Hot Water Wars

I mentioned in the past that our apartment building has the most retarded hot water system in Shanghai - nay, in China. You see, most apartment buildings, hell, even small apartments are equipped with a small water heater. No fuss, no loss of energy: the thing turns on when you open the hot water faucet, and heats it just right.

But somehow, our apartment building got conned into installing a hot water tank. If only it were an apartment hot water like in North America, that'd be one thing, but nooooo... Instead the entire block has a single hot water tank. What are the advantages? I still have no idea.

So right smack in the middle of November, the apartment building management declared that they would turn on the hot water only at peak periods. Which means that if you wanted to take a shower at 5h30 in the morning, like Helene, well, though luck: all you had was ice-cold water. They eventually relented and turned it on during the day, mostly because the tenants were starting to have murder on their mind.

Fast-forward to June 2006, past a few hot water outages and other assorted chaos (such as having only hot water - even in the toilet!) The frickin' hot water tank breaks down without a garantee. The management wants to fix it, but faced with skyrocketing costs, they decide to bill the landlords.

All hell breaks loose.

I have only a sketchy idea of what follows, because all I have as evidence is signs written in Chinese. But what I know is this: there's been 3 meetings between the building management and landlords so far. The first two resulted in the typical Shanghainese shouting match. The last one was mediated by a Government official.

In the meantime, signs discussing the hot water problem multiply. (I have no idea what they say, but I see the characters for hot water - зѓ­ж°ґ - everywhere.) Still, there's no resolution in sight.

Yesterday, things actually devolved to the point that the landlords held a... protest! They gathered in the courtyard, wrote some graffiti on the pavement, and made a fuss. The police was called in to monitor the proceedings while a man screamed in a megaphone. Yeah, you read that right. I actually witnessed my second protest - first one being the anti-Japan rallies - of my whole stay in Shanghai.

What about us, you ask? Well, remember I mentioned these small gas burners for hot water that all apartments except ours now have? Well, our landlady installed one in our apartment - Just as a temporary measure until they fix the tank, she tells us.

Well, I turned off the hot water pipe from the building, and we now use exclusively the burner. Hot water on demand, at last... But that's probably too easy a solution for the landlords... And so they keep protesting while we take our showers piping hot every morning.

Montreal: It's Official

Just to keep you up to date: I have now signed my offer letter from Ubisoft's Montreal studio, and will move back to Montreal this fall.

The actual date is still under consideration... It should be around October.

The Small World of Expatriates

Here's a sample of a conversation I had with a guy called Phil yesterday, at a colleague's party:

Phil: "It's so weird. Every expat seems to know each other here in Shanghai."

Me: "I know! I used to be jealous of how tight-knit immigrant communities were in Montreal. Italians or Chinese, for instance... They all seem to know each other."

Phil: "Erm. Wait a minute. You're from Montreal?"

Me: "Yeah! You too?"

Phil: "Yeah!"

Me: "Coudonc, t'es-tu francophone?!"

Phil: "Ben oui!"

So I got out my business card, and handed it to him, one Quebecois to another.

Phil: "Wow. Your last name is Roy?!"

Me: "Yeah... Oh. You too?"

Phil: "Yeah!"

Me: "Is your name..."

Phil: "My name is Philippe Roy."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I met a Quebecois in Shanghai who has the exact same name as my brother.

One Small Electronic Miracle

Remember my atrocious evening at Microfabrique last February? At that time, I had sworn off the electronic music scene in Shanghai, disgusted by people forcing me off a table because I wouldn't pay 1000 RMB in alcohol, so that morons who didn't care about music could drown it by playing Chinese dice.

Yeah, that experience had left me quite bitter.

Anyway, yesterday night, defying all my bitterness, I decided to go check out a new microsession at Tanghui, a cool bar outside the jaded old bar strip, 5 minutes away from the studio. It took Akufen, a fellow Montrealer and highly respected minimal techno artist, to draw me out.

I went in expecting a shitty experience... And I was pleasantly surprised.

The crowd, although mostly consisting of expats, was respectful of the artist, and seemed to genuinely enjoy the show. Some moron played dice for 10 minutes, but I guess somebody told him to shove the dice up where the Sun don't shine, because I didn`t hear a single die roll after that.

The crowd was not exactly as cool as the mostly Chinese student crowd of Mutek Beijing, but the overall vibe was excellent, thanks to awesome visuals and audio.

I went there with a few friends (all but one of them from Montreal, interestingly enough), and the illusion of sitting in a trendy St-Laurent bar listening to electronic music was perfect. The performance itself was very good and made me happy and nostalgic for the Montreal scene at the same time.

So... I guess small miracles can happen, after all. Small, micro-electronic miracles.

Comfort from the Eggplane

Yesterday, I went and investigated a new convenience store one street corner away from the studio. The small, welcoming place is called йЈћи›‹ ("Fei Dan"), which can only be translated as "Eggplane". Very weird. When I asked the girl at the counter, she explained to me that her boss is called Frederico, and that this was his nickname. The guy is frickin' called Eggplane, how awesome is that?

Anyway, йЈћи›‹ is a little foreign produce shop, which means they carry baguette, wine, cheese, and other exotic fares that warm the heart of expats, myself excluded. So I bought myself some bread, some Havarti with cumin seeds (a favorite of Helene), British beer, and two bottles of San Pellegrino (Italian mineral soda water that I have become addicted to; how snobbish of me!)

As I sat at home and had this little feast for dinner, it made me think just how much I was missing Montreal right now. Well, I don't miss it exactly... But I look forward to it again. As fate would have it, somebody from Ubisoft Montreal actually chose this time to call me and discuss the details of my transfer.

All this to say that if in 6 months, or a year, you see me buy frozen е°Џз¬јеЊ… ("Xiao Long Bao", little soup dumplings) and drink some з™Ѕй…’ ("Bai Jiu", Chinese rice wine)... Assume that I'm going back to Shanghai!

西施 Misses Helene

Boy, I think I don't spend enough time with our cat 西施 (Xi Shi)... She's obviously missing Helene, who is currently in Thailand enjoying sunshine and quiet.

Yesterday, when I got back home around midnight, the phone was off the hook, which is something 西施 does from time to time... Except the phone receiver was lying right next to a VoIP card, on which I had stuck a Post-It note with Helene's Thailand mobile number on it!

I'll have to check the long distance bills carefully next month...

Canadian Whispers

Like I said in my previous post, Helene is currently doing her best to enjoy the island of Samui in Thailand, while I toil away and do my best to finish Splinter Cell Double Agent.

Being alone was fun for the first weekend; not that I dislike Helene being here, quite the opposite!! But being by myself is a novelty, shall we say. I get to do outrageous, single guy things which I wouldn't do if Helene was around... You know, like watching horror movies and dumb guy movies such as The Fast and the Furious. Oh, but I'm so outrageous.

Anyway, she's been gone two weekends now, and the novelty is wearing off. So yesterday, I suddenly realized I was bored and in need of some activity. And this being Shanghai, I elected to go for a 3-hour massage extravaganza.

What made me initially hesitate is that, unless I go to a massage place where they're really used to giving massages to expats, the masseuses tend to get quite curious when I'm around. And as logic would dictate, the best massage places are precisely those that don't see a lot of us иЂЃе¤–. My current massage infatuation is with a place in Pudong, on Zhang Yang Lu near Lao Shan Xi Lu, where they give you everything from an oil massage to that funky back massage where they walk on you. And that's where I went.

I got the whole deal, of course, and it was a very pleasant and relaxing experience. But as I suspected, the masseuse really wanted to learn more about me, and pestered me with questions. Unfortunately, while I usually can grok most of what people say to me, in some rare cases, I'm just as clueless as if I had just arrived in Shanghai. Helene and I suspect this has to do with whether or not the person talking to us has learned a second language themselves; if they haven't, they sometimes have no clue how hard it is to understand Mandarin without them speaking clearly and with a restricted vocabulary.

Anyway, long story short, I spent most of my time yesterday night saying that I didn't understand a damn word the girl was saying. That really irks me when I've been here three years, and I can't help but feel it's my own damn fault.

Last time I went over was with my brother Philippe, and that time I had absolutely no problem chatting away throughout the 2 hour massage we got. I talked about my brother, about how I liked Shanghai, and about Canada. I told them, for instance, that Mandarin was Canada's third most spoken language, owning to how popular the country is with Chinese who wish to immigrate.

Fast-forward to last night, and the masseuse is trying to explain something to me yet again. This time I manage to make out what she's telling me, but it doesn't make any damn sense.

"I heard Canada has three official languages: English, French, and Mandarin. Is that true?"

Yep, Chinese whispers. Actually, Canadian whispers. Here I thought I had been quite eloquent in explaining the popularity of Mandarin in Canada to our masseuses last time, but in truth, I was spreading a big fat misconception about just how much Canada wants to speak Mandarin.

So, Shanghai, I apologize for spreading misinformation about Canada... But if you guys manage to convince the Canadian Government to make Mandarin the third official language... I'm all for it!

Shedding Shanghai

I tell you; it's a weird psychological process to begin to think about going back to my home country after 3 years abroad.

If Helene and I had decided we wanted to stay in Shanghai, I'm sure we'd be fine with it right now; but since we know for sure there's little time left for us before a homecoming, it seems that we're emotionally disengaging ourselves from our current city of residence.

Now, here's something puzzling; I wouldn't mention it if, in an MSN conversation with Helene today (she's "busy" resting in Thailand while I toil away here), she didn't observe exactly the same effect on herself.

Since I've started thinking of a life in Montreal again, I've begun to re-acquire a taste for philosophical debates, discussions, and other intellectual pursuits. Now, it probably sounds crass, but hear me out; it's not that I didn't feel this way in Shanghai, or that Montreal is a capital of intellectualism... (Really not, as a matter of fact.) But it seems like the 'expat life' somehow pushes you in a mood that is much more contemplative and adaptive. Living in a country which you are struggling to understand, it seems you become a master of relativism, and you acquire a certain Zen about the weirdness of daily life.

But now that I'm thinking of friends back in Montreal, I feel something awakening in me that was pushed aside for a while. I want to read more books, to talk about them, to write scenarii for comicbooks, to write short stories, to watch obscure movies and discuss them. I used to do that a hell of a lot more before my own life became a movie. Maybe it's good, or maybe it means I'm going back to a spectator's life. Who knows for now?

And so, mentally, I'm shedding Shanghai, it seems. I just know I'm gonna go back to Montreal and start gaining a deep appreciation for my time here. I even know I'm gonna miss it all so terribly. I know all this... And yet I need to go back home if only for a while.

There's a French expression that goes, Partir pour mieux revenir. Going away to better come back. I think in my case, it will be Revenir pour mieux partir.