Apartment

Am in my new apartment now! It’s small, but all newly refurbished and clean. I had just enough time to put all my stuff in on Saturday before I went to Shanghai for a night out for Charlie’s birthday.

Thus far I’ve been pretty strict with sticking to budget, but I thought a night out in Shanghai merited blowing it. When I arrived I caught a taxi straight from the station to the place Charlie’s staying, with some of her family friends, Adrian and Sally. The house is incredible, on an enormous compound of expats, courtesy of Adrian’s job. Made my apartment look a little less exciting.

We went out pretty much straight away to a bar that is about half way up an apartment block in downtown Shanghai, with an enormous outdoor terrace overlooking the Bund. Drinks were reasonable, and the view was incredible – we watched the sun set behind Shanghai’s famous sky line, drinks in hand.

From there we went to a bar/club called Mint, which is renowned for being one of the City’s more expensive night spots. I was drinking whisky (value for money) at 90RMB a drink – to put this in perspective, this would buy dinner for 3 nights easily out here. They’d managed to find some surly aggressive western bouncers from somewhere to control the crowd, which was mostly westerners – felt very bizarre after having been in Jiaxing for so long. More impressive was the fishtank at the end of the bar – which contained sharks. Real sharks. Only smallish ones, admittedly, about the size of my arm, but still pretty cool.

We had a couple of drinks there then moved on to somewhere more cheap, where I could actually afford to drink. It felt genuinely weird being in a place so full of westerners, and could easily have been any old club back home. Kind of missed that warm, fuzzy feeling of being special.

On Sunday day I woke up pretty early and watched TV with Will and Charlie, Adrian and Sally’s kids, until we judged it was about time that Charlie (my friend Charlie) got out of bed at 0930. She wasn’t too impressed, but Will did a pretty good job of waking her up, so at about 1100 we headed off to a clothes/fake market on the edge of the city centre. Lots of excellent fakes on display as usual, but managed to resist most of it. Picked up a dodgy version of Photoshop for about £2. Will be impressed if it works.

When Charlie had to head back (for a roast dinner – jealous) I went to meet Hannah, who’d just got into Shanghai looking for a Toni and Guy to get her hair done. We found it, but she was pretty disappointed to discover it seemed to specialise in trendy Chinese haircuts as opposed to the Western styles she was hoping for, so she gave it a miss. Spent an hour looking for another fake market near People’s Square but couldn’t find it. A man approached us and claimed to have Fake shoes handbags watches perfume you want buy?, so we did the sort of thing my Mum’s going to disapprove of and followed him down a couple of back streets, up a narrow little alley where people have definitely been murdered, and through a doorway into what I assumed was a room full of his mates preparing to rob us. Fortunately it was full of Fake shoes handbags watches perfume. Did a little bit of haggling but they weren’t playing properly so we went.

Got a lesson to plan, so will leave it there for now. Will get photos of apartment etc up soon as I’ve unpacked all my stuff – it’s strewn across the floor at the moment.