Weekend in Shanghai

 So last weekend I headed to Shanghai with my friend from school Sam to do a little sightseeing and Christmas shopping before we head back to the UK in a few weekends time.

Towards the French Concession

My hotel was a very shiny 5* hotel near The Bund and Yuyuan Gardens. I got a fab deal to go on a special club floor with free breakfast, afternoon tea, cocktail happy hour and dessert buffet. Was about £90 a night and saved me a fortune in food.

View from my hotel

On the first morning we decided to head to Yuyuan Garden. It is a very beautiful area with lots of old style Chinese buildings, and even though they are clearly rebuilt and fairly new it has a much more natural and less clinical feeling than other bits of Shanghai

Yuyuan Garden from my hotel

Yuyuan Garden

It is however very touristy and we spent a lot of time being asked if we wanted to buy watches, of all things, so we headed to a more traditional tea house in the lake in the centre of the market and drank tea instead. Of course being me I ended buying tea to bring back to HK too.

Yuyuan Garden Teahouse

Yuyuan Garden at night

After Yuyuan we headed along The Bund to take the touristy photos of the Shanghai skyline. Like Beijing when I visited the smog tends to spoil the view of everything but there are some impressive buildings there. Some nice American gentleman in the hotel were telling me all about the architecture (they had clearly researched it beforehand) and they claimed it was the only place where you could see three buildings over 180M tall in one shot. The tallest building was apparently made out of  six seperate sections and after that I tuned out and just ate my dim sum.

Tourist shot

Wandering along The Bund it was interesting to spot how many tourists were Chinese Nationals. Like Beijing they really do encourage the internal tourism scene. Us Westerners definitely are a secondary market for them.

After a few hours shopping and some lovely dinner at a Shanghainese restaurant we hit a hostel bar recommended by an IN teacher at my school, (Chris J) who used to live in Shanghai, called the Captain's Bar. It had a rooftop garden that had a unspoiled view of the Shanghai skyline, good cocktails and a really nice atmosphere.

 Shanghai was nice, and I'd definitely visit again for shopping and atmosphere but I'm glad I live in HK. The mainland had many infuriating attitudes that I would struggle with every day of the week.

Sports and Charity events eat your time

The last few days have been incredibly busy. On Thursday the school swimming gala, Friday was the House Relay competition and as always I decided to run in the staff team, Saturday a 50km charity trek and Monday Division 1 Cross Country tournament.  At some point in all this I should probably sleep!

The swimming gala was very snazzy at the refurbished pool in Causeway Bay, with lots of dressing up and house spirit.  Einstein House came second which felt familiar after 3 years in St. David House.

The house relay was madly competitive. The kids sprinted off like lunatics. The Senior Heads of House were actually tripping one another other, shirt pulling and yelling if we didn't run fast enough. For 12 minutes. It was insane.

The 50km trek was the hardest thing I've done since being in HK. Absolutely destroyed my legs, I'm glad I did not check beforehand how far it was in miles because if I had realised it was longer than a marathon I probably would have given up halfway.

Cross country was good fun. A day right up by the border with China at a lovely golf course supervising and encouraging the kids. It was ridiculously hot and several schools had to call out ambulances to their pupils. One girl from CIS was hallucinating as she crossed the finish line, staggering from side to side and batting away invisible somethings!

Fortunately all our pupils were good, sensible and stayed hydrated. The A grade boys came third out of fourteen teams so got to collect a trophy but more importantly they beat West Island School (that is our only objective ultimately.)

Since then we've had parent's evening and tonight I'm flying off to Shanghai to do some Christmas shopping. Sleep is a limited commodity here, or perhaps I should say time is limited and using it for sleep would seem ridiculous.

Halloween party

So Island School had a staff Halloween get together with a staff pumpkin carving competition that the pupils then voted on.       

After sufficient pumpkin soup and punch we had a lovely Halloween quiz that my team won with many prizes, such as glow in the dark rings, Halloween sweeties and the required bottle of wine.

Then we counted the votes for the carving competition.

My personal favourite pumpkin was disqualified due to primary school craft additions rather than just standard carving.

The whole collection looked very cool and the pupils cast over 500 votes, which is nearly half of all the pupils.

The Batman was a popular choice

But the winning pupmkin was Carolina's very artful carving (it took her over 4hrs).

Sadly I didn't have time to enter as I teach all lessons at the beginning of the week so no free's to go pumpkin carving in.

Learning about war

So Thursday was the trip out of HCMC to Cu Chi Tunnels and then back to go around the War Remnants Museum. I'm glad I did them both on the same day, just the museum could have come off quite one sided, but seeing all the traps etc. at the tunnels made it a bit more balanced.

On the way to the tunnels the tour guide stopped off at a local family whose income comes from making rice paper (at $1 a kilo) and collecting rubber from their plantation (about $10 a kilo). They let us try making rice paper,  then feed our failed attempts to their pigs and showed us how to tap the rubber.

We then carried on to the tunnels, which really are in a jungle. They let us get in through a real entrance (I felt blessed for being small at this point)

They showed us some of the traps set up to intercept American soldiers

You then had a chance to fire anything from an AK47 to an M60. However paying per bullet made it a bit expensive for my taste. A few in the group split 10 bullets in their pair which was a more sensible price.

Lastly we went down the tunnels. They are just over a foot wide and two and a half feet high; I felt they were small and claustrophobic so  I can only imagine what it was like for anyone over five three tall. We crawled and slid through them and then was reminded that people lived here for 20 years, in the dark. That gives a great idea how desperate that war was.

After the tunnels we headed back to the city for the War Remnants Museum, I didn't take pictures in there it was far too sobering and bleak for that. Did show some interesting bad use of science and propaganda in places (especially with agent orange) which showed a lot about the government here.

Last bit I went around was the political prisoner section, where they had some of the equipment used on prisoners from an island just off the coast. God, humans can be horrific to one another.

A very interesting day, learned a lot.

 

In HCMC it rains indoors

So today I went for a lovely spa treatment then up the Bitexco Tower for lunch and to take some pictures. Very lovely but the most interesting thing today, I'm sat in the kitchen and it's raining like hell. In the kitchen. Kitchen's are open to the outdoors here. It's tricky to get the impression right with a photo, but trust me I'm at the back of the flat, in the kitchen and rain is falling on my head.

I will get around to putting the palace and today's pictures up, but it takes forever to upload them on the phone. Laptop is in HK sadly.