The centre piece of this pic is the clothes hanging on wires. And those were not just strings, they were phone and power lines. What utilitarian city I live in ;-) Someone just forgot about all the dust, car exhaust discharge and whatever else get stuck to the clothes while drying. Really giving the mean of a fresh coat of "something".
O yeah, notice the new fashion at the bottom left corner?
My wife arrived back from working in Melbourne for a week. We decided to get some fresh air and to stretch those less used legs of ours. Hers were from 12+ hours flying and mine from 12+ hours sitting in front of a computer.
I thought this picture said a lot about our city. Everything was so "modern" but here we were still had people making a living carting used lumber to god knows where for a small salvage fee. And they were so happy to pull the used wood away. Sorry for the not so clear pic. I only had my iPhone 3G S taking a picture directly into the sun. The man was pulling the cart and the woman was encouraging him. There were three carts similar went by before I could snap one.
We took the new bullet train from Shanghai Hongqiao station to Hangzhou. Expansive on first class but it was worth it. Meaning, less "Chinese influence". The Hongqiao station has virtually NO human ticket counters. I couldn't find one. Only machines. RMB 131 one way for one person in the first class. We got wider seats and leg rooms. That was it. Drinks? right... Snacks? right.... The picture was taken as we sped out of Shanghai. The train speed was only at 200KM/hour and accelerating. Top speed was about 310KM/hour or so. The trip took 50 minutes with the last 10 minutes slowed down to get into Hongzhou. Normally, it would be a 1 hour 40 minutes on a fast train.
Hence I went to MFM the second time in less than a week back in Asia to facilitate the second time of transfer. And today, got a message from the MFM bank: rejected due to foreign exchange rule. What? What the F*****!!! The agent bank was the ICB(sh!t)C. That wasn't a real reason. So we had no idea what went wrong!
Perhaps, 3 is a charm? Welcome to doing real biz in C h!n @. Home of you really don't know what the F*** happened. Just roll with the punche$... yes, that $ has a $pecial meaning.
And today as well, got a letter from the beloved biggest motherland owned telecom. It said we owe them $ from 2007 on a payment. It was an outstanding bill and early termination of contract of our home #. Wait, we have been paying since 2005!!! And we have been using this line forever for Internet - ADSL. So what the F*****.... The letter was such as shoddy quality print. I could not make out the location of the office, the phone numbers to contact. I found out the office was about 45 minutes away south east of our apartment. Noooo... there was an office just 2 minutes walk from our apartment, that one didn't count! So I tried faxing a copy of our paid bill in from the number listed in the letter. No answer. Nothing.... So I called the number. Turned out it was an actual office number! Someone picked it up. He indicated that the computer said we owe $. Right... So convenient... The letter said if we don't pay, service would be cut off unless we have proof. If we didn't pay on a previous month, shouldn't the billing system carry forward that to the current month's billing? If so, we would have paid that back in July of 2007!!!! What a system. So I photocopied our paid and stamped June 2007 bill and mailed it in. Wonder if that is a way to collect extra dough because someone would not possibly has kept a paid stub from that far back. We did!
