ShangBy’s fabulous marketing manager Amanda will be visiting us here in Shanghai soon. She has been a little bit worried about the food… I keep telling her that there will no problems at all, there are plenty of super good restaurants here. Maybe not this one though..
Question is; do I have to wait for my food for 24 hours?
Hmmm… One a second thought, maybe I don’t want to get the food at all….
If you haven’t already met our fabulous host Claire, either in our live events or on our website, then I want introduce her here… This is one of her first blog entries on her very own blog. To read more, go to http://www.shangby.com/blog
I love love Hong Kong. Had a whirlwind visit there (I actually looked like a blur to anyone that saw me walking around on the street) leaving one day from Shanghai and returning the following night. Got a double-decker bus (love a double-decker) into town and quickly found myself at ChungKing Mansions, a garenteed chicken tikka masala meets “Alice through the Looking Glass” experience of a place meaning (in the least romantic sense) that it is filled with lifts leading to different hotels that contain oddly sized cupboards of rooms and sloped floors and twisty stairwells and corridors that could very well lead me somehow to parallel universe if I got lost. And, accompanying me everywhere I go in the mans is a pungent, sometimes better than others, smell of curry. Found myself a hotel in there, dumped my stuff (one small backpack thankyouverymuch - excited as I’m a self-confessed overpacker) and wandered into an Irish pub that had wireless. Met a fabulous Aussie lady and some wonderful Mongolian girls and had a very cool night. Next day I fled the mans rushing off to go to the Chinese visa office. Starbucks found me on the way and everything was organized and happening by 11am, leaving me with dangerous excess time to burn before my flight back to Shanghai at 8pm. Ran to City Super, one of my favoritest-est bourgeois supermarkets. Developed a love of strolling around beautiful supermarkets when I was 19 and living in London (bring on a Sainsbury’s/Marks and Spencers/Selfridge’s/Harvey Nich’s annyyttiimeee) -not a past time suited to everyone but something that I love to do that my boyfriend is extremely weary of. Somehow also found time to find a new pair of shoes on my little HK journey. My shoes size is 40/41, so it can be a real pain finding my size anywhere, but Mainland China takes the cake. Here, they only stock up to a 38/39 so I don’t ever stand a chance at finding shoes. After this is ran back to the visa office and then pretty much found myself boarding my plane back to Shanghai. Really busy day, but so nice to drop in and say hi to HK. Random collection of things I’m loving lately include National Geographic magazine, getting a subscription soon (wooooo!!) walking everywhere on the weekends aannndd walking home from work which is soo much nicer than trying to wade through an ocean of people all walking in different directions at high speed on the subway, designing my own jewelry (got four necklaces made last week at “Pearls by Demi” that are destined to be listed on the website for y’all to see), thinking about how Shanghai’s population is larger than Australia’s (more than 20 million including the transient population here ie. foreigners and migrant workers), which is just so fantastically unbelieveable to me…. and lastly, researching places to go diving to be able to dive with manta rays. That’s all… off to walk home with 19, 999,999 people…
They know how to keep their balance. But not how to protect themselves…
A few years ago I worked as a teacher in Beijing. They had a very hard time finding native speakers so Swedes were also accepted as English teachers. My funniest memory is when I asked a group of students in grade six to write a short essay about their families. The essays were of varying quality, some very funny, some tragic, all very honest and interesting. I have collected a few examples of these essays that I still read from time to time. Now I am sharing some of the best parts with you:
” My mother is kind, my father is smart, my sister is funny and my
grandmother is old, fat and tired.” Really, he couldn’t find any other words to describe his grandmother?
” My father is a pubic officer” Sounds like fun, what is it that he does exactly? (I think he forgot to put an “l” in there…)
” I don’t think my father is very smart but he is very happy because my mother is not very beautiful.” Hmmm, at least he was honest!
“My father likes to drink beer, he drinks many beers all the time, his work is a driver.” Good God, please don’t let me get into his cab!
“My father likes to do sports so he’s not fat. My mother likes to eat chicken and she doesn’t like sports -so she is fat. I have a cat, it likes to eat fish- so it’s fat too.” Again; honest!
“My father is a manager, my mother is a teacher but in our
house my mother is the manager. My father hides from my mother.” Go girl?
Some made me sad… One boy didn’t seem to have too much fun at home…
“I very lonely, mothers hobby is sleep, fathers hobby is beer and be angry, me no brother. I want brother.”
Of course there were many many essays that were super good and made me happy as well. One girl wrote that she had “a loving, ambitious, elegant, stunning, energetic, radiant, harmonious, luxurious, healthy, adorable, beautiful and fragrant family” Overkill, anyone?
Taxi rides in China are always exciting. Most of the time because you never know if you will make it in one piece but often because of the conversations with the drivers. It is enough to say “Ni hao” (hello) to get them going… The first comment is always “Your Chinese is perfect!” That is definitely not true and even if it was there would be no way for them to tell after just hearing me say “hello”. Then they go on to the top five questions which are always, ALWAYS the same:
1. Where are you from? (Sometimes they guess and when they do it’s either on US or Russia (!))
2. How old are you? When I answer and they learn my age they proceed to the next question:
3. Are you married? Since I am not and tell them this, this is usually when they lecture me on how I am getting too old and they think it’s about time that I get married and have kids and if I don’t it will be too late and yadayadayada…
4. Are you a student? When I tell them that I work here they go on to the last question following the standard routine:
5: How much money do you make? Trying to duck this question won’t do any good, they keep asking and asking and asking and since I never answer they keep guessing…
From here it can go anywhere… depending on how long time the ride lasts for they have more or less questions.
My strangest memory of a taxi driver was this one time in Beijing. I got into the taxi and after having answered question number 1 this taxi driver went on to ask if we had many “blablabla” (a word a didn’t understand) in Sweden. I couldn’t figure out what it was, I guessed on trees (they know we have a lot of forests in Sweden), ping pong players (the most famous Swedish person in China is a ping pong player, Jan-Ove Waldner, who everyone knows and they always say that he “has won over three generations of Chinese players”) , watch factories (many confuse Sweden and Switzerland). Usually when there is word I don’t understand the person will just repeat it over and over again in a louder and louder voice and finally write it down for me, as if it would be easier for me to understand the Chinese characters… Eeeh, it is not… This driver did a good job though and explained the word to me in every way he could think of. Finally he said “It is person who is old but not tall. He looks like a child but is not”. Then I understood that what he meant was a dwarf. It turned out that the only Swedish person he had ever met was a dwarf and now he thought that Sweden had more dwarfs than the average country. He also told me that there are no dwarfs in China. I said that that seemed strange but as it turns out, he was sure that he knew why… He said: “It is because we eat so much rice”. Unfortunately, by then, I had reached my destination so there is still a taxi driver in Beijing who seriously believes that there are many dwarfs in Sweden because we don’t eat rice…
Well, the taxi drivers in Shanghai are just going to have to wait for their own post…
Right now I am in Thailand, enjoying the Spring Festival in my very own way… A gorgeous island in the south west of Thailand, Koh Lanta, is where I am, and I am in love with this place. I was here two years ago and it has not changed one bit, it is just as nice as I remembered it. White beaches, green palm trees, wonderful food, crystal clear water, cold beer, I could go on forever… I am staying in a place called “Best House” and it really is the best place. Owned by a lovely Thai couple that really make everyone feel at home this is paradise on earth. Quite a change from the cold and snowy weather in Shanghai… It hits me how ones perspectives change. From a stressful world with hard work to a reality where the biggest decisions of the day are where to eat, what brand of beer to drink and what book to read. Right now I am thinking about where to go snorkeling tomorrow… Many beautiful islands to choose from, tough choice…
I wish you all a very happy Chinese new year, may the year of the rat be the best one ever!
I know I said that this post would be about taxi drivers in Shanghai but that will have to be the next one. Today, there is just one thing on my mind- snow. In Shanghai!
It hasn’t snowed this much in 50 years. 40 buildings have collapsed. The streets are covered in 4 inches of slush that the street sweepers try to remove with brooms. Traffic is chaotic since people aren’t used to driving in this weather. Shanghai train station suspended ticket sales for the next three days due to the weather and this at a time of year when about 1 billion Chinese are traveling for the Chinese New Year that is coming up soon. People are carrying umbrellas but because the snow is half melted, it just piles up on the umbrellas. My only comfort when my shoes are wet all through and I am freezing is to watch as the pile on top of their umbrellas suddenly slides down…
All day today we have had construction workers in the office to fix some electric issues. I have now drawn a few conclusion on what they are like:
- It takes a long time to get a time set up for the work but once they show up, they sure are efficient.
- They come in a group. I expected one or two guys, they were six.
- They make a huge mess, but they clean it up- with a broom…
- They like the concept of one guy working, five guys watching and commenting.
- They all wear suits and loafers, no overalls here…
- They don’t speak any English. (I didn’t expect them to be fluent but these guys were thrilled when I taught them how to say “Hello”.)
- Even though they are talking to someone who obviously doesn’t understand much Chinese (me for example) they try to explain complicated electric wiring in Chinese.
- After a while it is possible to cooperate with them by just using the words “It works” and “It doesn’t work”.
- They think the best way to protect their eyes during work is to wear a motorbike helmet.
Next time I will tell you about Chinese taxi drivers…
…was that they didn’t have the word FedEx printed on them. For days before Christmas I had seen few things BUT FedEx boxes. Thanks to the Rachael Ray Show we had more than 200 orders to ship out in a few days. Everyone in the Shanghai office helped out. The software guys were creating easier ways to print shipping labels, our director was going around Shanghai in a taxi collecting items from all our retailers, our network engineer was folding boxes and then there was of course a lot of sorting, checking and wrapping going on… Our camera guy caught some of it on tape. Have a look at what it was like.
I just want to tell you that the office is usually a lot tidier than this…
I am now back in Shanghai after a lovely holiday in Sweden. A holiday that was spent with family and friends, just the way it’s supposed to be. In Sweden Christmas eve is the special day, this is the day to enjoy great food and exchange gifts.
My Christmas eve started early since I woke up at 5AM, jet lagged. When I was younger it was a good thing to wake up before everyone else because that meant having a chance to inspect the presents under the tree undisturbed. In our house it was always a competition between my sister, my brother and me who woke up first. We always met under the tree but the person who had been there first was still the winner since they proudly could tell the others who that big present was for, who got the most gifts and what the boxes sounded like if you shook them.
This year I managed to stay away from that. At least the shaking part….
