Yangs Fried Dumplings

I eat a lot of these.

What you're looking at here is a piece of pork about the size of an Oxo cube, wrapped in a sort of pasta like piece of I dunno what, which is then popped into a frying pan and had the fuck fried out of it by a mysteriously angry Chinese man in a daft hat. This results in  a small parcel of pork surrounded by 3 fluid ounces of molten fat that is hotter than the sun. Four of them cost 60p and that's enough for me. Delicious. I burned my tongue on one yesterday when I was too keen to get at its heavenly cholesterol.
It comes from Yangs which is a chain of restaurants which serve just these and some noodles if you like that sort of thing, which I  don't. The brilliant thing about Chinese restaurants is they don't care if you bring in your own booze. So a trip to Yang's involves ordering your heart attack, nip to the Family Mart (a sort of Chinese off licence, confectionery and dildo store) buy a bottle or two of Tsing Tsao then back for the slap up, sit down Chinese supper while fellow diners point at you and laugh. The sight of a white person, all by themselves, with a grey beard in Yangs, wielding chopsticks badly, burning their mouth and then dousing the flames with Tsing Tsao is I discover, hilariously funny. I can't complain. I often laugh at the bizarre antics of our Chinese cousins. I swear at them a lot too.

I've been back to London and now I'm back out here in Shanghai again.

Yes I just can't stay away. I'm just out here for three weeks to cover a shoot for an advert for bottled water. That's right. Sitting in a chair all day, watching people who know what they're doing, filming a Chinese child fucking things up.

Town Square Shaxi. This was opposite the bar I was in. Otherwise I wouldn't have got a picture of it.

I ate some of this. See the fish in the top left. I thought you ate them, head and all. After I'd had two I saw everyone else had left the head. Hmmm

Blue sky. Oxygen. Not used to either of them in China.

Yes we ignored the old film maxim of never working with children or animals by working with both. Specifically a fucking idiot and some goats. The goats won hands down. Far more professional. Anywway we eventually got what we needed. The kid sadly, didn't get what he needed ie. my boot in  his ear but you can't have everything can you?

Two nosey parkers watching the shoot.

The editor is, however, putting a reel together of all the times the kid messed things up, fell over, dropped things, picked his nose, fell over again and hilariously got body checked by a girl and knocked to the floor. Me and the crew all gave the girl a round of applause.
I was filming in a place called Shaxi in Yunnan, which is a four hour flight and two hour car journey into the middle of goddam nowhere. This means that it has blue skies and has real oxygen instead of the toxic mix of poo vapour and mustard gas that we use for air here in Shangers.
Other good points about Shaxi was that it had an Italian restaurant, run by an Italian. I had a pizza. I was in Bumville, China and had the best pizza I've ever had. Weird.
Back in Shanghai now. The journey home was long and tedious but was enlivened at the end by the cab from Hongqiao airport in Shanghai back to my apartment. It was raining heavily and the journey takes us down the Yanan Road which is an elevated, eight-lane, death road that stretches the width of Shanghai that the Chinese use for crashing into each other. This would have been exciting enough had the windscreen wipers been working but, of course, this is China, so they weren't. Well, they worked intermittently. When they stopped, the driver would continue for a while until he considered he'd reached the most dangerous moment to try to fix them and then lean out of the window, grab the wiper blade and give it a pull. At which point they would feebly commence smearing water over the window again. How I laughed and reached for the seatbelt. Pointlessly as it turns out because, of course, it didn't have any.
I was so shaken up I had to have several beers to calm myself down. So it wasn't all bad.
I haven't blogged for a while due to a combination of laziness and .... no that's it...just laziness. I can't promise I'll start again but who knows?