The afternoon sun over Pudong

I was reading the other day that Shanghai has the highest rate of lung cancer in China. I am not all that surprised. I know that if I leave a white T-shirt outside to dry for more than a day, when I bring it in it will be yellow/grey colour. Oh, also the tallest building in the above photo is the Shanghai World Financial Centre, at an impressive 492 meters high.

Kelly and I are catching a train to Harbin for a week or so, leaving on the 30th. We plan to go check out the Ice Festival should be good, and cold.

Great Value Beer

Generic brand 'Great Value' beer. 1.8 RMB per can which is about 30 Australian cents. Ordinarily I wouldn't have investigated, as there are a plethora of name-brand bad tasting cheap beers in this country, it is just that I was intrigued by the fact that one of them calls itself a light beer. Looking at the back of the cans, I quickly found a disparity. The 'light beer' was actually stronger than the standard beer. A simple label mix up, or something more sinister....? The investigative journalist in me decided to check it out.

I bought both, tasted them, noted down points on there respective flavour and mouth feel, put off posting, lost the notes and then decided to hastily end this half finished blog post.

HASTY ENDING:- They tasted average.

Lately

The Suzhou Hello Kitty Bra Shop, for all your Hello Kitty Bra needs.

The city of Suzhou is known throughout China (and the Chinese say, throughout the world) for its Chinese Gardens. We did visit 2 of the gardens, the two that were hailed as the best in the city in our guidebook (the Humble Administrators Garden and the Master of Many Nets garden. They were okay. They are hailed as the best gardens in the best city for Chinese gardens. To tell you all the truth, I enjoyed the Chinese garden in Sydney better. These gardens were both quite unkempt, and while I did get some understanding of the Aesthetic by trying to imagine the gardens in their historical context, this imagery was consistently ruined by the megaphone touting efforts of the ubiquitous Chinese tour group. Anyway, the photos I took have the advantage of being silent.

A bit problem with the entirety of Suzhou was its audio component. They say that Suzhou is a city renown for its "beautiful stone bridges, pagodas, and meticulously designed gardens."

For Kelly and I Suzhou will be forever known as the 'city of squeaky breaks'. Every vehicle with wheels, when stopping, emitted a sound ten times louder and ten times worse than the most awful nails-on-a-chalk-board sound you can imagine. It was crazy, the traffic was stop and go everywhere and hence I walked around with my fingers in my ears a large amount of the time. I think gunshots would have been a more comforting sound, and the locals didn't even seem to notice. I am convinced that there is wide scale deafness in China (it would explain why Chinese people scream into their mobile phones on public transport.)

Anyway. Enough ranting. I went to an amazing underground electronic night last week, where the highlight (for me) was the Beijing based 8-bit/IDM artist known as Sulumi.

He served up an amazing live performance using 3 gameboys, two effects pads, an iPod nano, and a vocoder ran through a synthesizer. He played an 8-bit set, and it was probably one of the most amazing of any live sets I have ever seen. He made some hardcore inspired 8-bit sounds that had everyone in the place jumping. The man himself often was jumping about with a gameboy in one hand, a vocoder in the other and a torch in his mouth to see the LCD screens.
Nice work I must say.

In violation of the Chinese law...

I went for a bicycle ride yesterday, out to a shipping port on the edge of Shanghai. I headed there because I had heard that Shanghai is one of the most busy ports in the world, and I have always found something aesthetically pleasing about the massive scale of ports and big industrial facilities.

When I reached the port area I came to a massive barrier / checkpoint / guard station. Cars and trucks (mainly container trucks) were pulling up the the windows and handing papers over for inspection. I was concerned that I had rode my bike all the way out here and wouldn't even get in, but was hoping I would stun them with my foreignness. I rode up to the barrier at a fast pace and slipped through the gap between the barrier and the wall. No one approached me or looked at me strangely at all.



The first area I was in was labelled a Logistics base, and seemed to have many warehouses. I passed through this area and found another checkpoint for the Shanghai Chemical Logistics base. This time there was a separate lane with some people on motor scooters getting their passes checked by a guard in a uniform. I lined up, and when I got to the guard I just nodded, smiled and kept riding past him. Once again, no reaction.

This chemicals base did have many interesting smells. After I got my first whiff of a delightful this-place-smells-like-cancer bouquet, the thought did cross my mind that this might not be a good place to hang out in. As soon as I saw the structure below I decided that I would have to go in and check it out, but would refrain from eating, drinking or touching anything here.



As I headed towards the water, I crossed into a petroleum processing and storage area.

There was an interesting looking Sinopec facility, with guards at an open gate. I tried my old ride-as-fast-as-you-can-through-the-checkpoint trick, but that met with much yelling. I tried to ask the guards if I could have a look around, but I have no idea what they said to me. They weren't saying no to my request, but I couldn't understand what the were saying. As I turned around and rode out I noticed a sign that said "All visitors must sign in for visitor pass". Perhaps they were telling me to go get one, anyway I rode on to the oil terminal.

The oil terminal wasn't that interesting, it was just a series of jetties with what looked like big petrol station hoses on them. There were way more interesting looking huge crane things of in the distance.



I imagine that the hoses plug into the ship somehow and the pipeline takes the oil along the jetty to the masses of storage tanks I had passed. You can see the oil storage silo things in the next photo.



Now, if you look in the foreground of that photo you will see a farm. That's right, there is a series of vegetable fields INSIDE an oil terminal, INSIDE a chemical logistics base. That's just great. There was a number of fields, however the one I was near was cut of from the rest by the pipelines from the oil dock running through it. The pipeline was raised from the ground, and had a massive jet of white gas coming from a seam. There was a massive ring of dead vegetation around the gas jet. I am going to be more suspicious of my local produce market from now on I think.


I decided to try and head for the big cranes I had seen. I imagined that they were container cranes for ships, so I went back through the logistics base to the area I had seen stacked with containers. I soon found a sign labeled 'Port' and followed it to another checkpoint. This checkpoint seemed deserted, so I just rode on through.

Jackpot. Crane city. So I am just about to ride along under the cranes when a guy in a security booth comes out yelling. Both him and a security car come over.

So I try to say to the guy that I am just having a look, we can't get any communication happening and he radios for assistance.

The police that arrived in this car were quite congenial, and when I said I was just looking around they said that was okay, but I couldn't ride a bicycle in this area. They called a Ute over with their radios and loaded my bike onto it. The police didn't speak much English and I couldn't speak much Chinese, so I got into the Ute hoping that they were just giving me a tour of the port by car. We started off, and the driver kept asking me 'which ship?' I just shrugged my shoulders and indicated that I would be happy to see any ship, and then suddenly realised what was going on. They thought I was a crew member, and was going to take me and my bicycle back to 'my' ship!

Now, don't get me wrong. The first thing that crossed my mind was to pick a ship and stow away, as that has certainly been a dream of mine. I did realise however that I had no passport, money or food and if I got on to a ship and was found, all tourist excuses would get me nowhere. I tapped the driver on the shoulder and said 'No ship! No ship'. He stopped the vehicle and called the police back.

I tried to explain to the police that I was a tourist and had rode my bicycle in from Shanghai city. They seemed quite perplexed as to how I got here, and called over a man in a suit who was coming off another ship. He spoke better English and did some translating for us, I told him that I had just rode my bike in to look at the port and no one had stopped me at the checkpoints. When he told the police this they were very surprised. They indicated I had to wait, and after a while more police arrived. There was now four policemen and a number of port security guards around me. The latest police arrival spoke quite good English. He had me repeat my story, and questioned me in length about what I was doing in Shanghai. I claimed to be a student at the university, and showed him an international student ID card. He kept asking me if I had met anyone in the port area or had given anyone anything, The police didn't seem to believe it was possible that I had just rode straight through the many security checkpoints.

The head policeman then spent ages talking on his radio, and finally informed me that coming into the port area was a violation of the Chinese law and that I would have to write a statement about who I was, what I was doing in Shanghai, and how when and why I entered the port.
I did so, gave it to him, and after another 20 minutes of talking on the radio he loaded my bike back on the security Ute. He said that I had to show them exactly where I had been, and which gates I had rode my bike through, and that after this they would drop me off outside the entry gate to the logistics base.

They did as they promised, and I was free to ride back home. I was detained for about an hour and a half I think. It was all quite interesting, I am probably lucky they didn't detain me for much longer and I am definitely lucky they didn't check with the university to see if I was really a student. In retrospect it makes sense for them to be concerned by my presence, I was in an international area, where sailors and cargo are present before going through customs. I think the fact that I was an Australian helped, they wanted proof of that and I believe I would have been treated differently if I was any nationality with which China has major political issues (America)

I have put more photos up on Flickr, including the ones from Latvia and Lithuania that hadn't gone up before due to CD issues.