Back to Work

Turned out to be a great weekend, but, just like in college, it went by way too fast and now it's Monday morning again and I have to get ready to go to work. The event on Saturday at Starbucks was small, but it was nice to meet some other foreigners my age. After grabbing coffee eight of us headed to "A Future Perfect", an American-Italian-Chinese fusion restaurant and had a great dinner followed by a solid night out bar hopping until we ended up at Tapas Bar late getting a last round and ordering Tapas (appetizers.)

Yesterday I made it up for the noon ShanghaiExpat mixer at Coffee Bean downtown and saw a couple faces from Saturday but a much larger crowd and a huge variety of nationalities and ages. Whereas most of the younger group from Saturday were either new or had been here less than a year, these were the "senior" members of the Shanghai expat community, a couple of people I talked to, Cameron and Ed, have been here for seven and nine years respectively. Vinh, an Austrailian guy I met on Saturday, and I left around 1:30 for the new "knockoff market" that had its grand opening yesterday since the famous outdoor market was shut down about a month ago in a show of "good faith" on the part of the Chinese in the war on Intellectual Property piracy. Either way, it was pretty incredible to see basically a whole mall of small vendor stores selling anything you can imagine from every designer I've ever seen. I also got to one of the famous DVD stores and picked up five new movies (including two still in theaters) for about $7.50... total. Only one of them ended up not working and in this case it was just that the movie was entirely in Russian, but apparently they have a really good return/exchange program... it's a great country.