Here comes the bride

School holidays again!  Chinese New Year this time.  Today we made puppets out of paddle pop sticks and glued cut out pictures from magazines onto cardboard to make the characters.  Zara also dressed up as a bride and stayed that way for most of the day!

Zara at Zara

We have been off line for a while during a short trip to Hong Kong over Chinese New Year. Here is a shot of a Zara clothes store at Hong Kong airport on the way home.

Chinese New Year

Shanghai is gearing up for the year's biggest celebration - Chinese New Year. It's like our Christmas and New Year rolled into one and it all happens next week. Shops have been selling red and gold new year-themed everything for a few weeks now. Here is a shot of apples in the market that have been grown with some sort of stencil or sticker over the skin to give them an eye-catching look.

Taobao

Today I took delivery of my first Taobao online purchase!  An umbrella stroller made in China - but to export quality (it's a French brand).  Taobao is the Chinese equivalent of eBay - the online shopping website and there are hundreds of millions of products and hundreds of millions of subscribers/users - bigger than eBay I understand.  eBay was a spectacular failure in China - the story is well documented Products are usually cheaper than you find in regular stores, and postage / courier costs are nominal in China (the stroller cost about $3 to be couriered from another province to our front door).  To prove that word of mouth is the best form of advertising, I can attest to the fact that Taobao comes up in everyday conversation all the time.  Something akin to: Dang I've been to 5 different stores but can't find x product!  Response: have you tried Taobao?  The difficulty is that the website is completely in Chinese - but with the help of Google Chrome's auto translate function and websites such as taobaofieldguide.com it becomes achievable for my non-Chinese speaking self!

Plastic affair

China seems to have an affinity with plastic. Lemons for sale pictured here in the supermarket are wrapped in individual plastic bags, as are the mandarins behind them. Pomelos, currently in season, are also usually wrapped in plastic. Apples often have a soft plastic netting around them. To buy the fruit you must put it all in another plastic bag (as we do back home) and have it weighed and priced. It is then paid for at the cash register and put into another plastic bag to take home. Thats three layers! Another good example is toilet rolls. Each individual roll is packaged in its own plastic, then the pack of say 10 is wrapped in plastic to hold them all together.

But in a step towards reducing dependency, shops in Shanghai are required by law to charge for plastic bags at the check-out. It's very common to see people packing their groceries into their own bags brought from home.

Moooooo

We are at the stage in life where we nearly go through more milk than water - the kids both drink a lot. Fortunately we can buy Australian UHT milk at the supermarket here - Devondale. Admittedly it is a bit more expensive than Chinese milk but not prohibitively so.

This is what a quick stop at the supermarket to buy milk and bread looked like! (These 30 x 1 litre cartons should last us a good few weeks).

Snack

Today we stopped for a snack of fried goodness after picking up Max at 12 o'clock. Dunkin Donuts is the equivalent of Donut King back home.

Happy days

Here's a short video taken when picking up Max from kindy today.  I arrived a bit early, and he was unaware that I was there.

Keen as....?

The last teaspoon full of the Keen's curry powder went into the pumpkin soup tonight. A whole tin gone in six months! I am taking this as a sign that we're missing India.

Helper

How life has changed

Sunday afternoon. Sharpening pencils for the colouring box. Stay at home dad.

Winter swimming

Even though it's single digits outside, the pool in our building is heated to a warm 32 degrees.

Trend spotting

The picture doesn't show it clearly, but it is a sneaky shot of 3 out of the 4 staff at our neighbourhood Starbucks wearing black rimmed glasses without any glass. Yes, plastic frames only. Glasses without glass. Odd!

I have seen these "glasses" for sale at markets around town for not much more than a dollar, and noticed a few people wearing them, but this 75% of Starbucks staff thing tells me this trend must have moved into mainstream popular culture. They are of no use whatsoever to improve one's eyesight but oh so darned stylish! I find this an odd statement of fashion, but perhaps it is a sign that I am getting old.

Surviving Shanghai

I am worried. It was not until I finished my bamboo basket of tasty, steamed dumplings (xiao long bao) that I noticed the restaurant only received a "pass" by the food safety inspectors. The yellow non-plussed face depicting the result doesn't look happy nor healthy. Maybe that's how I will be feeling tonight. At least it's better than the red face of a "fail" grade. I will keep an eye out to see if any restaurants actually display a fail.

Baking fail

Today's baking: white choc chip biscuits - using precious Nestlé white melts hand carried all the way from Australia. Failed. I suspect because I underestimated the power of bicarb soda. Recipe said to place them at least 4cm apart on tray. I had a small tray - what can I say!

Back to school

Today marks the end of Christmas school holidays and heralds back to school (kindy) for Zara and playgroup for Max. Christmas holidays were only a couple of weeks - the long holiday is over summer: June to August. This means school routines are back on for everyone. All rise early, breakfast, make lunches, get dressed, change nappy (Max), make hair pretty, brush teeth, fill water bottles, organise jackets/gloves/beanies/boots. Zara and Tanja leave at 7am, then Max and I go by bike at 8.30am. School holidays seemed to go fairly quickly all things considered. A bunch of public holidays (and therefore having Mum home) helped. Even taking into account that it was so cold and therefore limiting "outside" activities, the kids got along quite well and didn't drive me completely mad. I'm sure that will come by mid August after a 10 week break.

Feeding the ducks