Long Weekend, Part 1

So it's been a while since I updated the old blog, and there's a ton to add so I'm splitting it up into three parts. Friday turned out to be a really interesting day with a trip to the Shanghai Racquet Club with my boss and Dr. Moreton to check out the Clinic our hospital runs there. The Club is located about 35-40 minutes West of where I live which puts it way outside the downtown area. It's located in a large development that was/is really popular with Expat families since the American International School, the Shanghai British School and some others are clumped together near the old International airport and a large number of upscale villas and housing developments. It was interesting to see the rest of the city but we had our closest "near-miss" of an accident yet on the drive back and I am now convinced that the drivers here are the worst I have ever seen. I can't imagine rolling the dice with my life like the nutjobs on bicycles do, let alone get on a scooter or motorcycle. There is a total disregard for traffic signals, lane markings and generally accepted "right of way" rules. The only thing keeping the death toll down is that speed limits are much lower and taxi drivers seem to have a sixth sense that lets them swerve to avoid accidents at the last possible moment. Never a dull moment.

After work on Friday I went back to Nanjing Road and exchanged my non-working DVD and the one that was in Russian for new copies and picked up dinner again from the street vendors. This time I hit the crowds at prime meal time and had to wait in a huge line until I realized that, like traffic lane markings, there is basically no respect for the concept of "the line" and people just push their way to the front as best as they can. Once I got the hang of sliding between people and using the "tap on the other shoulder and sneak by while they look the wrong way" move I actually got to the front pretty quickly, grabbed my dumplings and took the metro home.

The bathroom smelled terrible when I got home so I took some time to clean the litter box and sweep up the floor then opened a window and turned the fan on... none of which really helped that much, looks like I may actually need to invest in some incense. Larry called after dinner and I managed to pull myself together and take a really long cab ride over to the bund to meet him at a bar called "I Love Shanghai" (with a heart instead of Love... like I (heart) New York.) The bar's owned by an American named Jeff from Seattle and has only been open three months but has a really cool interior, great drink specials (ladies night on Tuesday features all you can drink open bar for women for 1 RMB... about 12.5 cents) and amazingly knowledgeable, skilled bartenders. We closed the place down around 1 and Jeff took us on a mini-bar crawl to some of his favorite spots around the city and checked out the lights of the bund from the other side of the river. Absolutely amazing architecture facing the river, left over from when the city was divided up between foreign countries and the bund was a part of the "British Concession." Got home late and forgot to drink water, which made Saturday a whole lot of fun... more in Part 2.