Another great talk by Dan Ariely. This talk is about the hidden reasons we think it’s OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we’re predictably irrational – and can be influenced in ways we can’t grasp.

Here is the video I took when we went on the silly and sparkly sightseeing tunnel in Shanghai. It was, well, interesting. And sparkly.

I should also mention that this is the first time I have ever opened iMovie, and just being able to add music to a video felt like an accomplishment. I also figured that I from time to time want to upload little movies (from Japan), so I made a youtube channel. Subscribe or befriend me if you want to ♥

This video explains what is going on in Japan to Japanese kids. Like my friend Wilhelm wrote: “Apparently the power plant really needs to go to the bathroom and makes people uneasy with its flatulence. A diaper will however solve the problem.”

Since the western media still is overfeeding us with all kinds of articles about radiation and power plants, I wanted to share a couple of articles that I found a bit different and interesting. I have no idea if these have been floating all over the internet or not already since I was a week in China, but they are great reads.

• The Last Foreigner in Japan. This is an interesting article about all the ex-pats who are leaving Japan, and how the author who is staying behind feels about it. In the comment section below the article there was a great remark: “For me there have always been two kinds of expats — there are those who come to live in Japan and those who merely come as tourists. Some of those tourists actually stick it out for twenty years without ever really living here.”
• Uniqlo Donates $25.6 Million To Japanese Red Cross. Reading this article made me really happy. Uniqlo makes a great donation, and even more impressive than that: CEO Tadashi Yanai will make a personal donation of 1 billion yen.
• Japan’s infamous mafia (Yakuza) are helping out with the relief efforts. Say what you want about the yakuza, it shows that everyone has good in them. A member quotes: “There are no yakuza or katagi (ordinary citizens) or gaijin (foreigners) in Japan right now. We are all Japanese. We all need to help each other.”

Please keep in mind that the true tragedy are all the tsunami and earthquake victims. Do whatever you can to help them. Donate money. Send stuff. Do something. I will go out tomorrow and buy supplies and ship it up north. ♥

Got back to Tokyo last night, and it felt good to be in a country with calm people and a reliable internet-connection. (China was niiice as well though, don’t get me wrong!) However, just in the first four hours of being home there was six earthquakes (probably aftershocks). I assume it is Japan’s way of saying welcome home. No major quakes. Today has been spent doing laundry and other housewife-like things and then going shopping for food. The supermarkets have almost completely restocked everything (apart from cup noodles) and there was no long lines anymore. I have tons of pictures from Shanghai to look through. Hope everyone else is well, I haven’t checked anyone’s blogs because bloglovin was blocked in China. Anyway – good to be home!

A big statue of Chen Yi right in front of our hotel. There was not much signs of communism apart from internet cencorship and various statues. I thought it was quite interesting that the statues are still standing. Well, obviously they are still standing, but I remember going on holiday through Eastern Europe, and a lot of the old communist statues there have been torn down, so it was really neat to see a country where all the statues are still standing and in great condition.

On the left, our hotel. On the right, one of the many walkways in Pudong.

Pudong by day. The night scene with the lights are absolutely amazing, pictures to follow in a later post.

A floating golden pagoda!

And in the middle of all the concrete, a little shrine. I love the contrasts.

We then had noodles for lunch, followed by…

…Starbucks. Still not convinced by Starbucks, their coffee is so incredibly mediocre to me. Maybe they have some special things on the menu that I have not tried yet? It seems a lot of other people love Starbucks, and if you do, please recommend a drink or two from their menu that does not taste like overheated milk with traces of mediocre espresso beans. Please. That being said, Starbucks beats most of the common Japanese coffee chains any day.

And then we took this incredibly silly but very cute tunnel that went from Luwan to Pudong. It seems to me like China is trying to be all fancy and high-tech and glamorous at times, but it doesn’t quite give the same feeling of high-class as fancy-high-class Japanese? Maybe I am wrong here, I have had far more time exploring Tokyo, so I assume that a short week in Shanghai can not really capture the true essence of the city. There is tons of good stuff about China as well, people here are outgoing and not afraid to try to talk to you, and it makes me feel less worried and less self-conscious when everyone else is just kind of whatever.

Look at our pretty hotel room! The bathtub is huge and everything feels so luxurious. The pictures really does not do it justice.

The room came with an espresso machine. The coffee wasn’t half bad, at least not for me compared to the Japanese coffee I usually drink. The coffee in Japan is on average quite bad, for the most part more than quite bad, so drinking something that slightly resembled a real espresso made me happy 🙂

Shanghai is big and kind of crazy. A lot of people speaking very loud everywhere, and since I can not understand what they are saying they all sound so angry to me, but I bet they are just excited and happy for the most part. Yesterday we spent the day walking around the Bund in Shanghai. Semi-fancy shopping malls, with a lot of the same brands that I have seen in Norway, actually. There are far more brands here that I recognize from Norway than there is in Japan. Only, Jack and Jones, Vero Moda, sandwich_, Mango…

Our hotel room comes with an espresso machine, and the espresso was actually half-decent.

Nothing I have seen looks like a communist country (apart from the Internet censorship), but a lot of the buildings are kind of old style and almost look European to me. I guess that it is quite different than Tokyo, where they tear everything down and build it up again every 40 years or so to earthquake-proof everything. Here there is still lots of old and pretty buildings.

We ate dim sum for lunch, and the rice-dish above was really tasty. It was like mochi without the mochi.

Our hotel corridor and a random building which I thought looked fancy. Everything there looks like it could be taken out of Metropolis or Blade runner.

For dinner we had szechuan food. I knew it would be spicy, but wow. We only ordered things with no peppers or one pepper indicated on the menu, but…

…this is what 1 single pepper indicated on the menu. A LOT of chili. And it was really good, but my mouth was on fire. Nobody spoke English in the restaurant, so it was pretty much just point and choose. When we ordered wine, there was absolutely no pictures and no English, and knowing a little bit of Japanese kanji doesn’t help at all in this kind of situation. All the wines were Chinese, and we ended up with a pretty bad red Chinese wine, but I suppose it could have been a lot worse.

We managed to order some vegetables without any chilli though!

And this is what the food looked like after we had digged through the chili for the meat and greens. I think it is the spiciest thing I have ever ordered.

Good news:

• We are in Shanghai. The lineup at Narita airport in Japan was crazy, but everyone is really good at standing in line.
• The hotel room is absolutely gorgeous and extravagant, and I think it is the nicest hotel room I have ever stayed in. (Pictures to follow.)
• There is complimentary internet, and I have access to both my email and my webpage.

Bad news:

• A lot of the webpages I frequent are blocked. Facebook, youtube, twitter, bloglovin, blogspot… So surfing the internet is kind of a limited experience.
• I am trying to think that I am on holiday and all is fine and dandy, but I feel such sadness in my heart for the poor people in Japan who are affected by the recent affairs. I very rarely cry over a country, but I my heart feels heavy for Japan.

I think we all need a break if we can manage to have one though, and I am lucky enough to get such a break right now. So I will try to enjoy my week in Shanghai. (Before I return to Tokyo.) Now that I know my computer is working from here, I can even blog. However, if you are friends with me on facebook (or any other place) I am not sure I will bother trying to access the pages by proxy. Maybe living facebook-free for a week will be a nice experience. I am available through sushibird.com and also via email for the ones who know me.

In general terms though, and I am very sorry if I offend any Chinese people (or China-loving people) that might read this, but I really do not think China is my cup of tea the same way that Japan is. That being said, I have only been here for a day. And that being said, I have other friends who LOVE China and have minimal interest in Japan, so I guess the taste differs a lot from person to person. I am not trying to say China is not nice, because it is, it is just very different than what I am used to. I know that people who are not that interested in Asia think that all East Asian countries are similar, but oh my god, the differences! (For me it would be to compare say… Norway and Spain?) I will make a separate post about the differences between Japan and China when I have actually been here a bit longer. So far, people here are kind of loud and have no sense of the 30 cm of personal space I am used to, and they stare. I thought I was not going to be stared at having dark hair at all, but I guess the foreigner-factor still counts for me, despite my dair hair.

But all is well and dandy in Lala-land, and now I am going out to take some pictures and eat some food and try to forget about the rest of the world.

I haven’t mentioned this on the blog yet, because I was a bit preoccupied with the earthquake and the crisis Japan is in at the moment (plus, I needed to get my visa), but I am leaving for China tomorrow. I am not leaving because I am trying to escape from Japan, this trip has been planned for a long time way before the earthquake hit. It is a one week vacation to Shanghai. I think I have figured out how to get to Narita airport with the train situation being the way it is. So – I might not be able to update the blog for the next week since I will be in Shanghai, and I have no idea what webpages might be blocked in China. So basically – if you do not see any updates here for the next week it does not mean that I have been harmed or hurt, it probably just means that I made it to China ok!

Again, I am not leaving because I want to get out of Japan, things here are, as I have mentioned earlier, quite ok in Tokyo. I just spoke to my school today, classes will start as normal in the beginning of April. Everything is fine with me, there is no need to worry. I will try to update from China, but I am not sure yet about what time and availability there will be to the internet.

Hope you are all doing ok, and sending some good thoughts to the parts of Japan which are affected by the current situation.

They say it is no food in the stores, yet look at the food I am eating. The media is really trying to paint a completely different picture than what is going on for most people. The picture above was my breakfast yesterday.