Leaving Gifts at Ikea

On a recent trip to an Ikea in Shanghai, we discovered this toilet. It's in one of the model apartments that Ikea constructs so that city residents can envisage exactly how well Ikea furniture might fit into one of the city's notoriously small apartments.

 What stirred my interest, however, were the toilets in the model bathrooms. The seats had been removed and a perspex cover placed over the toilets (see above). One can only deduce that at some point in the early days of the store, someone (or possibly unknown someones) must have left a "gift" or two in one of these. Perhaps they had expected the toilets to be flushable. One can only imagine that the seats were also removed so as to neuter any lingering desire for visitors to leave a deposit.

Red Star

Distracted by the gleaming office towers and Bladerunner-like backdrop of contemporary Shanghai, one often fails to remember that China's emergence from hard-assed dictatorship of the masses was not actually that long ago. Walk about a bit, though, and you will be abruptly dragged back to the past. Doorways like this are now either collectors pieces or replicated en masse; this one is an authentic gate that still guards the entrance to an alleyway in the city centre.

Firecrackers!

One of the delights of living in another language is coming across signage that can be initially perplexing. This one, as you might already have guessed, concerns the use - or not - of ran fang, or firecrackers.

Mobile Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship is all around you in Shanghai. This fellow is a regular in our neighbourhood, just one of the many people eking out a living by trading in the streets. The quality of the chairs is quite good, but rattan is the only product on offer.

Four Socialists

If you look closely, you can see the outlines of four famous socialists. Alternatively, this Cultural Revolution-era wall painting is a fading monument to four men whose ideological leanings caused the deaths of millions and millions of people.  

Fu Xing Lu Bar

 A new Belgian bar on Fu Xing Lu in the former French Concession. The kind of place to read a weekend paper in its entirety and gently shitfaced while doing so.

Another of Rock Man's Rocks

This gives a sense of the dimensions...and the potential cost

Rock Man

Parked by the side of a road in Pudong, this truck is one of three belonging to a man from Anhui who has come sell "rocks" to Shanghai residents. His best hope, he told me, was to sell one of those beasts to a restaurant owner or some newly rich entrepreneur looking to fill his garden. The rock seller and his wife cook their meals on the truck, hang their clothing out to dry on the nearby trees, and spend most of their day sat in deck chairs waiting for some rock-loving millionaire to drive past. For the less monied, there's a selection of much more smaller rocks from which they can choose.

Man, Chickens, Ducks

This man was standing by a road in the Pudong section of Shanghai. I couldn't tell if he had broken down, was waiting for a friend, or simply had chosen to rest. What I most liked was the juxtaposition of his working materials with the chickens and ducks. Were they his animals? Was he delivering them to friends? Was he headed home for a gargantuan feast? We were waiting for a traffic light to change so there was no opportunity to ask him.  He saw me taking the picture yet his expression did not change.

Drain Cover

The character on the storm drain cover is yu, the Chinese for rain.  Despite how arcane the Chinese script can seem, its innate beauty somehow transcends the cursing and self-loathing that accompanies the process of learning it. In this particular character, the four dashes represent rain drops falling from a cloud.  In its original form as recorded on oracle bones, the character had six horizontal dashes descending from a single horizontal line.

Mr. Deng, Fruit Seller

This is Mr. Deng, the man who sells a wide range of fruit off the back of a small truck near our home. He's usually on our corner from 4 or 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.  Deng xiansheng gets a little aggrieved when you demand that he remove bruised bananas from a bunch, and he can affect an indignant air if he spots fruit in shopping you purchased elsewhere. Still, he's pleasant, usually happy, curious about the world beyond China's borders, and a daily fixture of our lives. Below is a picture of Mr. Deng and his truck.

A Flower Seller

One of the delights of Shanghai is the continued existence of small shops and street-side retailers. Despite the presence of western behemoths like Carrefour, these independent entrepreneurs continue to hawk their wares to pedestrians.  On weekends especially, scores of flower sellers descend on our street. We gravitate to one man (not the one pictured above), a fellow whose marketing strategy extends to giving out free flowers to passing children so as to cultivate emotional ties to their parents. Many of the flower sellers are migrants from Anhui Province, one of China's poorest, and a perennial source of cheap labour for the building sites and restaurants of Shanghai.

Shanghai Snow

Despite Shanghai's blisteringly hot and humid summers, winter occasionally makes itself known. We awoke this morning to heavy snow. For a short while it blanketed nearby roof tops, playing fields, and even these lanterns, remnants of the recent Chinese New Year celebrations.

Road Cleaner

This is one of the three jovial women who regularly clean the streets near our home. I tried to persuade all three to pose for a picture but was unsuccessful. All three hail from distant provinces, lured by the chance of a better life in China's premier metropolis.