Chinese to take away

The secrets of Chinese food are mine - well some of them, anyway. I did a cookery class on Saturday with a couple of friends, we made such yummy stuff! The Chinese kitchen is really sparse compared to a New Zealand pantry and utensils drawer - most people make do with a wok, a steamer, a chopping board, a bowl, a spoon and a huge cleaver. That's it. For everything. The main condiments are soy sauce, vinegar, and cooking wine. We also used garlic, ginger, chilli, sesame oil and Sichuan pepper, a type of bitter peppercorn which makes your mouth numb.

I can make sweet and sour pork now! Forgot to take photo til halfway through eating it...

Chilli and sesame flavoured salad made of asparagus lettuce - a crisp cucumbery Chinese vegetable. For some infuriating reason this photo wants to load vertically, so tilt your head left.

Our glamorous teacher Yuan Yuan Lin, frying some pork. Photos aren't that great today, turns out I had my camera on some weird setting by mistake.

Ancient Chinese secret ingredient to sweet and sour pork...catsup.

Then went for a big wander through the French Concession. Here are some things I saw:

Abacuses (abaci?) are used by heaps of shopkeepers here. I don't actually understand how an abacus works, but here's another fun Chinese counting system: you can count to ten on one hand. 1,2,3,4,5 are how we'd do it, but they have totally different systems for 6-10.

I see people using these signs to play a dice game in bars all the time - the music is always way too loud to talk, so playing games makes sense. Another advantage - by making the "10" signal on one hand and, say, the "6" signal on the other, you make 60! Genius!

 Pretty vegetables

 Ha har! Finally photographed live pigeons and fish for sale.

Fruit truck

People dry their washing all kinds of crazy places here - often, on the busiest and most central streets, I see duvets strung on ropes tied to trees lining the road. I often see portable clothes racks hung with underwear and tshirts drying on busy footpaths.

Here's one way to attract tourists - blow up your Lonely Planet listing to several hundred times its original size!

Just when you'd almost forgotten you were in a Communist country, up pop Marx and Engels.

And then... I went to report on Shanghai Fashion Week. Ah, the charmed life of a Shanghai Daily intern.

Spelling Vivienne Westwood's name wrong in the official programme - you stay classy, Shanghai Fashion Week. [I didn't go to her show, calm yerself].