October’s first entry and it’s already the sixth!  This last week has been our holiday/fresher’s week.  We’ve had a week’s national holiday and, as all our friends are telling us how good fresher’s week is, we decided to have our own.  This infact consisted of going out most (in fact every) night, but spending as little as possible.  We now know the Shanghai nightlife inside out!

In the afternoons, as I wasn’t up in the morning, I visited various places in and around Shanghai including Mao’s Former Residence, Shanghai Museum, Jing’an Temple … the list goes on.

This combined with a bit of studying has made for a very productive holiday.  However, as we look to return on Monday, so does another typhoon.  It looks like a Cat 2 will skim the coast of China on Sunday/Monday, so we will undoubtedly get some of the off-springs from that.  This week we have been lucky as the weather has been extremely pleasant, unlike the city centre (I’ll explain later), with most days hitting at least 30C  and coastal breezes have reduced the pollution levels slightly giving the place a slightly fresher feel.

As for the city centre, it’s packed at the moment.  Currently, the Special Olympics and F1 Chinese Grand Prix are both being held in Shanghai, combined with the huge number of national holiday travellers has made for a rather busy few days.  The metro is the stereotypical sardine tin, sorry I mean train, and the streets are lined eight people deep moving, annoyingly slowly.  However, this all looks to end in the next few days, as everyone gradually heads back to work and so do we.