What’s Occurring

Not much in the way of adventures have occurred recently, but as is custom in Shanghai, enough odd things have taken place in my vicinity that there’s plenty to talk about.

1-Whilst cycling downtown (to get the 50RMB burger and a pint deal at Malone’s – IMMENSE) I witnessed a man crouched behind his large Alsatian with an open plastic bag ready to catch it’s jobby. The dog was almost the size of Beethoven (the dog, not the deaf guy) so the jobby was correspondingly large. The man had a great big grin on his face like he was proud of how well his dog was trained. To me it looked like the dog had actually trained the man pretty well. I think in any relationship, if you find yourself holding open a receptacle for someone or something to crap into, you are perhaps not getting the best out of things. You are literally at the arse-end of the scale and need to sort it out immediately. Very odd.

2- You may have heard in the news that there was a terrible fire in a downtown tower block the other day. Whilst on the same cycle we saw a couple of fire engines trying to get to the scene of the blaze. However, as is custom in Shanghai no-one got out the way. Traffic remained locked in stand-still, scooters continued to buzz round the blaring red trucks and I even saw some school kids try to cross the road in front of the fire engines when the lights finally went green. I was furious. My American mate started shouting at cars to move out the way but to no avail. The attitude here seems to be, “thank God it’s not me” rather than, “that could be me one day.” I have to say the longer I spend in Shanghai the more unsavoury I find a lot of it’s inhabitants.

3- My boss informed me that in the previously documented recording of the kid’s English CD, I had forgotten to say “Please turn to page 26.” This means I have to go back to the studio. She’s on to a good thing, my boss, as I only got paid £15 for my dulcet tones last time (due to various by-laws in the depths of my contract this is all I could expect apparently) and I’m pretty sure she’s mates with the bloke who runs the studio so she’s probably getting to hire it out for about 12 pence anyway. Apparently the second book is almost ready so I’ll be required once more to harp nonsense down a mic again. In fact, I was asked to proof read the second book, and the amount of mistakes was breathtaking. For the letter T, the little ditty read “T, t Tree. Tree. A Christmas tree.” Next to this was a palm tree, the least festive of all the trees. For the letter U, there was the following, “U, u umbrella. Umbrella. A yellow umbrella.” The adjacent umbrella was dark blue. It’s reassuring to know that the boss of your English school is still to grasp colours. I’m looking forward to seeing what Christmas decorations she puts up as well!