McDeception

I personally try to avoid McDonalds as much as possible but in China sometimes they are the most convenient because open 24 hours and almost in every station or large street.

So when we got early at Shenzhen North Station for a short trip to Guangzhou we went there for breakfast because with KFC these were basically the only two eating places open early and with more choices than just a couple of suspicious looking foods.

But I always forget McD has been the first and still the “best” at making food very different from the advertised picture!!

So I went for a breakfast dish looking like this:

….and got this:

Slightly less appealing and much weirder looking!

But what should I expect? My bad!

Birthday teppan yaki

Best way to celebrate my birthday has Ben going to my favorite teppan yaki buffet restaurant, called TaiRyu or DaYu (Japanese and Chinese name respectively).

Being a fixed price eat and drink as much as you want buffet it’s good to spend some time and enjoy a little bit if everything Japanese, from sashimi to good garlic beef to different kind of fish all made on the iron plate (except the raw fish of course)… washed down with Kirin beer and sake or many different kinds of juice…

So 潘蕾 and I enjoyed a long receipt of assorted foods:

Recovery from hell

10 days ago, one morning, when trying to read my email from the laptop, Windows stop loading properly but got stuck on the logo page. After checking and trying I figured out that the hard disk had been suffering a breakdown: even mounted as secondary on a working pc (got plenty, it has been the main part of my job in the past months to fix hardware) I could not “see” it.

Using some hard disk recovery application (HDD Regenerator, from a recovery disk my dad made for me) I could detect tons on bad sectors in the first partitions of the hard disk, probably exactly in the boot sectors.. No tool I tried was able to do more than just tell me the problem, so I resort to take a trip to the famous electronic city here in Shenzhen.

Located in and around 华强北路, North (běi) Huáqiáng street, close to SEG building (Futian district), the Shenzhen electronic market is really the paradise for electronics, both real and of course fake gadgets. Besides the products that when original are more convenient in Hong Kong, the market here offers also a full set of electronics related services, spacing from buying components (capacitors, LED, transistors, transformers, the whole lot!) to repair of any electronic devices, either the full system (PC, printers, etc.) or just parts, like mother boards, power supplies or, in my case, hard disks.. both repair or data recovery.

..counting the money well earned and that I was almost happy to pay to recover my data..

For data recovery, here they use some basic tools based on PC-3000, a Russian system able to perform miracles from time to time.. but of not so easy use (manuals are in Russian and Chinese.. we had a previous version at work, but with missing certifies and of course no more any engineer able to use it!).

But the guy at the specialized shop saw at once that the data were recoverable even if it was not possible to repair the hard disk, so I invested in a new shiny external hard disk of 1 Terabyte, and in the extraction/recovery job.. it was not cheap, but at least I could recover several GBytes of pictures I did not have any recent backup!

Next time in Hong Kong I will buy a new laptop hard disk (cheaper and of better quality than here, for sure no fake!) and then recover completely my laptop.

FUNNY THING OF THE DAY – As said, the electronic city is wonderful for mobile phone copies, as the new Samsung S4 copy a friend purchased (and I will as well soon), but when we checked it out we noticed that the default keyboard had a slighlty little problem: one letter was missing!!! Typical China!!

something’s missing.. something’s double.. guess what!

Street performers in Futian

I spent my first Sunday in the south by walking around in Futian district, 福田区, Shenzhen center.

Wandering around I ended up in a park close to Yitian subway stop, at the end/beginning of the line that connects to my present home, Longgang.

There was a group of middle age men, all wearing a red t-shirt that started, in a small square inside the park, to perform with the diabolo and other juggling instrument, including also using a whip or two at the same time and making movements very similar to Taiji movements.

After what looked like a warming up the set up for the real show, and the result was really cool, given also the special part with the tiaiji/kungfu sword exercise!

Really beautiful!!

Unfortunately

i can’t even upload on flickr these days.. In the south internet is even worse (more controlled ) than in Hefei, and I have experienced lots of weird behavior in ways not encountered before.

FUNNY THING OF THE DAY – Also in the south my bad luck is following me very close, as usual. So then, walking around and enjoying the landscape I did not see that the pavement was broken and I twisted again my right ankle. It happened 20 meters after I passed a Starbucks, so I decided to go back there, get an ice macchiato and.. let my ankle enjoying it as well: