Monday March 1 0928

Had a nice laid-back weekend: went to English Corner and saw the last of the fireworks for a while I think, since Sunday was the lantern festival. Sadly, I didn't do anything for it, since I'm actually feeling a little under the weather the past two days: just a touch of a headache and the sniffles, so taking it easy and drinking water. I blame it on the fluctuating of the weather and mediocre air quality after two weeks of fireworks.

Thursday February 25 1227

I find that whenever I am trying to pick up a new language (Latin, French, Chinese), that I end up spending more time on my own invented language instead. I think it's the same impulse where it's more fun to write something else instead of your school paper, or cleaning your room instead of the kitchen.

English: I should learn more Chinese.

Jezzali: Ec kadar calmi sena Cinu.

Chinese: Wo yinggai xuexi genduo Zhongwen.

Wednesday February 24

Darn efficiency: no Qingdao, since there actually is an available agent here in Shanghai, and the company doesn't want to go through the extra expense. Aw well =)

Beautiful weather in shanghai recently tho! It'll be getting rainy the next two days, but it has been very sunny and had warm air and cool breezes.

Tuesday February 23

Living in Shanghai last week was like living in a heavy-fire warzone, except the artillery didn't usually destroy anything. I was expecting that the Chinese would do a large firework show over the river or something, and that'd be largely it other than the occasional firecracker. There was no organized firework show: instead, every Shanghaier spent I'd guess about 1000rmb on ordnance. Here is one of the 'smaller' shows:
They sell those big fireworks on the corner in lieu of sparklers: serious business! If you've ever seen some of the grittier WW2 movies, any kind of night-time aerial bombardment of a city, that is what New Year's was like: clouds of gunpowder smoke meandering through the streets, there was so much iodine and particulate in the air that what was supposed to be a slightly humid night resulted in snow falling thick over entire street intersections littered 2-3cm deep of firework cardboard. I'd like to emphasize the fact I am not using hyperbole or any kind of exaggeration! It was like walking through autumn leaves much of the time, there was so much fireworks on the streets. 1000rmb bought you either 10-minutes of mega-firecrackers, or roughly 16 mortars of explosive fireworks (these two being the most popular to do). When 19,213,200 live in a city, and each family spends about 1400rmb or so, you can imagine the firepower!

It was like that for a week, the sky lighting up constantly with explosions until about 2 in the morning. It was really very cool! Sadly, fireworks are *quite* difficult to get pictures of on my camera, as it goes into nighttime mode and tends to only catch the fading light (it's a bit slow on the click). Just imagine the biggest fireworks show you've gone and went to, and then put that right next to your apartment building, and move the explosions down from hundreds of feet above to just about the third story: I swear that there was only enough in the mortar and the fuse was just short enough so that the firework explosion didn't hit the ground (although perhaps only a foot overhead). No such precaution about not hitting people's windows though! The above pictures' show very often had the shells bouncing off the apartment windows, resulting in truncated spheres of explosions, the rest showering off the walls.

Awesome!

Sunday February 21 0857

Much to my chagrin on this beautiful Sunday, I'm at work getting ready to start a work day. The Chinese have a bizarre approach to holidays: the days you get 'off' aren't actually 'off', but are largely compensated by sprinkling work days on the weekends throughout the year. Today and Yesterday go towards compensating the Lunar New Year, and the practice seems to be a universal one in China.

This'd've meant that I was in work yesterday, but I was notified on short notice and so I refused to come in on a Saturday. I wouldn't've come in today, but I'm going to Qingdao (to get my Visa extended comfortably past my stay's completion) on business expense, and I'd have to take a day off during the workweek, so I consented to working it off ahead of time.

I'll be composing my Lunar New Year post, which should have several nice pictures, throughout today and it should be my post for tomorrow =)

Wednesday February 17 1452

Sorry for the intermittence: it's a lot of trouble to get into the workplace during the holiday, so it is a pain to write up anything. I usually write them on my laptop and then transmit over the wireless to my work computer, but they've shut down the router. Doing well, and will give a nice summary blog for this week this monday, but I'm at the kindness of the janitor, hehe =)

Monday February 15 1211

Chinese New Year was very very fun! However, I'm not in a blogging frame-of-mind, so consider this an IOU =)

Thursday February 12 0930

Last night, I was surprised to discover I was being taken out to a fancy French restaurant with the other programmers by the Uberboss.

I had an exquisite steak and exquisite red wine (Bordeaux) at the excellent French restaurant in the old French Concession with amazing chocolate cake to top off the endless warm baguette slices with oil.

Yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

And for free too!

We repaid the Uberboss by going to a nearby fancy bar and playing this vicious game of dice that made us all drink more than one should do on a Wednesday evening, and took taxis home. It was awesome!

Wednesday February 10 0904

Only today and two more days left until my week off! I really need to think of things to do though =\

After the holiday, I'll probably head to Qingdao for some surf and sightseeing.

Tuesday February 9 0913

Another day, another post!

Chinese New Year is this weekend, and so I really need to get some plans together for Saturday and the following week (which I get off). I'd prefer to hang out with the locals, since I figure they know how to have fun on the New Year's eve, but my default plan is to go fireworks watching over the Bund.

Today, though, is just work. No real sign of work fatigue yet though, since I still look forward to coming in just about every work-morning: can't say that's been a common experience, haha!

Monday February 8 0908

Ahoyez Vous!

This weekend I did very little other than relax on the couch and programming/conlanging, since it was quite wet and no one was free to hang out. It was alright: I tried my hand at getting a genetic algorithm to work, and almost got it, except there is a bug I cannot seem to fix with my selection algorithm, which doesn't seem to work at all for some subtlety of reason beyond my capacity. Irritated, I just focused on thinking up all the verbal forms in Jezzali I could think of: I remember thinking to myself "Nah Ed, you won't need to bring Describing Morphosyntax by Thomas Payne to China, you can leave it here in Seattle".

It's always the book you don't bring... =\

Also, need to find if Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake is in any of the foreign bookstores, since I just finished the preceding book in the series.

Friday February 5 1740

Hey there!

Long meetings, eh. Gonna relax tonight! Pretty laid back weekend too: might program a little for fun.

Thursday February 4 0930

Ahoy!

Been working hard, but it's the kind of hard work you do when you are actually into the job, so am having a blast. It's still work, with deadlines and stuff, but I really do quite enjoy what I'm doing at the moment, and the people are cool. I'll try to take a picture of each of my friends in my next batch of alkaline batteries... I think I keep running out because I only ever take one picture every time I turn my camera on: I know the pictures I wanna take, and feel like the worst kind of tourist when I go around taking many photos at a go.

Apparantly there is a big company dinner tonight, and those are always pretty ritzy (with Budweiser, it has to be classy...) and so that should be fun.

Wednesday February 3 1605

Heya!

At work at the moment, taking a little break. Doing well, and thought I'd leave a short list of reasons why living in China is a-ok:

Two Mile Taxi: $2.50

1/2 kg of steaming Chow Mein: $0.60

6-pack of beer: $1.20

Internet Router: $20

Tuesday February 2 0941

Heya! This weekend I went to a rockery garden at People's Square, and here are some pictures. It was gray, and my batteries died a bit early into it, but it sure was nice to walk around a bit of nature, even if it was all artificially put together.

Monday, February 1 1743

Busy day at work, since the bosses got back from their conference, so wasn't able to write up a blog post. Will throw pictures from this weekend up tomorrow, since I need yet more batteries for my alkaline-sucking machine.