Moody but…

24^th April – Moody

In a strange flip of the coin moment, things varied from form as this week commenced and a slight dip in momentum left me a little sluggish on the bus home last Friday. It was bordering on worrying as I pondered whether to crack and buy Pringles & biscuits for dinner – such was the current ebb. My weekend was looking bleak, you see. I had no plans. The opportunities were limited and I felt a little like the new person in a new country who smells slightly, has no phone, no money, bad breath, and underarm hair. What was I to do with myself?
On that Friday I indulged the mood. On arriving home, I immediately donned joggers and a hoddie, cracked open a beer and commenced a movie marathon (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was interesting!). I did have a lovely conversation with a Scottish man from Abbey National who convinced me I needed a credit card and didn’t mind my munching peanut butter on toast (with bread which never goes off; worryingly chemical filled, would I grow another toe and gain the ability to see into the minds of simple organic folk if I continued to consume the additive based, potentially radioactive pseudo bread that I can buy so cheaply on my compound?) while he delivered a smashing sales pitch. It was not altogether a wasted evening: I made a new Scottish friend, convinced myself I was capable of flying across rooftops, (I simply needed a robber or violent attacker of the innocent as motivation to launch into the airborne pursuit), have a shiny new credit card whisking its way to me and realised what it might feel like to be seven months pregnant (with peanut butter and bionic bread).
An early night was in order and in the morning, well! In the morning, manifest in the slightly creaky leap from bed, hastily consumed green juice and satisfied glance in the mirror once I was ready for action at 7.30, was Super Kerry who whooshed through the flat and decided: enough! There were jobs to do and jobs they certainly ‘were’. I managed to complete four of the most lingering to-do activities that morning (after I watched True Grit, nothing opens that early). I had my canvasses stretched and even managed to communicate that I wanted the hen hao wooden frames, not just hao; I purchased the leads with which I can watch movies on my TV rather than the laptop; I bought a plant – the first of many; I updated my Uber account AND had time to have a mooch about the shops, visit a rather lovely supermarket that is super posh yet reflectively super pricey (I stuck to the essentials: a green curry paste (?), some green vegetables, a little bread of the non-chemically enhanced variety and a wee platter of sushi: I am giving up all things red this week in an attempt to discern what it is I am allergic to. In fleeting moments of terror, I actually have contemplated that the frequency with which my stomach blows up balloon like is rather frightening and the main article which is consistently in my diet is red wine – good god let it not be true.
Anyway, I was very proud of myself so used Uber for the first time on Sunday evening. What efficiently turned up was a suped up, bright yellow, booming Ford Focus with ‘The Fast and The Furious’ plastered down the flanks: perfect! Now even though the driver had a tendency to change up before he needed to, it was the most thrilling ride! I was speeding through the streets of Shanghai, a powerful engine (well as powerful as a suped up Focus goes) roaring as we changed lanes, caught lights and sped from corners, I realised I miss that. Still, not enough to get a car here.
And thus the perfect opportunitiy to explain my afore mentioned theory on driving here. There’s a weird synchronicity to the anarchic apparently logic lacking way in which people drive. Seriously! With no evident hard and fast rules, people tend to stop at red lights… but sometimes don’t (never when turning right); cycles, carts, mopeds and other automatic, vegetable fuelled or solar powered transportation devices do whatever they please while pedestrians weave in and out of cars encasing drivers who neither look in the direction they are headed or seem to mind that the taxi driver in front of them has stopped, blocking the entire lane. No, he’ll honk and move round him but the inconvenience only slightly ruffles his feathers; the fact that he is creating a hazardous and most inopportune situation doesn’t seem to matter! There are frequent and potentially deadly near misses all the time. And that’s just the point: they are near misses but they are misses all the same. In the 4 months I have now been in Shanghai I have seen no car accidents. Compared to the almost daily collisions on the straight road between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, to me it doesn’t make sense. They drive like manic worker ants, joining, merging, avoiding, overtaking but inevitably it works: passengers reach their destinations, a little shaken perhaps (more likely if they are western) but generally unscathed and it’s set me to pondering whether there are just too many rules on the road in the UK?
I guess you’ll all find out when I get my hire car this summer… I’m hoping for a Fiat 500 for the sole purpose of finding out what one of those little bad boys is capable of!
Anyway, what was destined to be a flat, potentially isolated weekend turned into a rather lovely eclectic mix of dinner, drinks, driving, DVDs and dough of differing dimensions (scraping the barrel with that last one in my desperate attempt at alliteration). All in all, it was a rather satisfying weekend. I can’t wait for this one either, with a movie tonight, all sorts of dinner and lunches going on, markets to visit, paintings to pick up and I’d imagine hangovers to plough through, leaving work today I’m really rather chipper! Yep, I said chipper!