The eggtray decorations (with Isaac, Chong and Bron)

Why pay for expensive paintings or photographs with which to decorate your bar when you could instead affix empty eggshell cartons to the wall.  Or maybe a little polystyrene packaging.  This in keeping with the bar pump “just for show” and the world’s wonkiest darts.  But since this was the only bar available to us on the resort of Sun Island (“The only natural island in Shanghai”) we had little choice.  Until 10pm when they decided to close.

Mao Pagoda on Sun Island – acting as a lighthouse in the river

Isaac, Chong, me and Bron by the Mao Pagoda (thanks, auto-timer on camera)

Sun Island is about an hour to the West of Shanghai, and lies in the middle of Huangpu River.  A retreat sort of place, with golf, go-karting, horse riding, spas, etc, at the visitors’ disposal.  We didn’t know we were going there until lunchtime on Saturday when Chong suggested it as a random thing to do on a Saturday in (near) Shanghai.  So yet more hot springs, a bit of swimming and an adventure challenge called “Find anywhere on the island to have a drink after 10pm”.   Another excellent, relaxing weekend away from central Shanghai (although hailing from Ireland, Isaac understandably took some cheering up after attending the Blarney Stone’s closing party the night before – one of Shanghai’s best “local” type bars is to be replaced with yet another Italian restaurant).

Today (Sunday) I’ve spent a few hours playing guitar whilst a German bloke sang.  One of these encounters that could have been horrendous, ending after a 5 minute creative nadir, but instead ended with a few songs taking shape*.  And since The Rolling Stones are (somehow) still going strong, this means I’m not too old to be in a band.  For the record – if a bloke called Felix suddenly starts releasing songs on iTunes and they sound like compositions I’ve been forcing Bronwen to listen to for the last few years, I hereby declare the songs (but not the lyrics) were composed by me.

Other than the weekend, a fairly quiet week for us.  Although somewhat unfair that Bronwen’s trip out of the office on Wednesday was to a building literally 2 minutes from where we live, whilst my trip on Thursday was to the Argos warehouse in the middle of nowhere until 11pm.  Nowt like a warehouse near midnight.

*Jude – this is what you avoided by escaping back to Canada!