The Warlock Imbecile

Nearly two months no “blogging” – shame on me! During that time Chinese New Year passed by, my dad visited me, some friends from Hamburg moved to Shanghai, I finished my fundraising for the “Million Tree Project”, and much more happened.

I could bore with all the details from those events and many more…but I won´t. Why? Because I will tell you something that happened on Tuesday morning on my way to work.

The compound I live in has a shuttle bus to the next subway station. It is really convenient not to be stuffed in one of the public busses with approximately 10.000 other people on their way to work. Anyway, as we drove along the main street to the metro station suddenly some of the people rushed to the windows of the bus to take a look at something that looked like an enormous fire (compared to the smoke we saw). In fact it was “only” a motorcycle so most of the people got back to their seats with a little disappointing look on their faces...it looked like nobody died = BORING!

I myself took a little longer look at the motorbike or what was left of it: completely covered by a big fireball, burned down to its very last…and a guy staring at it.

Seriously: A Chinese man standing right next to the burning remains of what used to be one of these motorbikes that carry either 10 people or 10 gas bottles. The last one might by the reason for the fire. Back to our Chinese “voyeur”: Standing 50 cm far away from the fire must be pretty hot but he didn’t seem to care. Watching straight into the fire with thick black smoke coming straight into your eyes must be pretty hurtful, but our homeboy didn’t seem to care about that as well. So why did he do it?

Two possible answers both of the leading to same conclusion.

First answer: He is some kind of warlock (random input here: Charlie Sheen, you´re the man!!) who can see the future when he looks into fire. Of course the smoke clouds come in different shapes which all indicate a different person’s future.

Second answer: He never saw a fire before. Highly likely in the modern world since everything is only electrical and there are too less fires in buildings right now.

Conclusion: He is an f$%kin imbecile.

Standing there staring at some random fire on the street with the dumbest expression on the face ever seen by mankind…jeez he has to be even more stupid than his face-expression! In the end I have to thank him somehow…he made my day start with a good laugh!

So much so far…hope I gave you another view into my daily life and what happens around me.

Next week I am going to the Inner Mongolia to plant trees there for my organization “Roots&Shoots”. I gotta admit, really looking forward to it :-) It should be fun and pretty breathtaking to see the desert, the planted trees and finally a REAL rural area in China. I will most-def keep you updated how my trip was and maybe surprise you with a spontaneous update this week ;-)

Till then – Take Care

L.

Viva Rosso corsa!

I know I haven’t written anything on my blog for nearly a month. And I sincerely feel sorry for that!

Tomorrow is Chinese New Year’s Eve so on my way from work to one of my favorite spots to chill, write, read or eat, “Wagas” near the Jing’an Temple, I thought about maybe I should write something about the Chinese New Year, why they are celebrating on a different date as we do, how the usual celebration happens and so on. But one thing on my way to the café disturbed me deeply:

A FUCKING PINK FERRARI!!!!!!!

Excuse my language but due to being one-eight Italian I can´t control myself when somebody destroys the most beautiful thing made by Italians since Da Vincis “Mona Lisa”…and NO, I am not exaggerating!

Normally I shoot people who don’t drive a Ferrari in red but because I am open to new things yellow, black or even silver Ferrari drivers shouldn’t be punished with a death sentence. But pink is just too much!

I will tell you how exactly everything happened, the seconds before and after I saw the pink Ferrari (it hurts more every time I write it). I was sitting in my cab driving along a queue of cars waiting to get into a parking garage of a shopping mall. First I just saw something shiny in front of a Toyota and then suddenly the blasphemy on car manufacturing showed itself and I didn’t know what exactly to do. Should I cry? Or scream at the women (no, she must have been a witch)? Throw something at the car? Paint it red? Call Luca di Montezemolo? 

As a consequence to this numerous ideas suddenly my head was filled with this emptiness! Soon anger filled this emptiness! 

How can someone possibly choosing pink as the color for your Ferrari. I don’t want to be anyhow some kind of anti-feminist but I think the woman driving got the car, no, the piece of art destroyed from her husband or father or lover, or some poor bastard who really has a bad taste in, let´s face it, probably everything, but at least in women and car-color. Two things pretty essential for a male person in my opinion…just sayin’.

In the end it is not only reflecting the bad taste of one Chinese women and one Chinese men but somehow a general odd thing in China: The taste of people regarding clothes, cars, etc. Sometimes I wonder whether people in China don’t own any mirrors when you see their appereance on the street. That would be an good excuse. But since I live in a Chinese family I definitely know: Chinese people do have mirrors! So, no excuse for the bad taste? Maybe it´s the change from the communist uniform to Karl Lagerfeld Haute Couture and Louis Vuitton “chic”, too much came too fast. That is probably the reason.

Anyway the result of whatever happened to give them that bad taste insulted the idea of Enzo Ferrari. A Ferrari is a race car that accidently came to the streets. What it isn’t? Some kind of doll for a spoiled and bored Shanghainese woman!!!!

Viva La Scuderia Ferrari! Viva Rosso corsa!!!!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to my loyal blog readers!!

I hope everyone had a good New Years Eve and you got to party, enjoyed time with your family or simply got smashed!

My New Year’s celebration was pretty good. First I had a dinner at my favorite Thai restaurant “Simply Thai”. The food is amazing!! It is nearly as good as the food I ate when I was in Thailand. Commonly “Simply Thai” is regarded as the best Thai food east of Thailand. When I try to be critical about the food I simply have to admit that it is too good to bitch about that maybe the service is sometimes a little bit too slow. They actually are really sometimes not of the brightest kind of mankind but anyway they speak pretty good English. And not like the one waitress at “Mr. Pancake House” who starts EVERYTHING with an “Excuuuuuse me” in the worst Chinese accent to use. She is seriously annoying!

Anyway, I was going to talk about my New Years Eve. After the dinner we went to a friend’s apartment and the way to it we wanted to buy tickets for the performance of some German/Austrian DJs and thought that a nice tiny can in our hands would be a nice companion on the way to the club. It wasn’t…it was freezing and holding a can of cold “Tsingtao” beer didn’t really warm me up. Ten or twelve would have. But one cold can in my cold hand with strong wind on 31^st of December didn’t. Spiritually it cheered me up but I am no Shaolin monk who can easily blank out everything around him, including the freezing weather and just focus on the happiness in his mind the beer can brought upon him. As I write this down write I gotta admit that I am kind of jealous. Being a Shaolin monk seems kinda cool. On the other hand I am not sure whether a Shaolin monk is allowed to drink “Tsingtao”.

But actually the way to the club, the “Mao Livehouse, was worth it. The party was a blast with good music, good people and good (Chinese standard) beer. Overall a pretty good way to celebrate the new year coming and even to celebrate a little longer than the big 00:00 ;-)

So know we have 2011. It still feels a little strange to type it. 2 0 1 1. I am not yet sure whether I should announce some good intention. Normally nobody sticks to all intentions announced on the first of January so I guess I will still wait a little bit. To be fair…most of the intentions are announced under the influence of large amounts of alcohol.

Now I will finish work and go to enjoy all-you-can-eat-and-drink Teppanyaki. The all-you-can-drink nothing for me today due to the chore called work tomorrow morning and the with work hand-in-hand going 7 am getting up but anyway the food there is good so I don’t need to get loaded to bear the food there.

Be tensed to hear about my intentions or no-intentions!

Cheers

L.