Stumbling on melons

I am with D on the other side of the Great Firewall, in Shanghai. Reports of the GF can be exaggerated. If you are here long term it is not impossible to get around much of it with a VPN. Or so I am told. Meanwhile I find myself greatly inconvenienced by the ongoing feud between Google and the PRC government. It is difficult being the servant of two masters.

Pictured above is the airbnb-type accommodation we are staying at for a few days before sallying deeper into China. Our billet is the lean-to structure tacked on the end of the house, itself now subdivided. In the neighbourhood are many very substantial houses (grander than this), dating from about 1920 to 1948 – testimony to the life of the Shanghailanders and the fortunes made from the century of humiliation which any well-brought-up Chinese person will be quick to remind you of in myriad contexts.

Our landlady, also pictured, lives in part of the house. She has already told D that she is 74, has two children in the USA, and much else besides. We had to tear ourselves away in search of a morning coffee.

It is just over 25 years since I first came to Shanghai, and 10 years since I was last here other than passing through the airport. The changes from the first time are enormous. One difference I have noticed since 2013 is that there are fewer buses. I put that down to the proliferation of metro lines and consequent withdrawal of bus services. Anyway, why get stuck in the traffic on a bus? I nevertheless hope at some stage for old-times’ sake to take the No 20 trolley bus which I first rode from D’s mum’s place to Waitan (or as Imperialist-nostalgists like to say, the Bund [no Wikipedia link available to me just now) in 1998.

The yellow bike in the background is a “share” bike. Shanghai is very flat and well-suited to cycling. The right handlebar twists as if it were a gear, but it operates a bell. The fly in the ointment is that one needs a local weixin/wechat financial connection to obtain one. For this we need to prevail on D’s relatives, which means the ideal hop-on-hop-off mode is not really practical for us.

As elsewhere in the world, cash transactions are now a novelty. The keyboard on my laptop needed replacing. When I produced cash to pay for this yesterday, the shop person said she hadn’t seen cash for a long time.

Title to this post from the legend on the slippers provided for indoor use:

Not entirely clear to me why somebody should be so attached to these chairs.

At first I wondered what the Beijing prejudice against tyre-kickers might be.

Closer inspection suggested an explanation:

Is his kingdom. (Beijing 2014)

Rather blurry shots from 2014 retrieved from my soon to be obsolete mobile phone.

Animal welfare is still a bit of a new thing in China, as is the keeping of cats as pets – you see rather harried feral creatures, for some reason more often white than is commonly seen in Australia.

This was a stall in the yuppy (and by night, night-life) area of Sanlitun.

I’m back from behind the Great Fire Wall.

In Australia, our new government sedulously dissuades us from any environmental effort, particularly when it comes to global warming, by the contrary example of the Chinese.

I first went to China in 1998. Since then, I have noticed some “environmental” developments.

Public rubbish bins now routinely have a “recyclable” and “non-recyclable” receptacle. True, this distinction is almost universally ignored, but to the extent that it is observed it may make things just a little easier for the free-lancers who go from bin to bin retrieving the recyclable objects (especially plastic water bottles) and putting them into enormous sacks on their bicycles.

Styrofoam takeaway food containers and chopsticks used to gather in practically every windbreak of any sort in any public place. I can’t work out how but you don’t seem to see them or at least so many.

In urban areas, at least, the motor bike has been supplanted by the electric bicycle (though electric bicycles have probable replaced quite a lot of ordinary bicycles as well).

And you now have to pay for a plastic bag at the Supermarket (a measure also adopted in Australia in the ACT though not yet in NSW). You can buy a slightly more robust one than they used to give away. It doesn’t cost much, but the Chinese are a frugal people.

Unarmed with my own bag I went shopping this year on the main street of Dali old town(Sifangjie, a common name for a main street in these parts). I have kept the bag I bought as a souvenir.

The bag identifies the shop and its slogan, reproduced at the head of this post, which places an appropriate (especially for China) emphasis on its goods being well-priced.

It’s only today that I really paid any attention to the other side of the bag:

And again, looking a little more closely:

That’s right: 钓鱼岛 – that’s the Diaoyu Islands (to the Chinese, Senkaku to the Japanese) – are Chinese!

Those are the islands which are currently the focus of heightened feelings between Japan and China.

I’d be surprised if Japanese supermarket bags are festooned with equivalent slogans.

See also here.

I am just back from China. I traveled to Shanghai, Beijing, Kunming, Lijiang and Dali in Yunnan Province, and to Yangzhou in Jiansu province. If I lived there I would doubtless equip myself with the necessary proxies etc, but without them, access to this blog (and many others) was denied me.

At various scenic attractions, a frequently encountered side-show is a stall where you can fire an air rifle or (as in this case) throw darts at targets or arrays of little balloons. This one was at a scenic spot and waterfall about 50km south of Lijiang on the pass which provides the entry to Lijiang from Dali.

That’s the Japanese prime minister’s picture on the board.