For anyone ever frusrated when trying to learn a foreign language...

Pity the souls whose sole aim is to understand this

http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/reading.asp

Living life on the Sky News diet

The PRC takes an active role in helping its citizens to lead upright and moral lives, and so takes it upon itself to help filter out corrupting foreign influences that might lead citizens to question the government, or other unethical activities. The BBC and CNN among others are of course prime examples of foreign scaremongers and rightly blocked in the glorious worker's republic.

With all decent to mediocre news sources blocked, I've been forced to do the unthinkable for the last few weeks and read Sky news. On the plus side, it does have lots of pretty pictures as well as a whole section on the termoils of the McCan family alongside Politics and World News (who's more minor subsections include from time to time the genocide in Darfur and nuclear tension in Iran).

Sensationalise? Us?

Hanzhou, Experiment, Art

Last saturday I went to Hanzhou. As i mentioned before, Hanzhou and Suzhou are supposed to be the most beautiful places in China. Personally, I'd cut Suzhou out of the list: Hanzhou was much nicer! It's a medium sized city built around a huge and lovely lake, surrounded by hills with tea plantations and lots of temples and pagodas. The gardens of Suzhou are indeed beautiful, but all of Hanzhou is.

We arrived quite late (circa 9.30pm), but were able to relativly quickly find a restaurent that opened late (cf. McD's in Suzhou!), before retreating to a moderatly priced hotel. However, their air conditioning was broken, so they shipped us upmarket for the first night for free! What a score. Next morning we had a breakfast buffet, all you want of a wide array of eastern and western foods.

I knew that my friend and regular blog correspondant Lisa Gao had planned to come to China at some point this holiday, but I hadn't expected to find her in my fruit bowl at the hotel

Breakfast isn't big in China so its always slightly eclectic, but not here. Lots of chinese dumplings, noodles etc., but also the full array of bacon, potatoes, cereal, cold milk, fruit, fruit juice, french pastires etc - I stuffed myself full for the day.

On sunday we visited the Lingyin Temple, a big budhist temple. It's just over the hill from the lake and is in the middle of the tea growing areas. Next to it is a famous hill called "Hill flown in from afar" after a travelling Indian buddhist mistook it for a hill from home which it resembled, which we climbed. The temple itself is still home to several buddhist monks, who climb another even taller hill each day on their hands and knees to visit another temple (which you can just see at the top of the tea field photo below, with a cable car for lazy tourists), and clean, worship and practice martial arts (allegedly). They seem to have struck on a winning revenue stream though - there are thusands of tourists daily, who come to burn incense and worship their family gods (apparently buddhism adopted gods when it reached china).

buddhas carved into 'hill flown from afar'

despite numerous signs informing that for true buddhists piety is more important than incense, the vendors outside still made a healthy taking. The chinese aren't the most religious of people, but they have a very special way of sinocising foreign ones

Buddhism, much like Islam, is a religion of peace

After the temple, we went to try and find the tea museum, but it was unfortunatly out of season. Instead, we got taken to one of the tea villages to a little tea huse to have tea explained to us by a local woman. We wondered the village for a bit and bought some overpriced locally cut stuff, then returned to our original hotel (unfortunatly repaired!) for a shower.

proof I was there

A tea field. I want one of these!

In the evening we went to a nice restaurent on the lake (my first glimpse of it so far!) that was packed, apparently Zhou En Lai ate there back in the day so it's always popular with domestic tourists. We wondered a bit afterwards, along one of the long causeways that cross the lake, before returning to the hotel.

We woke early the next morning for another marginally less impressive breakfast, less bacon and more rice but still palatable. No black tea either unfortunatly. We went back to the lake and hired bicycles from one of the many hire places around the lake and cycled round it for a few hours, which was really good fun and very pretty.

part of Hanzhu's beautiful West Lake

It was almost time to go after this, we had lunch at a nice Guangdong themed restaurent (the bit of China nearest Hong Kong, known for eating anything!) and headed back to Shanghai in the glorius monday sunshine.

All was good until I got back home, and discovered to my horror (and for the second time) that I'd lost my debit card. Further, my laptop seemed well and truly broken and I was a bit gutted. Luckily, some frantic calls later revealed that it had been left in the first hotel, they were very good and sent it off almost straight away. Laptop was less positive.

On tuesday Professor Ma arrived back, and the students and I and he discussed various plans for experiments. I got the go-ahead for mine, and my and another student decided to travel over to Pudong on wednesday evening. It was Yaoyao's birthday dinner in shanghai that night in Shanghai, she took several of us to an 'italian' restaurent. It's no wonder that Chinese people think they don't like western food - the imitation is pale (much like chinese takeaway in the UK i'm sure!). The pizzas we had were greasy, covered in horrible rubbery cheese, not a tomato i sight, the tuna (I'm a big fan of napolitana in the UK...) could have come from a can, not enough vinegar, bread too thick, no chilli oil, no pepper mill, etc... The potato salad side order was very good, however!

In the day on Wednesday we had some american visitors to the lab who I chatted to for a bit, they were the investors from the company but seemed to be more on the business than the science side. When we arrived at the company that afternoon I saw them again and told them my plans! It was late so I and the student (his english name is Bob!) headed to the dormitary nearby to start the next morning.

Our village, complete with a few words from the big man himself (5 ft 0 Deng. Party man Bob is a very big fan)

The village that the dorm is in is right on the outskirts of Shanghai where it merges with the countryside (and the coast!), and I've got some good photos of it. When I left it before a few weeks back, some workers had been clearing weeds from a large area of ground, which has now just about been turned into a nice paved area with trees and benches. Development is rapid.

then

and now

Shanghai's eastern edge

By Thursday morning, I was very keen to get by experiment under way. I'd spent some time fighting through paperwork, and finally got to the factory floor by about 10am, to find that the crucial stage of the process for my experiment is no longer used! We had to adjust it somewhat, and the results were less useful that I'd hoped. However, carrying it out was good fun and the company are planning to do my original experiment themselves at some point now which is great.

We finished early on Friday afternoon, and Bob and I returned via SHanghai centre. We went to a nice little market, and did some souvenir shopping. I have purchased a Chinese chess set which I now need to learn to play, and several other amusing nicnaks. I also aquired the newest harry potter for 20 RMB (1 pound 30) and a compilation of shakespeare plays in english and chinese.

Certified 'World VIP' Ma Sun carves me a name stamp

On Friday night I went out with Valencia and Kenny and several others, first to an interesting club in south Shanghai called 'Absolute House', before moving on to Attica. As usual Valencia had obtained us free entry to both places and drinks so the night was very cheap. After we left attica we wondered shanghai and ate funny shellfish as the sun came up!

On Saturday I went with Toshiba to Century Park - a very large park in central pudong not far from the Jin Mao tower. It was very nice, with a big lake in the middle that we were able to hire a boat and sail around on for a bit! After that we went to see the latest Harry Potter in the cinema (I'm not addicted!) and had dinner at an italian place much nicer than the one I went to on tuesday! Still not enough tomato tho and very overpriced this time: someone needs to bring Pizza Express or ASK here.

captain Jack

Shiji Park

On sunday, Valencia wanted to go to the Shanghai art museum. Very tired from the busy week I skipped Dragonboating to sleep, and on a whim joined her in the afternoon to go and see the special exhibit: lots of Gaudi's work from early 20th century Spain. We explored people's square afterwards, and got the usual approaches from 'tea shop' people trying to get money out of us - she was very surprised, and said it was a totally different experience from when she was alone! She thinks they might not know how to deal with a western woman, but I put it more down to her fluent Chinese - a good few people were taken by surprise when she jabbered back at them!

Gaudi was a big fan of 'hyperbolic perabaloids'. Obviously.

upstairs they had quite an strange mix of his furniture

he had a change of heart on his death bed - form AND function

Anyway, she had had to visit a nearby restaurent at some point as part of her job, called Saigon Blue, so we decided to have dinner there (unsurprisingly Vietnamese). It was a lovely little restaurent but a little bit out of the way, a few streets south of Nanjing Road and not quite in the french concession, and also hidden by a large strange hotel-like building (but not a hotel, apparently) called the 'Overseas Chinese Development Center'. You had to actaully leave the restaurent and enter the building to go to the loo, which might have been cold in the winter and felt a little strange! They want to change the place into a bar with V's company's help, but she wasn't massivly enthused. The food was very good though: we had lots of fresh veg in salads and spring rolls, which made me realise how much I've missed them - almost all vegetables here are stir fried or cooked in sauce (side note: I also spotted a subway tucked away near people's square which I will be visiting SOON!).

We wondered a little bit afterward before heading our seperate ways - she made me laugh at one point by suggesting we go for a foot massage - before I realised she was serious! After all the dodgy 'massaji' calls that one hears outside clubs in the early morning I wouldn't even have thought about it, but she told me about the wonderful massage she'd had the week before. It's a very different experience here for men and women! She has promised to take me with her next time she goes to translate for me and guarantee no unexpected surprises!

Laptop broken!

My laptop has broken so posts may be a little less frequent until (if!!) it starts working again.

Going to Hanzhou this afternoon for another tour - another beautiful little city about an hour and a half away on the train thats built on a lake and is supposed to be lovely.

I'll be back on Monday afternoon in time to get Prof Ma to hopefully take me to the company on tuesday. (Although the lab here apparently has some international visitors on Wednesday so I can't help thinking he might contrive to take me on Thursday to show off his exchange student!)

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!

How NOT to seduce a beautiful peasent girl...

Back when I was working in the company at Pudong, I got ton know some of the workers there quite well. As with everything here, it was very heirachical and segmented. To get a good job (engineer!), you need most likly a masters degree or better PhD, and a very good recommendation from your teacher. Alternativly, if you have a bachelor's degree and your teacher knows someone who works in the company, that's probably ok - in fact you'll probably even earn a little more than the masters candidate, or if you have studied abroad they'll snap you up (and give you a big salary bonus!). Basic salery here is about 3000 RMB a month, and there are reasonable promotion opportunities after a few years I'm led to believe.

If you started work after school, you become a worker, and that's more or less as far as you will go (one worker who had lots of experience and defected to the company from another one became the forewoman in her room, and got abot 20 more than the average worker. After 9 years.). You wear different clothes to the engineers to highlight the difference, work at the same station for months on end (although it wasn't quite the sweatshop hours I was expecting, usually about 8-5 with free lunch provided at the onsite canteen) and generally do whatever you're told. You earn about 1000 RMB a month, probably share a room with another worker for about 200 RMB of that each, spend another 200 or so on food and transport, and end up with about 600 RMB each month. Not the greatest of jobs.

However they all work with a smile and are generally really friendly, although none speak English (but they know the premiership results better than me) and often don't even speak regular mandarin chinese all that well (so I'm told), prefering their local dialect.

Since the student engineers there have some time on their hands, and there is a set of benches near one particular work bench, we got to know the workers there very well. One was a very pretty girl from Anhui province (reknowned for being undeveloped) who was very chatty and generally amusing. She took it upon herself to teach me Chinese in her spare time during the day, then stole my mobile number from another engineer andbegan a texting campaign, letting it be known that she wanted to be invited out to dinner.

Great, I thought, a chance to get to know someone a little different from the rest of the Shanghai croud (Shanghai, everyone says, is very different to the rest of China; much more modern, fast paced and materialistic). So I invited her to a restaurant for dinner one time... or that's what I thought.

I was a bit surprised when she said no, after all the efforts she'd gone to, but recently I found out why. I'd asked her to a fan dian. Now fan is rice, which is used very often here to mean food generally, and dian is a building or shop. However, apparently when you put the two together it means... hotel! I bit my lip but couldn't help chuckling inside when I found that out a couple of days ago, another Chinese mystery explained!

For all you Romeo's out there, a much better way to ask a girl to dinner is, as I now know, "Wo (time and date) qing ni qu chi fan", literally 'I invite you to eat rice' - the same fan but not a dian in sight!

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).