Chinese Shopping Apps: Giraffe Toy Edition

My son had a giraffe toy, and then I let my daughter play with it and she chewed the legs, so now I owe my son a new one. Let's go to Taobao (a Chinese shopping app) and find one.

Okay, so, first of all, I'm not sure how to search for this. I'm trying to buy the exact same toy that my son had, but like, how to describe it? It's a giraffe with legs that you can extend and they have suction cups at the ends.

Giraffe is 长颈鹿 [cháng jǐng lù] and toy is 玩具 [wán jù] so I guess I'll just search 长颈鹿玩具 and see what we get.

Oh, it's the first result. Huh. Apparently this toy is *the* giraffe toy as far as Taobao is concerned. Okay.

Chinese Shopping Apps: Ziploc Bags Edition

Here's a post about how I bought ziploc bags from Jingdong, a Chinese shopping app.

This is extremely boring for me. I use apps like Jingdong all the time, to buy really boring stuff like ziploc bags. But for those of you outside of China, perhaps you've never seen what the process is like to search for a product and check the options and prices and pay for it, with an interface entirely in Chinese. I think it's so fascinating how people in different parts of the world can have such different experiences, in the normal boring parts of their life, the things they do every day, which are so boring that they would never think to even talk about them.

Anyway, so, I need to buy some ziploc bags. Let's open up the Jingdong (京东) app on my phone and search for ziploc bags, which is 密封袋 [mì fēng dài] in Chinese.

A Box of Kiwis

Someone gave my husband a coupon for a box of kiwis, as a gift. This is a thing in China- giving a big box of fruit as a gift. If you got to someone's house, you should bring a gift, like a nice big box of fruit. Chinese people like fruit. My kids are Chinese and they eat fruit all the time.

Anyway, we had this coupon for a free box of kiwis, so we filled in our information on the fruit company's app and they sent it in the mail.

Here it is!

Behold, the kiwis!

When I first came to China and saw gift boxes like this, it struck me as really weird. I guess this particular kiwi box isn't super fancy, pretty much a regular grocery-store fruit box- but sometimes these boxes are really nice, red, for gifting. Fresh fruit- something that you have to eat fast because it will go bad- seemed to not really be the right thing to put in a many-layers-of-nice-packaging gift box. (Like, we immediately put all these kiwis in the fridge and threw away the box.) But somehow this is a really common thing.

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Related:

German Christmas Market (Shanghai, China)

Highway Rest Stop in China (photos)

German Christmas Market (Shanghai, China)

In December I went to a German Christmas market here in Shanghai, called Christkindlmarkt. Here are my photos~

You can view a larger version of this image here

Highway Rest Stop in China (photos)

I like the idea of sharing "boring" everyday photos of life in different parts of the world. The kind of photos where, if you live there, you feel like "I've seen this a million times, nobody could possibly find this interesting" and if you don't live there, you're like "Wow, cool, what's this? I've never seen this before!"

So anyway, here are some photos I took at some highway rest stops in China. Super boring stuff for me. But if you've never been to China, you've probably never seen this "boring" stuff before, so here it is.

(If y'all like this, I will try to do more posts like this.)

Video Game Museum of CADPA (Shanghai, China)

Hi readers! I visited the Video Game Museum of CADPA, here in Shanghai, and took a bunch of pictures I'd like to share here. Lots of old games and consoles. Very cool.

I'm not really into gaming like my husband is, but I like pokemon and Mario Kart. The first game I really got into was Pokemon Gold, on the Gameboy Color.

Here are my photos!

Fuxing Park, Shanghai (photos)

Here are my photos from Fuxing Park (pronounced "foo shing park") (复兴公园) in Shanghai. It's a cute little park, and the day we were there, the weather was really nice.

Here's the entrance to the park, which has the park name in Chinese, English, and French. The Chinese characters here are traditional characters, to be fancy, but the simplified characters are 复兴公园. (Mainland China uses simplified Chinese characters for everyday life.)

Shanghai Auto Museum (photos)

I recently went to the Shanghai Auto Museum, and I have a few photos to share here :)

First of all, the way the museum is laid out is really cool. On the 1st to 3rd floor, each floor has a big exhibition area, and there are big ramps curved around the edge of the building, to get between the floors. These ramps have cars parked along them. Seeing these ramps, I imagined how they must have had to drive and/or drag all these cars up these ramps when setting up the museum.

YK (Japanese BBQ Restaurant in Shanghai)

Hi everyone, I recently went out to eat at a Japanese BBQ restaurant here in Shanghai, and I'd like to share the photos. Also, this will sort of serve as an answer to the question "what's it like going to a mall in Shanghai, post-lockdown?"

First, we took a taxi to get to the restaurant. In the taxi there is a location code that you have to scan with your phone, related to COVID-19 contact tracing- I've written about these location codes in my many blog posts about the pandemic situation in Shanghai.

Location code inside the taxi. (Red lines added by me.)

Shanghai's Line 14 (New Driverless Subway Line)

On December 30, 2021, Shanghai opened 2 new subway lines: line 14 and line 18. I took some photos on line 14 recently that I want to share with you all. :)

Line 14 is driverless, and I found a few articles that say it's the longest subway line in the world (not sure if that's really true though- I can't verify if these sites are reliable or not). It's 39.1 km (24.3 mi) and goes right through the middle of Shanghai- passing through other big/ well-known stations like Lujiazui, Yuyuan Garden, and Jing'an Temple.

Here is an interactive map of the entire subway system in Shanghai. (Chinese site, hope it loads for my readers in other countries too.)

On this lovely day, I was on line 6, and got off at Yunshan Road station, to transfer to line 14:

"Jurassic World" Exhibition (Shanghai, China)

A "Jurassic World" exhibition recently opened here in Shanghai. I went to see it, and OH MY GOODNESS IT WAS INCREDIBLE. Wow. Like, amazing. It was so awesome.

It's robot dinosaurs. So of course I loved it, because I am a dinosaur nerd and I work in robotics. It was AMAZING, oh my goodness it was AMAZING.

(Oh this is great, I just did some googling and found that Smart Shanghai reviewed the "Jurassic World" exhibition. I love the tone of their article, totally agree.)

My photos:

Sign in the parting lot. 侏罗纪世界 (Jurassic World)

Disney Store at Lujiazui (Shanghai, China)

Hi everyone! In the previous post, I showed you my photos from the subway journey from Century Avenue to Lujiazui. In this post, we'll see the photos from Lujiazui.

Lujiazui (陆家嘴) is where all the famous Shanghai skyscrapers are. Several big financial companies have huge offices there. And it's so extremely touristy- like, if you come to Shanghai as a tourist, there is no way you don't come see the sights at Lujiazui.

So let's take a look at what we can see at Lujiazui:

KFC

Taking the Subway in Shanghai, China

Hi everyone! I went out and took a bunch of photos to show you what it's like riding the subway here in Shanghai!

All right! Welcome to Shanghai! We are going to take the subway from Century Avenue (世纪大道) to Lujiazui (陆家嘴). Here we are outside the entrance to Century Avenue:

This sign shows that lines 2, 4, 6, and 9 all go through the Century Avenue station.

Lego Store (Shanghai, China)

A new Lego store opened in Shanghai in September. I went there and took pictures for y'all~

A lego model of the Oriental Pearl Tower- the most iconic symbol of Shanghai.

79 RMB (11 USD) to make 3 little lego people.

99 RMB (14 USD) for Elsa, 169 RMB (25 USD) for Anna and Olaf.

89 RMB (13 USD) for a small bucket of miscellaneous bricks, 159 RMB (23 USD) for a large bucket.

There is a lego dragon winding around the column by the staircase.

Lego model of the signs on Nanjing Road. (Stairs on the left, for scale.)

This dragon is a freaking WORK OF ART, I love it so much.

If you have 999 RMB (145 USD) laying around, you can go in this photo booth and get a black-and-white pixelated lego version of your face. Uh...? It's 2D? Doesn't really seem worth the money....

This sign shows a lego version of the Shanghai Tower- the tallest skyscraper in Shanghai.

Lego models of the Eiffel Tower, Leaning Tower of Pisa, and Big Ben.

Legos are great ~ really one of the BEST TOYS for kids, in my opinion. ^_^ (And also for adults who are engineers like me...)

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If you want to see more posts like this, consider supporting me on patreon~ When I reach my goal of $20/month, I'll do a series of blog posts about various aspects of life in Shanghai. With lots of photos. ^_^

Starting Point of the Great Wall (Qinhuangdao, China)

More photos from my trip to Qinhuangdao 秦皇岛! These are from 老龙头 [lǎo lóng tóu] which means "old dragon head." It's the starting point of the Great Wall. As in, here's where the Great Wall runs into the ocean.

It was just AMAZING. I've mentioned before I love the Great Wall. The view at Laolongtou was just, wow.

Here's the gate you walk under when you first get there.

There was a courtyard with a bunch of small buildings, like I guess where the guards used to live in ancient times or something? This picture shows some kind of well mechanism, I think.

Here's a stream with a tiny little bridge you can walk over.

There were some delightfully-translated signs telling us to keep off the grass. This one says "芳草萋萋 踏之可惜 A pity to tread on fragrant and luxuriant grass." (It rhymes in Chinese.)

It was very hot and sunny that day. It's common for Chinese people (mostly women) to carry umbrellas for the sun.

On the Great Wall

Wow. Just wow. Look at this view. That's the ocean out there, and that's the end of the Great Wall.

There were lots of people enjoying the beach. It was a really interesting juxtaposition- children running and playing, building sandcastles, people wading in the cool water, feeling the soft warm sand, like we are all just on summer vacation enjoying the sunshine, and then right next to that is a piece of ancient history. Wow.

So apparently this last bit here looks like a dragon head, and that's why it's called Laolongtou 老龙头

Note: You can walk around the end there. So like, if you are an invading army, just walk all the way to Qinhuangdao and walk around the end of the Great Wall.

Here's the ocean. Go far enough and you might reach Korea.

There was also some sort of temple there.

A lot of Chinese temples have statues like this. These ones were about as tall as a person, but it's also common to see huge statues like 3 or 4 meters tall, with really angry faces.

"小草有情 脚下留靑 Grass and enthusiastie at the foot to stay green." It's actually a clever pun in Chinese though.

"少一串脚印 多一份绿意 Less a bunch of footprints, more of a green"

On the Great Wall again

There's a rusty fence here blocking you from walking farther along the Great Wall.

That's all my pictures from Qinhuanghao~ I'm really glad I get to live in China and visit all these amazing places~ ^_^

Photos from Qinhuangdao 秦皇岛:
Great Wall at Jiaoshan 
First Pass Under Heaven
Laolongtou (starting point of Great Wall)

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If you want to see more posts like this, consider supporting me on patreon~ When I reach my goal of $20/month, I'll do a series of blog posts about various aspects of life in Shanghai. With lots of photos. ^_^