5. Dongtai Road
There's a store on Dongtai Road, a chockablock stretch of antiques and curio shops off Xizang Road, that proudly displays a milk-bottle delivery box from the 1920s. I once tried to buy it from the couple who owns the shop. The husband laughed. The wife told me that several museum curators had already offered big money, but she wasn't selling. Amongst all of Dongtai Road's tourist tat — and, trust me, there is plenty of it — are treasures. Some, like the milk box, aren't for sale. But plenty else is, including lovely art-deco pieces and lots of Cultural Revolution memorabilia. About halfway up the street is my favorite book-dealer. Collectors of tiny antique metal teapots are also in luck — there's an entire store devoted to that esoteric object. Just east of Dongtai Road is a plant-and-animal market, where you can pick up a championship cricket for the next time you need an insect to enter in a prizefight. Doesn't everybody?

4. Din Tai Fung

The soup dumpling, or xiaolong bao, is to Shanghai what the chicken wing is to Buffalo. A delicate dumpling skin is wrapped around a juicy pork filling (or, in luxe versions, crab), and like magic, the dumpling also contains a shot of tasty broth. But be warned: All those famous local places listed in guidebooks promising to delight you with an authentic recipe? They're underwhelming. The sad fact is that the very best xiaolong bao in Shanghai are to be found in a sterile mall built by a Hong Kong developer. It gets worse. These dumplings come courtesy of a Taiwanese restaurant chain called Din Tai Fung No matter. Tell your friends you partook of Shanghai's greatest culinary joy. You don't have to mention the whole Taiwanese-made-in-a-mall aspect of the tale.

1. Din Tai Fung
Building 6, Floor 2, Shop 11a, Xintiandi South Block, Shanghai, China; 86-(0)21-6385-8378 More Info

1. Shanghai Maglev Train

The magnetic-levitation train ride from the international airport to the city is the perfect metaphor for Shanghai. The train reaches speeds of 430 km/hr (267 miles/hr), and the trip takes less than eight minutes. You'll be feeling a bit whiplashed, but that sense of disorientation hints at the fast-paced city that lies ahead. As of now, the Maglev doesn't extend to the rest of the Shanghai — the train line was built mostly as a prestige project to impress visitors, not to service locals — so the airport run is the one place you can enjoy the ride. Single-ride tickets cost 50 yuan.





2. Fuxing Park


Unlike many Chinese cities that appear to have forgotten that people occasionally like to perambulate, Shanghai is made for walking. Start your own walk in Fuxing Park smack-dab in the colonial-era French Concession, with its shady sycamore trees and stuccoed villas. In the park, you'll find grannies in pajamas belting out Chinese opera, and Mao-suited men taking their caged birds for a stroll. Around the corner at 7 Xiangshan Road is the former residence of Sun Yat-sen, modern China's founding father. His house, which contains period furniture and books, reminds you of what Shanghai felt like during its first heyday. Afterward, wander the nearby lanes — past elegant mansions now subdivided into several families' homes, complete with outdoor wok stations and billows of hanging laundry — to get a sense of street-level Shanghai today.

3. Shanghai Museum








Given its much-vaunted 5,000 years of history, China's museums are, in general, a sorry lot. Exhibits are badly lighted, the English information often a jumble of incomprehensible nouns. (In truth, some of China's finest artwork was carted off by the departing Nationalists in 1949, when they quit the mainland for Taiwan. But that still doesn't excuse the pathetic state in which most of the country's national treasures are displayed.) The Shanghai Museum, located on People's Square, is a welcome antidote to all that's dark and dingy. You don't — and shouldn't — try to digest it all in one go. My suggestion: Pick one section, whether it's calligraphy or jades or ceramics, and dig in. Personally, I find the bronzes strangely fascinating; in fact, the shape of the museum itself mimics that of an ancient bronze cauldron.

Shanghai: 10 Things to Do in 24 Hours

Shanghai bristles with buildings, but the city doesn't boast must-see sights like New York or Rome. The joys of Shanghai, instead, are on the street level, where everyday life unfolds with bewildering variety. An elderly woman in pajamas will be chopping vegetables on the stoop of her lane house, while a Prada-clad beauty will sashay past on her way to a nearby art gallery. So sharpen your elbows, pick up a pair of chopsticks and dig in.

facebook wants to read your mind

Facebook wants to know what's on my mind. Actually, that's not true; so far, it wants to know on. ly what's on some of my friends' minds. Facebook doesn't care about me yet, although it promises that will soon change.




Why is Facebook's news feed becoming so introspective? "It's going to be more about the message you want to send to others than what you're doing at that very moment," says Meredith Chin, Facebook's manager of corporate communications. Or as the company described it in a blog post: "One way to think about this is as a timeline — or a stream. As people share more ... the pace of updates accelerates." Sort of like those annoying tickers that run across the bottom of cable news channels, but all the news is about people who never get off their couches.

The old status-update formula was simple, declarative: "Claire is working," "Claire is hungry," "Claire is unable to finish this article, so she is procrastinating by checking Facebook." But if I'm hungry and you ask me what's on my mind, what do I say? Do I just type "doughnuts" into the field? Then everyone I know will just see the update "Claire doughnuts."

I liked it better when we were all just hungry.

Stand Up For Myself!!!

stand up for myself
"the soup is made of leftovers!"
"the soybean milk tastes like water!"
complaints about our dining hall are heard everyday.sadly,most of us accustomed to eating coarse food and suffering from poor service always do nothing more than complaining.
yesterday,I ordered brasized beef with carrot in the dining hall as my lunch.But you know what? All I can find in my dish are carrot,onion,and peppers!!!a university could be ruined by ahorrible dining hall really!!I wondered where the subsidies and endowments offered by government to improve living standard of college students have
gone.
theoretically,the marriage of an old seat of learning with famous dining industry might be expected to produce some interesting children. It might have been thought that the culture of the university would radiate out and transform the
atmosphere of the dining hall.That this has not happened may be the fault of the university.However, students and faculty members need to ask themselves why choose to tolerate terrible food and service instead of standing up for themselves.
I understand that everybody's business is nobody's business.people are always waiting for someone else to take care of it.So, at least,it seems to me,it contributes a lot to the bad situatin.
I decided to complain to the waiter and asked for another dish,not only for myself,but also on behalf of others.Althogh the man seemed very reluctant ,he did what I asked.It may not be as difficult as we thought to make a difference.

Amazing Chinese folk art

from www.56china.com





In the long history of China, the Chinese people have created countless arts along with making a living. These arts are the perfect combination of local arts and techniques. The inheritance and development of these arts and techniques has always been limited. Usually it was passed along among generations of family members, so the outsider will know little of the well-kept secrets. This film truthfully documented 58 artists of Chinese local arts and their various unique and wonderful performance, salvaging and unearthing these local arts in danger of extinction.



Paper Art
The first two forms of paper art began in the Han Dynasty with Chinese Paper Cutting and Chinese Paper Folding. These arts have expanded globally.







Puppetry
One of the oldest forms of folk art is puppetry. Puppeteers use various kinds of puppets, including marionettes, glove puppets, rod puppets, cloth puppets and wire puppets in performances incorporating folk songs and dances over some dialogues. The subject matter is derived mainly from children's stories and fables.









Shadow play
Chinese Shadow theatre is a form of puppetry that is performed by moving figures made of animal skins or cardboard held behind a screen lit by lamplight. The subject matter and singing style in shadow plays are closely related to Chinese opera, except without using live actors or actresses.
Chinese knot
Chinese knot is a decorative handicraft art that creates knot patterns. It is one of the more traditional art forms almost completely lost in the transition from Imperial to modern China

About face---People’s creditworthiness, it seems, can be seen in their looks

From The Economist print edition


SCIENCE proceeds by trial and error. The successes are trumpeted. The errors are often regarded with embarrassment by subsequent generations, and locked away in attic rooms of the subject’s mansion like mad relatives in a Victorian novel. Usually, they stay there. Craniology, phrenology and eugenics, once-respectable fields of endeavour that are now regarded with a shudder, may shriek from time to time, but few sane people pay attention to them. One, however, has escaped recently, and is trying to rehabilitate itself. For years physiognomy—the idea that a person’s face is a reflection of his character—was sneered at. Now, it is making a come back.
Appearances certainly count. Women, for instance, judge men by their faces. Testosterone levels are reflected in the face, and who is seen as a one-night stand and who as a potential husband depends in part on this physical feature. Similarly, a male face betrays the owner’s underlying aggressiveness and even his business acumen. Facial beauty in either sex is also associated with higher incomes. The latest research, though, cuts to the moral quick. For Jefferson Duarte of Rice University in Houston, Texas, and his colleagues are suggesting that one of a person’s most telling moral features, his creditworthiness, can also be seen in his face.
Dr Duarte’s research was enabled by the internet. Once, if you wanted to borrow money, you had either to visit a bank or to tap a rich friend or relative. Now it is possible to do business directly with a stranger, using a peer-to-peer lending site. The needy advertise themselves, and how much they want. Those flush with cash assess potential borrowers and decide who to lend to, and at what rate of interest.
The borrowers themselves have to disclose their financial positions, credit histories, jobs and education. Often, though this is not required, they also post photographs of themselves. That means it might be possible to assess the effects of appearance on the outcome. And the process is an open auction, which means that all offers, acceptances and rejections are in the public domain.
For his research, Dr Duarte chose a site called Prosper.com. His intention was twofold: to see if physiognomy-based prejudices about creditworthiness existed and, if they did, whether they were justified. To do so he used another peer-to-peer website to subcontract the job of assessing creditworthiness to a number of ordinary people. The site in question (which is run by Amazon) is called Mechanical Turk. In this case the people it matches are those who have a task that needs doing, and those willing to perform it.

Edible Excretions: Taiwan's Toilet Restaurant

from time


"There's poop everywhere! Y-u-c-k," says 6-year-old Jordan Lien as he and his family dine at the Modern Toilet, a popular Taiwanese restaurant chain that's expanding into China and other parts of Asia. The boy was looking at the poop-shaped lights and dish covers and the curry on toilet-shaped plates.


Diarrhea for dinner? That's the point. "It's supposed to shock and confuse the senses," says Modern Toilet manager Chen Min-kuang. But as Jennifer Finch, an American who was dining there, described it, "They do it tastefully. It's all very clean." (See the top 10 food trends of 2008.)

Every customer sits on a stylish acrylic toilet (lid down) designed with images of roses, seashells or Renaissance paintings. Everyone dines at a glass table with a sink underneath. The servers bring your meal atop a mini toilet bowl (quite convenient, as it brings the food closer to your mouth), you sip drinks from your own plastic urinal (a souvenir), and soft-swirl ice cream arrives for dessert atop a dish shaped like a squat toilet. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

I went there on a Wednesday evening, and the place was packed with students and families who were having a jolly time eating out of the john. "It's very progressive and irreverent, like a practical joke," says junior high school teacher Chen Kin-hsiang, who went because her students raved about it. "It's a little gross when you see other people eat," she says, "but when you're eating, you don't notice it, 'cause you're hungry and the aroma is appetizing." Smell is one poop-like quality the chef does without. (See pictures of China on the wild side.)

The reasonably priced food includes curries, pasta, fried chicken and Mongolian hot pot, as well as elaborate shaved-ice desserts with names like "diarrhea with dried droppings" (chocolate), "bloody poop" (strawberry) and "green dysentery" (kiwi). Despite the disturbing descriptions, the desserts were great. But after seeing curry drip down a mini-toilet, I may never have that sauce again. (See pictures of what makes you eat more food.)

The Chinese can take this, Finch muses, because they are more nonchalant about bodily functions, such as burping, farting or even going to the bathroom — an act performed squatting sans doors in some places in China. But many Westerners enjoy the novelty of toilet dining too. Chris and Julia Harris took their visiting mother, who they say is obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness, to "freak her out," but she had a great time (though she refused to drink out of a urinal). The only people who have a hard time, says Chen, are the elderly who have exclaimed, "I will not eat on the toilet!" (Folding chairs and normal dishware are available for the faint of heart.) (Read "The Science of Appetite.)

Toilet creations aren't new to China. The ancient Chinese may have been the first to use the throne — a flush toilet was found in a tomb of a Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 24) king — and they invented toilet paper in the 6th century. Modern Toilet owner Wang Zi-wei, 29, an ex-banker, got his idea from the Japanese robot cartoon character Jichiwawa, who loves to play with poop and swirl it on a stick. Inspired by that image, Wang began selling chocolate ice cream swirls on paper squat toilets. Customers loved them and wanted more edible excretion experiences, so he opened Modern Toilet in 2004. The theme-restaurant chain now has seven outlets in Taiwan, one in Hong Kong and one opening in Shenzhen, China, this week. Plans for other cities in China, Macau, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia are also under way. Dinner à la latrine, anyone?