Xiang Yang market is the place to go in Shanghai to buy “watch, bags, shoes, clothes” It is right in the heart of Shanghai - prime real estate. So it is, of course, being closed and moved in favor of yet another tower block. We’ll miss it - it added color to the neighborhood. The traders have set up a website - haggling looses something in cyberspace though.

Danwei (probably the most interesting China blog) has made an amusing video of the building site to the north. 

Happy Year of the Dog. I like Shanghai during Chinese New Year - it is relatively quiet. Every day is like Sunday. Today we walked with the twins in their Baby Bjorn’s to Times Square (about two miles). Good exercise for all concerned. There go the fireworks...again. 

Some guy - a foreigner who should know better - is ripping off my blog entries! Jeez. I’m not going to link to him here. His entry on domain scams is almost a carbon copy of mine. Click on the image to see the proof. Here’s the original

In the past two months we’ve had two phone calls from Chinese ISP and domain registrars telling us that some one wants to register a domain name that corresponds to or sounds like our company name in Chinese. They tell us that if we don’t agree we can stop this by paying them RMB 13,000. Yeah right! This is one big con. And it is not just some small operator - we’re getting calls from the major network backbone operators. They explain all this to my secretary (who knows nothing about DNS of course) and make it…

The June 2005 issue of IEEE Spectrum (membership required) is all about China. As with all such coverage read with hype filter turned on.

So today is July 1 and I just received January’s bank statement and Q Magazine. The envelopes look a little worse for wear - like they’ve circled the globe a number of times. I wonder where they’ve been. Looking forward to receiving today’s mail in six months time. 

The Plum Rain season has arrived. A month of daily rain, thunder, lightening and traffic chaos. Also known as the mould rains. The annual rains always bring floods and loss of life and property to China. Every year in the same places. However, judging by the news it’s always a surprise. 

After months of speculation it can be finally revealed...Burger King has opened in Shanghai.

Bar Rouge, The Bund, Shanghai