"Dear all:
On Sept. 19th, a trial air raid warning will be exercised from 11:40 to 12:03 in Shanghai. The sound of the air raid warning may be very loud, but it’s just a trial."
Two more weeks in a cast.
You can more or less work out what something is in the supermarket based on recognition. Sure, every so often you take a gulp of cranberry juice and it turns out to be cranberry vinegar but most of the time it's got a picture on the side or something gives the game away. With toiletries that goes right out of the window. Everything comes in a white bottle with a brand name and unoffesive swoosh on the sticker. Showergel, soap, cleanser, washing up liquid, mosituriser etc are all the same . Suffice to say we've got 5 bottles of conditioner and a tub of denture glue on the bathroom windowsill going spare.
Early on a weekend morning, Tianping Lu throngs with hungry locals. The street is lined with stalls, each offering a different type of breakfast snack: bags of soya milk, fried dough sticks, round sourbread sandwiches and savoury pancakes. The queue and our noses both agree that the latter is the star attraction and 10 minutes of the most orderly queuing I've ever seen in china later and we're tucking into something magical. I can only try to explain it: a pancake with an egg cracked over it, a sprinkling of spring onion, a smear of dark almost marmite sauce and optional spice - wrapped around a sheet of deep fried crispy pastry. Oh yes!
Around the pond, "zaoshang hao" to the guards, across the pavement, through the roadworks, glide over freshly laid tarmac. Pause for the khaki traffic attendant, watch for the turning bus and the senseless pedestrians. Zig zag onto Xietu Lu, race the traffic for a few kilometres, along the road with no surface, dodge the manholes, the cranes and the rickshaws of shoes boxes. Around the shiny new metro station. Under the motorway bridge, over the dirt and against the traffic, pause for a pancake and onto the ferry.