Our (New) Adventure continues

Well I'm not so sure you can call it new but with Theresa's appointment as Senior Vice President Healthcare Businesses at Shoppers Drug Mart we are now definitely going to be living in Toronto for the foreseeable future. For us this means reconnecting with old friends, getting to know a city we left almost fifteen years ago and most importantly spending time with our kids and extended family for more than two weeks at a time.

Asia was amazing and we will miss it. I encourage any of you who have not travelled there to do so - aside from the scary air pollution, China provides a fascinating look at both the past and the future - the wealth, the poverty and the sheer number of people have to be experienced to be believed.

So though the geography has changed, our adventure continues - stay tuned for stories of cottage life in Haliburton, life with Sasha in the condo :) and the trials of training a Golden Doodle puppy who joins our family the end of April.

A boring update

I can't believe my last post was in March - where did the Spring & Summer go?

Lots has happened though not too much on the scale of the craziness of Shanghai. Since March - we've left Shanghai, moved to Hong Kong and bought a cottage in Haliburton Ontario (that's about three hours north of Toronto). About the most exciting thing to report is the coming and going of the loons on our lake. I won't be back to Hong Kong till mid September so stay tuned for more postings come October.

In the meantime enjoy what's left of the summer and just to depress you, I saw a few leaves up north already turning bright red - Fall is on it's way!!!

This little piggy went to market - update

THE number of dead pigs pulled from the Huangpu River in Shanghai has now reached over 10,000 since the city government started finding the pigs about two weeks ago. According to The Shanghai Daily, as of 3 pm yesterday, the number of dead pigs hauled from the waters was 10,164 after another 369 carcasses were plucked from the river.

What me all our friends are asking is how do you even start to transport that many dead pigs to one place without anyone taking notice - bizzare is about all you can say. Everything is super-sized in China - the cities, the conspicuous wealth, the poverty and the buildings but 10,000 dead pigs and no one is saying anything about where they came from, how they got dumped in the river and more important why they were killed.

The government continues to tell residents not to panic, saying that all the tests show the tap water from the nine water plants near the city meet the national standards.

Though the city government has been updating the situation regularly on its official microblog since March 11 three days after someone posted pictures of the dead pigs there are still no answers about where the pigs came from other than some ear tags showed the dead pigs were raised in Zhejiang Province's Jiaxing City, located upstream from Shanghai.

With the PM2.5 pollutant count in Shanghai this morning at 153 (Toronto is 19) and the thought of a random pig floating past our balcony, I'm glad were heading back to Toronto today for two weeks - need a break from this occasional craziness.

Not for the faint of heart

Well just in case you missed this whopper of a story  the Shanghai Daily along with papers like the Wall Street Journal etc reported 3,300 dead pigs were found floating or washed up on the banks of the Huangpu River just a mile or so upstream from Shanghai.

Shanghai officials said "they had found no health threat to the city's water supply after the 3,300 pig carcasses were found in the river". A spokeswoman did admit one city waterworks plant was taking extra precautions in its treatment of water for tap usage. Authorities said one test they conducted on the water found a pig-borne disease called porcine circovirus, which doesn't normally affect humans. I guess "normally" is the key operative word here.

According to the story in the WSJ, floating pigs aren't Shanghai's only water-pollution problem this year. Residents near where pigs were being pulled from the river went days in January without tap water when a chemical transporter leaked benzene into a Huangpu River tributary. More than 20 people were hospitalized in the incident.

Theresa and I along with every other expat in the city drinks bottled water but sometimes you look at the bottled water and say "I wonder where that comes from/". Suffice to say we are both happy and healthy and continuing to enjoy life in Asia even with a few blips like 3,300 dead pigs floating in the river just upstream from our apartment.

Hello Hong Kong, goodbye Shanghai

For those of you who have been following our fun time in Shanghai, this part of the adventure is coming to an end as we pull up stakes and head off to Hong Kong in May/June where Theresa continues as Regional President of Asia Emerging Markets for Pfizer - same job, just new location.

 

For me it means what little Mandarin I've learned gets filed away and I start all over again learning Cantonese - won't that be fun. There will be new friends to make, new streets to explore and a whole slew of new stories to post.

Having been in Toronto for a few weeks and then Laos over the Chinese New Year, it's been a long time since I've posted anything and I have let a whole bunch of funny and weird things go by without a single blog. I will try and catch up in the next few weeks and also keep you posted on our next expedition into the unknown as it unfolds.

Stay tuned.

And the Oscar goes to...

I received an email today I am sharing with you since it struck me as both funny and outrageous at the same time.

Hear the buzz? The lights of the room dimmed, the sudden click of the film projector silenced the eager crowd, and we fixed our eyes on the screen to see what all the buzz was about... Oscar Frontier 2013! Just in time for movie award season, Markgraph Rooftop Moonlight Cinema is hosting Saturday evening screenings of the nominated films for Best Picture at this year's Oscars. We checked with our friend organizing the screenings, and he tipped us off that this Saturday, January 19, they will show Spielberg's "Lincoln" (the frontrunner of most Oscar buzz so far) starring the amazing Daniel Day Lewis. Let's go to the movies! P.S. The Saturday night films start at 8pm, and there are drinks and popcorn on site.

So most of these movies have not yet been released on DVD and here in Shanghai there is someone holding public screenings of the movies and selling drinks and popcorn. If there ever was a place for budding entrpreneurs, this is it - forgetting of course whether it's legal or not.

Chilling at Central Perk

For those of you who were fans of the TV series "Friends", Shanghai has got a treat for you. Come for a visit and we'll take you to Central Perk.

It's a new cafe just opened here modeled after the coffee house/restaurant featured on Friends.

It is a real-life replica of the TV show's restaurant set. The owner of the cafe looked at thousands of pictures of the set, watched hours of re-runs, and took five months to construct the look alike café.

This is almost as crazy as the Forest Gump  Seafood Restaurant we saw in Guilin.

A Taste of things to come

Just in case you wondered how bad the smog really gets here in Shanghai, below is a an email a friend’s school sent to all parents yesterday.

 

Dear Parents,

This morning we have decided to activate the red level response of our air quality procedures. 
Please see below the Air Quality Procedures for YCIS Pudong.  

For your information, when deciding on what level of response to take as a school, we take into account: the official air quality index reading for China, the unofficial US consulate air quality reading from Puxi and our own observations of the air quality.   Please note that parents of children with respiratory problems can ask us at any time to keep their child inside or not allow them to participate in strenuous activities. We will monitor the air during the day and if the conditions improve, we will then allow the students to play outside.

 Regards,

 YCIS School Office

Air Quality Response Plan:

YCIS Pudong will use 3 levels of Air Quality Readings and the following chart shows the action that will be taken for each of the 3 levels of Air Pollution:

 

Air Quality Level	API Reading Range	School Response
Green Level	Less than 100	·           No restrictions required
Orange Level	From 100 – 150	·            PE lessons / activities held indoors ·           Recess / outdoor play go ahead as normal ·           Students with respiratory conditions are  encouraged to stay in designated indoor areas during breaks ·          Outdoor events and field trips may be postponed if the activities are considered to be strenuous (decision made by relevant school leader)
Red Level	150 and above	·          PE lessons / activities held indoors ·           Indoor recess and lunch breaks (same procedures as wet days) ·           Field trips may be postponed, depending on the activity (decision made by relevant school leader) ·           Any planned outdoor events are postponed

 

The Difference between China & the USA

I picked up Friday mornings's Shanghai Daily and there it was "22 children stabbed at school by mad man". The first thing I thought was how wrong can a newspaper get it - even in China.

Then I realized they were not describing the horrible events in the US but something that had happened here in China the day before.

Seems a man rushed into the school, smashed a window and rushed into a classroom. He randomly stabbed 22 student in the stomach face and arms - thankfully none died. Min Yingjun, 36, is in police custody. A report in the Southwest Metropolitan Daily said he had been diagnosed with epilepsy when he was 16. Min's father said his son's condition had deteriorated this year. He said his son often ran off leaving the family unable to find him.

So there you have it - similar incidents with one big difference. In China there are no guns in the hands of anybody except the army and the police. Stop end of sentence. No guns period. 22 kids injured NONE DEAD.

I often criticize many things in this country but the fact is as far as personal safety goes Theresa and I feel safer here than in North America. We walk down streets here in Shanghai with a population of 23 million people that if they were in Toronto or Montreal we'd never go near. We walk at night without fear of being mugged or shot at and much of this comes from the fact we know the only people carrying guns are the police and army. I guess we could get stabbed or hit of the head with a hammer (the weapon of choice for killing here) but the fact is no guns on the street makes a world of difference.

Maybe the answer for the gun issue in the USA is to entice the NRA to forget about selling anymore guns in the USA and focus their energies on changing China's gun laws - why piddle with 330 million people when there's a market of 1.4 billion out there waiting for just what they've got.

You bought that beautiful bag in the USA?

The Shanghai daily newspaper reported today that thousands of fake luxury bags and purses have been confiscated and 73 suspects detained in southern China in a crackdown on what police say was a major source of counterfeit goods destined for export to the USA and the Middle East.

More than 20,000 bags and suitcases purporting to be famous brands such as Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Coach were discovered in the suspects' warehouses along with 17 manufacturing machines, 91 bank cards and deposit books, the Ministry of Public Security said.

Investigators said that more than 960,000 fake bags of various brands had been manufactured by this gang for export. So much for just buying fake bags in China.
They estimated the value of conterfeit goods is five billion yuan or $802,000,000 (US)

In January this year, police received information that the suspects were making fake Louis Vuitton and Coach bags in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, and exporting them to countries including the United States. Police launched a raid to capture the gang as they were in the process of exporting another batch of fake bags.

The gang is believed to have made such huge profits from the business that they had even managed to buy a large plot of land in Anhui Province where they were planning to build a factory, police said.