Ways of life in Shanghai

Observations along the way today...

I decided to walk from my area to an open market and then a park. The open market was supposed to be just at the end of one of the local streets. I guess I was saying "Yeah yeah, I got it" when it was really, "Huh?" My wife thinks all five of us in her household have this problem, but this time as I walked away from an empty lot, I thought, "Hmm, maybe she's right once in a while." So it was on to the park.

The walk to the park was through a local neighborhood so the sights and sounds were authentic. At one point, I felt like I was in a Chinese Seinfeld episode. Non-Seinfeld fans bear with me. You may recall a classic explanation of someone spitting on Kramer and Newman at a Mets game. Jerry uses the U.S. Government's illogical explanation of the one bullet theory with JFK to show how the person the guys thought was spitting on them was clearly not in the position to hit both. He ends with, "That's one magic loogie" (One definition I found for loogie is: A mass of mucous and saliva that is forcefully ejected from the mouth onto a person.)

So I'm walking down the street and the guy coming the opposite way tries to set a world record for size and strength of his loogie ejecting it with a fury rarely seen, just missing me. I walked away and thought, "If that hit me, it would have knock me down!" (and I would have been scarred for life.)

So it was on to a stop at Ichido, which is a local company that has many branches around the city. Their product is fresh and tasty and has become a favorite of mine for walking around food since most of the fast food is not good. I bought a croissant there the other day as a change of pace from the breakfasts here at the hotel because the lady here just doesn't know how to cook an egg other than burnt. So I a take bite of my croissant and it's soft and flaky and very tasty, mmm, pretty good. The second bite was a bit of croissant with a hunk of hot dog! Let's just say, I was quite surprised and decided to not finish this croissant. Now, I am very careful what I buy there. I don't like these kind of surprises.

So what is qian zi? Well, I didn't know either but I saw these people playing a game using a badminton shuttlecock. (I didn't know the thing they hit in badminton was called a shuttlecock either.) So using a badminton net and a small painted court, there were three players per team using anything but their hands to project the shuttlecock over the net. Kind of like hacky sack but with a shuttlecock and a net. I asked for permission to take photos which they thought was quite funny so I sat there and entertained myself for a while. Below is a sample and you can see more by clicking on this photo as it is a link to more...

One note, you are better off right clicking on the photo or video below and selecting, "open in a new tab" so to can continue to read the blog while this loads and also you won't have to go backwards to get back tot he blog. To see all the photos, after you right click and the link loads just press the right arrow key to scroll through the photos.



To get a feel for what these people are doing you can also look at a short video (20 seconds) that I took of them. The best way to watch the video, is to open in a new tab as instructed above and then immediately go to the bottom of the video screen and press the pause button so the video can load and you will avoid 20 seconds of herky jerky action that will take 2 minutes to play.



There were also a number of Mah Jong games going on in the park but even though I know what flower is, I don't know my crack from my bam (mah jong terms) plus I didn't have my 2010 mah jong card so I didn't try to play. It's actually ma jiang in Mandarin, but I don't want to get picky. Of course, at one game with three men and and one women, if you had to guess who was the only one not smoking based on my earlier blogs, who would it be? (If you don't know go back and re-read all of my blogs)

This week I go to Hong Kong on Wednesday (to renew my Visa for another 30 days) and try to add another 100 words to my Mandarin vocabulary. I bought Flash Cards on Saturday so they will get a workout while I wait for Planes, trains and automobiles.