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April 2008 - Posts
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This feed has moved to http://feeds.gothamistllc.com/shanghaiist
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From the BBC: Stephen Sackur talks to Liu Mingkang, Chairman, China Banking Regulatory Commission. Will China escape the downturn in the American economy?
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Wong Kar-wai is celebrating the opening of his *** movie My Blueberry Nights in the US this Friday by selling some merchandise — most notably, $95 t-shirts, $50 posters, and $25 postcards. And if you want to thank him for ripping you off in person, you'll get your chance in New York at a fashion boutique store called Opening Ceremony, where Wong is going to be on Wednesday afternoon. We hope that someone tells him that the US is facing a recession and that the real incomes are not increasing for the average American. $25 for a postcard? You can get four lattes in Manhattan for that price! Sheesh!
We've read a couple of blogs that have mentioned the Hong Kong International Film Festival, but here is yet another one from a blog dedicated to Asian Cinema. There are several movies mentioned in this post that we're really looking forward to seeing, especially Old Fish, which was mentioned in several other blogs of HKIFF participants as well.
From Screen Daily we learned that Summer Palace director Lou Ye's new film, ***, was one of the films selected for the fourth Cannes Atelier. This year's Atelier features 15 projects from 14 countries and aims to help directors get financing so that they can bring their projects to completion.
Last but not least, some cinematic dessert from YouTube: the top 10 Jackie Chan stunts. Not to be missed.
Cross-posted at China Film Journal.
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 One of William Shakespeare's most famous plays comes to Shanghai tonight as TNT's production of Hamlet begins its run over at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre on Anfu Lu. Arguably among the most intriguing and complex of the tragedies penned by the Bard, Hamlet explores the themes of revenge, madness (both apparent and real), and, ultimately, death — all in the "rotten" state of Denmark. Featuring some of Shakespeare's most famous and revered moments (the 'to be or not to be' speech and the 'play within a play' scene, for example), the tale of Prince Hamlet's attempts to avenge his father's murder contains great drama throughout.
TNT have earned a reputation as one of the premier Shakespeare touring companies over the years, performing across the globe and picking up a host of awards along the way. Under the direction of Paul Stebbings, this production aims to remain faithful to the spirit and the style of Shakespeare's own time and theatrical resources, which should make for a raw and sincere performance of the playwright's classic.
The British touring troupe will be treading the boards until April 12th (taking a night off on the 7th), with ye olde English dialogue and Chinese subtitles. The show will start at 7:30pm and tickets will cost you between 150-280RMB, or 800RMB if you want to go VIP for the night.
Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre: No. 288 Anfu Road; 上海话剧艺术中心, 安福路288号
Ticket hotlines: 021-62172426; 021-62173055
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 Shanghaiist recently caught up with Philippe Tzou, the Shanghai Couch Surfing volunteer. Couch Surfing is a great non-profit organization that helps people travel around the world staying in the homes of like minded people and sharing their knowledge and experiences. Shanghai has developed a unique CS community. As Shanghai-resident Philippe Tzou’s current guest Sascha Wenzlick put it: In Germany loads of people have CS accounts so you don’t get requests to surf so often. But in Shanghai you get weekly requests and CSers even confer to share the guests around.
Philippe calls several places home including Ivory Coast, France, Taiwan and Belgium. He worked for NGOs at the European Union in Brussels. Through working with disability groups he even found himself joining a wheelchair basketball league for a season and, as he put it, “getting owned”. Philippe has now settled on Shanghai and uses his skills and experiences to build the CS community here.
Philippe embraces the philosophy of Couch Surfing and has initiated one of its many collaborative projects. Through fundraising among his old Belgian CS network, he has started The Water Buffalo Project. The project will buy a water buffalo for a poor family in Hubei. It’s no pipe dream either. He has been to the selected village and settled on a family too. Shanghaiist has also had many guests over these past months and if you want to see one of those ‘nice ideas’ working in practice, you need look no further.
Pictured: Philippe Tzou and Sascha Wenzlick.
Watch out for a future post tipping the next CS party/event if you want to get involved.
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 Jonathan Watts, the China correspondent for The Guardian, has recently put in his year so far article about the internet here. It covers a lot of familiar ground and quotes Zonaeuropa and Danwei.org, among others, as sources. One of the most quoted facts in these kinds of articles is the world’s most read blog being “Lao Xu”. Lao Xu is the Sina.com blog of actress/writer/director Xu Jing Lei 徐静雷.
So what’s going on at the world’s most popular blog? This is what we found in her latest post: 今日闲散，到VERGELEGEN的葡萄酒庄园参观，品酒，好多好多小葡萄，像小黑珍珠，一趟水洗过去，乌黑发亮，像黑人兄弟的皮肤一样健康漂亮。也顺便品了品刚摘下来的葡萄，专为醸葡萄酒种的那种，很甜很甜。
…Today was a day of leisure … I checked out a vineyard at Vergelegen, and tasted some of the wines there … there were so many little grapes , like black pearls …after cleaning with water they were as shiny and beautiful as the skin of our African brothers …ate freshy picked fruit, so sweet …[Translation by Shanghaiist.]
Danwei readers might have seen that she is currently touring South Africa. Chinese language readers will notice we’ve been kind. At least she’s trying.
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Perched high up in a pod between the two terminals of Pudong airport, the hotel bar for both Motel 168 and it's sibling Ease Hotel. The cool design and eighth floor view is worth a look for anyone waiting for a delays, alcoholic plane spotters or location scouts for 1970s Bond movies.
To get there, take the elevator to the airport hotel from outside the Maglev station / KFC. Walk past reception in either hotel and take the elevator up to the top floor. Yes, we realise it's not exactly convenient.
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 If you are tired of spending your Saturday and Sunday mornings lying around with a hangover — what better way to kick it then by running around outdoors and shooting people with paintballs while wearing a Darth Vader mask and army fatigues.
We went paintballing a couple weeks ago and, aside from the aftermath of welts and bruises, we enjoyed it immensely.
Weichang Paintball Shooting Sports Centre is a bit out of town, so share a taxi from downtown (100 RMB, takes 40 minutes). Entrance is 150 RMB per person including gear, 90 paintballs and one hour of field access.
Paintball Shooting Sports Centre
388 Chenhua Lu, Songjiang (Line 1)
English Service: 57690313 13818773979
Mobile: Tony 13818773979
E-MAIL: paintball_cato@sh-paintball.com
Shanghaiist's managing editor Dan Washburn wrote an interesting article entitled "'That sniper was all over me, man'" about his paintballing experiences ... in Georgia, but seeing as the the game is pretty much the same wherever you go, check it out. Our favorite line is "I love the smell of paintballs in the morning."
Photos by Denitza Vatchkova. More pictures after the jump
The guns
The masks
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 As the Financial Times reported, April 1 was the day that China Mobile started trials of its homegrown 3G wireless technology in eight major cities, with about 60,000 customers.
A more recent Chinese reports suggests that the trials may only involve 20,000 people.
Another Chinese media report says that China Mobile offers three very attractive discount packages to people testing out 3G. For one, the regular voice telephone charges are less than what we 2G folks are paying now, and they get a 50% discount on top of that. At the same time, they are also offering 100-200 yuan off the price of certain 3G phones. One of the packages, for example, is 50 RMB per month, the basic rate for local calls is .4 RMB per minute, free to receive calls, and roaming costs .6 RMB if you call and .4 RMB per minute if you receive calls. Long-distance calls — and this is confusing, or perhaps some typo – 7 cents for 6 seconds? That would mean .7 RMB per minute, we think. As you can tell, these prices are basically the same as the GSM prices.
We're not quite sure if it's open to the public yet. Some reports mentioned something about being invited or just getting picked.
But the whole point of 3G is to bring video and web to your mobile devices, so here are some of those prices: Local video-calling will cost .6 RMB per minute if you call, and free if you receive. Roaming: .9 RMB per minute for outgoing calls, .6 RMB per minute for incoming calls. Long-distance within China costs .1 RMB for six seconds.
Some other plans include 28 RMB per month for 150 minutes of call-time, or 58 RMB for 350 minutes of call time, and another for 88 RMB which gets you 600 minutes of call-time, including caller ID, Olympics mobile news, 10 MB of data transfer and cool ring tones!
There are two places in Shanghai where they have 3G exhibition booths; one of them is at 48 Zhangwu Lu near Siping Lu (彰武路48号近四平路) and the other is 998 Renmin Lu (人民路998号). But you can only apply for 3G at the former, and not the latter.
What about 3G enabled phones? There are six you can choose from. For the trials in Shanghai China Mobile provided about 10,000 phones and 3000 wireless cards. The phones came from various manufacturers, with the cheapest being one from Lenovo, costing 1800 RMB, while the most expensive was one from Zhongxing, which cost 3800 RMB. The wireless cards were as folllows: Zhongxing — 700 RMB, Datang — 800 RMB, and TD at ... 20 RMB? Huh?
We are pretty excited about taking these cards out for a spin. Back in the day we had flirted with the idea of getting a 2G card, which was based on the CDMAone standards or whatever China's version of that is, but weren't convinced that it would work well on Apple computers (they actually do, in fact). However, the promise of 3G's speed has us revisiting the idea. For those of you that prefer to surf on your iPhone, you might be out of luck — even though 3G iPhones are coming out in May, that is, one month from now – it stands to reason that if they are being developed by Apple and AT&T for release in the USA that they won't be compliant with China's homegrown 3G network, TD-SCDMA. A lot of this depends on what happens between Apple and China Mobile – and although the news has waffled between the king is dead and long live the king, Apple Insider points out that might be some reason to believe that there are still hopes for a "legit" iPhone in China, because Apple is not married to any particular business-model, meaning that yeah, they made a killing with the exclusive agreements they have with AT&T in the US, Orange in France, T-Mobile in Germany, O2 in the UK, but hey, they're flexible and might change the rules of the game if that means that China Mobile will at least agree to play the game.
So you can't quite rule out the possibility that there will be a Chinese 3G-enabled iPhone sometime in the near future.
Photo from craig1black
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 We can see it now. Fast-forward to 2010. An ancient Tibetan god called Gozer arrives atop an apartment building near Xintiandi in Shanghai, where it tells the neighborhood's restaurateurs that the next thing they think of will be the form Gozer will assume to destroy their world. Despite their efforts to clear their minds, Bob Boyce imagines Haibao, the irksome mascot of the 2010 World Expo. As he explains, Haibao "just popped in there" as "something that could never possibly destroy us." Moments later a giant Haibao is seen walking towards the apartment building. And then the restaurateurs shoot at Haibao with their proton packs ... and so on and so on.
It will look something like the video found after the jump ... only bluer.
Photo from Joon Ho.
Text of this post almost totally ripped off from here.
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Is the Chinese government on a warpath of revenge? After enduring an embarrassing year of recalls and bans that left the "Made in China" tag-line in serious need of rehab, it appears that officials are eager to jump on any reason to have the tables turned. After Italy identified higher than acceptable amounts of dioxin in some mozzarella cheese made in the southern Campania region, the folks at the always busy Administration for Quality Supervision Inspection and Quarantine (or as we like to call them, "Irony and Whine") have put a ban on mozzarella imports from Italy, with other Italian cheeses required to go through lab tests before they're allowed in. From the International Herald Tribune:
Agriculture Minister Paolo De Castro said Italy has no direct exports to China, according to the ANSA news agency. "We are trying to understand the circumstances of this ban," De Castro was quoted as saying.
Italian farmers associations denounced the ban from China, with some pointing out that Chinese exports were tainted by a series of food and product safety scandals last year.
"Adding insult to injury the ban ... is decided by a country like China whose exports have created alarm across the world," said the Coldiretti group.
We feel for the Coldiretti group, one of the aforementioned farmers associations, who undoubtedly feel like the kettle to China's chemically-blackened pot. We were also intrigued by Minister De Castro's claim that Italy has no direct exports to China. If he's right, where the hell have we been getting our mozzarella from? If any of you cheese whizzes know, please comment below.
Photo taken from the site 365cheeses.
Eric Hu is Shanghaiist's Food Editor. Email tips, recommendations, and news and gossip about Shanghai's food scene to food at shanghaiist.com.
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