So I discovered the other day that I’m a bit of a Bowie fan, which came as a surprise. A friend lent me the T.V. series Life on Mars which is ok as TV series go but one thing that did strike me was how good the title track is. The title track is, not surprisingly, Life on Mars by Bowie which I don’t think I’d heard before. The show featured some other tracks which were good, Jean Genie is the only one I remember as it was, for reasons that aren’t worth explaining, mentioned in the show. So on the basis of this and memories of liking the one about the space man and the one he did with Queen I decided that it was probably worth a bit of a look. Especially given the fact that I live in a new-music-inspiration-starved vacuum (wow, there are two u’s in vacuum, who knew?).

As a new-music-inspiration-starved-vacuum (we’re going to run out of u’s at this rate) aside, more people using last.fm and adding me as a friend would help, go do it now. I did buy a Ladytron album on the basis of a song cropping up on neighbour radio, the album has lasted longer on the iPod than I expected at first listen. As a further aside I did think until the other night that me and my last.fm neighbour might be the only people who’d heard of Ladytron until a song cropped on the internet radio station that is played in a bar I frequent (being a bit vague here as I’m not sure if this is legit) the other night.

Any hu. So I decided I was going to lay my hands on a Bowie ‘best of’ which brings up the next music and China problem, the selection of legit CD’s (and for that matter non-legit ones) on sale is limited to Chinese music and the few foreign bands that somehow inexplicably seem to get some kind of following here, an odd collection including Backstreet boys, Avril Lavigne, Linkin Park. I actually found Fort Minor: The Rising Tied, the solo project of Linkin Park front man Mike Shinoda in my local super market of all places.

And so to the point of the post, I bought the best of album off iTunes and am not 100% comfortable with that. I like owning CDs, I like looking at them, browsing them for inspiration. I’m also fairly convinced that paying the same price for music electronically as I used to pay for a CD and getting less functionality is kinda wrong but I seem to be slipping into it through a lack of alternatives.

Thoroughly enjoying the Bowie album by the way.

Last Saturday a group of us walked from Laoheshan in the north west of Hangzhou pretty much all the way around Hangzhou to get to Wushan Square in the South. The route is a hilly course, to say the least. The ‘8 hour’ route we were following is described here (In Chinese, 线路九). I’ve mapped the route (fairly approximately) on MapMyRun here, you’ll need to switch it to satellite view for it to make any sense.

It was a totally amazing day, we set off slightly later than planned at 09:00 and made good progress over the first few peaks to North Peak in about 1.5 hours and stopped for a snack there. From North Peak we went over the next couple of hills heading south making ok but not great time on what was always going to be the toughest part of the course in terms of terrain. At this point we had to do our first frustrating drop all the way down to road level and then all the way back up to the ridge that boarders Longjing to the west. We arrived at Longjing about 4 hours in and took our time over a lunch of sandwiches, TimTams and strawberries sheltering in a tea field from the wind. We were engaged by a couple passers by during lunch the most memorable of which was a gentleman who seemed positively irked by the fact we were having a lunch of sandwiches at the top of a hill. He told us in no uncertain terms that this was just wrong and we should be eating in a restaurant. Excuse me but sandwiches at the top of the hill are the best thing about hiking.

From Longjing we headed south all the way down the ridge to Nine Creeks. We arrived at Nine Creeks about six hours in and stopped for a rest and most of the remainder of the food before heading up to Huapo Houshan. Here we were accosted by a local who, seeing us looking at the map was eager to lend a hand. “Where are you trying to get to?” she asked, “Wushan, how do we get there?” we replied. “By car” she said, slightly missing the point.

By the time we came down into Hupao itself it we were starting to lose the light. Unperturbed we headed off up Yuhuang Shan only to get completely turned about on this Escher painting of a hill. We came down the other side finally in complete darkness, or as complete as darkness gets this close to such a large city.

One last slog over a few more fairly low peaks and we were down on to Wansongling Lu. From here it was a quick hop, or would have been for fresher legs, over Wushan into the square. We arrived finally in the square at 20:00, eleven hours after setting off and piled straight into taxis to Maya Bar.

Hungry, thirsty and weary like I’ve not been in a long time we ate peanuts, nachos, chips and burritos in Maya before the days exertions and few beers finally took their toll and we staggered off home to bed exhausted but victorious.

Most of the day was a bit fuggy for photos but what I did get are on Flickr here.

Cult of Mac has a piece today quoting In-stat claiming that apparently there are 400,000 rogue iPhones on the China Mobile network (iPhones are not currently legitimately available in China). I find this very easy to believe, I personally know 3 people on China Mobile with iPhones and the demand clearly runs far, far greater than that. During spring festival in ‘hometown’ D’s cousin ‘little brother’ was beside himself to learn that you can get iPhones in Hangzhou and has been in touch several times since for more info.

As the Cult of Mac piece points out, what exactly is Apple gaining from this strategy of going with one network in each market, which is presumably what’s slowing their entry? I for one would have probably bought one if they’d been available in China a few months ago. Instead I bought a Nokia N95 which is easily replacing my old Nokia 6230 as best phone I’ve ever owned. The iPhone is very cool, I’ve played with one, a rogue one at that, but aside from oozing cool there wasn’t anything that made me want to switch from my N95 now.

To-date Hangzhou’s delivery food options have been limited to PizzaHut online, a couple of restaurants where if you were lucky and were prepared to pay their return taxi costs or the local Chinese place if you could bludgeon your way through the language barrier.

Not now though, the much hyped Sherpas is now here. We’ve just had our first experiment with it and it worked a treat. Called the hotline, all in English, ordered Curry Bistro ‘by the numbers’, they quoted an hour and fifteen minutes and it came in just under an hour, piping hot.

The restaurant list is limited for now but I, for one, am excited.

So we woke up this morning once again to snow, only a light dusting though, for now (it’s still snowing). Miss Leaf tells me that it’s not a problem because it’s not big snow. Whatever that means.

For those of you that missed it, no sooner had I posted about how the sky had finally stopped falling than things got dramatically worse. A huge snow storm hit which closed airports, highways and delayed trains across southern China. I reckon here in Hangzhou we had about 20 centimetres in a 24 hour period Fri-Sat.
It was interesting over the weekend with taxis and buses more or less unavailable. I should say the roads were open in the city it was just that there weren’t any taxis to be found and the buses came when they could. So with public transport more or less not an option I walked most places. I had a couple of assisted journeys where a bus got me part of the way there or I found a taxi at the half way point. It was like a weird post-apocalypse-movie-thing where technology didn’t work any more.

There are some photos I snapped over the last week or so in the flickr photostream.

I’m a little bit more interested in the weather today as I’m going to have to step outside my little walkable world of home-office-pub as, of course, we’re off to the outlaws for spring festival assuming big brother (in the non ominous sense of the word) can get here to pick us up. Fortunately I absolved myself of any involvement in the planning of this trip so am happily just a passenger for once. I hope.

On a more serious note, outside of causing me to have to walk to and from the pub the worst weather in decades is causing huge problems across central and southern China. You can apparently make donations at http://www.chineseredcross.org.cn/english/ though I’ve just tried it and the site is down or appears to be.