You know winter is around the corner when...

I've been making myself multiple cups of hot tea for the past couple of days. The pluses of living with my grandparents is that, being Chinese, they drink tea all day (instead of water) so I've got a ready supply of hot water already boiled and in big urns keeping it hot! No having to wait for the kettle to boil. I do miss some of my teas from home, hadn't realised that mostly they just sell more traditional Chinese teas here. None of your stupidly sweet flavours (but delicious!) like Apple Pie from the Tea Centre or even the nice clean taste of Irish breakfast (with milk). That said, I had a really tasty wheat based tea at a restaurant yesterday which I'm going to try and find.

I do find myself missing coffee though. It's all Nescafe and Starbucks here. Nescafe is all right for all night study sessions where you need to keep yourself pepped up, mixed with a bit of milo, but no milo! And Starbucks is just average coffee at hugely inflated prices. Not that Aussie coffee is right up there with Italian coffee or anything, but at least I can go out for a coffee and get something drinkable. Also I'm a little cautious about milk products, although that hasn't necessarily stopped me when I really want to have something milky (like ice cream... mmmm...) It's selective memory.

I've gone from American Project Runway to Australian Project Runway. American is definitely better, but the Australian version is not as bad as I thought it'd be. I can't imagine it'd be watchable to non-Aussies (due in part to too much slang - seriously, I think Aussies use more slang than ANY OTHER CULTURE!) but it's ok for me.

Another weekend being spent doing not much. Better than going out and getting food poisoning though...

Food poisoning

Have been out of action the past couple of days as I succumbed to a bout of food poisoning, now mostly over (phew!). At least now, having had it once, I hope I don't get it again! And I'm also glad that this was the extent of it. Last time I had it, it was much, much worse.

This reminds me I need to be more careful with street food.

Chinese levels

People have all varying levels of Chinese in my class. Lots of Japanese and Koreans who can write (not sure why Koreans can write, but a lot of them can... i guess they have a pictorial script too... ) but not really understand or speak and who are all mostly very studious. Two Germans with different levels, his is probably better cos he has a Chinese gf, but then maybe not cos all he's learning seems to be sex type words from her. And then there are two Malay-Chinese girls, one who is actually Malaysian and one Aussie. The Aussie has a really good accent but I don't think she knows that much Chinese (just good at pronunciation) and the other sounds kind of Cantonese when she's speaking (she speaks Fujianhua I think?) but can understand a lot, and can't really read or write. And there's me. I can read a lot more than before, and writing I've learnt some just from weekly mini tests on characters I've been studying for. And my listening is good for this level (definitely way above it), but not as good as the Malaysian girls, being used to Shanghainese makes Mandarin tricky sometimes. My speaking is sometimes ok and sometimes way off when I'm having a good or bad day. Some days my tones are so mixed up that I even confuse myself. Speaking to my grandparents every day doesn't help either. They're so deaf and I have to yell loudly to get my point across, it's easier to stick to Shanghainese which I can sustain at a loud level. Mandarin just goes haywire!

Same same but different

There's a comforting sense of familiarity and stability here in my Shanghai life due in main part to the samesame-ness of family relationships and lifestyles. It's like going back to Canberra after a long absence, although things may have changed, the overall vibe is largely the same. So here I am, it's been about 5 years or so since I last visited and it doesn't feel that different. My grandparents have moved somewhere new, but the furniture is the same and their daily routine remains "get up early, buy vegetables/groceries, prepare and eat lunch, play mah jong all afternoon, prepare and eat dinner, settle down in front of the TV all night and then go to bed early". And that's the same pretty much every single day...

The stability of their daily lives, plus the structured nature of my classes, means that my life is very same same each day. I suppose a little different in that the classes are different, some days I eat with classmates some days I eat at home. But overall the same thing.

I kind of crave novelty a lot so it becomes a little bit dull after awhile. I should appreciate being here more, but staying in one place always seems to mean you lose a bit of excitement in your life. Itchy feet!

Settling in - life in Shanghai

No posts for a bit as I lost my initial excitement about having proper access to internet to a certain extent. Am still using it a lot, but more for watching TV (oh how I love thee Project Runway) than for anything else. I'm sitting here drinking tea and eating a cookie and loading an episode of Project Runway, season 5. Not as good as season 4, not even close, as the designers on this season seem to lack... talent. That's a bit harsh coming from someone who struggles to sew in a straight line (I can do buttons though!) but it's true. Where did they find these people? No Christians, Ramis, Jillians or Victoryas in THIS round up. They were going for "diversity" of designers - in terms of style and race it seems - but they ended up with a lot of people who don't have great taste and some who don't seem that good at even basic garment construction! Wonky seams, badly sewn etc.

An overview of my daily life in Shanghai:
- Wake up early, having been awoken by the noisy tones of my grandparents making desultory morning conversation, but in very loud voices as they're both a bit deaf. Sweet sounds of birds chirping it is not. Birds chirping is also way overrated, I'd rather have silence. Oh sweet silence. My grandparents are very noisy people. When they talk, it's loud, almost yelling. When they watch TV, the sound is way up. And every afternoon they play mah jong and then there are 5 old people sitting there being deaf and loud and when they "wash" the tiles (kind of like when you shuffle cards) it's a cacaphony of loud exclamations (of "oh my cards were so terrible" or "oh i was just waiting on this one") and the tiles clanking against each other repeatedly.

- Eat breakfast (usually rice porridge and some small items like pickles, tofu and preserved vegetables) and then walk to class. Except for Wednesdays when I have afternoon class, yes! Sleep in! Although my noisy grandparents wake me up early, they go out to buy the daily groceries which gives me about an hour of blissfully silent sleep.

- Class lasts for a bit over 3 hours, in blocks of 1.5 hours each and a 20 minute break in between. I've started to make some friends in my class and through them met a couple of others which is nice. I went out to a couple of bars (not very good ones I must admit) and ended up slightly hungover on Wednesday afternoon. I think the cocktails here must have some extra poison in them, I only had one cocktail and one beer and should NOT have been feeling that bad the next day.
We have three types of classes: kouyu (speaking), tingli (listening) and the intensive reading course (can't remember the name in Chinese!). My reading course by far is the best as the teacher is very good at her job. She keeps you involved, and even if it is not exactly interesting perse (I mean it's just reading new words, reading passages about unexciting topics like fixing bicycles and being sick etc, and learning grammar structures) but I certainly feel like I want to learn with her. Listening teacher is also not too bad, but we move too slowly I feel. That's partly because I should be in a higher class but you're meant to do everything all on the same level and I'm too lazy to argue about it. Sometimes it's just easier following the rules here. Speaking is stupid, as we don't spend much time speaking, just reading the passages after the teacher. She's a really nice lady, but not much of a teacher so far. Looks like she might be improving, but time will tell.

- Lunch: I was eating this with my grandparents but now have eaten with classmates a couple of times. Both times Japanese! Curry and then ramen. I really want sushi though. Haven't yet scoped out the best places to eat. The area that my university is in is not as cheap as it's fairly central, but my grandparents said there are some good places around. Chinese is the cheapest of course, should eat more of that!

- Then the rest of the day I spend studying and watching TV online (yes, at the same time - although you need to study a fair amount, it doesn't need THAT much brain power).

Overall not hugely exciting, and I've never really been a fan of stability/routine, but that's what it's like here. My grandparents are very big on routine (they're old) so my life gets a little structured around them, and also around classes. They've got a bit of a salsa scene here which I am hoping to look into (found some links to it via Facebook - oh the beauty of FB!) and that should give me a bit of excitement in my life!

Shanghai shopping

Xixi mentioned that she thought shopping in China might have increased in price since she last came, and perhaps this is true in the department stores, but you can still get great deals in market type places. I went to the Hongqiao International Pearl City, driving there through insane traffic with my mum's friend and her daughter. Her daughter currently lives in Ottawa, Canada, but is here on vacation for about a month. It's nice having someone to do something with outside of just study and family and it was nice to finally do some shopping (and not in Qingdao...).

Le Sportsac is really big in China right now, which makes sense because it's brand-y enough to appeal to Chinese sensibilities, whilst also being cutesy enough to really really catch on! I invested in two little bags, and luckily my mum's friend was a really good bargainer. I wouldn't have been game to bargain as hard as she did, but then given how weak our Aussie $$$ is right now I should bargain for all I'm worth! I also got two wallets, one "Dior" and one "Gucci", but not the typical weird little infinity symbol Guccis that you usually see. That was definitely a need because my wallet is falling apart. I really wanted this beautiful "Anna Sui" old fashioned flowered one, but she wouldn't lower her price anymore so we walked out. If I see it again maybe I'll buy it. Although who needs so many wallets? You only really use one... it was really really nice though.

My name is Trin and I'm a shopaholic. Hello everyone.

Back to the past - Italy redux! Part 1 - Milano

Just noticed that I didn't blog about my trip to Italy AT ALL and that is something that needs to be remedied right away! This realisation was brought on because I was looking through a friend's photos from part of the trip and I was like ITALY!!!! :o)

So it started with landing in Milan to visit Diane, where I also tried in vain to get a new Chinese visa. Let me tell you know that it's no fun dealing with Chinese/Italian bureaucracy. The Italians are already crazy and don't believe in lines, which is also in keeping with Chinese people so it's just mass chaos. New York Chinese consulate was very orderly (those Americans keeping everyone in line), as is Sydney. But Milan? OH MY GOD! When I first got there there was a swarm of people hanging about outside the entrance (actually I went there the day before and it was all quiet and I thought SCORE but then found out it wasn't opened on Tuesdays... grrr...) and they were not really letting people in. Or only very slowly. There were these guys selling newspapers and trying to convince you to buy them, and they said if you did you'd scoot to the head of the line... not quite sure, it worked for one person, but I still feel like it was probably some kind of scam. Anyway, I was mashed amongst people for ages and STILL no use! No Visa! Ugh!

And also if I at any point thought Italy wasn't just a little bit racist there's this: they let the Italian looking people through FIRST and even let them PUSH THROUGH the crowd to get to the front. I realised this was because once inside the lines for getting visas was much shorter than the lines for Chinese consular issues (not sure what most people were dealing with) and ONLY the Italian looking people in the visa line. I mean I know it's partly a practical thing, but wouldn't a better system be to have one line for people doing Chinese-y things and one just for visas outside? Ugh... never again. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with Italian style bureaucracy anymore. Hate it!

Not that China is that much better. More organised/less crazy chaos, but long lines at time and so much admin/paperwork! Stamp this, show this, photocopy that. Everything is so exact and precise! I must say that GENERALLY it is fairly efficient though, which is nice. As long as there are no problems everything goes through very quickly, quicker than Australia!

Besides the visa dramas Milan was fun! It was rather surreal walking around and seeing all these familiar things. It kind of felt like it hadn't been that long and yet it was. So much can happen in two years.

I did some touristing around during the day while Diane was at work. I randomly went to Parma when my train to Como didn't turn up (oh Trenitalia... so RELIABLE) because my Lonely Planet said it was famous for its food, particularly ham. I love both food and ham. But Parma was a disappointment because it was August and lots of stuff is closed then. Also my LP is a bit out of date now (it was good in 2006!) and the salumeria in it no longer exists. *sigh* In short, Parma is kind of lame, don't go unless you've got a good reason. Better than you just kind of like ham and don't know where else to go.

I also finally made it to Como, yay for me. Beautiful but I almost puked on the bus from Como to Bellagio and that would have been unpleasant. All those nasty bendy bits in the road. Ugh.

Plus two of my friends from exchange were also in Milan! Score! I was meant to be meeting them in Amalfi but I hadn't realised we'd be in Milan at the same time. I met them in Taxi Blues (just turned up after I got an email saying that was where they'd be for lunch) a cafe near Bocconi university where we always used to eat lunch. And then we did what we always did in Milan and went shopping - down Via Torino!


"Back in Milano!"






Then onwards to aperitivo at Slice. Yum, just as delicious as always. We also tried going out to Old Fashioned Cafe but it was... ba bam BAAAAM! Closed. Dead as a doorknob.



Instead we got the best gelato in Milan from Ciocolat and then ended up at some outdoor drinking place where everyone stands around drinking beer and cheap alcohol.

The next night we had a nice Italian dinner (complete with after dinner espressos and limoncello) and ended up at Old Fashioned again which we'd heard was opening up that night! Such a difference from the night before where we have photos of us standing outside a desolate and slightly decrepit looking gate... It was a great continuation of my Milan reminiscences tour. I'm lucky I had friends there because it would have been a pretty sad place to revisit on my own.

Being at Old Fashioned was just like going out in Italy always was. Although we knew a lot less people. But you always meet skeezy Italian men when you're out and about, particularly if you're with three girls with blue blue blue eyes, and particularly when two of them are blonde! Italians are obsessed with the blonde hair/blue eyes look! I guess it has that foreign appeal that the Italian guys like. Except if you're Asian. Do I sound kind of bitter? I'm not exactly, but it IS annoying. I'm not going to turn this into a rant about Italy and racism (already done that up above) because I'm not living there anymore so there's no point. And there are some really nice Italians too, so I guess it's not fair to lump them all in the same broad category. And dealing with all of that is also a trip down memory lane, just the not so good side.

Overall a good balance. A mixture of the good and the bad. Enough for me to be like "yes there was all this stuff that I forgot that I enjoyed in Milan" combined with enough of the "oh yes, that's right, it was like THAT" so that I could be happy with my re-visit but also happy that it's not my home anymore.

Next up - Amalfi! :o)

Reading over the old to create the new

A burst of creativity always strikes when you have other things that you should be doing. I will call this "procrastination art". I'd like to think of it as being a real talent, maybe just because I spend so much time doing it that I'd rather consider it a positive activity rather than a pure waste of time.

I realised looking through previous posts that I really did run out of thoughts and time along my travels. Big gaps in places and not wholly satisfying descriptions/narratives/anecdotes of my travels. I think it's hard in this kind of situation because you want to make what you're writing about interesting but without getting so personal that you're revealing too much of yourself. It's got to be more than just a description of what you've done and what you've seen and where you've been. Because that's not interesting and if I was going to just do that then I'd just list places and monuments etc. And what makes it even harder is that you're always pushed for time when you're travelling, so you only have 10 minutes here or 30 minutes there, and you're never quite sure of when you'll next get internet!

So I feel like overall I wish I'd written a little more to remember things by. I have photos too, but I suppose that's not quite the same. Did I manage to get down what I was thinking or feeling at certain times? I think it's important to be able to learn from my experiences. And travelling, particularly travelling solo, is the perfect opportunity to be able to explore thoughts, feelings, ideas that you've had gestating in the deep, dark recesses of your subconscious. You come away from it all knowing more about yourself. Or maybe you come away having figured out something that's niggled at you for a long time.

What did I bring away from all of this? That you can't always plan really far into the future and that's ok. Feelings of instability and insecurity are fine, and not knowing where you might be in 5 years is acceptable too. It'll all come in time, and until it does, there's no point stressing yourself out more by worrying. This is not, however, the same as doing nothing and leaving everything to pure chance/luck/fate/ whatever you want to call it! It's more accepting that you don't know everything right now and that's all right.

This is more of an LJ post than anything else, but lacking the ability to access LJ, I'm left with this. I suppose it's an overshare for a travel blog post but I need to put it somewhere!

China - settling down

I finally have internet set up at my grandparent's place in Shanghai so I'll be able to update on my doings in China! And blogspot works here which is good. No LJ but I'll live without it.

I'd like to write something interesting about first impressions etc but then I've been to Shanghai a few times now, so it's not really first impressions at all. I had forgotten what China was like though and from reading my Lonely Planet I guess I'd recreated a very different Shanghai in my head. In reality, Shanghai, although modern, is still a Chinese city, making it VERY different from other, Western cities. I guess because New York, LA, San Fran, although they weren't the same, all had that essential Western city look to them that made me almost feel like I was at home in Australia. Even Mexico City, despite the armed guards with guns (eep!) and the street stalls selling tacos and other various tasty Mexican street meats, was kind of European looking.

But Shanghai is... well you definitely know you're in China. Because it's so quickly developing I thought that perhaps a lot of the inequalities between rich rich and poor poor had disappeared, at least in terms of buildings and infrastructure. However you can still find tall skyscraper apartment buildings next to little shanty type hut things. Although I guess there are less than there used to be. And then you've got all the little fresh food markets, with people selling a whole range of vegetables (yum) and then big slabs of meat just hang out on wooden blocks (not so yum).

So far my classes are ok. I'm in this weird situation of having much better spoken and listening skills than written and reading skills but because of the way the system works here I am all on the same level for all. Not very well organised I suppose, although I have been told some people mix and match classes, but generally have to figure it out on their own. It's good to learn some proper grammar having never really properly studied Chinese before. Just dribs and drabs of when my mother and grandmother tried to teach me, as well as the very uninformative lessons I took at a Chinese school back when I was 11.

Haven't properly made friends yet, but have a few people I talk to in class who are quite nice. I already have family and other connections in China so it's not too lonely. Also meeting up with Xixi in Qingdao was good. It did make my slowly developing Chinese a lot worse, as I didn't have to speak Chinese for about 5 full days! Every day you speak you gain so much, and every day you don't you lose so much. Probably the internet is a bad thing too as it means I'll spend more time in front of it and less trying to talk to my grandparents. Oh well, I'll try to limit myself, and anyway they always vegetate in front of the TV every evening.

Now should study for a dictation test tomorrow!