Results tagged “suburbs”

During our times in the suburbs of New Jersey (don't hate), the American restaurant chain Applebee's was always a friendly place for meals with family and late night gatherings with friends. All of those nostalgic feelings came rushing back as Shanghaiist read some rumors on the internets about the opening of the chain's first outlet in China. With our curiosity peaked, we decided to go check it out. As Shanghaiist and accompanying guest entered the...

This week's Adoptable Pet from Second Chance Animal Aid, Shanghaiist's adopted animal charity. From the SCAA:

We don't know honestly. We ride Shanghai's metro every day and have only used Beijing's a couple times back in 2004. Still, seeing Beijing ranked No. 9 (and Shanghai unranked) in this list of the top 11 underground transit systems in the world surprised us a bit — because all the China subway hype we hear is about Shanghai's fast-growing system (or maybe that's just because we live in Shanghai?). Here's what the list, from Virgin Vacations, said about Beijing's system (which ranked one spot ahead of Hong Kong's):

Despite stuff like Academy Hills and an in-house art museum, most of the descriptions that we've read so far make Roppongi Hills seem like a it's a playground for the gliterrati, i.e. the rich, influential, well-connected as well as tourists.

The Washington Post reports that the former next president of the United States, Al Gore, is going to put on some massive live shows to help persuade the world to take global warming and climate change seriously:

At the news conference Thursday announcing this summer's ambitious "Live Earth" concerts -- designed as an exercise in "mass persuasion" about threats of global warming -- Al Gore described his vision: a 24-hour musical extravaganza across seven continents, featuring as many as 150 of the world's top recording artists, introduced by an army of "celebrities and thought leaders" (think: Cameron Diaz and Richard Branson), playing before a total live audience of a million people, and reaching 2 billion more via television, radio and the Internet on July 7.

The foreign cities hosting the stadium-size concerts will be Shanghai, Sydney, Johannesburg, London, Rio and Kyoto, Japan.

When we woke up yesterday morning we discovered a new year's surprise: Our beloved shoes are gone. Like many good Chinese girls, we keep our shoes outside our front door (but inside a locked gated corridor ... with metal bars perfect for stealing shoes through, evidently). First we thought we might have just misplaced them (we can be kind of messy). But after searching our pile of shoes, we were very certain they were gone. And we were quite confused why someone would steal this pair, then we came to the conclusion the thief must be a man, since the shoes left untouched were all high-heels or very feminine boots. The pair that was gone was masculine style riding boots.

Photo by Peijin Chen taken from the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site.

Good

Don’t panic yet, but seriously, it might be inappropriate to say "Bund 18" in the future. According to this Eastday report (in Chinese), one of the 2006 government projects -- cleaning up the city's street names -- is going to be finished by the end of this year. There are 838 roads involved in this project: 146 road names are going to be written off, 154 road names are going to be changed and 225 road names are going to be prefixed. (We've checked the street names that will be written off and fortunately they are all in suburbs, like Qingpu, Fengxian and Baoshan)

Shanghaiist wandered into Shanghai Times Square on Huaihai Lu the other day -- against our volition, of course (this being a shopping mall and all). But in the end it was worth the pain of having to stand inside various clothes shops and nod glumly in support of countless new items that the better half seemed incredibly energetic about the purchase of.

Shanghai finishes the summer in style this weekend with a 40-strong DJ performance at Dino Beach under the guise of the Splash! music festival, kicking off at 3 pm this Saturday.

The Southern Metropolis Weekly's latest print edition had an interesting article about videos and movies online. The article profiled and compared some of the people working in this area and analyzed the business models and economics behind each. One of the people profiled was none other than Hu Ge, the Shanghainese man that caused a stir with his parody of The Promise, director-turned-hack Chen Kaige's latest attempt to waste several hours in the lives of innocent and hard-working people. That parody, a short film called A Bloody Case That Started From a Steamed Bun, got Hu Ge in trouble with the aforementioned hack, who threatened Hu with a lawsuit. The net result has been to make the once unknown Hu Ge into a cause celebre cum indie movie rebel. Not suprisingly, he's gotten some offers, most notably, to make another parody, this time with the approval of the filmmakers. The filmmakers behind the film 血战到底 (Karmic Mahjong). We think that the media might have already seen the parody version (which is basically advertising for the film itself) and were disappointed: Hu himself acknowledges that he made Steamed Bun for fun and because he was pissed off, whereas Karmic Mahjong is already comic and a bit of a spoof (we will review it soon), making it hard for him to find the inspiration. Unlike the first film, however, he isn't allowed to bring in bits and pieces from other movies and TV shows or music -- otherwise known as copyrighted material -- which also made his job harder. These days, Hu is living in a house in the suburbs where has a "studio" and is hatching plans to make a real, live-action film on digital video. The problem is, not many people have expressed interest thus far in investing in it.

Londonist prepares a Happy Birthday bath for Buddah this week and then things get all cliched. A madman goes on a rampage while axe-wiedling and London's mayor warns an American diplomat to avoid the kitchen if the heat bothers him so much.

Three years ago, when this Shanghaiist first arrived in town, the downtown area was THE place to be for quality foreign food. It wasn’t exactly Manhattan (or even Omaha) but it was where you went when the craving struck — for Mexican at Taco Popo, Pizza at Melrose, burgers at Rendezvous Café, and that take-your-visiting-parents favorite, M on the Bund.

Great news out of Jarrett Wrisley's restaurant and bar gossip column this week in SH (especially if you live near Tongren Lu like Shanghaiist does):

Yep, we have one. And it even leans more than the one in Pisa. But very few people know about it. And even fewer visit it. Only 2,100 people made the trek to Huzhu Baoguang Tower during Spring Festival -- and, in China, 2,100 is statistically zero. The reason? No one knows how to get to the tower, located in Tianma Mountain Park in Songjiang District which, 40 kilometers (the story says "kilograms") from city center, might as well be in Anhui province. It's not a fun commute.

Teachers' salaries, the burbs and long underwear

According to a recent report by Beijing's International Institute for Urban Development, Shanghai ranks third among Chinese cities in quality of life. The "key factors" used to concoct this study were not published, but with four of the top 10 cities located in malarial Guangdong province (first-place Shenzhen literally translates to "deep irrigation ditch", while Dongguan has been called the armpit of China), we can be fairly certain that the first "key factor" was the size of each city's contribution to the IUD. Shanghaiist won't completely dismiss the study, though, since it correctly ranks Shanghai above Beijing (fourth).

Shanghaiist visited a bar the other night. A new bar: Free Soul, on Fahuazhen Lu.