Weeber tells you about: Adventures in appliances

I promised to write you guys, didn’t I? The theme I had in mind about writing my entries was to bring up things that catch my attention, which I hope to imply certain interest in other people as well. The story I have to tell you this time happened to me about two weeks back, actually the day following my short-ish introductory entry. Pretty much next to the campus is a place called Wujiaochang (五角场, I like to translate it as “Five Corners Market”), a quickly rising shopping and business center with lots of bourgeoisie expensive fashion and cosmetics stores and American food chains (Think KFC, Burger King and Pizza Hut, for starters). I like to hang around there because it’s modern, clean and it gives me an impression of the global metropolis Shanghai supposedly is, unlike my home street that’s far more “average”. *No footage available*

Yup, they had floors.

Pretty much next to but still comfortably an arm’s reach away from Wujiaochang’s awesome Shanghai First Food Mall (A place of which food courts I’d like wed in a holy matrimony, can’t wait to let you hear about it more… I mean the mall, not the wedding.) is an electronics and home appliances superstore Suning. It’s basically four or three floors filled with all that you could possibly need in your home, mansion, summer house, bungalow, teepee, prison cell or igloo. 

The floor level is dedicated to cell phones, cameras, tablets, cameras and the required services to get you hitting the information highway like a proper neo-first-world-consumer -monkey (assuming you are Chinese and not European or some other OLD-first-world-consumer-monkey). Nothing interesting there, really, so I didn’t feel like grabbing any pictures from there.

The second floor instead was a miracle of sight and sound and, oddly, baby products. Above the hand-held status symbol fidgets you can more often than not fit in your shoe was a mustering ground for the Big Players. Check out THIS!

It's... beautiful!

That Samsung television defies reality. Its definition is better than real life. Its screen is nothing less than 85” big (that’s 2.16 meters from corner to corner for metric-thinking people), although it’s not the biggest the shop has to offer. I can easily say it was the best television I’ve ever witnessed, the minutes I was standing in front of it speak for it. My eyes were crying honey, candy cotton and baby seals just by staring at them pixels, there were so many of them! The price tag made me cry as well, but not because of joy (it also slaughtered all those baby seals). 249 999 RMB/kuai/yuan, however you like. That’s about 30 000 FOKKIN euros for a TV!

Besides that, roaming around that TV heaven gave me an impression I was on another planet or dimension. It was all familiar, but somehow nothing I saw there looked like I had seen it before. Or what do you think?

Yeah, yeah, I know you Chinese like to romanize your brand names into something international, but “Konka”? Seriously? With a font smoothly snatched from Nokia? That’s just… unsettling. Anyway, all those TVs looked like rather solid and good-quality products, something that I could buy to my living room with the money I will not have with me for years.

*hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm*

Third floor was filled with home appliances, you know, that stuff you actually NEED. Washing machines, water boilers, coffee machines, and since we are in China, water HEATERS!

 That’s right, you don’t get hot water from the tap just like that, you need to have a water heater to do that work. It’s maybe the worst bathroom interior decoration element, I can’t think of any interior designer that would not strangle them with his/her cashmere scarf just because of the idea that they had to actually include those monstrosities above the supa-fancy red porcelain toilet seat… Anyway, the mall was electronic one-stop for your whole home, go here and you never need to go anywere else. Here’s some more footage for you with captions that attempt to strike a chord in your sense of humor. If they don’t, forgive me for bad taste. Next time I’m gonna talk something about food. Stay tuned!

Ain't that one sexy washing machine?

Sometimes the brand names
just don't hit the nail in the head.

It's almost like Finnish, except the that
guys who came up with that most likely
don't even know Finnish exists.

From behind The Wall

Weeeeeeber reporting in!

If you've been wondering "What the hell is the guy doing over there in China? We haven't heard about him in AGES!", here's the answer (and plenty of other stuff, for y'all). My major issue of not being able to tell about my drunken odysseias everyday life here in Shanghai has been something called Golden Shield Protect. Colloquially, you may know it as "The Great Wall of the Internet" or "The Great Firewall of China". Basically what I'd been doing was digging a virtual hole in that infernal contraption of censorship that prevented me from watching cat videos sharing my adventures with You, dear reader, and now I'm through. A minor reason and delay was the lack of fancy-pancy pictorial memorabilia attachments that would make my battlefront updates on par with the others'. After prepping up and hitting the tourist mode with my smartphone camera and establishing a VPN on my laptop, I'm all ready to tell how it's like here. Ready? Go!

Instead, they have this.

Though it might sound like a fact too obvious to write down, it needs to be stated right away: CHINA IS NOT EUROPE. You can't stop noticing it every day in your daily actions. Nothing is like you are accustomed to. Personnel at foreign students dormitory don't speak English? This is China. You line up for hours to sign up (though you have a perfectly capable system for that on Internet), no one telling you what you are queuing for? This is China. People speaking to you sound like they were arguing with you? This is China. There are no toilet seats? This is China. Suddenly you are illiterate? This is China. You eat out absolutely incredible 10-course meal with your friends and realise you only paid 3 euros for it? THIS. IS. CHINA.

Oh yes, the food. Oh my God, the food! It's everywhere and it's so cheap that you don't even notice it, unless you start dividing your bill in eight to get the price in euros, then burst in laughter at the fact that with the same amount of money you can't even get the starters in Rosso! (To international readers: Rosso's an Italian food restaurant chain we have in Finland. Particularly affordable option to eat out.). There are so many restaurants and street food stalls that it also makes you wonder whether half of the population here cooks and serves food for living. My meals at the cafeteria generally cost roughly one euro, and this is your bang for the buck:

So far I've learned that best way to order food in the
 caf is to point at something and say 'that'.

Not bad, eh? Currently I eat there almost all the time: breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's just that cheap (and tasty enough considering the price). Writing this introduction also brought to my attention that I'm STILL not tourist enough and taking as much pictures as I should be to bring out this city to you the way I see it. So please, excuse myself, I need to leave now. I have so many things to shoot. Expect to hear about me more soon.