Shanghai's beach and other weird things

Life is like a river, if you try to swim against the tide you are just going to drawn. The best you can do is just follow the stream trying to dodge the obstacles. Following this philosophy of life I try to keep calm and carry on, despite life reveal itself to be quite a bitch at times. "If life is a bitch, I'll just go to the beach" I figured. So I did.

I took a bus there with my friend Mr.S. It wasn't the safest one, but we got there in about an hour.

On the bus there's extra seat in the middle. Safe uh?

This is an "artificial" beach. Meaning that they brought the sand from samewhere else, and they have built a fence that divides the "outside yellow water" from the rather clean one on the inside. But apparelty the "water cleaner" stopped working in September since the season was over. So the water was not that clean.

Too bad the beach as well reveled itself to be quite different from what I used to, also the weather was not how we expected it to be. Despite the fact the beach itself wasn't too bad, the chinese people once again managed to make everything to be weird and not fun.

First of all, no bikini girl. Everyone on the beach was wearing everyday clothes, like they were going to work. Not to mention the "tents" they built on the beach, because everybody knows in China: if you get the sun on your skin you will burn and die. Basically Chinese people are the closest living things to vampires.

From the photo it actually looks quite nice 

Giant water-bicycle which Chinese people can ride without worrying to get wet

Dirty, dirty water

Chinese people fully dressed

A little shop right in the middle of the beach

A Chinese baby playing next to the tent in which the rest of the family is avoiding the sun

We managed to have a decent time anyway, and had our daily ration of Chinese asking for a photo with us. Also we saw some cool kite action. 

After a while it started raining, so we moved to the center of the city which wasn't exciting at all, so we went back to Shanghai pretty soon. 

Not a wasted day, but I was expecting much more fun on the beach.

There's something else I should mention about this city, the fact that I love it and hate it at the same time. There's days in which I ask myself why am I even here, days in which I want to kill every single Chinese person on the streets. And there's days instead in which you turn left instead of right and you discover a totally new part of the city you ignored the existence of. And then you remember why you love this city, because there's always something new to do, to discover, to enjoy.

This is called "Shanghai's Times Square"

And to end this episode, some random funny things I found in the city

Don't you dare

Ok I won't even if I really wanted to

Just some monks I found outside my house

And that's how the handle a fire in China

Chinese Tortellini

It's a week of vacation, relaxation and boredom here in China. Too crowded to go anywhere, I have so much time for studying = I find any ridiculous excuse not to do it. So yesterday me and my friends decide to make some Jiaozi 饺子, meaning chinese dumplings.

                                                                             Here we have Mr and Mrs roommate

So first we made the stuffing

Which is a mix of: pork meat, spinach, corn, mushrooms, and different spices.

And then, of course, we folded them.

First you need to put the right ammount of stuffing inside the "dumplings base"

Then with one finger you have to take a drop of water and put it around half of the perimeter of the dumpling base

Then you'll have to fold it carefully following a precice Chinese method

then...TA-DAH! Dumpling ready to go in your mouth.

Folding this dumpligs reminded me of the time I spent when I was little making Tortellini (Italian dumplings/ravioli. If you need to read this, you should feel sorry for your miserable life) with my grandmother.

So then I thought...why not making tortellini??

                                                      This is more of a tortellone then a tortellino, but whatever

So then I made my own tortellini/tortelloni stuffing using pork meat, mushrooms, onions, tomato sauce, emmenthal cheese (I had no parmigiano...If you excuse me I'll go huddle up in the corner of my room for a second) and garlick. Needless to say, it tasted divine.

We made half and half for a total of 101 dumpligs.

Last step? Eating them of course!

Shanghai's Zoo Horror

It's national holiday in China for a week, and so I decided to (finally) go to the Shanghai Zoo. Maybe not the best idea, during chinese holiday every place is just overly crowded with (chinese) people. Here's few picture:

 Huge crowd at the Panda exhibition

But anyway me and Mr. S decided to go anyway. Now, before showing other picture you should know few things. First: I love animals and I love zoos. But not every zoo. I like nice and clean zoos in which they take good care of the animals, they help preserving endangered species and they teach people how to treat the animals in the best way. 

Well, I knew that a chinese zoo could probably not be as good as a western one, but I never expected to see what I saw. People were feeding animals with any kind of food (despide the signs forbidding to do so) like fruit, vegetables but also popcorn and sweets. But that's not all. Most of them were having fun throwing bottles of water to any animal they could reach, just for fun. And nobody was stopping them from doing so. I yelled a few people, but it didn't helped much. So I made with pictures:

 The apes are so used to receive food that they learned to ask with their hands

 the baboon enclosure...and the dirt begins

 A baboon dinking Yacult

 White kangaroos?

The lion was trying to sleep when people were throwing bottles at him to wake him up

 Same story, just a moe endangered species. the tiger is chewing a plastic bottle

 Bear just waiting for food to be thrown in his face

 here we have some "hidden" enclosure, in which animals are kept in terrible conditions

 they still enjoy it

 There's also nice places in the zoo, and in fact the problem is not the zoo, but the visitors

 A very smart looking chinese fish

The last enclosure I visited was also the worst, the crocodile one

This made me re-think everything I believed about Chinese people. I've never seen anything like this before in all my life and I rarely been as disgusted by the human kind.