Settling into Shanghai

After a nomadic summer, Jerel and I have been enjoying staying put in Shanghai for the last few weeks. Labour Day weekend was especially fun, as we celebrated Jerel's birthday with a busy weekend including: a trip to the Grand Theatre where we were amazed by Swan Lake; an evening at Cloud 9, one of the highest restaurants in the city (87th floor!); and an extravagant champagne brunch at our hotel (which was more of a 'brunchinner" given how much we ate)! We also had an entertaining walk along the famous Nanjing Lu and invented a game - guess how many times you will be approached in the next block by someone trying to sell you something.

The following weekends, we continued to explore this seemingly endless city. We spent an afternoon strolling the tree-lined streets of the French Concession, checking out its many quaint boutiques and cafes. I'm pleased to report that I came away with two treasures: a remarkably hard-to-find cutlery organizer and cool lamp. This past weekend, we were both reaching concrete saturation so made up a walking tour of several local parks. Our favourite was Fuxing Park, where a few locals went to great lengths to fly kites that looked a lot like large birds -perhaps to make up for the lack of real birds!

This past Sunday (September 14) China celebrated the 'Mid-Autumn Festival' when, as the hotel staff told me "the greatest joy is to share mooncakes with your friends and family and look at the moon". Well, neither of us was too taken by mooncakes (typical flavours are 'lotusroot' and 'red bean', often with an egg yolk center), and the moon was rather hard to make out, and but it was still fun to share in the excitement around this holiday. The locals really get into their mooncakes - in fact, things can get a bit out of hand, with perpetual long lines at the best bakeries, and scalpers getting busted for selling mooncake coupons (see article in the Shanghai Daily: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=373210).