Weekend Won

On Thursday I started to feel shitty. On Friday the feeling got worse. It was the flu - AKA, the 'Chinese Flu', AKA - "welcome to China - you're sick".... FUCK... Really???

On Friday night it hits like a ton of bricks; sweats, aches, cough, congestion... being sicks sucks. Being sick in another country sucks even more.

A few lessons learned however (CHINA FACT):
1) Get a VPN so you can watch netflix
2) There is a delivery food service called Sherpa.com - CRITICAL!
3) Stock up US cold and cough products, they just don't have them here... So i'm toughing it out with some advil i brought...

Four movies (Buy the ticket, take the ride; a Hunter T. bio, Full Metal Jacket, Bronson and Trainspotting) and 12 hours of sleep later, its Sunday morning..... Still feeling under the weather, but its a beautiful day and I can't bring myself to stay cocooned in my room for another 24hrs. Did I really travel half way around the world to sit in bed and watch movies???

So its off to lunch with the only two people I know (who I don't work with); American couple from Cali who are old friends with one of my best college buds.... Lunch is good and then off to to do what all folks do on Sunday - hit up the knock off video store!!

In NYC, you occasionally see guys hawking $5 DVD's on the street. Well let me tell you - in China they have elevated this to an entirely new level. I swear, it looks like a legit store, until you go to pay and its 10RMB (~$1.50) per DVD (which I was told was expensive)... unbelievable.. Anyway, still haven't tried em out, so will report back on the quality.. But thought I'd catch up on some classics.

After lunch, I went to check out the Shanghai art fair - I thought, "this will be a great way to see all the gallery's in the city without having to schlepp around"...

Well - I was wrong. It was 99% crap, so i took the business card for the only gallery that looked at all credible (Shanghart) and headed to their actual gallery...

CHINA FACT: All stores are typically bundled together on the same street. For example, there is an entire street of guitar stores... Just like there is entire area of gallery's.

Anyway - Shanghart is located in the M50, which is somewhere between an artist colony and gallery village. Kinda like Brooklyn, but more concentrated and in China... The road is completely covered in Graffiti, and its basically open studios all the time. Unfortunately, the art quality left something to be desired, but I will keep looking.

So thats Sunday. Gonna pop in a movie and kick back till another work day rolls around....

Eastern Days

I recently moved to Shanghai for work on a temporary basis. I'll be here through the end of the year. In the spirit of sharing, which is the purpose of this blog, I thought i'd shift gears from random cultural internet items of note, and focus my attention on random and interesting Chinese items of note....

So... My first observation.... The below images represent one aspect of Shanghai and China... Over the next few months I hope to show you others....