Experiment

I got a good news phone call this morning from one of the guys at the solar panel ompany, they've decided to let me do the experiment that I've been planning for a bit! Basically the massive majority of the cost of solar panels is the silicon that they use for it itself. It has to be so pure that they need some very energy intensive methods to purify it far enough (solar panels aren't quite as green as people like to think, they spend about half of their lives paying back the energy it cost to make them and they also leave a trail of chemical nasties) which is expensive. Consequently, people are looking at many new types of panel that need less material to work.

The easiest solution, of course, is simply to use thinner panels - which is exactly what I want to try. The problems include that they will be more fragile, and also that they will bend more during the sintering (heatin at about 500 degrees C) that they undergo, which might make them not work. On the other hand, any thickness reduction means big cost cuts, so it might be worth it. I want to basically thin some slices down about 10 or 20% and see what the effect is on their power output at the end, it's something that they've been interested in before but haven't actually tried yet, and I think they're keen to see what happens. They also have a new machine fairly recently that will allow very good thickness measurements.

My professor returns on Monday, so I'll probably try and get over there on tuesday to begin, and it might take the rest of the week to get done, but should be a lot of fun!

In other news, I finally cracked last night at the expat event and ordered the following monster:


I've been told on certain streets you can even find proper Turkish kebabs in polystyrene boxes, so I'm going to have to hunt one of those down next time. There is documentary proof of my betrayal of chinese food at http://www.shanghaiexpat.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album06&id=IMG_1010_001&op=modload&name=mdGallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php it's photo 19 if it doesn't come up automatically!

After the expat event Valencia got us guestlist entry and free drinks at the surprisingly retro disco club G Plus in a swanky mall in Xin Tan Di (her company helps market things in Shanghai. Apparently the locals tend to spend more in clubs than stingey foreigners, but they prefer clubs that have a few around and thus spend even more, so clubs like to encourage us to visit them). Very good club with good music and a very '80s mirrored theme, my only complaint (as with so many clubs here) was the narrow passageways and the insane amount of space dedicated to tables (which is how clubs here seem to make most of their money). On the whole big thumbs up tho!

An Underground European Club-Bar

This Saturday I toured the Shanghai Development Office in People's Square. Now as dull as that might sound, it's actually a Museum and they get lots of recommendations because on one of the floors, they have a cardboard replica of most of the city, with every building and tree painstakingly recreated. It just goes to show how far out I've been living that neither of my residences so far were on it, which was a disappointment!

Cardboard cutout vs. the real deal!

In fact, the whole place was pretty dull, I wouldn't suggest this to any would-be tourists.

Anway, it rained all afternoon so we sheltered in the tea room and then went to a restaurant for dinner. I had arranged to go clubbing as a smart club with Kenny, but all of us were in shorts and sandals and decided it was just too much effort to all go and get changed. Luckily, one of the germans with us knew a club called Pirates! that apparently wouldn't mind sandals, so we re-arranged plans and went there instead.

Well, Pirates! had absolutly no-one inside, so we went to the bar just down the road from it, Logo. The entrance was a dark door but inside was great, lots of old sofas and a small bar area at the back. 20 RMB entrance and drinks at 30 RMB, it was very relaxed and not trying to be anything like so many of the clubs here. It had a very European feel to it, the only problem was thatit was slightly smokey (it even had European toilets, although they were unisex and weren't in that great a condition)

Later on, a local band came in and played, they were really good! One of our friends Valencia (american, but has a thing for long-haired asian men) fell in love with the lead singer and we spent a lot of the evening trying to get her an autograph.

Floopy haired local bad-boy (love interest??!)

When we got bored here, we heard rumours about another after hours bar in the vicinity and spent about two hours trying to find it and also find something to eat nearby (we wanted dumplings but all wecould find was hotpot, which wasn't going to do in our condition). We didn't find it but did see some funny early morning scenes (lots of fights between locals, mostly).

A Busy Weekend!

I haven't posted for a few days: it's been a very busy weekend and I needed until now to catch up on the sleep!

On thursday I had dinner with a few people in Shanghai, which transformed into a rather late excursion to the before-mentioned Bonbons and a fairly late (early) return home. Friday was my last day at the company, so it was fortunatly rather light on the work front - trying to get some last bits of data and looking around the place a final time.

In the afternoon Prof. Ma returned me to Puxi via his daughters work, they invited me to dinner on Sunday chez Ma, whch is very close to the university - with the promise of Baijiu, the chinese national spirit.

Saturday was the real beginning: went into town to meet a friend for breakfast, and had my first experience of People's Square as a lone foreigner - totally different! I'd heard about this scam where a group of young female students 'befriend' you saying they want to practice their english, then take you to some teahouse where you end up getting charged a massivly inflated bill for a few cups of tea - as well as reading it on the internet, my friend Neil warned me about it: he'd been scammed for 400 RMB on the first day (they tried to take 1000!).

It hadn't happened to me yet but I wasn't surprised, I obviously don't look like the kind of guy that would fall for a scam. Or perhaps I do. Within 20 minutes of arriving (got in half an hour early due to mistiming busses!) it'd been tried on me twice. It really is very cleaver, but of course forwarned is forarmed and I got rid of them. When I came back hours later one pair were still there - apparently they'd 'got lost' and asked me for some directions!

That afternoon (to my eternal shame I forgot my camera for the whole weekend so have no photos of any of this) I met up with more friends - James and Ziyang from my course in Cambridge and a few of their friends, and went to KTV! KTV is karioke, but its massivly popular here, occupying about the same cultural space as going out for drinks. You get a room with the karioke stuff, order foor and drinks, and sing away to each other for several hour, and its as much fun as it sounds, although the only english songs they have are dodgy britney covers and the omnipresent Backstreet Boys (the supermarket near where I lived in Pudong played the BB greatest hits album on loop - but frustratingly didn't have a dance floor!).

Afterwards we went to a Guangzhou restaurent (Guangzhou (formerly Canton) is in the south of China near Hong Kong, and its people are famous for eating almot anything. There was a recent field mouse epidemic in central china where 2,000,000,000 field mice chomped through thousands of acres of cropland, but the farmers were able to make up their losses by exporting live mice to Guangzhou instead). We ate donkey and rabbit among other things and it was all rather tasty!

Afterwards I nipped briefly home to change and shower and make a rapid turnaround, before heading back into town to visit Attica, one of Shanghai's most famous scenes. It's on the roof of one of the buildings of the Bund (by this stage the loss of a camera was really getting to me!) and priced accordingly. It had two really nice rooms and a lovely outdoor bar area, and the clientelle were slightly more resectable than those in bonbons. We knew a few people there (someone in the Taiwanese mafia allegedly?!) and chatted and danced until about 4am. Clubbing here seems much less down-all-you-can-and-act-stupid oriented, although that may be because the people who I go out with don't drink that much, but it's actually much more fun and much less expensive. We also met lots more people, my Shanghai circle is growing!

Since we left at 4.30am and dragonboating starts at 8, I'd made the prior decision not to return home, and brought a bag with me to the club. The one weakness of Attica is that the cloakroom ONLY takes coats - we argued this one for a bit, and despite my bag containing nothing valuble the assisstant wouldn't give in, luckily it wasn't a bulky sports bag or anything and despite looking slightly metro, it wasn't so bad.

Crossed the city early in the morning and saw some interesting sights (camera loss now chaffing). McDonalds is open 24/7 near the bund, but the only people actually eating were a few groups of foreign lads clearly just out of a club too. However, most of the tables were occupied by sleeping locals - literally just head down on the tables like those funny mushroom people in Voyage of the Dawn Treader! Another open square was covered in homeless - so many here.

The subway is shut from 10.30pm - 6am which really makes me appreciate London's 1.00am-ish, although I wish more cities would follow NY's 24h example! Got to the DB pickup at about 6.45 and dozed by a wall for a bit until 8, then dozed a bit more on the coach. We had about 40 people this week: enough for two boats and races!

It was by far the hottest day so far and with no cloud cover. I borrowed some sun cream but it wasn't as good as my factor 40 stuff and rapidly washed off in the spashing. Despite the races being great fun, I knew it was just a matter of time until the strawberry look arrived!

I was meeting up with some more friends afterwards to explore Shanghai further and we popped down to a temple called Yu Yuan Temple, a former temple of Taoism and now a shopping mall and tourist area (the buildings are preserved and it's very pretty), with a little bit of temple left and some god statues that you can go and bow to if you're into that stuff (I and my guides of course were) and we were there for a while as the morning's sun turned into a heavy downpour outside.

We wondered the backstreets of Shanghai towards the bund and stopped for tea in a teashop (a very reasonable 2 RMB / cup, although my guides, who don't speak the loca Shanghai dialect, could only point and gesture, a great equalising experience!), and came to the far end of the bund. Got a ferry across (another 2 RMB!) and wandered Pudong breifly before I had to head back to my apartment for that night's dinner!

Evening came and I was picked up by the professor and headed to his. We had lots and lots of dishes (off the top of my head; peanut chicken, steamed fish, braised beef, a kind of local shellfish, several vegetables, fruit, left VERY full!) all of which were most tasty, and the promised maotai - the best brand of baijiu. It is about 56% alcohol, but much tastier than vodka, and between us I and the professor had the better part of a (small!) bottle. At this stage I was slightly concerned about how I would get home, but fortunatly Mrs. Ma (also a teacher at Shanghai Daxue) said she'd take me home!

Haven't been up to much besides work since, except to say that:

++=

Real* Tea! I was like a heroin addict drinking this. And yes, despite being packaged in the UK, all the ingredients are individually chinese!

Two nights in Shanghai

This weekend was fairly busy, and I'm finally getting round to writing an update about it. On thursday and friday night Seigo and Jono were in Shanghai on their massive world tour from Moscow to Thailand. Thursday, being a work night, we went out for a respectable meal at a restaurent in town and tried to order food from the confused waitress in rubbish phrasebook Chinese (she didn't seem to understand any of the CHinese I'd learn over the past three weeks - or perhaps didn't want to tell me where she lived!). The meal was very interesting, a little boiling pot of broth which you put bits of meatinto to cook. No rice, no veg, no fuss, and some really nice sauces.


Friday night we'd heard about a club called bonbons that we were keen to check out. Entrance was RMB 120 (about £8), but once inside it was an open bar. This drew our attention pretty sharply, and after another pointy meal at a nearby joint we headed straight over.

The setup in the club was amazing. Once inside you swapped your ticket for a drink, then when you want another you swap your empty bottle or glass for the new one, saving them hassle with table cleaners! We got chatting to a Chinese guy who had had the forsight to make a reservation (for which you need a group of 10) and who had a table reserved in a quiet area. We joined them and played a few hours of entertaining drinking games, had a dance and chatted to some other people. Jono took lots of photos so in a few weeks I'm sure they'll be in my possession.

We left at about 4 and struggled to a nearby bar, but that was a bit quiet as well. We had to fight our way through crouds of child beggars and prostitutes (and also those cyncal flower sellers who approach couples and emotionally blackmail the man to buy a flower) to escape to the nearest taxis and get away.

Saturday day was mostly sleeping - I pity Jono and Sog who had to get a 12 o'clock ferry to head off to Japan. However, I'd arranged to go out with one of the expat lads from last week (Bonbons again), and another guy he'd befriended at the pub, plus a couple of girls we'd met later at a salsa bar. I invited the guy we'd met on Friday and all of the sudden we had a party! It started to rain as soon as I got off the underground, but Chinese are the true capitalists, within moments there were entrepreneurs selling umbrellas for 20 kwai. Again it was really good, the DJ had lots of competitions (trying to find the most beautiful woman in the club or something...) and we danced until very early in the morning.

After two all night bonanzas, Sunday was very relaxed. Me and a housemate had dinner at the local restaurent. It had about space for three tables and was basically in the middle of a maze field, but the food was very satisfying and inexpensive.

A Night Out...

Last night I had my first night out in Shanghai, with an American chap called Kenny and a few girls who, all of whom met on one of the Shanghai expat websites (I prmised myself I wasn't going to go out of my way to meet foreigners, and the promise lasted over two weeks, so I tried! Unfortunatly the students here just don't have the inclination or spending power to go into town at night, so I really had no choice).

We went to a pub that has an expat mixer event every Wednesday on the top floor and followed it with a salsa bar/club in the French Concession.

Lots of interesting things happened but I'm still digesting the experience, Seigo and Jono are in town for a few days from later today and then Kenny and I and a few others are going out again on Saturday, so expect a longer entry about in near future!