As Seen by TV

A good friend of mine had a spare ticket to the F1 Chinese GP, so it was off to the races for me!  Even as a fan of F1 this was only the 3rd race I’ve ever witnessed in person… the last one was Monaco several years ago… so I was excited to having 2 days of INSANE engine noises (those F1 engines are seriously out of this world, if you’ve never heard one, make it point to hit up the nearest GP now!).

And here’s a video I took from the start…… that voice yelling is not me, then again while filming I couldn’t hear a damn thing anyway!

Part 2 of our trek through Thames Town (part 1) brings us past a Parisian square, complete with French street names, a map of Paris, up to date advertising posters for current exhibitions going on in Paris, as well as proper Paris Telecom phone booths.  What turned out to be a strange day, just got even stranger.

Also randomly stumbled upon a massive underground [and completely vacant] parking garage, located undernearth the church… parking for who, is anyone’s guess.

Is this England or China?

It is in fact: Thames Town, Songjiang, Shanghai [map].  A housing project which is part of the “One City - Nine Towns” initiative the Shanghai Planning Commission set up in early 2001.  All are situated around the suburbs of Shanghai, this one resembling life in Britain (others include Sweden, Holland, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy, and China – don’t worry, I’ll get to them eventually!).  Thames Town, at a 20% occupancy is hardly a success, but it does make for an incredibly bizarre experience… somewhere between a ghost town and a film set. 
Only difference is: this is real.

It’s a playground for the Chinese wedding photographers… with among other things, a church based on one in Bristol, and with a price tag of over 5 billion RMB ($750 million), this didn’t come cheap.

Part 2

As I am still sifting through 274 images I took over the past week (Huangpu district, Peoples Square, and the newly re-opened Bund), I’ll leave you with another DOPE VIDEO by OneMoreProduction titled “Pixels“, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll check it out:

OneMoreProduction – “Pixels”

Have a great weekend, wherever the hell you may be!

I learned this a couple weeks ago, and I must admit that if you are planning a trip to China (and thinking about buying stuff), this comes in quite handy (!!!).
Numbers 0-5 are standard internationally, but 6-10 is where it can get tricky:

Although one should always learn to speak/understand the numbers.  Mandarin uses a simple formula, in that you only need to learn 11 seperate words to build and count numbers 0 to 99 (English/French/Spanish requires 28).  For example eight (8) is pronounced “ba”, while ten (10) is “shir”, so eighty (80) is “ba shir”, and eigthy-eight (88) is “ba shir ba”.  Of course keeping in mind that every “word” in Mandarin has 4+ tones, so pronouncing it correctly is another story, learn more precisely here.

DianHua is a great iPhone application for learning the numbers as well as general translations, get it free here.