Shanghai Adventures

Alex, Nicola and I have been relocated to Shanghai from Nanjing to work on the film’s character design and model pack more closely with the Shanghai animators who are helping. An early start at 6am saw us up and getting ready to head to the train station. Each of us packed enough to almost fill the suitcases we moved to China with…then we met Warren outside our apartment equipped with one small rucksack and a small sports bag…well he’s a man, of course he won’t take as much…but then we met everyone else and they had the same if not less than Warren. Embarrassed. The lame westerners need all their stuff.

 We arrived in Shanghai at around 10am and made our way straight to the animation studio where we grabbed some lunch and then remained in the studio kinda doing not much until 8pm or so. Warren had spent his whole day house hunting for us and when he found somewhere he had to go get bedding and stuff. Busy day for him.

I needed a new desktop picture...so I drew Nayi.

 We were taken to our new house around 8pm. I couldn’t understand why everyone was saying ‘House’, ‘House’ surely there are no houses in China! Not in the major cities anyway. It turns out it’s an apartment but a massive one with 2 floors and loads of rooms, so it really is a house, a house on the sixth floor of an apartment block.

 Downstairs there are 3 larger bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom and upstairs there are 3 very small rooms with no windows and a smaller bathroom. The Chinese kindly let us have the downstairs, so I guess we can be with each other and they can be with each other but it’s completely unfair on them! I’m living in the biggest room in the house with 2 beds (one mattress) and loads of space, while Warren and Jack are sharing a small room with 2 mattresses on the floor. I tried to offer to sway but there hospitality won out. Hopefully they will ask me to swap soon, cause 2 months in that little room will be a nightmare for them!

 Alex and Nicola have the misfortune of not have mattresses, but instead wooden slats with a thin spongy blanket over the top, I fell really bad for them, if I’d have had to sleep on that I think I would’ve broken down in tears right on the spot! I’m spoiled…with my mattress rich life I’ve led!

 When we were here last back in December for 2 /3 days, we thought that the place where the studio is was completely abandoned. It’s in a place called a Technology Park, like the one in Belfast next to the docks. A massive place of nothing but offices and random companies and building work and when we returned here we wondered how we were going to eat and live in such a place but if you glance down the side roads, it turns out there’s lots of places to eat, just like in Nanjing…almost.

 There are some perks of being in Shanghai. Number one is the number one room. There is an actual toilet here, on you can sit down on and it has a door and everything AND there is soap in the bathroom too! One shop we went into sells KitKats, which is cool, even though it’s smaller that the normal KitKat. Living it up in Shanghai. More perks yet to be discovered.