On thursday I had dinner with a few people in Shanghai, which transformed into a rather late excursion to the before-mentioned Bonbons and a fairly late (early) return home. Friday was my last day at the company, so it was fortunatly rather light on the work front - trying to get some last bits of data and looking around the place a final time.
In the afternoon Prof. Ma returned me to Puxi via his daughters work, they invited me to dinner on Sunday chez Ma, whch is very close to the university - with the promise of Baijiu, the chinese national spirit.
Saturday was the real beginning: went into town to meet a friend for breakfast, and had my first experience of People's Square as a lone foreigner - totally different! I'd heard about this scam where a group of young female students 'befriend' you saying they want to practice their english, then take you to some teahouse where you end up getting charged a massivly inflated bill for a few cups of tea - as well as reading it on the internet, my friend Neil warned me about it: he'd been scammed for 400 RMB on the first day (they tried to take 1000!).
It hadn't happened to me yet but I wasn't surprised, I obviously don't look like the kind of guy that would fall for a scam. Or perhaps I do. Within 20 minutes of arriving (got in half an hour early due to mistiming busses!) it'd been tried on me twice. It really is very cleaver, but of course forwarned is forarmed and I got rid of them. When I came back hours later one pair were still there - apparently they'd 'got lost' and asked me for some directions!
That afternoon (to my eternal shame I forgot my camera for the whole weekend so have no photos of any of this) I met up with more friends - James and Ziyang from my course in Cambridge and a few of their friends, and went to KTV! KTV is karioke, but its massivly popular here, occupying about the same cultural space as going out for drinks. You get a room with the karioke stuff, order foor and drinks, and sing away to each other for several hour, and its as much fun as it sounds, although the only english songs they have are dodgy britney covers and the omnipresent Backstreet Boys (the supermarket near where I lived in Pudong played the BB greatest hits album on loop - but frustratingly didn't have a dance floor!).
Afterwards we went to a Guangzhou restaurent (Guangzhou (formerly Canton) is in the south of China near Hong Kong, and its people are famous for eating almot anything. There was a recent field mouse epidemic in central china where 2,000,000,000 field mice chomped through thousands of acres of cropland, but the farmers were able to make up their losses by exporting live mice to Guangzhou instead). We ate donkey and rabbit among other things and it was all rather tasty!
Afterwards I nipped briefly home to change and shower and make a rapid turnaround, before heading back into town to visit Attica, one of Shanghai's most famous scenes. It's on the roof of one of the buildings of the Bund (by this stage the loss of a camera was really getting to me!) and priced accordingly. It had two really nice rooms and a lovely outdoor bar area, and the clientelle were slightly more resectable than those in bonbons. We knew a few people there (someone in the Taiwanese mafia allegedly?!) and chatted and danced until about 4am. Clubbing here seems much less down-all-you-can-and-act-stupid oriented, although that may be because the people who I go out with don't drink that much, but it's actually much more fun and much less expensive. We also met lots more people, my Shanghai circle is growing!
Since we left at 4.30am and dragonboating starts at 8, I'd made the prior decision not to return home, and brought a bag with me to the club. The one weakness of Attica is that the cloakroom ONLY takes coats - we argued this one for a bit, and despite my bag containing nothing valuble the assisstant wouldn't give in, luckily it wasn't a bulky sports bag or anything and despite looking slightly metro, it wasn't so bad.
Crossed the city early in the morning and saw some interesting sights (camera loss now chaffing). McDonalds is open 24/7 near the bund, but the only people actually eating were a few groups of foreign lads clearly just out of a club too. However, most of the tables were occupied by sleeping locals - literally just head down on the tables like those funny mushroom people in Voyage of the Dawn Treader! Another open square was covered in homeless - so many here.
The subway is shut from 10.30pm - 6am which really makes me appreciate London's 1.00am-ish, although I wish more cities would follow NY's 24h example! Got to the DB pickup at about 6.45 and dozed by a wall for a bit until 8, then dozed a bit more on the coach. We had about 40 people this week: enough for two boats and races!
It was by far the hottest day so far and with no cloud cover. I borrowed some sun cream but it wasn't as good as my factor 40 stuff and rapidly washed off in the spashing. Despite the races being great fun, I knew it was just a matter of time until the strawberry look arrived!
I was meeting up with some more friends afterwards to explore Shanghai further and we popped down to a temple called Yu Yuan Temple, a former temple of Taoism and now a shopping mall and tourist area (the buildings are preserved and it's very pretty), with a little bit of temple left and some god statues that you can go and bow to if you're into that stuff (I and my guides of course were) and we were there for a while as the morning's sun turned into a heavy downpour outside.
We wondered the backstreets of Shanghai towards the bund and stopped for tea in a teashop (a very reasonable 2 RMB / cup, although my guides, who don't speak the loca Shanghai dialect, could only point and gesture, a great equalising experience!), and came to the far end of the bund. Got a ferry across (another 2 RMB!) and wandered Pudong breifly before I had to head back to my apartment for that night's dinner!
Evening came and I was picked up by the professor and headed to his. We had lots and lots of dishes (off the top of my head; peanut chicken, steamed fish, braised beef, a kind of local shellfish, several vegetables, fruit, left VERY full!) all of which were most tasty, and the promised maotai - the best brand of baijiu. It is about 56% alcohol, but much tastier than vodka, and between us I and the professor had the better part of a (small!) bottle. At this stage I was slightly concerned about how I would get home, but fortunatly Mrs. Ma (also a teacher at Shanghai Daxue) said she'd take me home!
Haven't been up to much besides work since, except to say that:
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Real* Tea! I was like a heroin addict drinking this. And yes, despite being packaged in the UK, all the ingredients are individually chinese!
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