Tales of City

The Ministry of Railways decides to slow down the high speed trains after about half month of the train crash on 7.23. The proposal is to decrease 50km/h from the current 350/300/250 km/h designed speed, and the 200km/h train will slow down to 160km/h. Accordingly, the ticket price will decrease.

The new railway operation chart is still under compiling, and railway stations have stopped selling all high speed train ticket after Aug. 15. In the meantime, the State Council is going to check the safety of all high speed railways and the projects under construction.

In the past several years, China has accelerated the train speed for 6 times. It is the first time to slow down the train speed after it rushed for the world record highest speed for several times.

Hope the high speed train can be safe. Hope it is a good start for China to correct its blind development.

Usually we can see peddlers selling different food on the street.  I still remember one of my manager said that he may buy baked sweet potato, but never eat it on the street because he don’t want his acquaintance seeing that. He concerned about his public impression. Except the public appearance, will you buy and eat street food?

I can see people laughing, talking and eating before the tables of the street food everyday. I have to say that those food tastes really delicious and I like this kind of life style.

For me, I don’t say no to the street food and ever have them as breakfast and supper, but I eat street food less and less in recent years. What I worry about is the healthy problem. I don’t know whether the raw material itself is safe. I don’t know whether the food is cooking under a safe condition. I also worry about the sanitary condition which is really a problem on the street.

As promised in my previous blog 2010 Average Monthly Wage in Shanghai is 3896 RMB, I will describe and demo here how the social security fund calculated in Shanghai. Be noticed that the methodology may be the same in other cities, but the proportion may be different.

In Shanghai, the social security funds are divided to 5 items, including pension, medicare, unemployment insurance, maternity insurance and employment injury insurance. Besides, housing fund is also mandatory. All of these is called Insurance and Housing Fund in China (五险一金, five insurance and one fund). Read full story…

Xujiahui is one of the places that you must go in Shanghai. Do you know the origin of Xujiahui? Here is what I learned today.

In the late of Ming Dynasty, Xu Guangqi, the director of the Imperial Library, built farm and performed agriculture experiments in this area, and then it grew to a town. As Zhaojiabang (肇嘉浜) river and Fahuajing (法华泾) river conjunct here, the town was named as Xujiahui (徐家汇). In Chinese, the first two words (徐家) mean Xu’s family, the last word (汇) means conjunction of rivers.
Read full story…

Last Saturday, I visited Pudong Kerry Parkside for the first time. Pudong Kerry Parkside is right located at Huamu road station of metro line 7. The transportation here is very convenient.  If you take Maglev train or metro line 2, you can interchange to metro line 7 (direction to Huamu road station) at Longyang road station.  When arriving at the terminal station Huamu road, you can directly get out from the No. 5 exit of the station and reach the building through underpass.

 Direction board outside the No.5 exit Read full story…