Catshanghai

Everybody is writing reviews of the past year so I will join in too. 2007 has been a great year for us, although it has not been without struggle and frustration. I have just been scanning this year’s blog posts as a prompt for the some of the highlights, which I will summarise below:
Personal Stuff
We [...]

House prices across the UK fell at their fastest rate in more than two years last month as higher interest rates and tighter controls on mortgage lending prevented many buyers from getting on the property ladder, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) says today. Its latest monthly report on the housing market says prices [...]

LONDON (Reuters) - A retired Scottish school teacher was recovering on Monday after spending nearly four days trapped inside a men’s toilet with no food or mobile phone. David Leggat was locked inside the bathroom at a lawn bowling club near the Scottish city of Aberdeen after the door jammed and the handle on the [...]

Want your very own web site address, but don’t want to mess with pay-for hosting packages or server configuration? Today you can buy a domain name for around 10 bucks a year (or less) and map it to a variety of free web-based apps for no-mess and no-cost hosting. Typical commercial web hosting starts at [...]

I would like to give a piece of my mind to the urban planner who set the timings for the crossing at the junction of Chongqing Lu and Xujiahui Lu. Pedestrians have to wait five minutes for an opportunity to cross this eight lane highway. Then, they are given about twenty five seconds to get [...]

I hope this cheesecake tastes as good as it looks. We are eating to mark the arrival of Miss Gao in her new house near Fudan University.

This picture shows a man fitting an air conditioning unit in our eleventh floor appartment. The only thing keeping him alive is a bracket supporting the outside unit. He does not even have a rope or safety belt. He works as a contractor for Chunlan and is probably paid 3000 RMB a month for such [...]

Our new house is full of fresh, cut pineapples at the moment. We are using fruit to improve the smell of our home by filling the rooms with a sweet fragrance while gathering all the bad odours that have accumulated over three months of renvoation. Local refurbishment projects are very cheap compared to Europe so [...]

We saw these really funny, but dark blank CD designs at a stall outside Bridge8 near Jianguo Xi Lu. Each CD only costs 10 rmb. I think they make great presents and I might get the whole set to give to students as prizes. The designs remind me of the logos on The Thing’s t-shirts [...]

See ‘Surviving Shanghai’s Street Hawks’ blog post.