Through the keyhole...

Last night I sat down to a cold refreshing can of beer, no prizes for where they got the inspiration for the name from! I think they spent as much money on the product development as they did on the product advertising but it was cold and refreshing. I'm not much of a beer drinker but I have noticed that Chinese beer is not that strong but very gassy and, in restaurants especially, is served in small glasses, much like the Australians have midi's and probably due to the metric system. You can get a pint but you will pay through the nose as it is usually only served at English style bars/pubs which are very fashionable and only available to theose people with well paid jobs. On my way past one bar I saw a pint of draught Guiness for 59 yuan, about a fiver, which over here is a fortune to many people in China let alone Shanghai.

A few of you have requested some shots of the apartment to see how and where I am living so here they are:

This is lane 385, where our apartment complex is situated (up on the left) and on the corner is the Cheers bar. It was something else when I came over last September but has had a refurb and name change, as so many places do so quickly in Shanghai. Yaning is convinced it is a den of disrepute as you cannot see into it from the street and there were once large windows with curtains that never opened which have been filled in. She's dying to go inside and take a look...lol

This is the entrance to our apartment block, not much to look at.

Here is the main room of the house, the living room/kitchen/dining room. Many main rooms in China have multiple purposes and with a family living in small apartments the living room is also often the parent's bedroom. Walking around at night you can see many of the small shops are also peoples' homes and their bed becomes their workbench by day.

Here is the front room, attached to the main room, it should really be the living room but is serving as a storage area at the moment and will be even more full when I get my stuff shipped over...lol

Moving on to the bathroom, very small but serves our needs (and those of the mosquitoes!...lol). It's great to have a show as in this weather you need at least four or five a day. What's that Ma? At least his move over has improved his sanitary habits?....lol

Here is the bedroom, very spacious and with functioning air conditioning, thank God! Yaning said that the apartment upstairs has at least 10 guys living in there, all on shift work, so we have it quite comfortable.

And finally there is the patio. Only kidding, it is the washing area and some space for storing those items you don't want in the house like mops and buckets.

The apartment actually looks better in the photos than in reality but the rent is pretty cheap and it is clean. It does have its problems though as it is old and we got a little flooded when we had the storm the other week...lol By Shanhai's standards it is pretty comfortable as many people don't have it so spacious or functioning.

As you can see there is a great difference between the rich and the poor. A lot of old areas are being knocked down to make way for new devlopments and you can guess that those people displaced form their old homes will not be offered one of the new ones, but that's the price of progress, it's the same the world round.

The variety in living styles is vast and you can walk one block off any of the main affluent roads and see people living in cramped quarters.

This is a shot of a typical alley with work being done to keep the houses up and peoples washing stretched between the buildings on poles. In fact many of these types of alley don't look as nice as this one. As I said earlier, alot of people share their living space with their business and the only access to running water is a shared tap, you can often see people washing themselves or their clothes in the street in the evening.