The second night, after dinner, we went for a walk around the University. In China, if you don't go for a walk after dinner, your food won't be digested.

The Shanghai University is so big it has a road running through it. It really is BIG.

Each dormitory building is big, and there are 26 of them. That is a lot of students.

I have to say, at night time Waikato is more pretty, as Shanghai University doesn't have any spanking-new lights set up.

Yvonne and I got no more funny looks (per Chinese person we passed) than we do in NZ. Some openly stare, and I stare right back. They don't seem to notice or care, they just want a look. A few give you that slack-jawed, wide-eyed OMG A WHITE PERSON look, which makes me laugh every time.

On the way home we stopped at a small corner store, and Yvonne's parents bought a whole sugar cane. The sugar cane was about 2 m long, and cost 7.20 RMB. It tasted good, and I enjoyed watching the shopkeeper peel the skin off with his intimidating knife.

The next day Yvonne and I went for a walk around the uni, and into the Baoshan suburb shopping centre. The uni looks a lot nicer than Waikato during the day, mostly due to the fact that there was recently a flower show, and the flower arrangements are all still set up. They look pretty, and I took some photos to prove I wasn't hallucinating.

The library is worth a mention. WHOA it is big. Massive is probably a better word. It is bigger than probably 6 of the Waikato libraries put together. If this building was in the middle of Hamilton, our tourist 'attraction level' would most likely triple. Not only is it big, but it looks nice too. Yvonne's Dad says it looks like a book. He loves books.

To get to the Baoshan shops, one must walk through the uni. The title: "Baoshan shops" implies a couple of dairies on the corner... Actually it is a mall bigger than Chartwell Square. It was also incredibly hot, so hot that we quickly found what we were looking for (mint Sprite, a razor and some shaving gel) and got out as soon as possible. The people in charge of the airconditioning must be recieving bribes fromt he power company, it was that hot in there.

Mint Sprite is my new favourite drink.

On our way back to the uni I saw three beggars, and Yvonne remarked that they were just lazy. Everywhere we go we see people sweeping the street, and Yvonne says that the beggars are just too lazy to do that for a living, and/or they make more money begging. I sniggered at a western couple who were trying (failing) to ignore a beggar as he trailed after them bleating for coin.

Not only was there a mall there, there was also a large amount of little shops. Most of them seemed to sell crappy pink plastic 'things' - think cellphone accessories. We didn't actually go into any of the shops though, so it could be that they all read the same Store-Window Advertising Instructional Manuals.

We also needed to buy a USB cable for Yvonne's camera. We got one of those at a store on campus. Guess how much it was in NZD?

NZ$2. The same cable, in NZ, would have cost in excess of NZ$15!

When I started gushing over how cheap it was, Yvonne reminded me that the majority of the population earns a pittance. I agreed, but still kept going on about the price. $2! A USB cable the same price as a bottle of coke. There was a guard standing at the uni entrance, and Yvonne speculated that she would get paid about 800 RMB a month. That put things into perspective, but as I come from NZ, and never intend to earn that little, the USB cable still seemed cheap. I think it always will.

On the way back we also passed the same shops that Yvonne's parents bought the sugar cane from the night before. Beside sugar cane store there is a tropical fish store, and I demanded we stop in for a look (I love fish). The fish were of good quality, though there were not so many types. They were far, far cheaper than their contemporaries in NZ, further cementing my desire to live in China one day. Oh the aquarium I will have.

Later that day I felt I was coming down with a cold, thus the reason for late posts. It's been a few days now, and it has gone away. Tomorrow we're going into town proper, I'll try to get some photos of beggars and shops selling cellphone accessories.

 Subscribe in a reader

Tags: China | University | 中国 | 大学

First I said Ni hao, then her dad said Ni hao. This continued for some time. Yvonne's Mum asked me what time we had arrived in Shanghai: san dian ban dao le ma? But I thought she said Sheng dan ban dao le ma? The latter doesn't make sense, and I had to get Yvonne to translate it. Turns out they have an accent that is hard for me to understand. Life would be boring if everything was too easy.

As soon as one steps off the plane one can smell the pollution. It isn't as bad as I had expected, but it was still there. Outside Pudong airport there is a big road, built especially for transport to and from the airport. It is far bigger than anything we have in NZ, and it isn't even a main road. It is raised off the ground, and is about 2 stories high.

To catch a taxi from the airport one has to line up, which was much more orderly than I expected. We got a van because of our copious amounts of luggage.

The ride from the airport to Yvonne's parent's house took about an hour, and was fun. Her dad pointed out that there was a gold sun, 金太阳 - which is lucky.

One thing that struck me was that the documentaries are true, people really do transport ridiculous loads on bicycles. I saw one car packed full of tired looking construction workers, and another full of 'cool' looking young men in suits.

The funniest was a man transporting a bathtub on a scooter. Yeah, a bathtub, lengthwise on a scooter. HA!

Even just driving from the airport to Yvonne's parent's house it was pretty obvious that Shanghai is still developing rapidly. There is construction going on everywhere. There are a lot of totally crap looking places too. Crap like nothing we have in NZ. South Auckland is a paradise compared to them.

Another interesting thing was the way roads are laid out. There is the road, which usually consists of two lanes per way, then on each side there is a bike road, then a footpath. This makes the roads quite a challenge to cross.

After arriving at the house and moving the luggage inside, we sat for awhile. Then we ate dinner, which was tasty.

I laid the presents out on the coffee table, and said that they could open them after dinner.

Yvonne was pretty excited, bouncing up and down on the sofa. All of the presents went down well, I had to explain that NZ is full of crap birds that can't fly, and we love them. I think they were a little confused about that, but they liked the singing Kiwi anyway. Yvonne's Dad particularly liked the slippers, saying that they were the nicest he's ever had. Looks like he had fun modeling them for the camera, shame the cameraman couldn't get a focused shot.

Yvonne's Mum loved the hand cream, demonstrating it's intended use. She said she'd wear the necklace all the time, and Yvonne explained the meaning.

Yvonne's dad can be seen in picture 08, posing with his new favourite bookmark. They both loved the blanket, and can be seen stretching it out so that they could appreciate it's full size.

The card went down well too, I heard it being opened through the night.

I went to bed early because I was tired.

 Subscribe in a reader

Tags: China | 中国

Before this I had flown from Christchurch to Wellington. Granted, I flew all by myself at the age of 7, but it was still only about 2 hours. Actually I don't remember how long it was at all, just that I liked it a lot. Flying to Singapore from AKL promised to be somewhat different, and it was.

Take off was, and always will be, awesome. Planes are great, and fun to ride. Shame tickets are so expensive.

The flight itself was fine, although long. My worries that we'd have nothing to do were unfounded. A few minutes after take off we were given headphones to use with the LCD screens embedded in the seats in front of us. We had about 80 channels of video, some games or audio to choose from. There was also a channel that gave information about the flight, the speed of the plane, a map that was updated every second showing our current position, and other information.

The staff were what you'd imagine from the advertisements, unlike most 'real' versions of ads. They were immaculately well presented, polite and helpful. They exuded an aura of calm and control, which I'm sure would be reassuring to those that can't understand how safe modern airlines are.

Yvonne was uncomfortable for most of the flight apparently, though SHE was able to sleep. I couldn't sleep because seats are for sitting not sleeping. I sat and watched TV or listened to music. At about hour 7 I felt sick but walking around for a little while fixed that.

Landing was about 50% as much fun as taking off.

I was glad to find that no-one had replaced our luggage with drugs, as this would have resulted in a swift hanging.

Soon after we arrived I demanded to be fed. I have provided 2 photos as evidence that I was. The sausages were terrible. The toast was good, but I mean... it's toast, not rockets.

I made Yvonne drink at least half of that water bottle, as the air conditioning on the plane must be 0% humidity.

While eating I told Yvonne all about how driving is more dangerous than flying, and the reason why people are more afraid of flying is because if you crash a car, you might die, though crashes are more common; while if you crash a plane, you WILL die, though crashes are less common. Certain death is always more frightening than possible death, hence the misconception that flying is more dangerous.

Yvonne bought some eyeshadow because she needed to have that "in between shade" between black and grey - I'm sure you know the one to calm her nerves.

I saw some guards who had MP5s. You can't really see the guns clearly in the photos, because I wasn't allowed to get any closer to them.

Departing from Singapore was hassle-free.

The flight to China was about 5 hours. This time I had a window seat. I looked out the window for most of the flight, and saw a lot of blinding cloud.

The coolest thing I saw was a mountain rising above the cloud. Like an island in a sea of cloud. Cloud, there I used that word four times in the same number of sentences - I'm a literary genius.

Chinese customs had two groups of lines, one for nationals, one for foreigners. Obviously, Yvonne went through the nationals line, and I through the other. My line was slow. The customs official was fast and efficient though, it wasn't their fault - there were just a lot more foreigners coming into China than nationals. On the desk in front of the officer there was a feedback unit, which consisted of a box with four buttons set in it. The buttons had faces on, smiley, not-so-smiley, unimpressed and unhappy. I pressed the smiley, because the guards were watching me and I didn't want to "give them a reason".

There were no guards with guns at Pudong airport, though Yvonne and I agree that there must be a room (rooms) close by that contains 30-50 soldiers standing at attention, watching propaganda films and listening to Mao speeches.

I saw Yvonne's dad first, though as I said nothing I have no evidence of this.

That is all for now, I've just been informed that I must eat breakfast this instant.

 Subscribe in a reader

Tags: 中国

This is a short tutorial that aims to explain how to place a search box at the top of the sidebar, above the navigation menu. This will require some fiddling with code - don’t be afraid! I’ll do my best to walk you through it.

First you need to have the code for a search box. I got mine by adding a Rapidsearch page to my website, uploading the page, viewing it’s source then copying the code that created the searh box in that page. This tutorial could be modified to work with Google’s custom search. If you do this, please let me know which steps needed modifying and I’ll include them here.

Luckily you won’t have to do that, because I’ve copied the required code for you (plus an extra that you’ll love):

<div id="panel">
    <form action="PATH_TO_YOUR_SEARCH_PAGE" method="get">
        <input type="text" name="query" id="search_site" value="DEFAULT_TEXT"         onclick="clickclear(this, 'Search within this site')" onblur="clickrecall(this,'Search within         this site')" />
    <input type="submit" id="search_button" value="Search"/></form>
</div>

1) To use this code, open your website in Rapidweaver, press “Themes”. Select the theme you use for your site, and make a copy of it. Select the copy, right click and press “Reaveal Theme Contents in Finder”. This will open a Finder window containing the files required to make your theme ... your theme.

There are two files that need editing in order to make our search bar work: “index.html” and “styles.css”. Both should be visible in the Finder window.

2) Open “index.html” in a text-editor. I use TextWrangler, because it is free and provides syntax highlighting. If you are a serious coder, try Coda or Eclipse. Scroll down until you see:

        <div id="navcontainer">

Copy the search box code (displayed above) just below this line, then change DEFAULT_TEXT to whatever text you want to be displayed inside the search box. You need to change PATH_TO_YOUR_SEARCH_PAGE to the path to your search page as well. It should have changed from this:

    <div id="navcontainer">

To this:

    <div id="navcontainer">
         <div id="panel">
        <form action="PATH_TO_YOUR_SEARCH_PAGE" method="get">
<input type="text" name="query" id="search_site" value="DEFAULT_TEXT" onclick="clickclear(this, 'Search within this site')" onblur="clickrecall(this,'Search within this site')" />
<input type="submit" id="search_button" value="Search"/></form>
      </div>

That has changed the theme’s template to include the search box above the navigation menu in the side bar.

3) This part will clear the default text when a user clicks inside the box, and restore it if the user deselects the box without entering a search term.

Still inside “index.html”, scroll up until you see:

        <script type="text/javascript" src="/rw_common/themes/pagesofinterest/javascript.js"></script>

Directly beneath this line, paste this code:

<script type="text/javascript">
    function clickclear(thisfield, defaulttext) {
        if (thisfield.value == defaulttext) {
        thisfield.value = "";
        thisfield.style.color='DESIRED_ACTIVE_TEXT_COLOUR';
        }
    }
    function clickrecall(thisfield, defaulttext) {
        if (thisfield.value == "") {
        thisfield.value = defaulttext;
        thisfield.style.color='DESIRED_IDLE_TEXT_COLOUR';
        }
    }
</script>

Replace “DESIRED_ACTIVE_COLOUR” and DESIRED_IDLE_COLOUR” with hex codes for your desired colours for these states. To avoid confusion: “active colour” in this case is the colour that the text will be when the user has selected the text box. I have mine set to #333333, which is the same colour as my body text. “Idle colour”, if you haven’t guessed already, is the colour that the text will be when the search box is not selected. I have mine set to be a very light grey: #C5C5C5.

If you’re not a computer, you’ll need a human-usable interface for generating hex colour codes, which are those nasty-looking 7-digit codes, like the two I mentioned above. To do this I use Dr. Peter Jones’ RGB Colour Calculator. If you don’t want to pick your own colours, you may instead use the colours of your theme. Have a poke around in “styles.css”, they’ll be in there somewhere.

4) There is a chance that your search box is in the perfect position already, but I’d say that chance is pretty slim. To remedy this, we now need to open up the “styles.css” file. Into this file, paste:

#panel{
    position: relative;
    left: 5px;
    width: 169px;
}
#search_site{
    color: #C5C5C5;
    font-size: 11px;
}
#search_button{
    position: relative;
    margin-top: 4px;
    margin-bottom: 4px;
    left: 96px;
}

#panel contains the styling for the entire area within which the search box’s form, text area, and button reside. Adjusting the “left” positively will move the whole set left, adjusting it negatively to the right. Adjusting the “width” value will change the width. You may add anything you want here. I used W3Schools to learn about CSS syntax.

#search_site controls the styling of the search text box. I have set the default font colour and size here.

#search_button controls the styling of ... the button. Use this to position the button. “margin” defines how much whitespace there should be between the element in question and its neighbours. Append “-left”, “-right”, “-top”, “-bottom” to “margin” to set the respective values.

Save both the “index.html” and “styles.css” files and preview your site. You should now see a search box above the navigation menu in the sidebar, in every page!

Congratulations!

 Subscribe in a reader

 Subscribe by Email

Tags: China | 中国