Not for those afraid of heights…

“But it’s raining!”.  Sorry, it’s going to take more than rain to stop a couple of Brits from climbing the 367 exposed steps to the top of the viewing platform on Lupu Bridge, after walking over an hour to get there.  The second-longest arch bridge in the world, Lupu Bridge spans the Huangpu River due South of where we live, and offers fantastic views of the city.  Or probably would have done were it not raining.  It’s not somewhere you should head for if vertigo (or acrophobia) is an issue, since the steps climb the outside of the arch with not a great deal to separate you from the river (or road) below.

Climbing Lupu Bridge was a bit of an achievement, if only to prove my legs were working once again after playing football on Thursday evening.  For 2 ½ hours.  Well, perhaps a slight exaggeration; 20 of us on a 5-a-side pitch meant plenty of breaks in the 150 minutes we had available, but still more than enough exercise for me seeing as I last played 5-a-side in about 2006.

The Euro 2012 Championships have given us (well, me – Bron chose sleeping as a more preferable alternative) a few late nights this week.  Monday’s England match wasn’t too bad with its midnight kick-off local time, but Friday night’s game – Saturday morning here – was a bit of an effort.  Having kick-off delayed by 15 minutes to 3am was also not ideal.  The England win made it slightly more bearable, but leaving a bar when it’s light outside (when dark upon entry) never feels quite right.  Especially when the old Shanghainese have already appeared to start their morning Tai Chi rituals.  Bed for me at 5.30am as the old folk begin their exercises.

Saturday daytime was largely spent resting (both understandable and acceptable under the circumstances I think!) but we did manage a short walk to explore Dean’s Bottle Shop, and were forced to suffer a couple of pit-stops on the way home (life’s essentials: mango rum blended cocktails and passion fruit mojitos).  I think I’m starting to worry people – it’s not just Prosecco and cocktails though; I did actually buy some real ale from Dean’s well-stocked shop.

Only a couple of nights out this week – on Tuesday night Andrew took Richard and me to an Islamic restaurant near the office.  I’m not sure if in Islamic countries the waitresses dance between the tables with soup bowls on their heads, but they did here.  Camel meat hadn’t been top of my list of foods to try (or to expect) in China but it was on the menu, so appeared on the table: tasted a little like hardened luncheon meat.  The rest of the food was excellent (if less exotic), and probably explained the hour’s wait for a table.
On Friday night, Bron and I met up with Tim and Sarah to visit Bali Laguna, an Indonesian restaurant recommended to us by Rachel.  A venue definitely living up to its billing, with a glorious setting in Jing’An park.  Sat outside in the cooling evening air with the mosquitos mysteriously absent, we had a great evening with superb food, entertaining company and banana based cocktails beer.  Yes, definitely beer.

And certainly one of the highlights of the week was Bronwen’s home-cooked curry on Saturday night (yes, our first Saturday night at home since moving here!).   I love the food here in Shanghai, and you’re certainly never short of varieties/flavours to try, but I haven’t half missed a proper, home cooked spicy curry.  Bloody lovely.

128 boxes were taken away from Olney, and a little over 2 months later, all 128 turned up in Shanghai.  The 6 blokes from Crown (the relocation company), seemed unconcerned at the sheer number of random items being unpacked, despite the bewildered looks from their owners.   It’s indescribably fantastic to finally have a sofa to sit on (no offence to our now abandoned Ikea chairs), but the bread bin, recycling bin and other items that back in March seemed sensible to pack now seem just a little superfluous.

Too much stuff. Far too much stuff.

Still, Thursday was obviously a momentous – if a little stressful – day for us both.  The Crown fellas did an excellent job of lugging everything around and rebuilding desks, beds and other items without any instructions to follow.  The size of the task became apparent early afternoon, at which point the 6 on-site blokes had turned into 10.

So pretty much most of our week has been spent preparing for, receiving and unpacking the shipment from the UK.  From the minimalist feel of the house on Wednesday to a house resembling that of one of the hoarders from Life of Grime on Thursday, our ayi must have been in shock when she arrived on Friday.

Despite living here for over 2 months, we still seem to find something new each time we venture out.  During Saturday’s brief excursion (as a respite from the unpacking) we came across a Belgium beer bar pretty much 2 minutes from the house.  I have no idea how we’d managed to miss it until now.  We’ll be sure to keep popping in just to make sure it’s still there.

On Saturday night we joined Jo and a few others in an Italian restaurant to celebrate her birthday.  Having drank decent beer during Saturday afternoon, I couldn’t face a lager.  So yet again, I was forced to drink Prosecco.  I’m discovering it’s a very manly, bubbly drink.

Our Mandarin lessons are proceeding nicely, but we’re still so far away from engaging in conversation at any meaningful level.  It’s all very well being able to ask “What are you doing at the weekend?”, but if the answer is anything other than “We will go to the library”, or perhaps “We will eat rice” then we’re stumped.

So as I type this, I’m sat on our sofa from Olney, with reminders of England dotted around (Union Jack cushions from Emma & Simon and John & Stella, wooden Union Jack heart decorations from Tim & Kim) and it feels a lot more like home.

Apart from the fact it’s currently 33 degrees.  Never mind melting, I think I’m dissolving.

Not that an excuse was really called for, but a few pints of locally-brewed beer at the Boxing Cat Brewery seemed a fitting way to celebrate our six-year wedding anniversary today.  In addition, Tuesday marks our two month anniversary of living in Shanghai so we felt it appropriate to have an additional pint  to celebrate.

Absinthe and Gin based cocktails for those wedding anniversary moments

This all following last night’s extravagant impromptu cocktail session at the Constellation Bar: never before has walking past a bar, stopping and going “That looks worth a try- should we pop in for a look?” proved so expensive.  A few hours, several cocktails (tequila based, absinthe based, other-miscellaneous-based) and much lighter in pocket later, we decided not to bother heading towards our original destination.   Classy Brits as we are, our evening meal consisted of nuts from the Constellation Bar and a few chips (the British, not American version) from an Italian Restaurant that made the mistake of still being open for serving gone 11pm.

Earlier in the day we’d joined Rachel in a bottle of Prosecco at her nearby apartment to accompany an excellent home-cooked meal (prepared by Rachel’s ayi).  It hasn’t just been a weekend of drinking though – my quick estimate looks like almost 10 miles’ worth of walking around (the Fitbit reckons 14 miles, but it’s a bit like estimates from fishermen – take a third off and you’re closer to the truth).

Over the weekend we walked to two parks on opposite ends of the Former French Concession, with Fuxing Park today giving us the unexpected aural battle between a bench-based lady opera singer and a full-on band playing a couple of metres from each other.  We have no idea who arrived and set-up shop first, but with the whole park at their disposal, you’d have thought the cacophony of discord would result in one of them admitting defeat.  It didn’t seem to, and nor did it seem to dispel the curious crowd.

The Prosecco was purchased at our nearby Marks and Spencer, selling British food at very reasonable prices.  By reasonable, I mean if you’d popped into Harrods with fifty quid and bought Prosecco, crisps, fish fingers, biscuits and little else you’d probably not complain.   M&S out here is our little Harrods.  That little slice of luxury (fish fingers) is sometimes essential.

And speaking of essential, yesterday’s Prosecco and cocktail session meant today’s reversion to beer was purely medicinal.

So Happy Anniversary Mrs Sims – let’s hope next year we’ll be celebrating in a house with furniture to sit-on!

Five language lessons in and we can finally, in perfect Mandarin, order a bottle of milk, a glass of wine and three dictionaries. What I failed to manage this evening was to convince the taxi driver I wasn’t really capable of joining in with his Mandarin-based rendition of Nessun Dorma. “Eaaaah?” beckoned the taxi driver in a rising tone, gesticulating with two thumbs up (whilst driving the taxi) and beaming at me in his mirror, “Eeeaaah, ho ho ho!?”. Never been so glad to hear adverts appear on the radio.

What I was trying to do in the taxi was work out at what point Shanghai becomes “home”, or indeed, what makes something home. Nearly two months in, the lack of furniture means the house still feels more like a hotel. But our local area is becoming more and more familiar, and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of the food (two very spicy Sichuan meals this week so far) or the late nights (JB forcing us to visit a late night pool bar after our Mandarin lesson on Wednesday night).

According to Wikipedia, home is “usually a place in which an individual or a family can live and store personal property.”

B*llocks of course: home is wherever Bronwen is.

If you’re going to name your establishment “Dr. Beer”, selling five on-premise brewed beers at fairly expensive prices, then please, please, please don’t serve them in plastic glasses.  Fancy plastic glasses they may well be, but they’re still plastic.  Specially moulded plastic too, to disguise the fact that I’m getting somewhat close to a small-bottle-sized serving; nowhere near a pint.  And I don’t care if it keeps the beer inside the plastic a little cooler!  A relaxed Friday evening eating snack food with Bron in Dr. Beer was somewhat spoiled by the fact the fresh, flavourful, non mass-produced beer tasted, well, plasticky.

In an earlier post, I mentioned how several sights we’d once viewed as strange now appear normal.  One exception to this is spitting.  Since this blog is a record of our time in China, it has to include the lows as well as the highs; seeing people (usually men) spitting in the street certainly counts as one of the lows.  It’s not so much seeing it but hearing it that bothers me, since the act of spitting usually follows an elongated cleansing of the throat (I guess just to make sure whatever’s down there is all going to be ejected).  Some of the guidebooks talk about the necessity of cleansing the body and so in theory it’s far better to eject that which the body attempts to naturally expel rather than swallow it or deposit it into a tissue that could (potentially) infect others.    Regardless of why, I’ll just be British and say I find it unpleasant.

Enough complaining.
We have a “Walking Tours of Shanghai” book that throws up some fascinating nooks and crannies we’d never otherwise know about.  The book is also invaluable in revealing hitherto unknown restaurants and bars down these nooks (that’s bars in nooks, not nooky bars; I think that’s something else) and crannies.  On Saturday we discovered a superb dim sum restaurant at the end of a huge private garden.  So although we weren’t allowed in the garden, we had a great lunch overlooking it.

Saturday night was spent with work colleagues in a trendy bar called Char Bar overlooking The Bund, followed by a few games of pool in the not-so-trendy Big Bamboo.

Brunch at Sashas (not quite as poncy as it sounds) gave us an incredibly relaxing and enjoyable way to spend Sunday afternoon.  A good few hours, again with the work lot, sat outside with free-flowing sparkling wine.  Not quite a British beer garden, but it did for us both today.

And Dr. Beer owners please take note – the sparkling wine served was served in glasses, not plastic containers resembling glasses.

A few people have asked why I haven’t mentioned anything to do with work in the blog. So let’s give it a go: Working in the office here in Shanghai is just like Milton Keynes, apart from the fact that we have a total of 3 lifts for 24 floors (with each floor easily accommodating over 150 people); And that the coffee shop downstairs sells Hot Dog Danish Pastries (with Tim so far being the only one brave enough to try one); And that smoking at either end of the building is permitted; And that the ladies get a choice of toilet (sitting or squatting, depending one’s knee strength I suspect); And that the cleaning lady is ridiculously happy and gleefully chats to Tim and I in Chinese every day (that’s chats to us, not with us); And that at 12 o’clock the office pretty much empties (but the corridor by the lifts quickly fills); And that most people can’t understand what I say.
That last one is no different.

Walking to the office from the Metro station is to run the gauntlet of mopeds, motorbikes, bicycles and changing-direction-like-butterflies Chinese people.  And the shops with those outwards-opening doors made entirely of glass.

But they’re a friendly bunch in the office, and incredibly keen to help us out with our Mandarin.  Maybe I can post more about working here once we’re a bit more established as an organisation.

Away from work, a hectic week as ever. We went out to see Friendly Fires (a band from St. Albans) on Tuesday night at the Mao Livehouse with an audience made up of well over 90% ex-pats. The Mao Livehouse is somewhat akin to a student union bar – smallish, dingy but sadly without the cheap drinks. In this case, a great energetic atmosphere in a bloody hot venue. Further Mandarin lessons on Monday and Wednesday evening, and a Thai meal Wednesday post-lesson with Matt, a neighbour of older sister Karen’s, who delivered a much-appreciated food parcel of cereal, crisps, beer and shampoo.  I suppose, technically, shampoo is not food.

A bonus visit each to the local police station for me & Bron to extend our locally registered status.  This as part of the process to get enough paperwork together to release our sea shipment.  Hopefully less than three weeks’ away now… We’ll see…

And finally: Walking backwards clapping man – if you ever read this blog, many apologies for posting your picture without your explicit permission. However, you’re a cheery delight first thing in the morning. One day I hope to be able to either join you in this daily ritual or at least ask how you manage this very skillful act without being knocked over.