Results tagged “buytickets”

Now into its fifth year, M on the Bund’s Shanghai International Literary Festival kicks off this weekend and once again has an impressive line up featuring a string of famous names and expert figures from across the book world. Running for the next three weekends, the festival offers Shanghai’s literati the chance to see some of the best Chinese and international writers. With so many great events to choose from (you can buy tickets and view the full line-up here) it’s hard to select highlights, but below are Shanghaiist’s picks from this weekend’s guests…

In the spirit of keeping you, the readership, informed as to the latest and greatest Shanghai happenings, we thought we would share an exciting email we received from our friends over at Spli-t Works. We've been told to keep our calendars clear on the 30th of June, as Absolute House is expected to be graced by The Go! Team.

Singapore's Lian He Zao Bao (联合早报) ran an article about "face projects" (面子工程), the highly expensive public buildings that ostensibly make their home cities seem cultured, prosperous, and advanced, but which in reality are often huge wastes of resources.

Those of you in the know may have heard that new ticketing machines are making an appearance on the Shanghai Metro system. Yesterday, Shanghaiist passed through the Century Park station and witnessed two new ticket vending machines that include the option to recharge your stored-value card straight from your bank card, unpacked but not yet in use. Awesome. These new machines are being added at selected stations around the city.

Not sure what the seating arrangement will be like at JZ, but we got to Cotton Club around three hours early because we are losers were told we couldn't reserve seats ahead of time. So we chose a booth that looked nice and sat down. Moments later, we were told we couldn't sit there -- because that table was reserved. Huh? (There wasn't a "reserved" sign on the table.) We eventually sorted things out with the bar's super-cool, super-laid-back owner (sorry for raising our voice, Greg!) and we got our booth, but just warning you to be prepared for anything, as is generally the rule in China.

Even if Robbie Williams decides not to come to Shanghai, at least we know it's not because he didn't receive the requisite approval from the Culture Bureau. We hadn't seen these until they showed up on our RSS reader -- copies of the documents from the Culture Bureau granting permission to foreign acts to come to Shanghai. For example, here's the one for Williams, which specifies when he's to come and perform, and how many people are allowed to come total. This is what the Chinese document looks like:

It's been an eventful few weeks on the movie front as we dodge the shitty movies that get thrown at us left and right. Chinese audiences weren't too keen on The Da Vinci Code, in part because most of the people who had gone to see it had already read the book, and the plot of the movie hewed so closely to the book that there was little suspense as to what the conclusion would be. Oh well, at least we have the 9th Shanghai International Film Festival (Jun 17-25) to look forward to. Or not -- we've never been before. Several years ago, we went to buy tickets, but quickly lost heart after we saw the huge lines. Movie theater etiquette aside, we see no real point in spending that much dough when films like The Passenger are readily available at your local DVD shop -- every day is a film festival in Shanghai!

Getting paper tickets has always freaked us out a bit since we're pretty forgetful -- and e-tickets are so much more convenient anyway. Now it seems all we have to worry about now is forgetting our phone, because Shanghai has gone ahead and decided to sell movie tickets on mobile phones. These tickets will include the time, place and name of the movie that you're going to watch, and you just have to bring your phone and have it scanned in order to enter the movie theater. The report says that this service started on May 16, so it's not likely that you know anyone who has done it yet, but one thing's for sure -- all these high tech conveniences won't really matter to the 200 million people living on less than 1 US dollar a day in China. Anyway, here's one of the websites where you can buy tickets -- and they seem to have The Da Vinci Code tickets for sale for the release of the film on Friday.