Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 5

British Open Week! We have been having problems with the TV, basically freezing or not having any reception. We had complained a few times before, but every time they had an engineer come up, the TV was working again. This week, however, the company that handles our "serviced apartment", ACME (yes, really, it is called ACME), talked to the landlord and he agreed to switch out the satellite box itself. The dish outside is the same, and we have the same box with the smaller tv in the master bedroom, but they switched out the box in the living room on Friday afternoon. And you know ... it hasn't frozen or dropped yet I don't think! Just in time for the live coverage of The Open Championship (or the British Open as it is known in the US). It is a little odd watching the live coverage starting at about 4 in the afternoon since we are used to getting up very early in the morning to start watching the coverage back home. Here, the leaders didn't tee off on Sunday until about 9PM Shanghai-time.

Food this weekend also was interesting! Saturday afternoon, we did a Brazilian Rodizio where the servers come to the table with knives and a skewer and they slice right at the table. There is one called "Latina" which is only a couple blocks from the apartment, and we had lunch with an American couple (Duane and Carol) who live in the same building as we do. I met Carol walking out of the building one day a couple weeks back and we have since become friends. She is leaving Tuesday for a couple months to go back to Colorado to help her daughter, who is having back surgery.

From lunch, we headed over to the French Concession on the Puxi side of town. Our first stop was the building where the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China was secretly held on July 23 in 1921 and where the Communist Party was formed. The building is a typical Shanghai "stone-arched gate" construction, built with wood and blue bricks, which was originally a girl's boarding school.

These two are pictures from the outside


When you go into the inside, there is a huge display and so Tom decided to get his picture taken.

They didn't really allow pictures inside, so we didn't really get much. The displays were in both English and Chinese which made it quite easy to understand.

We then headed over to the former home of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen and Cho Enlai, but it was around 4pm and that is when both of them closed, so we decided to return on Sunday. We did a bit of just walking around the area and then headed for an early (and light) dinner at an Indian restaurant called "Masala Art". We got home and of course, watched The Open!

Sunday we got up and Tom worked out at the gym because he has early meetings on Tuesday and so he shifted his workouts up a day. We then headed over to the former home of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. This is the entry gate

Dr. Sun Yat-sen was a doctor, revolutionary and political leader. He was a pioneer of Nationalist China and is frequently referred to as the "Father of the Nation". It was interesting going through the chronology of his life, since he ended up being president and then resigning multiple times, and was frequently in exile due to being on the "out's" with whomever was in power at the time. There was a museum that had lots of relics of different parts of his life that walked us through almost every year from around 1894 (when he really started his revolutionary work after being frustrated by the Qing government and quitting his medical practice) to his death in 1925 from liver cancer. There was an audioguide in English that had an entry in basically every single display. I must say that this was probably the most extensive audioguide of almost any that we have had. It was pretty interesting. We then got to go through his actual former home which Tom really like but I thought was just average.

They didn't allow pictures inside but we could get a nice picture from the outside. This is the building that houses the museum

and then next door is the house. Behind the house is a lovely little garden.

At that point, Tom was a little hungry and so we decided to hold off on Cho Enlai's house and head straight to brunch. One of the things which we have noticed is that there are alot of restaurants that have a "Sunday brunch'. This Sunday, we decided to have brunch at the Vienna Cafe, which was 3 or 4 blocks from Dr. Sun Yat-sen's house so it was pretty convenient. It was a really nice brunch for 145 RMB which included a cappuccino, unlimited orange juice, and a buffet of different breads, meats, cheeses, cereal, and fruit, as well as your choice of eggs (scrambled, over easy, etc). It was a pretty small little cafe, reminding us of the small places in Paris, but quite nice inside. They had a sign up that on Thursday nights, they do showing of movies including The Kings Speech a few weeks back, and a French movie this week (with English subtitles) about the life of Yves St. Laurent.

So here is another interesting dichotomy that is here. We see people driving around in a Porsche or Lamborghini, and then someone like this ... a guy riding a bike pulling a cart loaded with various things. We see people pulling 2-wheel carts like what I think of how things were done before they actually came up with the concept of a car or truck.

After that we headed home and got ready for our first outing for golf in Shanghai! We haven't swung clubs since January, so we were a little rusty so we decided to go work on our games at a driving range. We just took a couple clubs and caught a taxi down about a mile or so south of the apartment to a driving range. There are 3 stories of hitting bays out into a driving range. We picked up a brochure and it is actually a "members" driving range where you can purchase a yearly membership and get discounts on the driving range, access to a private chipping and putting area, a social club, as well as (it looks like) the ability to make tee times at a couple local courses. They charge by the hour for a hitting bay and so Tom and I just got 1 bay and went back and forth hitting for the hour. It was nice to be able to relax a little between hitting. We looked around and then headed back (by taxi again) home. We watch a little of The Open and then went to lunch at the IFC Mall. As you go into the "City Super", which is an upscale grocery store ...umm...Lifestyle Specialty Store as they call it ...there are a few little restaurants and so we got a little Japanese curry dinner. This City Super is where you can get a lot of imported goods at ridiculous prices! We try not to get too many things there, since for example, a box of Total cereal will set you back about $13! However, they do have some things there that I can't get at the Lotus supermarket that we do most of our normal shopping at, such as fresh herbs, sliced deli meats and cheese like feta and goat cheese. So we go there when we need to pick up something special. There is also another market called the Pines Supermarket that is over near the Carrefour that we go to every month (to stock up on non-perishables) that also has a lot of imported goods. So if you REALLY want to get a US product, you normally can. I haven't found grits yet, but I still have a couple more places to check!

Now ... we're hanging out watching live coverage (again) of The Open Championship. Not sure if we'll watch it until there is a winner since that probably will be a bit late for us, but we want to try to catch as much as we can. Then, we'll be off to bed to get sleep for another busy week at work.