Notice anything odd about this elevator’s buttons? On first glance, it does have 37 floors, which seems to be a strange number of floors for a building to have. But on further inspection, you’ll see there are no 4s.

This apartment building, like many in China, Japan, and Korea, has no floors numbered 4. The reason for this is because the word “4″ in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sounds very similar to the word for “death”. So, like the number 13 in the west, the number four is considered to be a very unlucky number.

Apparently, in Hong Kong some buildings skip floors 40-49 completely, and floors go from 38-39-50-51-etc.

Well this is an interesting deal. I’m just wondering, which one should I drink first?

Hint: At 68 RMB, NEITHER.

Shanghai’s Qingqu prison houses about 110 prisoners from 37 different countries around the world, and every year the prison staff encourages them to put on a Christmas variety show.

This year’s highlights included:

- A speech from the prison warden
- 30 person orchestra
- A quiz on Chinese classical literature
- An exhibition of cross-stitch embroidery
- Obligatory singing, dancing, costumes, and comedy skits
- Darth Vader attacking Apollo 11
- A gorilla
- Santa Claus giving out doodles to inmates, accompanied by a special guest…

Check out the full gallery here.

Happy holidays!

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Tags or tiny ads aside, graffiti isn’t all that common in Shanghai. You see it around, but mostly for some commercial reason (it seems to be more of a fashion thing here than anything else). So, I was surprised to come across this area outside the construction of what I assume is to be the millionth apartment hi-rise to be built in the neighbourhood.

The two guys scraping off the one piece had about 20 cans of spraypaint in bags behind them, presumably to add something new.

Went to this bulk hotel/restaurant supply store on Macau Road in Putuo district last weekend to pick up some kitchen stuff for the new apartment. This is the place you go when you need 10 walk-in freezers, 1,000 woks, 60,000 sets of chopsticks, 200 industrial meat slicers, and steamed bun baskets up to 1.5 meters in diameter.

The place has four floors in a huge warehouse with endless shelves that carry everything you could think of that would be used in a kitchen or restaurant (both Eastern and Western).

We picked up an awesome stainless steel wok, a Japanese sake bottle with cups, and some tiny xiao long bao baskets.

Not 小广告, but close.

This blast from the past is “Don Lapre”, a money making genius who hosted a late-night infomercial in the early 90s.

In “Making Money Secrets”, he went on and on about how he became rich by putting tiny classified ads in newspapers. According to Don, the secret was that if you could put one tiny classified ad in one newspaper, and that ad made only $30 – $40 profit in a week… and THEN you put that same tiny classified ad in newspapers all over the country… you would make a LOT of money!! Don himself claims to have made $50,000 dollars a week out of his one bedroom apartment.

Of course, Don never mentioned what these tiny classified ads that would magically generate $30 – $40 a week worth of revenue out of nothing would be… that you would find out by buying his “Making Money” package for only $39.95! But who cares! With just one tiny classified ad, you’d make that back in a week!

I always wondered why he felt the need to repeat tiny classified ads every minute or so. Just imagine the money you could make with LARGE classified ads…

Cloud 9 is a nine storey shopping centre connected to Shanghai’s Zhongshan Park 中山公园 metro station. The centre of the mall contains escalators going up, with each floor’s stores circling around the interior. The place is massive, and because it’s connected to one of the biggest hub stations, the ground floor is always packed. You can find almost anything you can think of in Cloud 9.

I’ve been going there for a few years now, but never realized how crazy it was until now. Check out this cafe on the ground (or is it basement?) floor – picture taken from above:

And this is a view of the escalators from below:

If that isn’t crazy enough, it also connects to one of the more interesting skyscrapers in the city (not my pic):

This building looks great at night, and you can see it from almost anywhere in Changning district.

Our cat Dosa got an early Christmas present this year: a cat mansion.

Ellen ordered this grand feline house from Taobao (China’s eBay) for 300 RMB (< $50), and it only took about 20 minutes to assemble. The 'mansion' is carpeted and has a few elevated platforms with a couple of toy mice dangling on strings. It stands about 185 cm tall, and because it's not very wide, it doesn't take up a lot of space in the apartment.

Almost immediately, the cat went nuts over it, and now it's the only thing she bothers scratching. She plays in it, sleeps in it, and just hangs out. She also loves being at the highest point in the apartment and being able to look down on everything.

In our old apartment, Dosa was rotten. She scratched up everything in her path, and what she couldn't scratch she would knock over. Her favorite time to do this also happened to be at 3 AM or so.

The furniture (while crummy to begin with) was scratched up quite a bit. Luckily, the landlord didn't care, but at the new place we were determined to make sure this didn't happen again. Getting her de-clawed was out of the question, so before the mansion we tried a few things:

What didn’t work

- Yelling or making loud noises: This worked temporarily. She got scared and ran away, and seemed to know what she was doing was wrong. Unfortunately, being a cat, she just didn’t really care. She just became more careful and caused trouble when we weren’t around.

- Cat nails: These look ridiculous, but do tend to work pretty well. Unfortunately, the cat absolutely hates the process of attaching them. Also, they only last a few days or so before they fall off, so going this route means you’ll be doing this every week or so. Apparently vets say they are harmless, but I still don’t really like the idea of them. While nowhere near as cruel as de-clawing, the cat’s main defense mechanism and means of grappling itself on to things no longer work as expected. Something tells me it must be a bit messed up for the cat.

What did work

- Lockdown: Since we moved into the new place, whenever we are not around to monitor her, Dosa is banned to the kitchen and laundry room where she cannot destroy anything other than her litter box and food bowl. This has worked really well, and seems to have calmed her down quite a bit.

- Spray bottle: These make a great deterrent, and seem to teach the cat pretty quickly where in the house is off limits. When she jumps on a table or starts attacking wires, a splash of water in the face scares the shit out of her, and makes her remember not to do it again. Now, whenever she sees the bottle, she runs. So while a little traumatizing, it’s painless to the cat, and you get the desired change in behavior.

The cat mansion seems to be the deciding tool in the transition period from ferocious beast to domesticated member of the household. The mansion makes her behave but still provides an outlet for her killer instincts. The way things are going, I’m pretty sure in a couple of weeks we won’t even need lockdown or the spray bottle to keep her in line.

As a side note, acording to Google Analytics, for some reason one of the most often used key words that gets people to chungkingmansions.com is ‘cat mansions’. So while I never planned it, hopefully now all of you cat mansion aficionados out there won’t leave here feeling completely ripped off.

Lots of sales at the grocery store this weekend!

15.80 RMB for 500g of very fresh frog

Eels and turtles are more expensive. 56 RMB for the eels, and 248 RMB for the turtles (500g)

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Here are some pics of the new apartment we moved in to last week.

It’s pretty nerdy, but I think the coolest thing about the place is the electronic keycard access! Not only do I feel like I’m in the future when I come home, I also don’t have to carry around keys any more. I wonder what happens if the power goes out though…