Shanghai China Snippets Observations about living in Shanghai and China in general

6:00 Woken up by the sounds of a building that is being molested. The roof tiles are falling on the pavement. I peek outside of the window. Construction workers are having a great time acting as the localized alarm clock.

6:05 Put in earplugs and fall asleep

8:00 Get up, look outside and notice that construction workers have left. Probably sick of those harmonious sounds as well.

8:13 Walk to the bakery. Try to use the zebra crossing but bicycle morons have decided that the white stripes are the preferred location for parking their wheels. Give one cycle a friendly nudge to make him move forward, past the zebra crossing. Get a dumbfounded look.

8:24 Stand in convenience store to get water. Young white collar worker also wants to buy something and stands on my toes. He doesn’t notice it until I push him back. Get a sheepish look.

8:30 Back home, the day can start.

Imagine being a cabbie in Shanghai. You make long days, one day on, one day off and your salary has decreased over the last 10 years.

You also just survived the “spit sack” campaign that was intended to urge you to leave your phlegm in there instead of the street.

And now you’re ordered to stop yawning and eating snacks while on the job. Someone in the local government must have some beef with you it seems. (more…)

We have bought an apartment and originally I planned to write down the process. Catshanghai has done already an excellent job in describing the process.

The only thing I like to add is that fees for real estate agents are negotiable. Officially they are 1% of the purchase price paid by the buyer and the seller respectively. As the internal motto of one of the agents we visited is, “Nothing better than a sale”, we discovered they are more than willing to drop the 1% from the sellers side to lower the purchase price. (more…)

While adding new links to My China Start I ran into the Flying chef website.

The Flying Chef is labeled as a Shanghai-based, inexpensive service to book an experienced Chinese chef to cook in your home for private dinners.

I kinda like the concept and it doesn’t seem to cost too much. I’ll try it out sometime this summer I guess.

And no, I’m not paid to write this:)

Not my best picture, I know, but I’m always impressed with how they move things here.

Walking in Nanchang Lu we noticed Tailor Chen. A male showed us the fabrics and the price for a pair of pants seemed ok, 550 Rmb.

We were willing to buy and thought we’d try to bargain a bit. Just a little and if they had come up with a good counter offer or even a vague promise that we could get a discount next time, we would have accepted and paid. (more…)

It’s been some time since I put a new picture online of the building activities in my neighbourhood. Back in october 2005 I published the last picture and since then the building is almost finished. Take a look (more…)