Give me some light!

When I looked at the calender yesterday I noticed that the Europe just enjoyed the 21st of June, start of Summer, longest day of the year and I caught myself thinking:  I can´t help it, June is the most depressing month of the year in Shanghai.

Back home I  love June. Not only because it is my birthday month but I love the long days and beeing outside. BBQ´s,  fresh strawberry cake,going camping,  lazing on the river until late at night.... I know that the summer so far was not to everyones expectations in Europe. But let me tell you what June is like here:

Imagine the greyest November day - but leave the leaves on the trees. Than you bring in 80% humidity, so bad that mold is actually growing on the pavement - and than you heat it up to about 28 degrees.
To top that you now add the smell of zillion people, the drains from bottom and fumes from top.  By 7 o´clock the day is over and it is pitch black outside...you have the picture ?

So to light up at least our life indoors we have just been to Ikea to buy some stronger lightbulps for our kitchen. The family who used to live in here before was also from Germany and did not only install nice looking lamps but also managed to somhow set up a dimmer (which honestly was a selling point to me when we looked at the apartment :-). But it was never really bright enough.

So we went up a couple of watts and invested into some enviromentaly friendly light bulps.The result we just got was: Our kitchen is a disco! It appears that the electric circle can´t handle energy saving light bulps and every time we try to fix a new light bulp we either end up with a a ballroom effect when the light is switched on - or even better - the socket sparks when the light is switched off!!

So it seems like we have to be brave, and continue living in a slightly winter-like but cosy enviroment (depending how cool you turn the aircondition you can actually achieve that effect)... or we just escape the city for a couple of days and hope for some sunshine in Nanjing this weekend :-)

And if that doesn´t help than there is a plane waiting soon to take us back to enjoy the European for a while, hooray!

When Paul leaves..Sherpa comes

Paul has left for a business trip for 10 days leaving me with no one cooking for me. I know I´m VERY spoilt from my husband who despite me not working still fills pole postion for chef in the kitchen. But  what shall I do? He is so talented, he loves cooking and I can always think of more exciting things to do than that. So why take it away from him :-) ?

The other night I really fancied an Indian curry. Sure I somehow could have assembled something by myself (after all Paul made me a survival cook book once for when he is not arround)  But Shanghai offers a much better and faster solution.  It is called "SHERPAS" and it works as follows:

Sherpas is a "Take away" delivery service. But not only for Pizza, Chinese or Mc Donalds (MC actually have their own delivery service here!), but for more than 60 favorite restaurants in the city which are  listed with their menue in the Sherpa-bible:

It is extremly easy to use which is one reason why it is so popular.
All you need to do is to pick and choose a dish from your  favorite restaurant...

... call the hotline or just order the whole thing with 3 mouse clicks on their website.
You get an order confirmation by email and than you wait about 45 minutes until the doorbell rings and an orange dressed men delivers your (still hot) food on a scooter...

.. and enjoy your meal!...

The only thing you are left with are the dirty dishes afterwards

But if you are lucky,you have an Ayi who does even that for you :-)

The concept is genious. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner - you can really order everything.If you choose to order from different restaurants. The little scooters pick it up and bring it all at the same time to you.

But just to get the picutre right here:

I will go shopping now and try myself on a Chinese stir fry tonight :-)

If you want to find out more about Sherpas, take a look under

http://www.sherpa.com.cn/index.shtml

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Let´s dance!

I have decided to take up dancing. "When did you come up with that idea?".. I hear you say.
My answer: "In India - it was prescribed by the doctors"..nice prescription if you ask me :-)

I love to move to a good groove. But with dancing I don´t meant the shaking with a drink around a nightclub - I mean PROPER dancing with a teacher and everything.

The Chinese love to dance and therefore finding a dance instructor here is not a too difficult task. You have the choice of going into one of many parks here in the city and join the groups during their daily "Open Ball room dancing practise".. or you go to one of  dance studios.

Not too far away from where we live, in a loft on Maoming lu, there is a dance studio offering a wide range of different dance classes. Ballet not beeing my sort of thing and "Sexy dancing" not really what I was looking for, I decided to grab my friend Judith to try out one of the Salsa classes there.

The internet described this class as following;

In our Salsa Class for Beginners, you will first practice the basic steps without a partner, then quickly progress to partner work

Basic rhythm, timing and steps

Secrets of being a great Leader or Follower

Partner Connection

Cross-Body Leads

Open Breaks

Basic Right and Left Turns

Cross-Hand Hold

Combinations that put it all together

And more…

Now, I wouldn´t write about this experience if it wasn´t a real China one which happened as follows:

We arrived at the studio and registered. The lady at reception looked up and down on me and asked " have you danced before?"..."Yes, I have" I said proudly. "I did Hip Hop for some years and took also some Salsa lessons"..No need to tell her that all I remembered from the salsa lessons was me and Paul arguing ..."Oh really???" she said and giving me a look like "you don´t come across like that".. "thank you, Bit...".. I thought and beamed back to her in excitement.

We went into the room with maybe another 15 people. When the instructor came in we quickly noticed that we had seen him before dancing away  during a salsa night in JZ bar. He is a tiny chinese guy who, unusual for the folks here, is very good in shaking his hips.

Our little group of students excisted of a bunch of Chinese girls, a couple of Chinese guys and a few lao wais (foreigners) from Spain and Brazil - surprise..and Judith and myself. In summary 70% women, 30% men.

But we were not worried because this was a beginners class and partner dancing was not expected..that´s what we thought.

After about 4 minutes of simple warm up steps the teacher very quickly moved on (and encouraged us by loud shouting) to partner dancing and - even worse - switching partners over and over.

With not even a hand ful men in the room, and knowing that the male "lao wai" species was just too keen to practise with one of the chinese light feathers, Judith and I decided to stick to ourselfes as partners. For me that was very conventient because Judith is actually a quite exprienced Salsa dancer!

Another 15 minutes later the instructor increased the challenge level and we found ourselfes nearly breaking our backs in a what I consider "advanced" position.

Thanks to regular yoga practise I could almost meet the expectations!

But if you think this was  great - than wait for what comes next:
The next move was going to be a lift up pose. The teacher demonstrated it to us with a tiny chinese girl and it goes as follows:

1. The guy knees in front of the woman
2. The woman lifts her left leg up on his shoulder
3. The men stands up, wrapping his arms around the womans hips
4. The woman leans back against his arms with leg on his shoulder and head and arms hanging graciously towards the floor.
5. The men swirls the woman around - and everybody is happy..

Seeing this the guys in the classroom whent a little white..and so did I when the teacher decided that the best way to encourage his fellows was to give another demonstration by using - ME!

Of coarse I could not say no to the invitation in order to not loose face. Just as I stood in front of him I sweetly smiled and hissed at him " whatever you say, be nice!!).
So instead of using words, he spread out his arms with  a "Tadaaa..look-at-this-big-lao-wai-woman which-I-tiny men-am-about-to-lift-up, look"...before I placed my leg on his shoulder....

...and so it happened that a whole bunch of Salsa students have now a picture on their I-phone showing a short men, lifting up an "enormours-feeling-woman" and her head is nearly hitting the floor.

Latest when the group moved on to the next step - which was basically jump on your (male) partner wrap your legs round him  like a squid and bend your back to the floor, Judith I had enough.
This was not Salsa, this was acrobatics! Even Judith agreed: This course is not for us.

But if you think I give up than I must tell you wrong:

Will try bally dancing next!!  :)