I Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Cry

In London,  this would be some kind of bold street art installation called "The Mopper's Revolt". In China, it is a randomly placed, 5" tall,  bathroom tiled, podium-like structure at the center of a busy intersection. At one point, it may have been used to direct traffic, but has now become a shelter for homeless mops. Mops of all sizes and colours, different mops everyday. This is right outside my house and I have never seen who leaves the mops there or IF they come to claim them. I am setting up a charity for all of these abandoned mops. It's called Adopt-a Mop, because no mop should get left behind.

Decathlon, where people go to sit down. I know these pictures look like I am just creeping! I was actually disappointed that these photos did not properly convey the point I am trying to make. You can only take so many pictures of a cheap, two-man tent before people start wondering what you are doing. People apparently have a distaste for park benches and public seating in this country. They sit on demo furniture for a very, very long time. Longer than you are willing to wait for your turn. Forget about  actually trying out the sofa at IKEA that you would like to purchase, unless you want to evict an entire Chinese family which has moved into one of those little model room/houses and tucked their kids into the beds. On the bright side, if you want to catch a little old lady to bring home and clean your house, you could just unfold a lawn chair on the sidewalk and wait...

You can apparently get anything delivered in this city. ANYTHING.

Oh look, a big pile of rubble on the ground and a humongous digger.That's not too special. Except that this particular pile of rubble and heavy machinery are inside the pre-school complex where I used to work. During lunch, the children were taking turns playing "hop the hole", "climb the digger" and having snowball fights with rocks. So cute!

But don't worry, while all of this was taking place, the workmen were nearby... taking a nap on the grass.

But, just when I think this place is too wacky for me to handle, it suddenly redeems itself the only way a high-speed, developing nation knows how: by  introducing a "new and never before seen" trend to it's consumers a la Backtreet Boys and the Venus Razor. Welcome back Furby, welcome back.

AYI YA YA

Why every relationship needs a slave...I mean, cleaning lady. Not just any type of cleaning lady, an Ayi, a Chinese cleaning lady.

The obvious reason: she will clean your house, for a very reasonable fee. We paid ours $200 a month to come to our apartment 3 hours a day, everyday. She does the dishes, cleans the bathroom, vacuums, washes and irons all of the laundry, and doesn't make a peep while doing it. She is like a delightful little house elf that only speaks Chinese. Tony and I don't argue about who is going to do the dishes, we don't have to be responsible adults sharing the household responsibilities, we don't clear away the garbage after we order take-out, we leave crap everywhere! Then...woosh! It's gone. You are now thinking: in the future, you are  screwed as you have conditioned yourselves to live like total slobs. You are correct. Our Ayi left just before we went to Thailand, and we have been navigating a sea of dirty underwear and unidentifiable junk on floors and tabletops ever since in the vain hope it will all just suddenly go away, like the good ol' days :(  It's still there. But we're getting a new one next week and hopefully she will make it go away. I have not learned any lessons from this brief period of un-Ayi-ness other than...I like other people to clean up my mess.

When stuff goes missing, or anything goes wrong, you don't have to blame each other, just blame the Ayi. Can't find the TV remote? Ayi probably stole it. Didn't see/"recieve" your last gas bill? The Ayi probably threw it away. Ever since the Ayi left, Tony and I having been blaming each other for everything!!
"Where's my watch?"
"I don't know"
"But I put it down here and now it's gone"
"Who was the last person to tidy this?
"Not me, maybe the rabbit took it?"

See? If the Ayi were still working here, we both could have been angry at her together, instead of having nobody to blame but ourselves when stuff goes missing.

She takes care of the stuff we wouldn't think to do, but when they are done, they are awesome. Like, ironing Tony's work shirts. I cannot iron. I might actually have a vacuous hole in my brain that sucks out any instructions or information pertaining to ironing. Ironesia. Everything I have attempted to iron in the past actually looks worse than before I touched it. And Tony just irons on an as-needed-three minutes-before-I leave-for-work basis. She also folded my underwear into tiny little squares before she put them back in the drawers. I miss this small gesture. When I asked Tony to put them back in the drawer, he threw them in like he didn't even care about them. MY UNDERWEAR. I retaliated by chucking his in the drawer with socks unsorted. Sucker. 

It's the little things that show you care, even when the Ayi does them for you.

She will make hilarious mistakes with your home and belongings that will bring you and your partner together in laughter. Such as sorting your naughty drawer into a clinical, IKEA style organizer or putting your sharpest knives face up in the utensil storage. She might run out of space on the laundry line and decide it's a good idea to dry your underwear on every lamp in the room, so that when you come home your living room looks like some kinky sex lair. This was especially funny the time Tony had students coming over, moments after he walked in the door. She might even start muttering ancient gutteral Chinese curses at you every time you've left the blender for her to clean, all chunky with smoothie residue.

I understand that everyone is different and we might not all agree that hired help essential to support the health of your relationship. There was also a time when I might  have agreed. But having a tiny little Chinese lady clean my house everyday has become the equivalent to a can of Pringles. Once you pop....

Oh, and side note, this sandwich tasted so good. Why do I always read the ingredients list AFTER it's in my belly?!

Snakes on a Plane

Happy Year of the Snake! 

I haven't posted in so long (due to Chinese internet restrictions, not because I am lazy) that I had to go back and re-read last post so that I could properly update. So the fish are dead, RIP. Um...also (1.) I quit my old job, (2.) got a new job, (3.) got a house rabbit which is still alive and hopping around on the balcony as we speak, (4.) and have been suffering a horrible spell of bad luck which has caused numerous incidences of bodily harm. If China was a person, I would sue it but since I can't actually pin anything that has happened to me recently on living in Shanghai specifically, and because you can't sue a country no matter how much you resent it, I...digress. 

(1.)So I quit my old job as a kindergarten English teacher. I can't go into the details of the job too much without wanted to bash my own memories out of my brain with a blunt object, but imagine a room. The room has two windows sealed with prison bars. No heating, in December. White washed walls. A chalkboard. back to back desks. The cheesy smell of unwashed thermals hangs heavy in the air. The innocent sound of a giggling 6 year old is replicated until it escalates into screeches, paper throwing, hair pulling, the manic chaos of a group of starving plane crash survivors marooned on an island, each trying explain why shouldn't be eaten that week. The easy solution is to eat the TEACHER. So they do. I am devoured by a group of 36 children, 40 minutes a class, 6 classes a day, 5 days a week. My leftover flesh is taken home and stir-fried with rice, packed into little Hello Kitty containers, and sent back to do it again, until I am completely destroyed, my soul is dead, and I quit. And I've been unemployed for a long, long time. 

(2.)Then, magically and awesomely, I got two jobs at once! The one I accepted was a position as an infant/toddler educator at a lovely international pre-school. No more teaching English, much more doing what I love and what I am good at. Those babies better watch out, because I have some crazy learning lined up that is going to blow their little minds! The position I did not accept was at this beautiful special education school and though I won't be employed there, I have been volunteering there everyday as a teaching assistant in the pre-school classes. In my time there, I have learned so much about the children who attend, their needs, and their unique abilities. They are amazing! There is a little boy who can read and do maths (fractions, long division, multiplying), taught himself to speak English, French and how to read sheet music. He is a brilliant four year old with undiagnosed Aspergers. I have also been introduced the world of early intervention and techniques for managing behaviours.  It's really mind blowing that these techniques and philosophies are not used or taught in mainstream schools when they make perfect sense and apply to ALL KIDS!

(3.)So I also got a rabbit. That's new. He is so cute. Cuter than any of your animals. He is kind of like a great combo between a cat and a dog. He greets you at the door when you come home like a dog and begs for treats all cute with his paws in the air like a dog, but is clean, independent, pees in a litterbox and sleeps all stretched out in the sun like a cat. Unfortunately, he poops like a gumball machine which is neither cat nor dog-like at all. It's just a pain in the ass. His name is Bucky. Here is a picture of him being cute, for your enjoyment. 

(4.) Bad Luck-o-thon. It all started at the beginning of the year when I got cervical ulcers coupled with a bunch of other gyno-issues which have been ongoing. In Feb, I got food poisoning from my long time friend, tofu and electrocuted my hand on a 72 volt battery.  It was all black and crispy. Then, Hello March! This morning I was thrown from the back of Tony's electric bike and sprained my elbow and ass. I don't know if you can sprain your ass, what I do know is that this shit needs to stop so that I can stop living in fear for my next body part to shrivel up and fall off or something *.

Tony says that since I've had all my bad luck at the beginning of 2013, the rest of the year is going to be great. I am trying to be as optimistic, but I am a pessimist by nature, which might be part of the problem. We do have some great things to look forward to. We're going to a ball on the 16th and have a trip to Thailand planned. So I'm going to pretend my bad  luck didn't know we're into March now, and it's time for it to go die.

*Also bad luck, Blogger got rid of my favourite font. :(

 Happy safe, lucky 2013 to ya'll. 

New Arrivals

Our apartment is facing directly opposite a pet market. It's quite strange that I only discovered it was there while shopping for houseplants, only to find a big blue macaw on a perch in the same room as about a half dozen chickens, some caged budgies and cockatiels, and a goose. Random. 

It is actually not a very nice place to be. In China, as with any developing country, pets are treated as as stock rather than respected as living beings. It's a hard fact to ignore sometimes. Last week, I found a kitten about the size of my palm in a bush outside my apartment compound. It was crying and crying so I wrapped it in a towel and took it upstairs only to find the little thing was covered in parasites and had badly infected eyes. I took it to the vet who said it was too sick to survive and would die painfully on it's own if it wasn't euthanized. Needless to say this was a shitty day for everyone involved, especially poor kitty. There are some organizations in Shanghai to help with the massive unwanted pet population but it runs on donations/volunteers and animal shelters are a pretty new and foreign concept in a country that still has sick and starving people to deal with. 

The mammal population of these "pet markets" are in a pretty sad state, but the fish are just strange.

This is not my picture, but they have the same ones here. They inject pockets of ink under the scales of the fish to make designs in their bodies, or in the case of this photo, Betty Boop fish. Not all fish look this ridiculous. They also sell all types and sizes of goldfish, tropical , and saltwater fish. 

Anyone who has met my boyfriend will know his strange obsession with Clownfish and yesterday we took the plunge and adopted two tiny babies, an anemone, a crab, and a whole lot of weird little mermaid flowers. This is the tank. The anemone is that orange blob in the front and the crab is in hiding.

This is our little clowny, Schumacher

And this is Button (Formula 1 drivers)

I hope they will be happy in our house. They already cuddle and rub each other at night and never swim far from each other. Apparently this is called "hosting" and eventually they will become a mated pair. Awwwwwwww!!!! <3

1/2 of Box of Cheerios is $7.50

Today Tony and I spent 50 cents on both of our lunch! It was a steamed bun concoction called 'bao zi' which can have all manner of things stuffed inside of it. Ours were stuffed with cabbage and noodles, and another with tofu and spinach. We tend to stay away from the meat options of any street food as I am a veggie and we both want to avoid three days of the shits. 

This is just one example of how cheaply you can survive in China. I'm also trying to keep some familiarity and nutritive value in our food by cooking at home a lot, using primarily Chinese supermarket stuff. Last night, I made Mexican black beans with my own salsa and sour cream. It was delish and I am a genius.

We have had to say goodbye to a lot of foods we love. They are either unavailable or extortionately priced. The pot of sour cream was the most expensive part of the meal at $5.50, as it's considered an import product. We haven't really had any dairy since we arrived, save for Tony trying every brand of yoghurt on the shelves in order to satiate his weird cravings for the stuff. Milk is a bit dodgy as they do some weird Chinese chemical thing to the cows and 100g imported block of cheese costs more than my daily commute to work, so it's essentially bye-bye dairy. Finding a good loaf of bread is like trying to find a unicorn. Chinese people put sugar in everything. I bought a loaf of bread labeled "Rye with Date Products." I bit into it expecting rye bread with dates, instead it was essentially chocolate cake with dried cranberries and chocolate chips. It was good and I ate it, but it lied to me. I still want whole wheat, toasted, with butter, not costing the price of a new laptop. These are the sacrifices we make. OUR BREAD IS CAKE PEOPLE!

There is a fun side to having a completely different supply of products to choose from at the supermarket. We often buy random fruits, candies, and drinks to see what they are like. Sometimes they are great, and sometimes they look like candy but are actually strips of dried, unidentified meat rolled into shiny foil wrappers with a fun little cartoon man on the side. Tip: In China, you can never judge a food by it's misleading description/appearance. Some things I have tried (these are not my pictures):

A sports drink containing the sweat of the "Pocari", whatever that is.

 

This fruit smells like pee. Do not eat, unless you like to eat pee.

This is actually fried wood-ear mushrooms. Very yummy, unfortunate translation.

Candied sweet potato. Really good.

In conclusion, upon traveling to China, or any country abroad, try everything and see if you like it (after risk assessment, if it looks dirty, do not consume). It might end up tasting repulsive, or it might be the most delicious and moderately priced thing you have ever eaten.

Cheerio!! xx

Our New Place

 Some videos of our place.

I feel a bit sorry for cockroaches. They look so unassuming and they have no idea they are not welcome in your home, scuttling up the curtains of your bedroom window. The next time you find one in your home, I suggest doing what we did and providing Mr. Cockroach with trade instead of imminent death. One hot air balloon ride from the 5th story in exchange for his vacating the flat immediately. Simply tuck him inside a discarded plastic sack, the ones that the bolts from IKEA come in works nicely. Open your window and let him fly into the wind. 

Anyhow, apart from invading creepy crawly friends, our apartment is assembling nicely. We repainted over the hand/snot marks on the wall and went to Chinese IKEA twice, which is MENTAL. Imagine a fusion of regular IKEA and a Chinese supermarket. Now double the amount of people inside on a Sunday. Now imagine all of them hanging out on the furniture, sleeping on the beds, and lounging on the sofas like they were in their own homes. Now add a an inability to queue and funny chinglish toilet paper dispensers in the bathroom explaining how this paper is "not from tree, but from life." I hope I have painted a vivid picture  of what our home furnishing experience has been thus far. 

Fortunately, our place is now almost painted, furnished, internet connected, and clean. It is situated right under the metro line and is just down the road from all of the foreign food shops and restaurants. It also has a spare room complete with sofa bed, awaiting it's first victim...I mean visitor, mah sister.

So, job? Check (I'll tell you about it in another post). Apartment? Check. Now we are just waiting for our visas to finish processing...dum dee dum dum dum and then (hopefully) check. After all of that is finished, I want to do some serious catching up with ya'll. I'm thinking...mid- September?

Sending love and humidity from Shanghai xx 

Return of the Chinglish

In case of emergency, please form an orderly line here to pay for your groceries

Who needs IKEA? For all of your household furnishing needs, make your way to "Hotel Thing Confluence"

Tired with conventional and unfashionable glasses for the blind, Helen Keller took matters into her own hands.

Sugar, no boys allowed!