As I look back over another year in Shanghai I realise I have spent more time in this city than in any other place as an adult. Working for over six years in one school, getting married to a local, buying an appartment in a working class Chinese neighbourhood and raising a ‘joint foreign enterprise’ child are approximate to laying down roots. However, I am still a foreigner and will always be somewhat alien even if I become really really good at giving taxi directions and wielding chopsticks.

School time operates much like a carousel. You get relaxed spells during winter and summer holidays interspersed with unrelenting weeks of busy pressure as if one is running a sprint and a marathon at the same time. However busy it gets during term time, I always know that teaching in an international school is a lot more engaging than teaching disinterested Bristol yoof and eventually the carousel will turn to reveal the next holiday. I’ve survived before and I can do it again.

But, I also take heart from the awareness that I need to thrive in order to survive. I enjoy my job and sometimes I am even quite good at it. It’s easy to get stale and complacent after several years working at the same post, but I am fortunate to get fresh impetus from the energy and passion of colleagues. I was fortunate to be play a small supportive role in the Learning 2.010 Shanghai education technology conference at Concordia in September (http://www.learning2.asia). One major outcome of this conference was to ignite discussions within our department about the way to allow ICT to break out across the curriculum by working more closely with other subjects. The impetus came from my colleague Adriaan and it looks like we have some momentum to move forward.

I am more of a tinkerer than an advocate. Our department has been using Moodle as a tool to share resources and activities for more than three years. I started using Moodle when I was still in the UK and it struck during my first years in China that the crippled state of the Internet required us to build our own walled garden where we could curate, host and share learning resources.  Moodle would have remained a pet project of the ICT department, but two years ago Nick and Adriaan helped to push it forward.

First, we persuaded the school bosses to give us  a server to play with so we could make Moodle available to the wider school community. Then the prospect of a swine flu outbreak made it necessary to provide a digital backup plan for learning to continue in the event of school closure, which fortunately did not materialise. Still, the foundation of the facility took root thanks to Nick’s tireless enthusiasm until it became firmly established in the school’s culture by the beginning of this academic year.

Jake was still a baby this time last year. It has been amazing to see him grow and develop week by week throughout 2010. My online behaviour has been rather reticent during the last year, except for occasional video posts showing off Jake on Facebook. He is a fearless little boy who takes great delight in showing off his physical prowess whenever he can. By the time he was ten months old, he was already walking very well.  We cam back to the UK for a month in July. Our highlights included witnessing him mount John’s stairs without any help whatsoever and laughing with glee while filling his nappy in front of an assembly of geriatric scrabble players. Since our return to China, Jake’s hair has become increasingly wild and curly while his daring exploits at the local KFC slide has followed suit. In short, Jake is a little action man who loves the ELC music DVD and a fickle succession of reading books about animals and monsters ranging from Maurice Sendak to Julia Donaldson. We spent a few days before Christmas in Hainan Island. Jake was ecstatic when encountering the beach, the swimming pool and any escalator. It’s been a delight to watch him grow up this year from a baby into a proper little boy.

Shanghai Expo opened its doors at the beginning of May. Where we lazy or ungracious for choosing not to go. I enjoyed the spactacle of the architecture from the bridge on my way to school every morning. Shanghai was certainly a better place to live during the six months of the exposition, but I did not fancy the idea of queuing up for hours in the sweltering heat to spend fifteen minutes in a pavillion just to say I’d been there.  I am thankful for the six months moratorium on heavy construction that the made the noise and dust less polluting than it was before. It’s business as usual again since the Expo finished at the end of October. The building crews are working 18 hours a day on the site across the road. The outcome will be another tower block to obscure our view of the Nanpu Bridge after months of dirt and noise.

In some ways that pails into insignificance when compared with the individual acts of pollution I have to encounter on a daily basis when wheeling Jake around the back streets of Puxi. Acts of selfish pollution include smoking, even more smoking, spitting, reckless driving and inconsiderate parking in front of entrances for wheelchairs and pushchairs. Two weeks of holiday allow me to be more  philosophical about my prospects of changing an adolescent culture to be more compliant with my wishes about airs, graces and basic safety.

The weeks, months and years have started to blur together rather like the imagery from Maurice Sendak’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’.

And he sailed off through night and day
And in and out of weeks
And almost over a year
To where the wild things are

The carousel turns and I’m still in Shanghai. My lack of online activity reveals a busy, engaging year (offline) in terms of my professional and personal life. Happy new year. What will 2011 offer?

You know it’s spring in Shanghai when people put their washing out on the streets. Spring has arrived.

• We enjoyed Chinese New Year in Lingang in Nanhui Pudong
• Jenny found out that our baby is a boy and we’re going to name him Jake. Jenny is now 6 months pregnant. May is fast approaching.
• Our school bought a web server based in Shanghai, which means we can build online learning communities such as Moodle and wordpress blogs. This has been keeping me busy.
• We spent a fantastic Valentine’s day at a new Italian restaurant called Bacaro in Taikang Lu. Its pan fried salmon is really fresh and it melts in your mouth.
• We spent Jenny’s birthday with her friends at the ‘Special Dollar’ hotpot restaurant on Xujiahui Lu.
• I discovered Boduf Songs’ albums. I have not been moved so much by depressing folk music since I heard Caroline Martin at the Bristol’s Cube in May 2003. Enjoy this MP3.
• We watched Red Cliff 1, Red Cliff 2, Eden Lake, and lots of Planet of the Apes.
• Jenny is going part time, but she still makes clothes for musicians including Jiang Fan of canto poppers YFM. Here is a video of Jiang Fan singing wearing one of Jenny’s designs.

Sometime before Christmas I tried to add a few friends from the mobile Facebook site using my crappy HTC Tytn Windows Mobile cellphone, but Facebook defaults to ‘add all’. Like an idiot, I added hundreds of students and parents as friends. It was never my intention to mix my professional and private lives to this extent so I deleted my Facebook account. I had to Email them for special instructions to delete my profile, but it worked.

A month later, I am taking stock of my life before China and realise that I am getting further and further adrift from my friends back in the UK. We are all older and busy with our families and jobs. They are in different time zones or not connected to the Internet. They don’t use Skype, Twitter or even Email. Keeping in touch with friends from the UK is not always easy. There is a tendency to drift apart.

Even though I spend hours every day on the Internet, I am not always an effective networker. Call it shyness or a passive satisfaction that is very happy to spend much of my social time with Jenny, our child to be and Chog the fat cat. Every now and again, I feel the need to poke my head out of the shell in search of face to face and virtual network friends using tools such as Twitter and Facebook. The birth of our child in May somehow makes me want to get in touch with people again, such as my old university friends and the good folks from Sheffield’s Gyaltsabje Buddhist Centre.

It will take me a little while to retrieve the connections that I deleted when I got rid of the old Facebook account. I hope to find a few more lost souls such as the tall Dutchman from Orange County who has a habit of turning up at the most extraordinary places when you least expect him!

Today we went to Red Town, Moganshan Lu’s art studios and on the Pudong side overlooking the Huangpu River.

Much of Shanghai is closed during the first week of October to celebrate the 59th anniversary or The Communists seizing power in 1949. Red Town’s sculpture space was closed, as were many of the studios in Moganshan Lu.

We wanted to see The Bund all lit up from Laris, but we forgot to take into account the chaos of national holidays. Imagine Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Eve. We ended up hanging out on the Pudong side of the river near Superbrand Mall. The weather has been warm and sunny with a comfortable breeze, although it is starting to cooling down as autumn settles in. It was still madly busy as hordes of locals and visitors enjoyed the city lights. We had fun wearing red devils’ horns that a friendly merchant sold to us for 10 RMb each.

Everyone in a car wanted to be a taxi driver tonight. Even the licensed drivers were trying it on. They wanted to charge 100 RMB for a 15 minute ride to Nanpu Bridge. I felt like writing down their numbers and reporting them, but we found a reputable taxi after a while. I don’t like drivers who try it on, but reporting them is not worth the bother and they are just trying to make a living.

I’ve been filming much of the week using my Sanyo Xacti. The video has been really good especially when I shoot in 720p using natural sunlight, but there are no mic inputs and the sound is not very satisfactory. I’ve been getting to grips with Imovie to edit the footage after everyone goes to bed. It turns out my Macbook can cope with editing HD h264 footage, although Imovie crashed a couple of times. I have a rough cut almost ready to burn a DVD for my mum as a momento of her holiday. Imovie is great. It saves so much time for basic video editing.

Tomorrow we are heading over to Jenny’s family in North Shanghai for a slap up meal. I hope to throw up more highlights from the footage I’ve been filming. Observing Jingan Temple made me realise that it is a microcosm of Shanghai. I never thought of Jingan in this way before. I need to share the footage to drive my point home.

This is still an issue or I would not choose to resurrect such a gloomy old blog post. The difference these days is that I am enjoying my summer holidays. Thirty degrees celsius, a daily bike ride, all the time in the summer and plenty of sleep equip me with forgotten reserves of patience and tolerance towards all sorts of challenges and bad news.

Still, a couple of incidents have reminded me that I still have trouble understanding and being understood whether I am speaking Chinese or English.

People in this city like to speak Shanghainese or Shanghaihua. It is the language of family and back room deals. I live in a working class Chinese neighbourhood near Nanpu Bridge where Shanghainese is spoken almost exclusively. Of course all locals can speak Mandarin, but it is in a slurred accent that is supposed to be the Chinese equivalent of Geordie or Scots.

It seems that Shanghainese people over the age of 50 have great difficulty understanding foreigners mispronounce Mandarin. My spoken Chinese is still proto pidgin, but I know more than a thousand words. I can even string together multi clause sentences such as ‘Yinwei wo meiyou ya, wo bu hui chi tiandian’. (I can’t eat dessert, because I have no teeth). My wife and colleagues have no trouble understanding my laughable attempts at speaking Chinese. Unfortunately, this basic repertoire does not cut it with aging locals who just don’t understand my poor grammar and tone deaf pronunciation.

Today I tried to tell my wife’s aunt that I wanted to get a new key cut. The only way I could get her to understand was to show her a bunch of keys and get her to call my wife to translate my instructions into authentic Chinese.

It’s not just Chinese that is causing me trouble. I have started to use a phone transciption service called Jott . I tried using this service (in English) to create Google Calendar entries, E-mails to self, Remember The Milk tasks and new Evernote reminders. The Lifehacker set have been raving about this service for months, because it is free and makes use of Indian call centres to convert audio into text that is then used to update a plethora of aforementioned web services.

The idea is convenient and fascinating, although I am ethically ambivalent about a poor bugger from Bangalore transcribing my voicemail for $2 an hour. I have read the tutorials and followed the examples, but I can’t get Jott to understand my perfectly clear British English. When I tried to dictate ‘Introduction to Computer Systems’ Jott mistook my entry as ‘In seduction, that can take this.’ Maybe I need to improve my accuracy by dictating my Jott entries in the style of John Wayne.

Try it for yourself to see if you have more success with Jott than me. You need an American telephone number to start using the Jott service, but this is easy enough to setup if you become a Rebtel user, even if you are in China.

The nub of this post is that doesn’t matter if you speak good English or poor Mandarin. People will still struggle to understand so you may as well talk to your cat, which is a lot less trouble.

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Personal Stuff
We started the year renting a flat in Jianguo Lu and we spent all of our weekends after Chinese New Year looking at places to buy in the Luwan and Huangpu districts. Eventually we found our dream home near Nanpu Bridge, but we had to deal with bankers being stupid about transferring money and the general house buying marathon. It didn’t stop there. Even though we bought our appartment in July, we didn’t move in until November after a team of workmen gutted and renovated the place making it the nicest house we have ever
lived in. Shanghai feels more like home than ever. I am enjoying getting around by walking, on bicycle and the wonderful new metro service that opened two days ago.

We adopted Chog the cat in the spring and he is enjoying the heated floor in our new appartment. It is an amazing feeling to have a cat greet you when you arrive home after a tiring day at work.

Jenny also moved her studio from Shanxi Nan Lu to Taikang Lu. More information about the new studio will be posted here in the next day or so.

Relevant Posts
Buying a House In 13 Steps
State of the Renovation

Learning
Education is my livelihood and I got turned on by the possibility of student created digital content and learning communities as engines for learning. This is still very much a concept and is something that I want to take much further in 2008 given that you need lots of bandwidth to make these things happen. The IBO Information Literacy and Shanghai’s Learning 2Cn really inspired me that learning can be fun, exciting and international.

Relevant Posts
Blogging For Schools
How Many Computers Does It Take To Turn On A Teacher?
Are You A Digital Immigrant Or Digital Native?

The Internet
This has been another great year for Internet tools including Twitter, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Reader, Firefox, Firefox extensions, the Flock browser, RememberTheMilk, Fring, Facebook, Shozu and blogging. It has also been a frustrating year, because the Internet offers the possibility to cater all my information, communication and entertainment needs in one big cloud. The truth is that DRM, censorship and bandwidth continue to be obstacles that prevent normal Internet users in China and elsewhere from getting everything that the Internet can offer. I don’t know how many hours have been wasted by slow Internet connections, blocked sites and timeout errors. I hope we have a much better year for connectivity in 2008 and that different services become far more inter operable.

My favourite website of the year has definitely been Lifehacker for excellent technology and productivity tips. Leo Laporte’s TWIT network continues to produce high quality shows, but I have also been enjoying Tekzilla from Revision 3. There is still a gap in the market for a child friendly Internet tech video show.

Gadgets and Desktop Software
I became an obsessive Windows Mobile user, because it kept me blogging and connected on long bus journeys, although it often crashes at inopportune moments making me curse it as much I enjoy it. I had a look at the Iphone and admired it, although I am not prepared to invest in one given that I spent a fortune on buying and renovating a house. I would love to buy a tripped out MacBook to run Windows, Mac and Linux on the same box, but I will keep that in check while I save up spending money for our planned European vacation. In the meantime, I bought my wife a fantastic Asus Eeepc for 3000 RMB and gave my old Dell more mileage by running Ubuntu Feisty and Gutsy Gibbons on it. Ubuntu has served me well as a robust open source OS serving my everyday computing needs, although I screwed up an upgrade, which lost me a little data (and lots of time). I ended the year by setting up a robust and ridiculously cheap offline backup solution using Jungledisk and Amazon’s S3.

Relevant Posts
Lifehacker on Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile Must Have Apps

Music and Film
I continue to enjoy my Emusic monthly subscription. $10 a month entitles me to 30 unprotected MP3 songs and it works on Ubuntu. Highlights of the year have included Fridge’s “Eph Reissue” and I am a Robot and Proud’s “The Electricity in Your House Wants To Sing”. We have access to more films than we could ever, which we enjoy on our new big screen projector that has turned our living room into a cinema. We have recently enjoyed “Rescue Dawn”, “Zoo”, “Shortbus”. Films is going to become an even bigger part of our life as we start to show our favourite crazy movies to friends in Jenny’s studio on a weekly basis. I regret not writing more film and music reviews, although it has been a busy year and I feel my blog lacks a focus.

I wish anyone who reads this has had a great year and can look forward with enthusiasm to an even better 2008.

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Tags: Shanghai, culture, blogs

Yes, we have a new resident in our house. He is a young spunky cat that we have named Chog, short for Chinese mog. Do you get it? He had been living on the landing outside Jenny’s shop for a few months, basically neglected and he was about to be given away when we stepped in and gave him a nice home with us.

Chog likes to explore every nook and cranny of the house even the shower. He enjoys playing ball and eating crunchy biscuits. He oscillates from being very affectionate to being a little devil who attacks your legs especially at 9pm, which turns out to be his witching hour. He has adopted my computer chair as his home and scratchpad, which means I have less time to compute and blog. He is also a real cat from Shanghai.

We love cats in this house!

We went to this Freaklub party at Club Logo in Xingfu Lu after bumping into Sebastian Tootekool at Ikea who described it as a cross between a live show and a DJ set. Read this link. Freaklub is a weekly techno night run by Tootekool at Club Logo.

I’ve always had a good time at this venue where the old Tang Hui used to be and it is where I met Jenny. Club Logo looks pretty similar to the old Tang Hui except the bar area is less cluttered and the lounge has a computer, table football and lots of couches, but no hippy cushions. If anything, I like Logo better than the old place because it is relaxed and not too crowded. It is a little bit out of the way so the people go there to enjoy the music and the slightly underground vibe. The patrons are mainly casual European twenty-somethings, but I bumped into a colleague who’s even older than me and didn’t look at all out of place. A bottle of beer only costs 20 RMB and it didn’t cost anything to go to this party. I’m going to stick my neck out and say it’s my favourite club in Shanghai.

Techno can be really good if it is not too cool, has some passion and draws from other influences. Otherwise, it is bit like a cake that looks very nice, but is just tasteless cream and air when you bite into it.

Bontempi 5 have a different vision. They are a group of DJs from Switzerland who play a mixture of techno, house, tribal beats and nu-jazz. Their music is very enjoyable, eclectic, passionate and energetic. We got there after 12:30 when Jose the saxophonist started tooting along. It took him a while to get into a groove, but then his playing made the music more alive, colourful and hypnotic. The visuals were great too. We left very happy at 3.30. Well done for setting this up Tootekool.

Bontempi 5 will play another free set at Club Logo next week. I suggest you check it out.

Venue: Club Logo, 13 Xingfu Lu (near Fahuazhen Lu)
幸福路13号 近法华镇路
Telephone: 6281-5646