..Miss Brightside..

+ SHELTER

After descending down the steep stairs and dropping off your 50RMB, a dark tunnel will lead you to one of the only true alternative nightclubs in Shanghai… The crowd can be quite hit or miss depending on what night you go (one night it will be dead and the night after it will be rammed with sweaty people!) but guaranteed is a night of much-needed good music to lose yourself in.

On Saturday nights when it’s rammed, you might do best to seek refuge in the tube-like backroom, where there’s plenty of sofas to sink into. The drinks are pretty cheap too and service doesn’t take that long, but one word of warning - as with many places in China, toilet roll is scarce so bring your own!



+ M2

This club is a superficial twenty-something’s dream –> expensive drinks, heaps of painfully hip young professionals strutting their stuff, lots of booths and tables where you can pay for the privilege of sitting at. The ‘dancefloor’ is more like a walkway and there’s no space to stand, and yet or some reason I find myself here every weekend!

Music-wise, think Beyonce, Black Eyed Peas and your typical run of the mill American pop. On my first proper night in Shanghai I was taken to this club, I expected all the clubs to play chinese music and yet everything about this place just reminded me of a club back home!

+ Logo Bar

It’s sometimes tricky for me to remember this place’s address to tell the taxi driver, but if in any doubt, follow the smell of weed! Away from the bubblegum pop overload of other Shanghai nightclubs, this place will feel like heaven - if the music isn’t intense electronica that you just can’t stop dancing to, it will be a chilled out dj set playing music perhaps more suited to jamming to in a bedroom lol. The sangrias are a steal at 20RMB, as is a big beer jug of Tiger beer.

In my opinion this is where some of the nicest people I’ve met go, it has a great vibe about it. I love how on one side of the bar you have table football, and on the other a dancefloor with a DJ platform. The graffiti and doodles on the wall provide this place with a stripped down, who-gives-a-shit atmosphere, and I like how you have to go through a padded punishment-chamber style door to reach the unisex toilets (which have a pugnant smell akin to punishment!). I would love this place that little bit more if they had seats that didn’t bruise your arse-cheeks, but I guess it’s just more of a reason to get up on the dancefloor!

+ Bar Rouge

Hmm.. a fave with travellers and French expats, this club is as far away from my preconceptions of Shanghai as possible. Even though the music playlist is quite often predictable chart fodder, the 100RMB is worthwhile just so that you can chill out on the terrace and gaze at the gorgeous nighttime view of Pudong - bring your camera! While a lot of the people who frequent this place scream pretentiousness, you are guaranteed to enjoy your night here - the first time I came here I was endlessly entertained by this guy who seemed to be having some kind of acid trip, he was jumping on the speakers trying to drum the beat of the song against the ceiling! Drinks are pretty expensive so best to go with a big group and share the cost of a large bottle of vodka.

If you haven’t been to this festival yet I urge you to buy some tickets for next year’s. Despite sleeping in a waterlogged tent (due to a combination of a cheap tent and one night of intense rain!), each morning I woke up eager to explore as much of the festival as possible. Camped out in the furthest away field, Dragon’s Field, our nights could be spent chilling out at Stone Circle surrounded by an array of people crouching around the stones and various bonfires and lit candles.

Funnily enough, my favourite photos aren’t of the bands that I went to see, but of the Worthy Farm Site itself. Below is a selection of my favourite snaps.

The amazing Wednesday sunset near Brothers Bar, Glastonbury.

An attempt to eradicate the puddles of mud.

I decided to take a cheeky snap of some men in very basic toilet cubicles!

Aerial view from the tower near the Park Stage.

Decorative rubbish bins and a jeep given a hippy makeover.

Despite my initial apprehension to Jay-Z’s headliner status, seeing him live was one of the most awesome moments of the whole experience. His flawless delivery of a string of tracks has helped him gain an even bigger fanbase… next year though I hope an act along the lines of Radiohead or Björk get signed up for the prestigious Saturday night slot at the Pyramid

Before I came out to China, I made a list of some of my main concerns.. after all moving to a place where you dont know the language, know absolutely nobody and have barely any money, there’s bound to be a few! I read through them again the other day, and it was funny to see how clueless i was about moving out here. Below are some of main concerns and what I think about them now:

+ My job is 100% commission-based (although half my rent is paid for).. will I be stranded in China without any money?!

I moved to China while in my overdraft, and with no idea when my first wages would be paid. In my line of work, particularly due to paperwork etc, you do not get paid until at least two or three weeks after you earn it. It was only the other week that something was put into my bank account! When I look back on it now, I realise I knew I would not have enough to survive, but thankfully I have parents who were happy to deposit more money when I needed it… at the time though I was adamant I would not ask for any handouts and could handle whatever China threw at me. Now I realise I was perhaps too head-strong for my own good! But if I had thought logically and been less rash, i would not have had the amazing experience that I’ve had so far… sometimes you need to just bite the bullet and do something, rather than endlessly putting it off for a more convenient time.

+ I have a great set of friends at home, will I find people who match up to them?

Moving away from everyone I’m close to and who care about me is something I don’t think many people are willing to do. When I first got here, most of the people I was hanging out with people from work, and it was quite difficult to strike up friendships with anyone else! The problem with the expat lifestyle is that you meet so many cool people all the time, but everyone has such limited free time it might be a month before you get a chance to meet up for a drink! Thankfully, I specifically chose to live with other english-speaking young professionals, and before you know it you introduce each other to your friends and then you are able to form a great network of people to rely on. It is only though friends of friends of friends that you then are able to source out people who you can strike up good bonds with, and I’m happy to say that from just a few months here in Shanghai I know I have met some great people who I will definitely keep in touch with. Even better, having so many international friends means there’s so many places in the world I can now visit and have a personal tour guide for

+ How am I going to cope with the difference in food?? It’s such a big part of our social lives, our health etc, and I have no real idea what to encounter!

It was a big concern to me that my favourite foods, such as kettle chips, good chocolate and of course a good English pub lunch would be really hard to get hold of. I seriously thought that the majority of what I would be eating in Shanghai would be egg noodles and stir-fries.. Funnily enough, the apartment I rent doesn’t actually have an oven so most of the food I make is with a frying pan, but the food situation out here is sooo much more. Firstly, there is literally any kind of food your heart desires - Sherpa’s home delivery service allows you to order in meals from the top restaurants in Shanghai, and even Macdonald’s deliver to you! When it comes to homely treats such as good chocolate and Western brands, there are plenty of Western supermarkets to cater to you… as long as you’re happy to be seriously overcharged!

Ever since I can remember I have had a bowl of cereal in the morning, but here in Shanghai the decent cereals are twice the price as back home, and I cannot justify spending 70RMB on a box of weetabix when I could potentially buy 70 steamed buns off a hole-in-the-wall vendor for that price! And of course one of the issues is the milk here… You can get milk imported from New Zealand which is nice, but the majority of stuff is full-cream milk and a lot of it has this indescribable taste that i can’t put my finger on - to be honest when I heard about the melamine scandal of Chinese milk it just re-asserted my uneasiness about buying it. I miss it so much I have already planned to drink a gallon of good English milk the second I touch down to London Heathrow!

+ Culture shock - I have never been anywhere so foreign, will I be able to settle in there, despite my severe lack of Mandarin knowledge!?

The second I got off the plane in Beijing, it was such a relief to see English translations in the airport. Part of me was sincerely worried that i would not be able to work out how to negotiate customs and immigration! I feel very lucky that the majority of road names are also translated into pinyin so I can at least find my way around. I work with Westerners, and all my friends speak English, so it has made it much less of a necessity for me to learn the language. Despite this, i feel absolutely hypocritical that i haven’t learned barely any mandarin and still have problems pronouncing basic phrases such as left, right or  straight ahead to the taxi driver! I would like to be proficient enough in the language so that I can communicate with the locals.

A while ago my door was jammed/locked and I couldn’t back into my apartment.. it was after midnight and I was absolutely exhausted.. I went downstairs to the service guys and tried to express to them by waving my key frantically that i couldn’t get in! they finally got the hint and phoned a locksmith, but it was only thanks to a fellow resident that the issue was resolved (he spoke English so I was able to sort out payment and organise a time for the locksmith to return etc). Overall, the culture shock with regards to language is quite easy to get used to, I’ve learned to just accept I can’t understand the shop names and have no idea what the people standing next to me in the metro are chatting about… it’s funny because I think when i get home it will feel like information overload as I’ll be able to understand everyone and read all the signs, and don’t even get me started about being able to read a good magazine!

Despite all my concerns, I feel like being able to overcome the issues of living here has actually made for a better experience. If anything, I get angry when locals try to speak to me in English, or if I walk down a road and spot loads of westerners.. it’s a great feeling to be isolated from the majority of things I am used to and still manage to survive and enjoy my time!

Alesha Dixon of Mis-Teeq fame’s documentary about the perils of retouching in the media and its influence on contemporary perceptions of beauty aired as part of BBC3’s Beauty Season this Monday. Her persistence in investigating the increasingly narrow ‘acceptable’ norms of ideal female beauty highlighted just how artificial the images we see every day the media are. Declaring it as her ‘mission’ to convince a glossy magazine to put her on the cover without a single Photoshop trick, I couldn’t help thinking that discussion of female beauty needs a ruthless debate that exceeds Alesha’s focus on the industry’s airbrushing of pimples and skimming of thighs and bingo arms. Take a look at most television shows and magazines and you will see a wave of identikit female presenters and models who are often hard to distinguish between.

How many TV shows aimed at young women can you think of that are hosted by women size12+ and that challenge conventional norms of beauty? The females in the public eye that appear to excel in their careers are mostly blonde-haired, waif-like and do very little to represent more than 5% of the female population… While documentaries such as Look But Don’t Touch should be commended in their exploration of representations of female beauty, there are several points about the show that reveal the British audience are once again crying out for a show that truly delves into this issue. Cheryl Cole, the stick-thin Girls Aloud member (who, it must be mentioned, seems to have gained an exponential amount of tabloid inches in proportion to the number of inches her waist shrinks to) was interviewed by Alesha about the unrealistic expectations that the media places on young girls. Stuart Jeffries, on the Guardian’s TV & Radio Blog, remarked that:

Yesterday, incidentally, Cole topped a poll by a slimming-aid firm to find Britain’s “ultimate fantasy body”.

Surely I’m not alone in finding the documentary rather hypocritical in choosing the very stunning Cheryl to voice her concerns over the perils of airbrushing in adverts?! Firstly, the camera quite clearly captures Cheryl as a flawless beauty whose tiny frame quite evidently fails to represent an average teenage woman’s body?

Time and time again it appears that the majority of men surveyed in various questionnaires about the ideal woman favour curvier women over the boyish frames of supermodels and the like. It is interesting then that women nevertheless feel that to be attractive and sexy they must undergo a never-ending battle to lose weight and tone themselves to perfection… I am not damning skinny women seeing as I myself am a size 8, but it’s becoming more and more apparent to me that the real reason women such as Victoria Beckham are (seemingly) adored by young females is because of the power that becoming skinny has endowed upon such public figures. When in the Spice Girls Victoria Beckham was arguably never the centre of attention, but the second she bagged a famous footballer and her body started to shrink she was worshipped by the tabloids.

Can our society’s ideals of female beauty ever shift back to some degree of normality? Liz Jones, ex-editor of a glossy fashion magazine, ended up having to leave her job because of her attempt to inject some normality into magazine covers again.

When did you last see someone bright on the cover of a magazine? When did you last see Zadie Smith on a magazine? [...] They’re all vacuous and vacant.

If the publishing companies in charge of women’s magazines are so desperate to maintain high sales figures, why are they continually attempting to sell a product which on the whole results in lowering the inner happiness and satisfaction of its impressionable young female readers? It intrigues me to think that those in charge won’t attempt to market a product that holistically promotes well-being in its readers and embraces the reality of women’s bodies. Sadly, maybe it’s because most young women truly buy into the idea that the answer to a successful life (both professionally and privately) lies in trying to fit into a very narrow set of parameters of beauty.

This is quite possibly the fifth time since the beginning of Miss Brightside that I have had to start all over from scratch due to my ineptness as a ‘webmistress’. This time, I have taken it as an opportunity to rethink exactly what i want to use this domain for. Since its creation in 2005, I have had sooo many high hopes for it, but unfortunately have let it slip and never bothered doing much of note with it.

Now I am living miles away in Shanghai, China, I figured what better time to get the site up and running again… partly because I now have some (perhaps) interesting topics to blog about.

The site is going to be my outlet for everyday musings on absolutely anything. Hopefully within the next few weeks I will start to upload my old articles and some fresh, new, content inspired by my time in Shanghai!

It’s exciting because I have way too many ideas - all i need is to actually give myself the time to write them down. Ever since I first attempted to broadcast my writings on the net (god knows what kind of crap I wrote at eleven years old thats floating in the web right now!) I have tried to think as far outside of the box as possible… wish me luck!