Wow it’s been so long I still haven’t talked about new years eve!!
Well we worked all day but after work we went out to eat HOT POT! :D We wanted to do something afterwards to celebrate the coming new year, we asked warren if he wanted to play pool and he seemed well up for it, though at the hot pot meal, one of the spoons was left in the hot pot at the steam made the handle extra hot so when Warren grabbed it to get some food he burnt his hand, that night he coldn’t play pool. L That idea went down the drain, we wanted to get some fireworks and go onto the roof and launch them from there! Sadly noone was interested, well at least we had the TV to watch it on, oh but guess what! The cable connecting to the ariel decideds to get al broken yay. We couldn’t even make it to the river side in the centre of town since the subways close at 11:00 pm. We decided to go to bed disappointed.
I have now been changed locations at work. As before I was working on designing background aras for the film, now I am painting backgrounds so when they get round to painting the actual layouts that will appear in the film thye can colour pick from the paintings. Here is a photo of my new work space. With conveniently placed fruit to how how healthy I am XD lol
The new area is now more private being inside a room with only four desks. Now I share with Louis, Phoenix and a new guy Wu hao who is pretty awesome. For my first meal in my new area I decided to order from a new menu that had appeared in the take away drawer at work. Of cousre it’s not traditional Chinese food, it's a hamburger, but it had a funny design of pikachu on the cover. Aa what you can get away with here lol.
After a little stroll back from work on a Friday we bumped into a small gathering, turned out in the centre were supposedly shoaling monks recruiting people to train kung fu to. Course they weren’t real, one was even having a cigarette while others performed. They kept trying to speak to me in super local and fast Chinese, and I kept repeating I don’t speak Chinese. Hmm a lot of the older generation doesn’t seem to mind, they’ll just babble on at a hundred words a minute anyway hehehe. I better learn Chinese quickly then!
After that we saw the new super duper shopping centre had actually been built, man they work fast here! It was a mess last time I saw it, still rubble in loads of places. Me and Louis visited the place on the Sunday . On the way people had set up mini stalls on bikes and were selling lil’ fishes and tanks. When we got there we found out that it’s soo convenient, big shopping centre, small prices and soo local, we don’t have to catch a bus to get there and speaking of convenient, the tram is up and running and only cost 2 rmb ( 20 cents/15p ) from one end of the town to the other! So getting to the subway to go into the city centre won’t have to cost 14 rmb like with the taxis. It’s all new and shiny too!
We found a poster from someone’s “men’s fitness” magazines which was quite interesting. So we thought phoenix might enjoy the photo, so we put that on his desk, but it wouldn’t be complete without toilet paper conveniently placed around it :P.
Turns out he wasn’t happy :O *shock*
(As a disclaimer, he wasn’t bothered really, just he looks quite upset in the photo XD )
Moving into the new place meant I met Wu hao, who’s a pretty cool guy. His digital painting skills are very impressive and he’s super generous, I swear I’m going to be fat from the amount of sweets he keeps offering everyone. I say offer, he buys a box and just says “here you go” while chucking it on your desk haha. He’s also taken us out for a meal since he got a raise. Was a nice place, we had the usual set of dishes we would pick at. There were these croquet ball thingies, soup with bones in, fried octopus beef with a load of fat on in soy sauce, and the fat didn't taste to bad, god knows what it’s doing to my arteries though :S. Spicy beef and other tasty plates were served.
Next Wednesday the studio is sending an assistant to go off and buy the workers tickets to see the movie AVATAR!!!!!! In 3DDDDDDDD yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah woot! If anyones lived in Shanghai before they would know that you have to get your tickets way early in advance in order to see a popular movie and only on the weekdays, so not Sunday. I’m so happy, thought I’d have to go without seeing it. :D Every time we went it’s been sold out.
I will have to go out sometime and get some new clothes, I can’t keep wearing the same three jumpers, I’m gonna see if I can get anything cool looking at good prices sometime at the weekend.
I traveled to Carrefour on my own the other day. It was fun and relaxing, I walked for a while, then got lost, so hopped on the tram, then got lost again, but it was interesting seeing all the new areas an living establishment. Finally I gave up and took a taxi there, to “Jalefor”. They had snickers and other sweets on offer :D so I bought a few!!!! Yummeh!! Only 3.5 rmb a bar, that's about 30 pence. Considering how much imported chocolate is here that's a bargain and a half!
After I left the store and walked a bit down the road, some guy called out to me.
“Oh no” I thought. “this guy just wants me to buy something”
After talking to me he just randomly kept asking me lots of personal questions like where do I live, do I work here etc, but in the the end after asking him why he wanted to know, he told me he just wanted to practice his English. So after a long chat with this random guy he showed me to the tram so now I know where to go to get off at Carrefour J. Very helpful.Lots of people here want to practice their English with foreigners.
After one day at the studio I was walking home with shake shake and to our surprise we past a big fire in an apartment area. When we got a closer look it turned out to be a flaming mo-ped!! And there was this guy poking it with a rather long stick of bamboo.
Me, Louis and Miya met up to town and went off to explore the older parts of shanghai, the areas that have more Chinese style buildings as opposed to the western architecture they have in the centre part due to other countries taking over areas in the past. It was packed there, and very turisty, we saw many an Englishman and for some reason all the westerners here are the size of basketball players, no wonder they think all westerners are super tall!
