinan Lu hits Taikang Lu, but there's a number of branches around town.

East of the Old West Gate

2009-04-01T17:29:00.009+08:00

If the title of this update sounds poetic, or perhaps the name of a Kung-Fu movie, it's actually just a description of the area – the West Gate of the old city walls was torn down long ago (along with the walls, for the matter), but the name is retained, and Old West Gate Station is a subway station of line number 8, two stations south of People's Square.

I happened across the station while visiting the very touristy, very corny Dongtai Lu, and knew I had to be back! The station is on the Western edge of my favorite part of Shanghai's old town – the area of the city that existed when Shanghai was just a small walled fishing village, and foreigners hadn't yet converted it into a large port city.

Actually, most of the traces of the truly old are no longer around, what remains is generally lower-quality housing from the early twentieth century. Still, the houses have a certain beauty to them:

These traditional houses don't have much privacy to them, and in a way I feel bad walking through and taking pictures of an area that is somewhere between a public street and private home. It's still a fascinating voyeurism of people going about their lives in a style unique to Shanghai, even when it's just normal everyday kind of things, like this outdoor kitchen, with a faucet in the background.

And although of course I'm not secretly peeping into people's bedrooms, a lot of the houses have doors opening directly onto the street, I'm reminded of when I walked through my college dorms:

It's also interesting, many of the streets, particularly directly north of Fuxing Road, are thin and narrow and dart every which way, very strange!

With these smaller areas, it's mostly private homes, although there are a number of smaller stores, generally selling snack foods, cigarettes, and very basic cooking items:

And there's a lot of commerce actually on the street: fruits, vegetables, maybe a simple bowl of noodles, cloths, that sort of thing.

And I don't want to forget, people getting a haircut, out in public!

There's a lot of wooden birdcages hanging from second story balconies, in addition some people keep pigeons:

It's just a fun area to look around, and now that the subway goes right near to it, it's an easy activity for an idle afternoon. As the title says, it's East of the Old West Gate Station, just a couple minute's walk. Take the #1 exit and head east, walking past Qinglian Lu - there's currently some construction going on. The southern border to this area would be Fuxing Lu, and the eastern border would be the large ugly apartment buildings alongside Henan Lu, which jarringly enough are decorated with a very large amounts of pseudo-Grecian statues. A few blocks past this road, and a little to the north, is Yuyuan Gardens and the related tourist stalls.

There's no real northern border – there's pretty much interesting buildings all the way up to Hongkou. However, the smaller alleys pictured here are concentrated in the area just a few blocks north of Fuxing Lu, the streets get wider and more commercial as one heads north – maybe the underwhelming Taoist temple alongside Renmin Lu can be considered the northern bordern to all of this.

Sukhothai

2009-03-29T17:19:00.000+08:00

Sukhothai is a city in Northern Thailand, which I went to after visiting Chiang Mai. While Sukhothai and Chiang Mai both have a lot of old temples, for a tourist that's about as far as the relationship goes. Chiang Mai is a large vibrant city, with a large amount of attractions – actually, for most tourists, the nearby trekking is the highlight. Sukhothai is a one-horse provincial city that happens to be built next to the ruins of the ancient Thai capital and its numerous stone temples.

But that's not to denigrate these ruins – they date back seven hundred years, and in terms of beauty, convenience, and general pleasantness, if not scale, I ended up appreciating these ruins more than those of Angkor Wat, in Cambodia. The comparison isn't specious – I can't claim anthropological expertise, but many of the temples were built in the same time frame, at a time when the Khmer culture, from its capital in Angkor, dominated South-East Asian culture.

I don't want to delve too much into Thai history, I'll just attach a few of favorite pictures:

What also made my visit interesting was that I visited during a large festival, where people from all over Thailand flooded into the city, and at night the ruins were lit up. I found all the celebrations very underwhelming, honestly, but it contributed to a festival-type atmosphere.

I ended up staying in a very nice, low-key guest house called “No. 4 Guest House,” for the grand total of about $6 per night. I grabbed the last room, and I was afterwards told by another guest that it was the only place in town with rooms left - I guess I narrowly avoided disaster! Despite being not too far off the main road, there were a number of rural Thai-style houses nearby, and it was overlooking farmland - temporarily flooded, I'd guess for the production of rice.

Guoyuan Hunanese Food

2009-03-25T13:51:00.002+08:00

Guoyuan is a small Hunanese Restaurant, near the Hongkou football stadium. While in most regards it looks the part of a standard local restaurant, it stands out in one regard: there will almost always be a line out the front door, day or night.

It's actually a favorite restaurant of mine, and a restaurant that's very convenient for me. I don't go as often as I might like, and I'd like to take a moment to blame my friends – while it's near two subway stations, it's still not a very central location for most people. And the people I do know in the area, for the most part, can't take the spiciness. As opposed to the sweetness and even blandness of Shanghainese Foods, Hunan Food is spicy, and Guoyuan plays the part. As an extreme example, here's a plate of bamboo, covered in peppers, along with garlic, ginger, and other spices. Not to be macho, but most Shanghai residents, local or foreigners, just couldn't handle it!

The restaurant is entirely Chinese-language, and while the service is friendly, they're a bit rushed. A foreigner who doesn't speak the language and doesn't have a little familiarity with Hunan food might have a tough time. There is a list of the most popular dishes on the first page of the menu. One of the recommended dishes is found on almost everybody's table, and is really very attractive-looking, twin pepper fish head. I admit I'm not the #1 fan of fish head, so when I brought the camera I instead got fish soup. It's an interesting mélange of spices, including herbs that I usually see in a cup of tea!

How authentic is Guoyuan? There's obviously a few concessions to local tastes. For example, Shanghai people love cucumbers, and I'm guessing that spicy-oil cucumbers aren't a menu item at most restaurants in Hunan, although I quite enjoyed them:

But while I've never been to Hunan, or have any friends from Hunan, I assumed the restaurant was for the most part authentic, and I've also heard the chef is from Hunan. However when I went with a Sichuanese friend, she told me that while she enjoyed the restaurant very much, it wasn't at all what would be served in an authentic-style Hunanese restaurant in Sichuan, which borders Hunan. While obviously that could be a reflection on Sichuanese restaurants, she guessed that the restaurant adapted a lot of foods to local ingredients and tastes.

Anyway, the restaurant is on 520 Dongjiangwan Lu, a five or ten minute walk North of the Hongkou Football Stadium subway stations of both line #3 and line #8. Prices should amount to around 40-50 kuai per person, that's six or seven US dollars. The restaurant is open from 11-2 and then from 5-10, daily. There's no reservations taken, and there's usually a line, although the line isn't too bad except on weekend nights. While the restaurant is small, and patrons are often smoking, the décor inside is simple but classy.

Shen Hao Professional Camera

2009-03-22T12:32:00.000+08:00

Shen Hao Professional Camera is a small Shanghai company that makes large-format view cameras – old-school cameras which use larger film and contain many completely different mechanisms than a 35mm camera. They're much heavier and inconvenient than a normal camera, and really you don't see them around Shanghai at all, any more than in the US anyway.

As I haven't used their cameras, I can't provide much first hand information. Their only sales department is inside the Xin Guang Camera Mall, on the fourth story, room 419. There's several other camera stores in the mall dedicated to large-format cameras, as well. Shen Hao cameras are also sold online in foreign markets, with their 4x5 camera going for $645, and there's a company website with more details, although the website doesn't ever want to load. Additionally, Ken Rockwell, who's a little controversial with camera nerds, compiled a lot of excellent data on using and purchasing a large-format camera. He actually recommends the Tachihara, which is a very similar camera being produced in Japan. Finally, Ansel Adams wrote several interesting guides to photography, which often focus on the use of a view camera – his most famous shots were made with large-format cameras.

These large-format cameras have some advantages. There was a recent exhibition of photography in Shanghai, where pictures of Dongbei citizens standing in the snow were taken on 8x10 film. Even with the large prints, the fine details were both obvious and impressive, which is really the raison d'etre of large-format photography. One could say the resolution of 8x10 film is equivalent to 800 megapixels, although the actual number depends a lot on use and who you talk to – anyway, with the increase in film size comes a corresponding increase in detail, and the total resolution is around 50 times greater than that of 35mm film, or of a DSLR for that matter. There's also an ability to change the plane of shooting, where perspective can be altered, or the focus plane can be changed.

However, large format view cameras aren't quick to use, and at ten pounds or so for a complete setup, are heavy and bulky to carry. They're also expensive – even a minimal setup will cost upwards of a thousand dollars. Additionally, buying the film and having it developed costs several dollars per shot (Weima, on Wulumuqi Lu, services large-format photography). So it's not a camera for casual photographers, and is probably best used by a devoted landscape or nature photographer who wants to make poster-sized prints.

There's also a host of accessories that are needed: a lens board, a focusing screen, a film tray, and even a little cloth to hide behind, to see the focusing screen when there's light outside! Shen Hao sells many of these accessories, although they're interchangeable between brands. Really, the cameras Shen Hao sells are more of a chassis, to put all these accessories into – as long as the camera is a stable, light-tight platform, with a degree of movement, technical image quality boils down to the separately-purchased lens, and the film. Shen Hao does have a good international reputation as building a cheap but acceptably solid camera.

In addition to the most well-known film sizes, 4x5 and 8x10, they also offer cameras and film backs with wider perspectives such as 7x17, having ratios around 1:2.5, about twice as wide as a picture taken with a 35mm camera. Interestingly, they also offer view cameras in medium-format size, both 60mm x 170mm, and 60mm x 240mm. They'll take respectively four or three pictures on a normal roll of medium-format 120 film, which is much cheaper and easier to purchase and develop than large-format sheet film. They offer about the same total resolution as 4x5 film, although with much narrower perspectives.

Chiang Mai

2009-03-18T13:02:00.001+08:00

Thailand falls outside of the scope of this blog, in that it's not actually a part of Shanghai. But on the other hand, proximity to South East Asia is one of the best parts of living in China. It's convenient to travel to, it's extremely cheap, and there's really a wide variety of attractions. I'll have a few posts concerning Thailand and Cambodia over the coming months, and I had a few posts about Bangkok, a couple years ago.

First I'll mention the city of Chiang Mai, in Northern Thailand, about a hundred miles from Yunnan and the southern border of China. Chiang Mai is a city of 1.3 million people that extends on and on, but the city center has something of the feel of a small city, only there's hundreds of ancient temples. I'm a big Buddhist religion nut, just walking around looking at the temples was so interesting:

Thai Buddhism is of a different variety than Northeastern Asia, and the temples are much more interesting (and even, mysterious) than the temples of China, which are the ugliest and most uninteresting temples in Asia - to be fair, Chinese temples usually don't get government funding or official encouragement, and were actively destroyed during the Cultural Revolution only 35 years ago. In Thai temples, there's many more statues, decorations are much more intricate, there's more worshipers, and there's iconography and interesting practices I tantalizingly only half-understand, like these ropes tying together the Buddhas.

While I found the temples to be the highlight, and also the most fun to photograph, Chiang Mai is simply a pleasant city to be. I could easily imagine spending an entire vacation there. People are friendly, the weather's beautiful, tourist infrastructure and foreigner-oriented businesses are extensive but easy to get away from, and there's a lot of different sites and activities. There's a lot of interesting markets, I tried a very fun one-day Thai cooking school, also there's popular treks around the area, often multi-day excursions amongst hill tribes. While I had to leave the longer treks for a future visit, I took a one-day trek where, amongst other things, I went around the Thai countryside on an elephant.

I didn't run across any Thai restaurants that I would call excellent, but there was a whole lot of very good, very cheap street food. Here's a typical bowl of Chicken Pad Thai, it's available just about anywhere in Chiang Mai, or really any Thai city:

There's a large Chinese presence throughout Thailand, although it's diluted by being several generations removed from any large wave of immigration. Still, particularly in Bangkok and Northern China, it was normal to see houses and stores with Chinese decorations, most commonly these talismans:

If I have complaints about Thailand, one would be that I was stranded there, by myself, by the infamous airport protests, and the second would be that it's so convenient, fun, and inexpensive to visit, I find myself measuring trips within China against just going to visit Thailand. Really, it's generally cheaper to go to Bangkok than to Sichuan.

So Congee

2009-03-15T13:32:00.004+08:00

I have a problem with So Congee. So Congee is a quite nice restaurant with a quite nice atmosphere and quite nice food, for a pretty decent price. I went with a friend who afterwards half-jokingly claimed she wanted to eat there every day. While I also like the place, really two things hold me back from giving raves. First is that congee is just, well, congee. Very simple, I've never made it myself but I imagine you just add some water to a bowl of rice, then boil it for a long time. It's great when you want something basic, in the US I'd get it with a few vegetables or meat for maybe two fifty. In China a plain version costs two or three kuai, somewhere between a quarter and fifty cents. Generally if people have it they'll have it for breakfast, which I tend to skip.

But really my main problem with the restaurant is that, my God, it's so slow. I find myself waiting half an hour or more, for food that I think of as being so elementary. I can get crazy impatient and actually asked if I could get a long-wait-discount, last time I went. It didn't work, but I didn't expect it to. Anyway, as long as I'm prepared to wait (something I have a hard time with), the atmosphere at So Congee is comfortable, and it's a good place to relax. The furniture is nothing amazing, but it's attractively lit, it's none to loud, the tables aren't stacked right against each other, and there's usually a cool soundtrack playing in the background – last time I went, it was early Billy Holiday.

The restaurant is kind of split in half, there's also a sister restaurant So Hot Pot, confusingly enough it operates in the exact same space even though they make it out to be two different restaurants. Most of the customers seem to be there for the hot pot. I've never tried that, I'm not a huge hot pot fan, and while I'm sure their rendition is decent, the place seems a little restrained atmosphere for what's usually a meal eaten with friends and a few bottles of beer. There's also a menu of Shanghai foods, snacks, and desserts. I usually order a snack or vegetable alongside my congee, they're generally fine but nothing amazing.

The congee is given in a large bowl with a large serving spoon, there's a base price of eight kuai per person, although I could see getting an extra portion if people are hungry. Other ingredients are mixed in, there's a whole lot of different types of mushrooms and seafood to choose from, along with some other meats and vegetables. Prices are maybe fifteen to thirty kuai, depending what's added in, but it varies. These ingredients are always very high-quality. The base congee is bland, as is to be expected, but is about as nice as congee can get. This congee had needle mushrooms and eel added:

So really it's very good food, and for only sixty nine kuai I felt like I had a nice meal for two at a nice restaurant. So despite my misgivings about the concept of an upscale congee restaurant, I recommend giving this place a try.

The menu is entirely translated into English, and there's numerous pictures, additionally I imagine some of the waiters speak English. It's located a little North of Jing'an Temple, on 98 Yanping Road, near Xinzha Road. I don't think reservations should be necessary, but it might be a good idea during peak times – the phone number is (21)6267-1781.

Shanghai in the Movies: Suzhou River

2009-03-11T12:57:00.003+08:00

“Suzhou River” is a movie that I've brought up several times in my blog, although I haven't written specifically about it before. It's my favorite mainland Chinese movie made in the last sixty years. It makes Shanghai look dusty, poor, half-built, crowded, and seedy, and was a major motivation to come out to Shanghai in the first place. Or perhaps on a subconscious level, I was just attracted to a city where Zhou Xun might be swimming around in a mermaid outfit.

It presents an honest look at the city, with a number of people in the background that are obviously not actors:

And similarly, there's a lot of settings that obviously aren't sets.

The characters are all flirting with being petty criminals, and are solidy lower class, and the apartments look the part:

Zhou Xun is currently a top Chinese actress. This was her first big role in a movie, although she was already well-known for a part in a popular TV series. While I admit I don't really like any of the other movies I've seen of hers, I admire that she varies between doing popular Chinese movies, and Chinese art films.

She plays two roles, and she does an excellent job in each, although I'd call both characters under-written. Her principle character lives in a houseboat on the Suzhou River, which I find extremely improbable. There's currently a very small amount of families living in these boats, and I understand it was somewhat more common when the movie was made, but really it's just not the sort of place a young lady who doesn't haul freight for a living would live. It's still a very cool set.

All-in-all, while I don't think this movie tries to provide a thorough or entirely representative look at the city of Shanghai, it's as good a look at Shanghai as any other Shanghai movie I've seen. By concentrating on the lower end of the city, it's an interesting alternative to movies where Shanghai is depicted as some sci-fi futuristic Hong Kong, which it clearly is not.

In many ways, the movie reminds me of Hitchcock's “Vertigo,” but with an unusual first-person viewpoint for about half of the movie, and there's also an influence of Wong Kar Wai. While it's the best Mainland Chinese movie made since the Communists took Shanghai, it has its problems, and probably wouldn't crack a “top 100 list” if I was to include it against Hong Kong & Taiwanese movies. For what it's worth, I'd call “Farewell My Concubine” the #2 Mainland Chinese movie.

It's interesting, how the politics of this movie played out: For unspecified reasons that would seem to include being generally negative about China, being co-produced by a foreign (German) company, and not receiving filming permits, the film was banned from China's miniscule movie theater industry – although in practical terms, there was/is no real local audience for art movies, and Chinese government censorship is basically an endorsement in other countries.

Furthermore, the director Lou Ye wasn't allowed to create a film in China for two years. He came back with the absolute stinker “Purple Butterfly,” a WWII Shanghai espionage thriller starring Zhang Ziyi. He then created the somewhat sexually explicit, somewhat mediocre “Summer Palace,” about student life during the Tian'anmen Square incident. After having it screened at Cannes without government approval, he was banned from filming movies in the PRC for five years. While the cause would seem to be obvious, again the actual reason wasn't publicly specified, and Lou Ye, for his part, gamely claims the five year ban was because production levels weren't up to the Film Guild's quality standards.

And for what it's worth, this post has the distinction of being my 200th update.

Update 6/8/2009 - Lou Ye managed to secretly film a a movie in Nanjing, "Spring Fever." It was submitted to the May 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and won an award for best screenplay. I'll probably have a future update on the film, additionally I assume he'll sure receive some kind of official rebuke.

State of the Blog Address

2009-03-10T12:36:00.002+08:00

I've built up a small queue of stories and pictures, and I've decided to have regular updates on Wednesdays and Sundays mid-day (Shanghai time). I think I can stick to that for a ways. I might also have occasional small updates on other days, if I feel like it.

This blog is driven by the pictures I take, and I've largely re-converted back to film cameras. Unfortunately, I broke my film scanner by plugging it into a 220 volt source! Oh man! There's photo labs in Shanghai that scan film, but they're pretty sorry and a little expensive. So until I get a new scanner, that'll have an influence on what kind of updates I have, or sometimes just the quality of pictures I put up - particularly with my upcoming updates about SE Asia.

I welcome comments and suggestions about what type of updates to post, I'm interested to hear from anybody who follows suggestions made on this blog, and I'm dying to meet people who want to jam old-school Hawaiian music! Either post a reply, or send an email to jeff oaktowncrack com.

And while I'm at it, I noticed that a few old Shanghai movies will be screened at The Glamour Bar the next couple Sundays at 6:30 pm - "Street Angel" on the 15th, and "Crossroads" on the 22nd. They're both tops, especially Street Angel. It's 65 kuai, I believe the price includes a drink. The movies are also freely available for download off archive.org, I have an earlier post with the links.

Punjabi Indian Cuisine

2009-03-08T13:20:00.001+08:00

Punjabi Indian Cuisine is an Indian restaurant located downtown. It's located near Shaanxi Nan Lu Station, from there walk a block to Xiangyang Lu, cross the street, turn left, and walk a half block. Punjabi Cuisine is located at 102 Xiangyang Lu, on the third floor. From the outside, the sign is really dirty and old, and in general the place looks like it might be kind of sketchy. The first time I saw it, I was ready to turn back!

On a tangent, I also thought it was funny that there's a clothing store a few doors over called “Ranma 1/2,” a Japanese cartoon I liked in college. There's no connection, except for the name:

Despite the scary sign and having to climb a couple not-impressive flights of stairs, the actual insides of the restaurant are quite nice. Clean, modern, comfortable, and with really corny paintings on the wall:

I've only had the lunch special, on the weekend, there's a meat version and also a vegetarian version that I've never tried. It costs fourty nine kuai, about $7.50, and it comes on a metal tray like an army canteen. Despite the utilitarian metal tray, the foods are colorful and pleasing to the eye. All of the foods are delicious, and reasonably authentic-tasting (I'm no expert, although I've been to India and my sister lived there), and the spices were only turned down somewhat. All in all, I'd call the food very good, but not outstanding. The portions were large, if not huge. It also includes a basket of pretty good naan, which I didn't take a picture of.

There's also an 88 kuai dinner buffet, but unless you haven't eaten in several days, or are visiting by yourself, I doubt it's a good value – most of the dishes cost somewhere around fourty kuai, it's probably a better bet just ordering what you want. The menu is very large, it contains both genuine Indian food, and foreigner Indian foods like Chicken Tikka Masala, and as would be expected there's a North Indian slant to it all. Unfortunately it doesn't offer Indian-Chinese foods like Lollipop Chicken, that would be awesome.

I've been several times, and it's always been a little sparsely populated, and every single other person in the restaurant that wasn't with me was Indian – I found that surprising, anyway. I understand it's more popular for weekend dinners, when there's Indian folk music performed. All in all I wouldn't call this an amazing restaurant, but when I get in the occasional mood for Indian food, this is my favorite place to go.

Lan Ting

2009-03-04T14:59:00.001+08:00

Lan Ting Kitchen is the Shanghainese restaurant I've been to the most, unless I count the local-style greasy spoons or xiaolongbao shacks I pop into. It follows the pattern of many of my favorite Shanghainese Restaurants: amazing food, cheapish price, no English, and a small & packed environment with no atmosphere other than a certain “wow, this is really different than the US” novelty. There's six small tables, half of them seat two people, and half of them seat four, with a little squeezing.

Lan Ting is conveniently located at 107 Song Shan Road, it's a couple blocks away from exit number two of the very central Huangpi Nan Lu Subway Station, nearish to Xintiandi. It doesn't take reservations, and there's generally a line outside – you take your chances. Arrive on the weekdays or at around five on the weekends, and there might well be either no line or just a short line. On the weekends, it's more like fifteen minutes to an hour.

The menu is extensive, generally a waiter will give a copy to people in line, to order before they sit down – that sounds terrible, but the restaurant doesn't push customers through, and even if they did, it's not really the sort of place to linger. The menu is divided into different types of food, each with their own page, and every page has a few of the most popular dishes highlighted. Someone without any Chinese should be able to order fine, just by selecting a highlighted dish from a number of different pages. Inevitably, looking at other tables, 90% of the dishes ordered are these highlighted dishes.

Here's a dish I very much enjoy, sweet & sour pork strips, it's #7 in the above menu. It's quite vinegary, with a nice breading. I could eat it all day!

And this is the remains of a nice vegetable dish, swimming in an alcohol sauce. A lot of the dishes here are cooked in Chinese Yellow Alcohol. In small amounts I don't really have an opinion if that's a good or a bad thing. However, in a few of the dishes the Yellow Alcohol taste is overwhelming, and just not to my favor.

Their fried fish with vinegar dish is excellent but very simple, perhaps it's simply too much fried fish with vinegar for only two people. I'd still recommend this dish, but it’s better for groups of four than groups of two.

I tried this straw-mushroom dish because they were sold out of my first choice, but I found it bizarrely bad. It wasn't gross, just the tastes didn't match or amount to anything more than “random ingredients heated in the same pan.”

Finally, they have excellent soups. Their shepherd's purse & tofu soup is my favorite rendition of my favorite soup – with my #2 being the version at Shanghai Restaurant back in Oakland California, ha ha. I also very much like their Hot and Sour soup.

The bill comes to around fourty kuai per person when I go, that's about six dollars. Although the atmosphere is poor and having to wait outside is a pain, especially in the cold Shanghai Winter, I strongly recommend this restaurant.

More Potato Chips!

2009-03-01T14:36:00.010+08:00

Is it possible for a blog to “Jump the Shark” twice? I'll leave the question as an exercise for philosophers, but on a more empirical level, here's a second update about Potato Chips in Shanghai. Potato Chips are still the most common snack found at just about every street corner in Shanghai. I can't say I'm a huge fan, but sometimes I'll get them, especially after I've found that my meal was just too small for me – it's an occupational hazard of being six and a half feet tall and living in China!

Blueberry Potato Chips:

Hats off to market leader Lay's: in the three years since my first Potato Chip update, they've managed to do a good job of keeping their best flavors and replacing the stranger ones – actually, Cucumber Potato Chips are the only holdover from the earlier update. However, they've introduced strange new sweet-flavored ones, Blueberry Potato chips are very common and do a surprisingly good job of matching two flavors that would seem to be impossible to match. I have never once ever seen a blueberry in mainland China, but recently it's a popular flavor for snack foods, chocolates, and the like.

There's also mango and lychee potato chips, I tried them out of curiosity. They're awful!

Sweet and Sour Tomato Ruffled Potato Chips:

Most potato chips in China are of the normal, sliced variety. The ruffles are a nice change, personally I think the texture is much better. Unfortunately their flavors suck – this one's just weird, they also have plain, which I find boring, and generally unappetizing beef & pork flavors.

Lime Potato Chips:

Shortly after my last update, Lay's discontinued Lemon flavor and replaced it with lime flavor, despite that Limes aren't generally available in China. It's a lot less sweet and a little more Sour, and is pretty good stuff. This is probably the most common flavor of Lay's Potato chip, anyway it's definitely my favorite. My second favorite is Cherry Tomato flavor.

Doritos D2 Corn Chips:

Corn chips! I like them more than potato. D2 chips used to be called “Nacho Cheese Flavor.” There's also D3 chips, which used to be called “Taco Flavor,” and aren't very good. I guess they got re-named after some marketing guru realized that somewhere around 100% of Chinese people have never eaten either Nacho Cheese or Tacos. Still, I don't really understand the names “D2” or “D3.” Why isn't there a “D1”?

Cheese Cheetos:

I haven't had these in years, let me say that the Chinese version here is pretty bad. It's just bland-cheese flavor, there's no tang. Unfortunately there's no “Spicy Nacho Cheese with Lime” flavor, I had a college roommate who loved that stuff. They also have “Beef” flavor, and “Brazilian Beef” flavor, very strange.

Cheetos are produced by the Dorito's company, which means there can be a little bit of searching to find them. Lay's are everywhere, but there’s also Doritos, Pringles, a Japanese brand called Oishi, and a Chinese brand that is really sorry.

Old Houses of Shanyin Lu

2009-02-25T21:16:00.001+08:00

Shanyin Lu is a street near the Beijing North Road shopping area and the Duolun Lu Old Street. The obvious reason to go is because of Wanshou Zhai, a small hole in the wall that makes not only very good (if somewhat inconsistent) xiaolongbao, but also excellent noodles and won-tons. Wanshou Zhai is right at the base of Shanyin Lu, it's a short street and I think it's worth continuing on to have a look at the old, colonial-style buildings of the area. They're of a higher quality than the shikumen that are being pulled down all across Shanghai, from what I gather Sichuan Bei Lu was a top spot to be back around 1930. A lot of China's most famous Kunmingtang figures lived there, as well as many of the literati, and Lu Xun, a proto-revolutionary author proclaimed “China's best author,” had a well-preserved home here:

It's brick buildings, three stories tall, with air conditioners installed. But there's other styles represented, the front gate to this apartment, with stucco and arches, looks like a half-attempt at a Spanish facade:

A number of the buildings have plaques on the outside, giving a few historical facts about the building, and in an ideal world, that means the building won't get torn down to make a ghost mall or another 5-star hotel.

Most interesting, to me, was larger Edwardian-looking mansions, in the classic Shanghai style of blue and orange bricks.

I don't know much about these buildings, but I'm very curious. I imagine they were originally built as a small apartment building, in the model of the author's apartment from Scenes of City Life, and are currently stuffed solid with people? Anyway, the laundry, and the accruements of daily life, seem to be overflowing out of the house:

And generally it's just an interesting area to look around, you don't see curved brick buildings every day of the week:

LOgO

2009-02-22T13:04:00.003+08:00

I haven't had much to say in this blog about the nightlife of Shanghai, and that's because the sort of things I said in a recent post about Shanghai's foreign restaurants apply double to nightlife in Shanghai – it's absurdly expensive and too low quality, in comparison to what I was familiar with in the United States. The sort of places that are popular with foreigners generally don't attract a local Chinese following, and even the top spots probably wouldn't last a week in any large Western City. It's more something foreigners do out of force of habit.

That said, it's a habit of mine, there's a few spots I enjoy, and I'll have a short group of updates about them. The first will be Logo, which is something of a dive bar, on 13 Xingfu Lu – it's a little out of the way, I usually get there by taking the taxi from the Hengshan Lu Subway Station. I like to go on Sunday nights, when there's an open mic night. The music can be inane, in the way jamming can often be, but some of the individual performers are very good, and can really stand out when they need to. Even at its worst, it's fun background music.

Drinking in Shanghai is on the expensive side, but LoGo is fairly cheap, and tipping isn't expected. Most people are drinking big half-liter mugs of Carlsberg, a tasteless beer, it goes for 30 kuai (about $4.50). They also have some mixed drinks on the menu, there's froo-froo tropical drinks like Pina Coladas and Mai Tais for 35 kuai, they're better than I expected and mixed strong. There's also a bunch of mixed drinks I've never heard of, maybe that's how they mix drinks in England.

Logo often has dancing, and some performances by local bands – I'm not a huge fan of these, because aside from where the main stage gets set up, there's really not much space in the main room. Even when it's not busy there'll be a lot of squeezing, to get past people. Anyway, the club has an English-language website with a list of events. There's also larger room up front, I'm guessing it doesn't have as much sound-proofing or it would be the main room. It's chill, there's more places to sit, it's quieter, it's lit a lot brighter:

There's a foosball table there - the people who play are in a league above any foosball I've seen before.

A big problem I have with Logo, that's endemic to nightlife spots in Shanghai, is that everybody's chain smoking, and ventilation doesn't amount to much. Personally I find it gross, and by the end of the night clothes and hair will smell really seriously disgusting. Beijing (of all places) implemented a ban on indoor smoking, and I'm hoping Shanghai does the same.

Lan Xin Restaurant

2009-02-18T13:33:00.005+08:00

Lan Xin Restaurant is a Shanghainese Restaurant that I enjoy, but a restaurant I think of as existing in the shadow of Chun, which is practically next door on Jinxian Lu. Like Chun, it's a small, home-style restaurant, turning out authentic tasty versions of the local cuisine in a casual setting. Chun is a little famous for not having a menu – or at the least, every time I've seen Chun mentioned, the no-menu thing gets mentioned as well. Lan Xin has a menu, but it's hand-written, here's a gander at a page:

Lan Xin is a step or two behind Chun in a few regards. The place is small, but doesn't feel charming, just packed. In addition to the main dining area with five tables, there's also a seriously steep flight of stairs that leads to a small room with a couple tables and a couch, it feels like sneaking into someone's private room for a meal.

I think the food, while still very good, is not as good as Chun's. While Chun is consistently excellent in everything it creates, Lan Xin varies. Still, there's a number of dishes that the restaurant is famous for getting right, and these dishes are seen on just about every table. One of these is Hong Shao Rou, a Shanghai specialty of fatty pork with a sweet sauce. Their rendition is on the fatty side, but still probably the best I've ever had. The "red" sauce it's served in is dark to the point of being black.

Another popular dish is Cong Bao Xia Ren. OK, I'm a lazy eater. I don't like spitting out bones, I don't like picking at shrimp shells to get out the meat. These shrimps were very tasty, but small and inconvenient to eat: first bite off the heads, then pop the rest in the mouth, try to chew out the meat, and then spit out the shell.

My favorite vegetable dish there is nothing fancy, but quite nice: Tang Cu Ying Si. It's a lightly pickled mix of a local vegetable, sliced mushroom, and black fungus:

But there's a lot on the menu that I find surprisingly average. Certainly not bad, but not the sort of thing you'd expect to find at a restaurant with a perpetual line. The Tofu and Shepard's Purse Soup, usually a favorite of mine, is oily and not particularly good. And this eggplant, not as spicy as it looks, just wasn't anything to get excited about:

And a quick digression: I've lived in Shanghai for quite some time, and before that I lived in heavily Chinese Downtown Oakland. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about Chinese food, and consequently I snobbishly turn my nose up at certain un-authentic American Chinese restaurants, although I think there are plenty very authentic Chinese restaurants in the US. So what to make of Lan Xin's Gu Lao Pork? It's quite good, but it's coming from almost the exact same playbook as Sweet and Sour Pork, the sort of thing you'd find at Panda Express. It's not quite as tangy, and the meat is of a higher quality than what you'd find there, but it wouldn't raise an eyelid if it was served back at some mall in California, alongside a fortune cookie:

Update 2/25/2009 - Wow, according to Wikipedia, Sweet and Sour Pork is actually the same dish, after being transported to Canton and then California.

One advantage Lan Xin does have over Chun is that it's half the price, bills should come out to around fifty kuai ($7.50) per person, or less. While I think it's possible on some theoretical level to just show up and get in line, I definitely recommend making a reservation first, the phone number is (21)6253-3554.

Unfortunately, there isn't any English at all, and while the staff is friendly, this restaurant will probably be impossible to navigate without at least a little Chinese, or a willingness to point at other people's tables. It's worth trying your luck though. Finally, the address is 130 Jinxian Lu, it's very close to both Chun and the Lomography store. I get there by taking the #1 Subway to Shaanxi Nan Lu station, walking north along Maoming Lu for five or ten minutes, and then taking a left at Jinxian Lu. It's right near the corner.

Xinjiang Style Restaurant

2009-02-11T14:46:00.002+08:00

Xinjiang Style Restaurant is a very good Xinjiang Restaurant in the Hongkou area. On the Chinese food site Dianping.com, it's currently rated the #2 Xinjiang Restaurant, based on taste. This isn't my first update about a Xinjiang Restaurant, I've also mentioned the unfortunately-named Xinjiang Rather Go On Expedition A Restaurant, near Jing'an Temple. And much of what I could write for that restaurant applies to this one as well: Xinjiang Food is from the Muslim, Eastern-Turkish minorities of Northwestern China. It's Central Asian in character, with a Chinese influence, and makes an excellent break from eating standard Chinese fair. Xinjiang Restaurants are most known for their lamb kebabs, which are popular both with a meal, or a snack for people just passing by. And to my mind, the kebabs aren't as good at Xinjiang Style Restaurant. They're being cooked out front in the small picture up top, here's a closer look at them:

I wouldn't call them bad, they're actually pretty good and I order a few whenever I go. Rather, it's that there's solid chunks of seasoned lamb fat on those kebabs! It's probably something of a treat for those stuck in the freezing Xinjiang winters, but to me it's kind of gross. Anyway, past that, I prefer Xinjiang Style Restaurant's food to Xinjiang Rather Go On Expedition A Restaurant's. The two restaurants are comparable in quality, both of them occupy the range of being better than good but worse than amazing.

The environment can't be called upscale, but service is friendly and there's a unique atmosphere. Particularly in the early afternoon, Xinjiang Style Restaurant is almost entirely occupied by Uighur/Eastern Turkish people, many of whom seem to know each other well. Maybe they're of the same extended family, or maybe it's just a close-knit community, I haven't asked. Even if they have nothing else on their table, they'll generally have a large stack of Xinjiang-style bread, it's very dense but vaguely reminds me of naan. I can't say I'm a huge fan, but it's not expensive, neither.

I am a big mushroom fan, and these needle mushrooms are marinated in a really delicious vinegar-dominated sauce that reminds me of the mushrooms you'd find in an Italian deli:

The soups are fun, and while I couldn’t give a culinary history, they seem to be thoroughly Xinjiang-ized takes on Chinese soups. For instance, this Hot and Sour soup was swimming with peppers, lamb, and onions:

Looking underneath, it's all heated with a dry flame, that keeps the soup at a low boil while it's at the table. It's not at all uncommon to see in Shanghai, but I still like it very much.

I've never seen any foreigners at this restaurant, and there's no English spoken, but the menu has pictures included for the most part, and there should be no real difficulties. It also has English translations that make almost no sense. My favorite thing to get, if I'm going by myself, is a plate of Ding Ding Mian – chopped-up noodles with diced lamb and peppers. It may look like Chef Boyardee, but it's so delicious!

This restaurant is located on 98 Dongjiangwan Lu, it's about a 5 minute walk south from Subway Line #8's Hongkou Stadium Station, Exit #1, and in the shadow of the elevated subway line. A meal should cost somewhere between twenty and fifty kuai per person.

Yuyuan Night Festival

2009-02-09T13:56:00.012+08:00

Chinese New Year happened recently, it's the first day of Spring according to China's incredibly confusing, traditional Lunar-based calendar. Like the Western New Year, it's marked from the first day of the first month, however the actual holiday lasts for a week (officially), and often two weeks (with private vacation time) – more or less corresponding from the New Moon to the Full Moon, two weeks later.

To celebrate all of this, the shopping center surrounding Yuyuan Gardens, which is kind of Shanghai's equivalent to Pier 39, puts on a big display of lights. I don't have much more to say about this, so mostly this update will just be some pictures I've taken – some of the pictures were taken at last year's Year of the Rat celebration, some were taken at this year's Year of the Cow celebration, but really the two celebrations were pretty much the same.

The alleyways of the corny tourist shopping center were covered with lights, in a red paper covering that all looks stereotypically Chinese, there were rows after rows of them:

And there were sporadic parades through the grounds, with people dressed as traditional Chinese gods, or more commonly as silly Cow mascots. It was hard to get a picture of this, here's as good as I could get:

Even though the grounds are fenced up with an admission fee of thirty kuai (about $4.50), the place is still open for business, although business at most places, surprisingly enough, doesn't seem especially fast. I'll try to talk about one of these food stalls, Nanxiang Xiaolongbao, in an upcoming blog. Here's a small snack stall:

As stated before, the whole place was covered with lights. The nexus was the famous nine-turn bridge, right outside the actual entrance to Yuyuan Gardens. It was too crowded to seriously contemplate entering, but here's a quick picture:

Police were out in force, probably to keep an eye out for pick-pockets. They also did a lackadaisical job of driving away vendors selling things on the street - mostly the vendors sold silly light-up cow horns. When they saw the police, they would run the other direction. The police occasionally yelled at them, but didn't give chase. They could also be seen admiring the lights themselves:

I'm writing this all in the past tense, but the real last day of Chinese New Year's is tonight, so let me take the opportunity to wish all my gentle readers a happy Year of the Cow!

On Foreigner Food in Shanghai; A Few Mexican Restaurants in Particular

2009-01-27T17:28:00.006+08:00

I try to avoid talking too much about foreign food in Shanghai, and that's not because I never eat it myself, but because foreign food in Shanghai just doesn't feel like an integrated part of the city. Whereas in the US, everybody eats foreign foods without thinking twice about it, in Shanghai the only people who eat at most foreign restaurants are expats and their romantic interests.

There's many reasons for this, and yes I think it's partly because Chinese citizens can be very provincial. But I think the larger part is that this food is almost universally of a low quality, I don't think there is a single Western Restaurant in Shanghai that could survive on quality in, say, San Francisco. And the prices for this mediocre food is generally much higher than it'd be in California - it's hard to compare, but I'd call the prices about 50% - 100% higher than what would be typical in San Francisco. Finally, this is all happening in price-driven Shanghai, where beer costs a quarter, manapua costs a dime, and you're never going to be more than a five minute's walk from a place that serves a quality local-style meal for $2.

I'll start with a few case studies, a couple of recently opened California-Mexican Restaurants. The first is the recently opened Agave Cantina, near-ish to Jing'an Si, at the corner of Changle Lu and Jinmin Lu. It's a California-Mexican Restaurant that's quickly picked up a huge following. How, or why, baffles the mind. At 65 kuai for a burrito, there's nothing inside this stale tortilla but meat, have a gander:

It's an obvious mis-understanding of what a burrito is, and in the US nobody would seriously consider going to this restaurant. And yet in Shanghai, foreigners are lining around the block! While I could understand paying more for quality, the quality isn't there, and by local standards the price is absurd. People go purely out of a sentimental attachment to burritos. To emphasize, a small group of friends could either get one of these apiece, or they could spend the same amount of money to get an exorbitantly large, multi-course meal at, say, the excellent Xiao Bai Hua. Or for those who measure prices in terms of alcohol, they could go to a local Convenience Store and get twenty-four cans of beer, plus a Fried-Chicken Microwave Burrito:

I'm more positive about El Mexicano, a small new local chain. And I think pricing is a part of it: Shanghai restaurants are operating in a city where 50 kuai ($7) gets one an excellent meal, and 100 kuai gets a restaurant worthy of raves. It would be difficult to spend more than 50 kaui at El Mexicano, and if the burritos aren't much more authentic than Agave Cantina's, they're tastier. And I think the horchata is good, and the tacos, at 7 kuai apiece, are nearly authentic enough to have fallen out the back of a taco truck – a slice of lemon standing in for a slice of lime being the biggest difference. OK, I'd never claim this restaurant to be excellent, and if this place opened in California it wouldn't last a week. Still, El Mexicano is a model of what I'd like to see in foreigner restaurants in Shanghai – prices comparable to a Chinese meal, and food that's at the least moderately authentic and tasty.

I also think there are a very few exceptions to the rule of Shanghai's foreigner food all being bad or at least overpriced, most notably certain Japanese restaurants, and perhaps Thai House. And of course I realize there's people for whom the money involved is of no real concern. I'm not one of those people, and I wouldn't be even if I was a millionaire, and even if I was one of those people, I'd still think that the Foreigner Restaurants in Shanghai are sorry.

Figaro Café

2009-01-25T14:15:00.005+08:00

I'll keep this update quick, because Figaro Café is largely (if not entirely) foreigner-oriented, and raving on about it just doesn’t at all go along with the increasingly-ignored “Slums of Shaolin” motif. However, I'd like to give the place some quick ups. The main branch of the chain is near Xintiandi and the Huangpi Nan Lu Subway Station, on 160 Xingye Lu & Madang Lu. First of all, they serve coffee:

OK the horrible truth is I don't like coffee, and while sometimes I'll go to cafes in Shanghai, it's almost purely because I have time to kill and want a place to chill for a little while, reading and using wi-fi. Figaro charges 18 kuai for a normal-sized cup of coffee, or 22 kuai for a bizarrely large mug. Quality seems about average, to my undiscerning tastes.

The reason to go is that the place is the best spot for a foreign book nerd in Shanghai to be. Downstairs, it's a convenient place to pick up Shanghai's various free English-language magazines. Upstairs, there's a large number of bookshelves, where customers freely drop off used books, and pick up new books to take home and read, as part of an international club called Book Crossings. I'll guess there's somewhere around two hundred books available, mostly in English but some in Japanese and other languages.

These books do change, it's worth dropping by from time to time to see what's newly available. In all honesty the collection does have a serious tendency towards fluffy airplane novels, while my preference is towards serious literature and studious non-fictions. But there's almost always a few top-notch books available. I've had good experiences diving outside my normal genres – for instance, I thought the military history "Panzer Commander" was fascinating. Theoretically, the available books can be gleaned off the Book Crossing website – while that does give an idea of what's available, realistically, most people obviously don't register their activities with the site, and I'll admit I'm one of them.

The friendly manager also runs a number of book related club, either on a weekly or monthly basis – there's reading clubs and workgroups for authors. I don't do them, but I've seen them operate and maybe I'll join in, sometime in the future.

The number two café for booklovers? I'll give that title to Garden Books, on 325 Changle Lu & Shaanxi Lu, near the Shaanxi Nan Lu Subway station. Honestly, I've never had the coffee there, but it's a very nice bookstore with an attached café, I had their ice-cream once and thought it top-notch.

Update 2/17/09 - Oh man! Figaro Café lost their lease just yesterday, a bank is taking over the space. I heard the manager say she was looking for a new location nearby, and expects to open in about two months - I'll update this blog when it happens. There's a smaller branch with a smaller selection of books and a less interesting atmosphere, at 456 Nanjing Xi Lu. It's about a five or ten minute walk west of People Square.

Update 3/25/09 - Actually, the second branch at 456 Nanjing Xi Lu has also closed. The main branch is still set-up to re-open, I'll post the information when that happens.

Shangweiguan Nanxiang Xiaolong

2008-12-31T18:36:00.005+08:00

It's been a long while since I've posted an update about xiaolongbao, but please believe it's not from a lack of eating them. I've actually gone a little wild about them, more than I should be considering that the “soup” of xiaolongbao is largely coagulated fat, heated up in a steamer until it melts. I've been frequenting Delongguan the most, and perhaps that's become my favorite xiaolongbao. But I still go to and enjoy all of the xiaolongbao places I've mentioned so far, except for Din Tai Fung which isn't really all that.

Shanghweiguan Nanxiang Xiaolong is currently the top rated (by taste) Xiaolongbao on Chinese food website dianping.com. While these rankings change from time to time, as more and more reviewers pitch in, it appears that Shangweiguan Nanxiang Xiaolong is stuck permanently in the #1 position. It scores a 27 out of 30 on taste, there's no grade inflation on Dianping and that's about as high as ratings get. The #2 xiaolongbao, Jia Jia Tang Bao, currently scores a 25 out of 30.

The branch mentioned here is located in a neighborhood area, rather than a shopping district. There's mostly large apartment buildings nearby, with a small strip of low-key restaurants at Xingshan Lu. It's pretty obvious which is the xiaolongbao restaurant, from all the workers inside making xiaolongbao, there's also steaming pots out front.

Nanxiang Xiaolong's Chinese menu is pretty minimal: the standard pork xiaolongbao, shrimp xiaolongbao, and won tons. As always, for non-Chinese speakers just saying “xiaolongbao” and giving an appropriate amount of money should do the trick. Drinks are next door at the convenience store. This is 3.5 kuai's worth of xiaolongbao:

It doesn't look too promising, to be honest. But it's easy to tell why these are the top rated xiaolongbao in town. Xiaolongbao is supposed to be delicate, and these are as delicate as I imagine possible- they seem to dissolve in the mouth. That's true of the dough in particular, but even the meat is obviously very well ground, and unlike the vast majority of meatballs can be described as “light” and “silky.” The taste of the soup and meat is also very nice. Personally I wouldn't claim these are the best xiaolongbao in Shanghai, just because the competition is so strong. However they are still excellent, have a unique vibe to them, and I definitely recommend anyone in Shanghai to try them.

The restaurant is located on 598 Xingshan Lu. The big problem with the place is, it's not very convenient to get to. Personally I walk from Jinshajiang elevated subway station, it takes about fifteen minutes. There’s a whole lot of lefts and rights involved, so I don't imagine there's an entirely convenient bus – of course a taxi, or a motorcycle taxi, is also a possibility. Here's a map, in Chinese, of the local area – the “A” in the upper left corner is the location, and I don't think it's as confusing as it may look.

Child Swapping

2008-12-27T18:29:00.000+08:00

Going to People's Square on the weekends is a daunting prospect. There, they run “English Corners,” which seeks to match up Chinese people who would like to learn English but don't want to pay, to foreigners who would like to teach some English but don't want to be payed. Since there are a great many more people in the first category than the second, these corners will start aggressively chatting up foreigners walking past.

I don't go to People's Square on the weekends all that often, even if this area is nearish to the excellent restaurants on Huanghe Lu, Lao Kele and Jia Jia Tang Bao. Last time I did, I was surprised at how greatly the English corner had expanded. There were hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people in their older middle age, hanging around and talking. I noticed a number of them were holding up signs. I had a closer look:

They actually aren't part of the English corner. The area has been overrun by parents who converge on the weekends to match-make for their children, it has the feel of a salesman convention. There's signs everywhere, often listing a short resume including their name, phone number, sometimes their pictures, their age, their height, their interests, and their schooling. There's no standard form, so different parents put up whatever would make the kids look attractive. I don't think I should put the information up on the web, so I erased some of the information in Photoshop, and then blurred it all, and I'll only include a couple of pictures with this update. Still, people looking for a Chinese boyfriend or girlfriend should definitely send their mother over!

Hongkou Street Fair

2008-12-24T12:05:00.000+08:00

Hongkou Stadium is in Northern Shanghai, it's the place to catch soccer games and perhaps the occasional Jay Chou concert. Despite having a few foreign-language schools in the area, it's not the normal place for foreigners to be, although with the new subway line #8, it's only a 4 station commute to the centrally-located People's Square. I think the area has a lot of life, and a fun example is the street fairs located in the stadium's surroundings.

The time of these street fairs is irregular: they happen on a lot of summer weekends (and I have to admit that's when these photographs were taken), but they also happen on holidays, or occasionally for no apparent reason. While there's probably some schedule somewhere, I've asked a couple locals and they have no idea, so it seems o be a very mysterious process. Anyway, despite the lack of advance notice, these fairs can get busy with people. One of the attractions is makeshift alleyways of tents, each offering various street foods – in the foreground here is Japanese takoyaki:

And unlike with most street food in Shanghai, there's tables set up, for people to eat at:

Here's another picture of the foods. I don't want to give the impression the stalls are all Japanese style, but here it's a mish-mash of mochi-based sweets:

There's also a lot of clothes being sold, it's always low-end, everyday sort of clothes, and they never have anything nearly my size – I recently saw 6'0" listed at XXL! So I don't have exciting pictures of that. Here's a picture of some of the knick-knacks being sold. They often have an ethnic focus to their products, which I guess goes along with being operated by the ethnicity in question – I believe this would be Yi, or Dai?

And more rarely, there's things like massages, hair stylists, and product demonstrations, often operating with headset-type mics hooked up to amplifiers, and generally being annoying.

Yuxin Sichuan Restaurant

2008-12-20T11:46:00.007+08:00

Sichuanese food is well-regarded throughout China, and that includes in Shanghai, where people's tendency is towards bland-ish foods, with the strongest flavors coming from the sugar. Consequently, I think a lot of the Sichuanese Restaurants here get overly localized, and a number of friends from Sichuan or neighboring Chongqing confirm this – Hunanese Restaurants are a better bet, for those looking for a fix of spicy food.

Yuxin Sichuanese was introduced to me as the most authentic Sichuanese Restaurant in Shanghai. While I've never been to Sichuan and can't go into any detailed comparison, it definitely gets spicier than Shanghai's other Sichuanese restaurants, and some dishes have a pronounced ma flavor – it's a peppercorn with a numbing effect on the mouth. Here's one of the spicy dishes, covered in peppers:

It's rabbit, and it's quite good, although it's swimming in oil – which is perfectly authentic Sichuanese. However, I wonder how much the menu has been adjusted to suit local tastes. Really, only a substantial minority of the menu is marked as being spicy, and these sweet fried eels, while excellent, definitely strike me as belonging to Shanghai's cuisine, rather than anything out of Chengdu:

This is an easy restaurant to recommend. Two locations are downtown – one on 333 Chengdu Lu & Weihai Lu, plus a more convenient location on 399 Jiujiang Lu, directly south of the East Nanjing Lu Subway Station. There's also a Pudong Location, on the third floor of a mall on 796 Dongfang Lu. A meal comes to about 100 kuai per person. It's a good idea to make reservations on weekends or Holidays - 6361-1777 is the Jiujiang Lu restaurant's. There's English menus with lots of pictures, and it's a nice if crowded environment, with tables divided off from each other, a professional waiting staff, and tablecloths that start out sparkling white. I wish I had a better picture to demonstrate:

Shanghai in the Movies: Shanghai Baby!

2008-12-17T11:09:00.010+08:00

I could never blame somebody for not liking Wei Hui's Chinese novel “Shanghai Baby,” and similarly I hope no one holds it against me that I enjoyed the novel quite a bit. It was fun in a campy sense, in the way a really bad movie can be, where there's a mean-spirited sense of fun of laughing at a work of art that fails on so many levels. Books don't usually have that sort of appeal, but “Shanghai Baby” played like a Hollywood movie, with a fast pace, shallow ambitions, and a general appeal to crasser instincts. While the characters and plot got boring and weren't quite enough to make it a camp classic, I'd still recommend it.

So it's a disappointment that the German movie version of “Shanghai Baby” fails to deliver on a work with so much potential for camp. I don't think that's the fault of the location scout for this movie. The movie is really poorly shot and gives one the tritest possible views of Shanghai. The movie starts with a framing device in Germany. Here's the first shot shown of Shanghai, at 4:50 in:

This clichéd view of the office buildings of Shanghai is shown over and over, dozens of times throughout the movie, including three more times in the following minute. Shanghai Baby lives within sight of these offices, and goes to clubs within these offices. These offices are invariably seen in the back window whenever she rides a taxi, and the offices are frequently used as an establishing shot, when the movie's actions have moved from distant locales back to Shanghai, or sometimes just to establish the transition from day to night.

Ever the dedicated blogger, I re-watched the movie in fast forward, to determine the longest period of time between shots of the Pudong office towers. I clocked it in at nine minutes twenty three seconds, starting after the Shanghai Baby anachronistically takes a ferry to cross the Huangpu River away from the office towers:

From there, she takes a quick break to Hainan, in Southern China. When she gets back, the movie establishes this with a look at the office towers:

While a non-resident may think of these office towers (and upper-end apartments) to be the Wall Street or Le Défense of Shanghai, or perhaps as being really centrally located to Shanghai's downtown and looming over the city, in reality the area is off to the side of Shanghai, and nobody goes there unless they work there, and the large majority of office space in Shanghai is located elsewhere. It would be as ridiculous as showing Alcatraz in every single shot of a movie set in San Francisco.

It must also be said that I could make a similar exercise out of the number of times Shanghai Baby's breasts appear onscreen – the movie verges on being soft porn. However, Slums of Shaolin is for the children, so I won't show screen captures.

The area around the Suzhou River (in particular the old post office) is shown a dozen or so times, actually it's a favorite area of my to wander:

And really there's not much more to the movie's Shanghai than that. A few other postcard views do make a one-off appearance, though, here's Jing'an Si:

The movie played a few festivals and is now going straight to DVD in several countries. Its problem was that it lost the novel's sense of wannabe bohemianism and self-congratulation, made the storyline more cliché, and made the characters even more flat. To its advantage, the Chinese people living in China speaking with other Chinese people spoke in English, and it seemed that they had learned how to pronounce the words by rote, or at least that they weren't fluent enough to put inflection into what they were saying. I thought that was pretty funny. Additionally, Shanghai Baby has cool hair.

Xiao Bai Hua

2008-11-12T13:01:00.003+08:00

Xiao Bai Hua is a Shanghainese restaurant near Xujiahui, a big shopping mall of a district. It's become one of my stand-by places when I go out for a fun meal with friends, because it's good food, not terribly expensive (even by Chinese standards), at a cool location, and has a fun, casual atmosphere. The insides are clean, brightly lit, and whimsically decorated, and it feels something like dining in a home:

I first heard about the restaurant off the yelp-like dianping.com, where I looked up, uhh, fish-head soup. That brings up images of a soup-pot full of fish heads, but here it's just a slightly creamy, well-flavored soup with an entire fish inside of it. The fish gets cleaned of the offal, but the head is left on – diners can just choose not to eat that part. The soup is excellent, and I get it almost every time I go to the restaurant. It's 88 kuai (about twelve dollars) for a bowl, but there's enough soup that two or three people could make their entire dinner out of it.

There's a very extensive menu full of Shanghai specialties, with an emphasis on seafoods. The menu is fully translated into English, and it's all very good, although I don’t quite think it rises up to the level of the soup, or of Chun, for that matter. The prices are decent, generally 20-40 kuai for a dish, and I usually end up spending about fifty kuai per person when I go. Here’s another picture of their food, again with the soup:

The restaurant is a little tricky to find the first time. I take the subway to Xujiahui, and then the #12 exit, across the street from Best Buy. It's a five or ten minute walk down Zhaojiabang Lu, past the park, to Wanping Lu, where I cross the street and take a left. Half a block down, on the right, is an alleyway, the address is 299 Wanping Lu, and the building is #3. There's a pink sign.

It's hard to pass by at night, because it's lit up like a Christmas tree!

It's a good idea to make a reservation if going at peak times, sometimes there'll be a short wait. The phone number is 21-6472-1867.

Songjiang Mosque

2008-11-06T12:42:00.010+08:00

Shanghai has a visible Muslim population, with Chinese Hui Muslims all about town (often seeming to run Pulled-Noodle Stands), and the generally-Muslim Eastern Turks visible as well (often seeming to sell barbequed meats or raisins). However outside of the food services, there doesn't seem to be much of a Muslim presence – for instance, businesses that aim themselves at a Muslim clientele. The only mosque I've seen in Shanghai has been the underwhelming Peach Garden Mosque, near the Old City of Shanghai.

I'm curious about the Islamic religion, so I've wanted to go to the mosque in the suburb of Songjiang for a long time now. The mosque was originally built in 1391, I had read it's one of the oldest mosques in China. However Songjiang is quite a ways out of town, so I never made it out, until I heard that Shanghai's new line #9 went out to Songjiang, and I decided to give it a try – the line also goes to Qibao Old Street.

The subway ride and transfer there is so annoying, worlds beyond the terrible People's Square Station. There are two stations, both named Yishan Lu – the line #3 version is the proper one to transfer from. From there, the two lines don't actually connect, and there's a long line for a free bus to the line #9 station, and then after the short bus ride, it's about an hour long subway ride to Songjiang terminal station, and a further ten minute taxi ride.

To my untrained eyes, the mosque didn't look all that different from a Chinese temple:

The largest difference being that there were gardens on site:

And also a small graveyard:

As well as the occasional Arabic sign or calligraphy:

There weren't any people worshipping when I went to the Mosque, although I went on a Saturday rather than a Friday. However, I understand it's still an active mosque, here's a snapshot of the Prayer Hall:

So honestly I found the mosque a little disappointing. However, it's worth a gander for those who are already in Songjiang, for whatever obscure reason.

Chun - A Shanghainese Restaurant

2008-10-29T16:23:00.000+08:00

This will be the first post in a series about favorite Shanghai-style restaurants. That's in addition to my series about the best places to get xiaolongbao, a local-style snack.

Shanghai's cuisine is not my favorite. I prefer the stronger flavors of South East Asian cuisine, or maybe the hot, oily Sichuan and Hunan styles of Chinese food. Shanghai style food relies on subtle flavors, where quality comes from the fresh ingredients. There's less oil than other Chinese cuisines, with foods often being steamed, rather than fried in a wok. Local seafood is prevalent, as is local produce – farms still line the outskirts of Shanghai. Sauces are mild, often depending on interplay of light soy sauce and sugar – really a lot of Shanghai's food is mildly sweet, and that's probably the biggest hurdle for someone new to the cuisine.

That being said, probably my favorite place in Shanghai for local-style cuisine is Chun, on 124 Jinxian Lu, right next to the Lomography store and nearish to the Shaanxi Nan Lu Subway Station. The restaurant has only four tables, between that and a NY Times write up it all sounded very mysterious. But really the insides are nothing special – it looks like a normal hole in the wall, only maybe just a little fancier and a little smaller. Also, with such a small restaurant, it's a good idea either show up really early, or better yet to book a table, the number is 21-6256-0301.

There's no menu. Instead, the chef prepares what's fresh that day – customers tell the waiter how many dishes they want. Of course there's some leeway to order favorite dishes, or to request certain foods not be served. The waiter only speaks Chinese, but the restaurant is well-known enough with foreigners that I'm sure it's possible to order without the local lingo.

All the pictures above have been taken at the restaurant, and they were all incredibly delicious, to the point that it was hard to choose a favorite or least favorite dish. If there are any caveats to be made, it's that the food is served local style, and personally I'm so lazy at eating, I hate spitting out bones, or digging the meat out of shrimps.

What was shown? The pictures were taken at a meal for two, where we got a cold braised pork, a plate of seasoned shrimp, a steamed whitefish with a hong shao sauce, and pork soup with bamboo shoots and those crazy tofu sheets that are tied into knots. A lot of food, although I should have added a vegetable. It came in to slightly under 200 kuai, or about $14 per person. About double the price from some of my other favorite Shanghai-style restaurants, but you pay the big bucks to get the best!

More Old Chinese Movies

2008-10-08T11:17:00.007+08:00

I've posted before about old movies of Shanghai, it's become something of a hobby and I'm contemplating rolling out a separate blog about the subject. A couple months ago, I posted a list of thirteen pre-Communist Shanghai movies that were freely available, with the promise of more. Never one to disappoint...

Silent movies, with original English and Chinese intertitles:
Poor Daddy - 儿子英雄 (1929)
An Orphan - 雪中孤雏 (1929)

Silent movies, with only Chinese intertitles:
Daybreak - 天明 (1933)
Greedy Neighbours - 恶邻 (1933)
Cosmetics of Market - 脂粉市场 (1933)
National Customs - 国风 (1935)

Movies with Mandarin Chinese audio, but no English subtitles:
Plunder of Peach and Plum - 桃李劫 (1934)
Twin Sisters - 再生花 (1934)
Bible for Girls - 女儿经 (1934)
Children of Troubled Times - 风云儿女 (1935)
The Boatman's Daughter - 船家女 (1935)
Song at Midnight - 夜半歌声 (1937)
Youth on the March - 青年進行曲 (1937)
Dream of the Red Mansions - 红楼梦 (1944)
Diary of the Homecoming - 还乡日记 (1947)

I'll still post more movies, but I think I've already uploaded many of the best, so I don't expect to be updating frequently. However, all these movies are posted to the excellent archive.org, so if you're hungry for more, try browsing their archives. Also, a number of these movies are available off Amazon.com, yesasia.com, or rented from netflix.com - the ones from Netflix and Amazon will have subtitles.

Wuyuan and Surroundings

2008-10-01T09:37:00.013+08:00

Feeling adventurous after a small trip to Fujian Province, I decided to take the bus back, rather than a plane. That allowed me a chance to look over the countryside, and to make a small detour to Jiangxi Province, on the way back to Shanghai.

Don't do this.

Here's the bus I took, it was a bunch of lay-down cots rather than seats. The cots were a foot and a half shorter than me, meaning I had to sort of fold myself into the cot. Everybody around me was chain smoking. To top it off, it was an 18 hour bus ride. And, the driver dropped me off by the side of the dark highway at 2:30 in the morning, and told me (and a fellow traveler) that it was about a mile to Jingdezhen, a medium-sized no-horse town a few hours away from from my final destination of Wuyuan.

But that's an overly long introduction to Wuyuan. Basically, Wuyuan is an ugly city that acts as a transportation hub to the beautiful villages nearby. So the first order of business is getting out of Dodge and making it to somewhere else. With me, I went to Small Likeng:

As a small village, it made for an interesting contrast with the Hakka villages I had been to several days before. It felt more typically Chinese, not being a Hakka area and all. The countryside, with plenty of rivers and streams, was beautiful, if not quite up to the standards of Yongding. And the buildings were beautiful, well-preserved, and built right against the water. I did have a complaint about all the tourists:

It's not an elitist "I'm too cool to be in a touristed spot" attitude, although of course I do have that attitude. It's more that, Small Likeng is a small village with small sidewalks. With the large tour groups and busy crowds going by, I found myself waiting in line just to walk down the street!

But I don't want to exaggerate; even in Small Likeng, it was easy to get away from the crowds. Here's a couple quick pictures:

There were a number of other villages that weren't quite as impressive, but weren't as busy. They didn't all feel cut from the same mold, though, there were marked contrasts between them. It doesn't photograph well, but Sixi Yancun had a labyrinthine feeling of large featureless buildings, connected by thin irregular pathways:

Whereas Qinghua had a more country feel to it. Here's looking under Rainbow Bridge:

And nearby to central Qinghua City was a beautiful valley filled with older homes:

Similiarly to Yongding, there was an odd relation to the locals, and it felt like their normal lives had turned into a tourist attraction. I was also on the receiving end of this, as random morons would go up to me and yell "Hello!" constantly. Anyway, whether it's cultural imperialism or not, I thought it was interesting to see the villagers doing their thing, here's a few quick pictures:

From Wuyuan, it was a seven hour bus ride back to Shanghai - the proper kind of bus, with seats and rules against smoking.

Pictures of Duolun Lu

2008-09-24T13:01:00.013+08:00

Duolun Lu is one of my favorite streets to wander. I'll have a few updates about the surrounding area, just because that's how much I enjoy it. This is a generalized take on the central street.

Duolun Lu's obvious comparison point is Taikang Lu, where an old shikumen was partially converted into a bunch of snazzy, chic boutique shops, the kind that foreigners just go wild for. Only, Duolun Lu isn't quite as snazzy, and is located near Hongkou Stadium and North Sichuan Road, a decidedly less chic part of town. The street has some really beautiful landmarks, though, and furthermore was the home of many of China's left-leaning literati, in the first half of the 20th century - including Lu Xun, perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese author. The area is dotted with statues dedicated towards these artists, or in some cases, to famous personalities from the era.

The main street has some interesting sites, like an Early Shanghai church, done in a Chinese/Western style. It was re-purposed after the Liberation, but is now again serving as an active church:

There's also this mansion that's still in use, I believe by the city government:

And then some buildings that aren't in a great state of repair, but still have a cool 30's Shanghai look to them:

Interspersed are some fancy newer buildings. They're generally such things as art dealers and cafes:

And a bunch of other older buildings, either old apartment buildings, or just older buildings that have been converted into curio shops. They're more interesting than one would expect - I bought an old-school Ruan Lingyu poster for a dollar.

Behind the main tourist street is normal shikumen living, with lots of narrow brick corridoors. This isn't a very exciting photograph, but it's a typical scene:

Bouquets of flowers decorate this door:

And there's the normal cheap street food available:

Really, this is one of the best areas of Shanghai to wander, not only because of Duolun Lu but also for the immediate surroundings. In addition to Wanshou Zhai Xiaolongbao, which I've mentioned before, there's Sichuan Lu and some cool shopping (Including Snaps Shop 2 and a branch of Lillian Cake Shop), Lu Xun park, areas of beautiful old brick buildings alongside Yishan Lu, and Hongkou Stadium. Oh, and there's also occasional decorative-rock markets on the street, but I'm not sure on which days.

It's a very photogenic area, and on a nice day there's a whole lot of people wandering around with cameras. While I'm on the subject, a number
of photos here were taken on the Seagull-branded toy camera I mentioned earlier.

Danta

2008-09-10T11:57:00.007+08:00

Here's a short update about a favorite subject: danta! Danta is an egg custard tart. It's a dessert that's associated with Macau, although I've read that it originated as a slight riff on some Portuguese or English desert.

To my mind, Lillian Cake Shop, a chain that's located throughout Shanghai, creates pretty much the perfect danta. The reason it's better than the competitors is mostly that it's cooked at a higher temperature. Like a creme brulee, the sugar at the top of the danta hardens and forms a thin caramelized layer at the very top - most places don't do this. In addition, the crust is light and flaky, but salty, a very nice contrast with the intense sweetness of the cream. It all goes for just 3 kuai, and out of the oven it's impossible to beat.

These cakes are located all around Shanghai, including inside a large number of subway stations. If none of these other danta are quite as good, a number of them bear mention. The first is from Lisboa Macau Restaurant, a favorite restaurant which I've written about before on this blog. They make a standard danta, as well as an egg-white danta. The egg white danta is lighter, bordering on a meringue, and definitely worth trying:

The other I plan to talk about is a little embarassing: KFC! It's the most popular fast food in China, but KFC makes some efforts to localize the menu, and one of these localizations is danta. KFC's dantas are actually pretty decent. It's in the same vein as Lillian Cake Shop, and they even caramelize the top layer, just overall it's not quite as good. They offer standard danta, and then a danta with candied fruit on top. The candied fruit is disgustingly sweet and throws off the whole balance of the flavors! Anyway, the worst thing that can be said about KFC's danta is that the 5 kuai/danta price, about equivalent to seventy five cents US, is much more than charged elsewhere.

Quanzhou

2008-08-27T11:09:00.003+08:00

Quanzhou is a medium-sized city in Fujian Province, a historic port city that Marco Polo once raved about as the largest port city in the world. I like all the temples and religious buildings and whatnot, and actually visiting this city was my impetus for the larger trip. While it was a nice enough city, I'll admit it was perhaps the low point of my trip to Fujian.

But I'll start by saying: yes, there really are a lot of old temples and shrines scattered here and about. Many of them still seem in use, not just a tourist draw the way temples can feel in Beijing or Shanghai. Here's the largest and most famous, Kaiyuan Temple:

But really just walking down the street, it was possible to come across active shrines and temples. I didn't go on a big day for Buddhism, but the Guandi Temple was quite active, and even on the sidewalk people stopped to burn incense. There were prayer pillows just sitting around on the sidewalk, for people to kneel in prayer. I wish I had gotten a better picture of it:

And a little out of the way was Chongfu Temple, an interesting modern neighborhood temple with a beautiful grounds, and a lot of Buddhist monks busily going about their business:

Additionally, there were a few other religions represented: the world's sole remaining (crypto) Manichean Temple is located in a village nearby, UNESCO sponsored a very interesting paper about it. There's also the remains of the Qingjing Mosque from a thousand years ago:

It wasn't all old churches, of course, and Quanzhou has several long streets, filled with shops and restaurants. It's not nearly as vertical as with larger cities, though: most of the shops were kept to a single floor. It all had a lot more character than one might expect: here's a shop that sells only red dresses:

And here's a side-street full of restaurants, this one's sign offers lamb, goose, and dog meat. But all I saw was roast chicken:

While there wasn't much in terms of nightlife, I did see a really cool take on DDR, the rhythm-based video game. It was hooked up to a real drum set! This girl was good, from a distance I thought I was hearing some rock band, playing in a club:

Anyway, these shopping streets are very, very long. I walked them back and forth a few times, and got so tired! In addition to taxis, there were also a large number of pedi-cabs. It seems Chinese-y, I guess, but it's the first time I've seen them in a way that wasn't entirely directed at tourists.

And continuing on with my earlier discussions on xiaolongbao, I ordered the local variety, and it was one of the strangest versions I've ever had. The dough on the outside was thick and mealy, tasting more like wheat bread. The meat filling was hearty and rich, and the dipping sauce was a hot-sauce, rather than vinegar. I like it, but it was really stretching to call it xiaolongbao! Most people ordered it with a broth that had some peanuts added.

Pictures of Fudan University

2008-08-20T17:30:00.006+08:00

Fudan University, in the north of Shanghai, is one of China's top universities. I haven’t attended the university, so I’m not about to provide some full-scale expose. But I did wander the grounds with a former student, and I thought it was interesting, so I’ll attach a few pictures in this update.

The University is effectively split into two different halves, on opposite sides of a major street. Right at the entrance to one side is a large statue of Mao Zedong:

There’s also a skyscraper/classroom building, the Guanghua Towers. It’s a new building which houses mostly science and engineering classrooms, from what I’ve been told. I can’t imagine how crowded the elevators must be, right when everyone gets out of class all at once:

And another skyscraper building is to the rear of this picture, on the opposite side of the campus. It's not quite as large, it hosts liberal arts classrooms.

The university has been around for slightly more than a century, though, and a number of older buildings are still in use. These buildings are much smaller and seem pretty pleasant. They also have large fields around them, and wide roads that cars can drive on, and really much of the university seems very much in the American university model:

And there’s also small parks and gardens scattered about:

I didn’t see much of student life, because I visited during the summer on a weekend. However I did see that the school had organized a school dance from 3-7pm, very quaint. On the Liberal Arts side of the university, there were streets directly off-campus full of bookstores and restaurants and so forth, it seemed like it would be a lot of fun. Also, the main pathway was lined with street-side dealers selling snack foods, or clothes, or even kites:

Seagull Camera

2008-08-13T13:21:00.012+08:00

Seagull Camera, based in Shanghai, is China's premier camera brand, which isn't saying much. Everybody in China gets Japanese cameras, same as in the US. The company has never even developed a digital model, and I don't really understand how it still survives – perhaps through generous government subsidies?

The Seagull headquarters is located near the Bund, on Huqiu lu near Suzhou River – it’s directly south of Zhapu Lu food street. I didn’t walk around, but I saw it contains a display room, where most of their products are for sale.

Those with an interest in taking pictures might find the brand worthwhile. Seagull exports their TLR cameras to a niche market throughout the world, they're one of only two companies still producing TLRs. These cameras use a film size that is four times larger than 35mm film, and hence contains four times as much detail – theoretically, image quality is much better than any 35mm or digital camera. In operation, they don’t really look anything like a normal camera. I’ve only seen somebody using one once, here’s a picture of it:

The Seagull model is an imitation of the premier TLR brand, Rolleiflex. Personally, I own a Japanese-made Yashica, which also imitates Rolleiflex, and can confirm that the picture quality is outstanding. While I’ve heard the Seagulls TLRs don’t have as good a lens, and that quality can be inconsistent, it’s possible to find them used for around $25 or less, say at the Xingguan Photo Mall. There’s also a 109 model that I suspect is actually an OK camera, and has a higher-quality lens. However, it’s a newer model, not available used, and sells at a higher cost than a used Yashica.

Looking at these used Seagull Cameras gives a quick look at the wacky economy of post-Liberation China. The brand-name “Seagull” itself was shared among various companies, who separately made the same product at different factories. Additionally, the design was shared with a number of regional camera companies, which have since dissolved, but the cameras can still be found used.

Seagull’s other main product is the Seagull DF series. They’re a line of film SLR cameras. Interestingly, they’re fully compatible with Minolta’s old manual-focus lenses (and vice-versa). These cameras are cheap new, and practically free used. It’s a very easy way to get into SLR photography – used, a camera plus a 50mm F1.4 lens goes for about $50. On the other hand, getting a used Minolta XG or X-700 off ebay won't be much more expensive, and they're probably better cameras. Anyway, here's some information on Seagull's SLR line, for those with an interest in giving them a try. I'd guess the zoom lenses aren't very good, but I'm sure the prime lenses are fine. And at $30 for a new 50mm lens, and $60 for a 24mm, it's not a huge investment.

It will blow away the results from any non-DSLR digital camera, especially in lower light. As an example, here’s a band-picture of Muscle Snog, taken on ISO800 film, actually with a slightly dimmer F1.8 lens. Fuji also makes an ISO1600 film, although good luck finding it in Shanghai.

And here’s a picture of a band taken on a small digital camera. While it’s not a scientific A-B comparison, please believe that I’ve taken a lot of band pictures, and both results are pretty typical:

The display room also (strangely enough) sells Olympus's Stylus Epics, a line of smallish point-and-shoot film camera. They're still new, and there's a number of varieties. I have a couple and love them. The fixed-lens is the one to get for indoors, but the variations with zooms are also very good as an outdoor camera.

Seagull also re-brands generic cameras and cheap digital cameras. I ended up getting a 25mm toy camera. It’s fun, even if it sucks:

Shanghai Nights

2008-08-10T17:06:00.002+08:00

I was happy to come across a video of the ultimate Shanghai song - "Ye Shanghai" or "Shanghai Nights." It's a jazzy tune from the 30s that I only knew through "Suzhou River," which is itself the best modern movie about Shanghai. It's still a well-known song with Chinese people. I'm told it was associated with the Paramount Theater, a jazz club on the far corner from Jing'an Temple.

Make sure you're in a place that tolerates dancing, then give it a listen!

Fujian's Hakka Countryside

2008-08-06T12:20:00.003+08:00

This update is about perhaps the most impressive area of China I've ever been to: the rural interior of Fujian province, a four-hour bus ride from Xiamen. I mean, Shanghai is a lot of fun, but the stepped slopes around Yongding can be breathtaking:

The part to notice is the large structures in the bottom left of the photograph. They're crazy! Gigantic earthen buildings that housed an entire clan, they were built by Hakka tribes trying to steer clear of bandits:

The insides are mostly wood structures, with some stone, and a shrine (and perhaps smaller buildings) located to the inside:

However it doesn't really seem like a pleasant place to live: the rooms are stacked against each other tightly, and there's no modern conveniences like electricity or water. I also imagine that fire is a constant danger. Here are the insides of another tulou:

It's possible to rent a room in a tulou for a few dollars per night, but I opted for a place with an electric light and a shower, nearby. I was still located right nearby to all of this, walking around it was surrealistically beautiful:

That's actually a classic shot of Yongding, and here's another one, which shows how extremely beautiful the surrounding areas can be:

It's all farmland, I heard that the wood used in chopsticks is a big local crop. It's very interesting, the villages are populated almost entirely by the very young and the very old - people of normal working age have almost all left to Xiamen, or to other big coastal cities. Really it's just an eerie feeling. It also leads to surprisingly old people, out working the fields. My friends told me I should have gone out and helped, rather than just snapping a picture:

These houses recently got added to UNESCO's list of the world's top tourist destinations. But when I went, a few months ago, there were basically no other tourists there, and it was obvious people weren't used to tourists - I was constantly asked if I was French, maybe the French equivalent to Lonely Planet highlights the area? I was also told I was tall constantly. On the other hand, people were very polite, and didn't even stare or yell "hello" at me.

But there's definite inconveniences: basically nobody speaks any English, and there's no English menus (or even proper restaurants). So while I would definitely recommend a tour of the area, it's probably best to arrange the tour through a travel agency, unless your Chinese is pretty good.

Old Chinese Movies (For Free!)

2008-08-02T11:02:00.000+08:00

I've become a fan of old Chinese movies, and I'm trying to put my entire collection online. Unfortunately, this has proven problematic, for too many reasons to get into. However, here are a number of older Chinese movies that are freely available for download - Chinese movies become Public Domain the year following their 50th anniversary of creation.

For those who just want to try a new cinema out, I'll quickly recommend the toppermost of the poppermost. My favorite is probably Spring in a Small Town (1948), with English subtitles separately available. It's a minimalist melodrama and quite lovely, there's also a decent re-make from a few years back.

Other top movies include The Goddess (1934), which is a silent movie with English intertitles, and Scenes of City Life (1935). These are both set in a corrupt 30s Shanghai, and both have been talked about before on this blog. "Scenes of City Life" was followed up by the slightly more upbeat Street Angel (1937) which has English subtitles separately available.

I'll make a quick list of the movies I know are available. They're all taken from archive.org. Many of them are available on DVD in the US, and can be rented from, say, Netflix.

English Subtitled:
Spring in a Small Town (1948) (subtitles)
The Goddess (1934)
Scenes of City Life (1935)
Street Angel (1937) (subtitles)
Princess Iron Fan (1941)
This Life of Mine (1950)

Chinese Only:
The Big Road (1934)
New Women (1934)
Queen of Sports (1934)
Song of the Fishermen (1934)
Crossroads (1937)
The Spring River Flows East, Part 1: Eight War-Torn Years (1947)
The Spring River Flows East, Part 2: The Dawn (1947)

I personally view my videos using BSPlayer 1.37. Unlike newer versions of the program it's spyware-free, but it's starting to show its age. Additionally, most computers made in the last five years will have video-out, and can be easily plugged into a TV.

I'll try to write an update to this post soon, as I find more Chinese movies and get more posted online. I'd appreciate any tips if people know where to find more. Thanks a lot to archive.org for freely hosting these movies.

Kimura Japanese Kitchen & Some Katsu

2008-07-30T22:31:00.010+08:00

In my somewhat limited experience, the best Japanese restaurant in Shanghai goes by the name Kimura Japanese Kitchen. Well...it's not easy to tell exactly what the name is, as the billboard seems a random mash of Chinese, Japanese, and English. It's located at 2255 Beijing Road, near Jiaozhou Road and a little north of Jing'an Si, and here's a picture of the sign:

As somebody who won't even go for a California Roll, thinking it's just too unauthentic, China's take at Japanese food is worlds beyond that. Sushi, for instance, will have mayonnaise piled on, sometimes it'll be pressed into the form of a sandwich, it'll have sweet things added to it, and maybe it'll get heated up in the microwave before serving.

So there's plenty of Japanese restaurants, but many of them are either extremely un-authentic, or are targeted at the Japanese expat community. That makes it way out of the price I prefer to pay for a meal, particularly as I'm not a huge fan of Japanese food. Kimura Japanese Kitchen is a favorite for the way it breaks out of this pattern. It's authentic, the owner is Japanese, there's Japanese signboards, and most of the customers can be heard speaking Japanese. But it's also cheap, as far as Shanghai's foreign food goes. Consequently, the place is usually pretty packed, even if you can't tell that here:

The simple interior reminds me of a basic restaurant from the times I've been to Japan, and the menus and signs are in both Japanese and in Chinese. They also have an English menu.

My favorite thing to get is the katsu, maybe because I like it in a Hawaiian plate lunch, ha ha. Here's the katsu curry, it costs about $4:

And my friend quite liked her ramen, which is more photogenic, anyway:

For katsu fans, there's also a very good, very Japanese-style place around the corner on 176 Jiazhou Lu, near Beijing Lu. Forgive me if I make a Japanese mistake, but I think the name would transliterate to Shi-chan's Tonkatsu? Get the fatty tonkatsu, it's better than the lean. It is a little expensive though, at about $10 for a not-large order. Here's a picture of the storefront:

The Japanese chain Curry House, which is also in Honolulu and pretty much exactly the same (they don't offer "The Challenge"), has a rapidly-expanding number of stores in Shanghai. They're casual, and always crowded. Somehow it inspired a Japanese video game as well, wow. The katsu and curry rice is about the same price as Kimura's, if not as good. It's still decent and there's a lot of different varieties, and I think the place is worth going to. The food is, uhh, better than it looks:

Shanghai, 1980

2008-07-27T11:42:00.005+08:00

There's not much to say in this post. In 1980, right after China was opened to foreign tourists, my grandparents took a guided tour to Shanghai, Beijing, Canton, Guilin, and other top tourist spots in China. My grandfather shot a number of pictures to Kodachrome, which have preserved pretty much perfectly. Here's some of the most interesting pictures.

There's not as many picture of Shanghai as I would have liked, but the pictures do show a wildly different look to them. Here's the former French Concession, I believe. Only there's no cars, and everybody's wearing blue or grey pajama-suits:

Here's another shot of the cool clothes. Sometimes maintenance workers dress a bit like this, but you don't see it much anymore:

While people aren't staring at the camera in that one, there's plenty of other photographs that demonstrate a foreigner was a big novelty. I at first thought this was some kind of fight, but really the crowd is just gathered around the foreigner with a camera:

Here's a young lady, I guess she's having her picture taken.

They still had the old boats in the Shanghai-area rivers, and they looked even more beat up then than they do now:

And here's a nice picture of Guilin. I was never much interested in visiting Guilin until I saw his shots. This is just one of many amazing pictures:

Gulang Yu & Xiamen

2008-07-23T10:51:00.003+08:00

I'll have a few posts about a trip I made to Fujian Province a few months ago. Fujian Province is along the southern coast of China, directly across from Taiwan. I had been to Fujian Province before, on a company field trip to Wuyi Mountain. I had considered a trip back ever since then, and so I was delighted that the return trip was also excellent. Some places more than others, but it was generally a sustained high point.

My first stop on the trip was to Xiamen & Gulang Yu. Xiamen is one of the major cities of Fujian, I've also heard it referred to by the name Amoy, which comes from the local dialect. It's a large, sprawling city, although the downtown area was fun to wander around. The city is built on an island, with the Eastern Coast being the downtown of the city:

The picture was taken from the small Gulang Yu island, which was an interesting if heavily-touristed area. More than a century ago, Xiamen was the center of foreign operations in China, and Gulang Yu was where the foreigners lived. A lot of their houses remain, in various states of repair:

And the streets have a charming randomness to them, with a lot of thin alleys leading every which-way:

It's all very beautiful, and with a strong foreign feel. There were a number of small and relatively inexpensive hotels and hostels, dramatically sticking up in the air, to the left of the ferry peir. It was all very beautiful, and I've never seen so many cameras in my life - and in China, that's really saying something! There were plenty of old film cameras or Holgas in use, and also a large number of couples getting their marriage photos taken - it's a big Chinese custom, done a few weeks before the actual wedding:

But while Gulang Yu is beautiful, it's not the most exciting place. There's a cheap five-minute ferry to downtown Xiamen, and the shopping street of Zhongshan Lu. It's a large pedestrian street that's pretty similar to the other large shopping streets in any large Chinese city. However it did have plenty snack foods, some interesting side streets, and a few activities, like these people performing traditional Chinese music:

And there's also Nan Pu Tuo temple, a large active Buddhist temple with an interesting series of hills to the rear of the temple ground:

All-in-all, I don't know if Xiamen and Gulang Yu merit a special trip on their own, but they're relaxed and beautiful and generally interesting places to be.

Taikang Lu - stuffwhitepeoplelike

2008-07-16T11:25:00.015+08:00

I've become a big fan of the website Stuff White People Like. It catalogs the interests and concerns of the Caucasian hipster set, and I like to think that it "keeps me real," as it were, after living years in Shanghai. For better or for worse, a lot of people in Shanghai just don't share the hipster aesthetic.

Taikang Lu is the best place to immerse myself in a hipster setting. A semi-converted shikumen full of cafes and boutique stores, I think it's the stuffwhitepeoplelike center to Shanghai. You could look over the updated list from their website, compare it to what's available on Taikang Lu, and probably check off 90% of it. You couldn't do much better even in the US, unless you were in the Mission District, Brooklyn, or downtown Portland.

Taikang Lu is not particularly convenient to get to. It's south of the uncool foreigner hub Xintiandi, which is itself South of the Huangpi Nan Lu Station. The walk from the station is about twenty or twenty five minutes. It's a short street, and really what people care about when they say "Taikang Lu" is the shikumen and buildings starting around Alley #210. However, the street has an interesting mix of down-market restaurants, up-market bars, and a local-style vegetable market:

These shikumen are a really interesting setting. I've talked about them before. It's a brick building structure, with shops on the outside street, and on the inside a series of narrow alleys, common courtrooms, and small apartments. It's really quite beautiful, and these shikumen are well preserved:

However what was formerly people's apartments has often been converted into trendy shops, such as this store selling ethnic chotchkies, scarves, and handbags:

Or a very, very large number of cafes, of all kinds: small little nooks, to larger chains - Maui Coffee has a couple branches:

And similarly, there's a large number of art galleries of all different sizes, here's a small one:

I don't want to continue along these lines too long. What else is there? A large amount of foreign restaurants (including a burrito stall, but it's not good), a number of boutique fashion joints, a Tibetan jewelry stall where the jewelry was owned by famous Tibetan lamas and now goes for thousands of dollars, and small cocktail bars. There's English speakers and English menus to everything, and most places have outside seating.

A couple favorites includes an eclectic Chinese antique store, which has things like 60s sewing machines, and Projection 216, a fashion design studio that cheaply shows art movies on their projection TV, during the weekend, in a very small room. Unfortunately, they're taking a break for the summer.

Anyway, the area is also interesting because it's only been half-converted into a retail space. It's still very much in use as a residential space, especially towards the back, and it's a fun way to check out what a real shikumen looks like, while being ignored by the residents. They're going about their lives oblivious to the tourists wandering around, and often snapping pictures of everything in site:

And there's the ubiquitous laundry, getting hanged up on a sunny day:

So I hope I give a good impression of the area. Taikang Lu's shikumen is definitely one of the best places for a foreigner to go in Shanghai. And don't get me wrong, I recommend my Chinese friends to go, and they enjoy it too.