This week in Shanghai...

Well, plenty has happened for us this past week... nothing overly exciting, but I'll give you an update anyways.  

Last weekend we wanted to start seeing the touristy sights of Shanghai, but decided instead to stay closer to home and just check out what's in our neighborhood.  We ended up walking for almost 4 hours, doing a huge big loop of the area.  We found a post office, grocery store, and a couple of bakeries really close to our place, and also a couple little parks.  They were nice, except for the fact that it's still about 30 degrees here every day (plus a whole lot of humidity), so we don't really feel like doing anything overly active in the parks.  Also, wherever there is a bit of grass and trees here, it seems that there are also tons of mosquitos.  These are not so much of a problem for Andrew, but they LOVE me and I end up getting eaten alive.  So at this point I'm not especially keen to be sitting around in any park.  Maybe once the weather gets a bit cooler, which it's meant to by the end of October apparently. 

While we were in one of the parks, we saw some Chinese guys trying to "mountain bike"... of course that's a little tricky in Shanghai as there are NO mountains, but they were giving it their best shot, jumping from rock to rock on their bikes... they were actually really good and had quite the crowd watching them.  

"Chinese guys trying to jump from the ground to the smaller rock to the bigger rock on their bikes... very cool, and very much something I'd never try b/c I know I'd break myself in about 30 seconds!"

One interesting event this past Wednesday was "Teacher Day".  I'm not sure if this is an international thing or just Chinese, but we loved it!  Basically it's a time when all teachers are honored.  It seems like a funny time to have it, right at the beginning of the school year, b/c how are the kids supposed to know that early on in the school year whether their teachers are worth honoring or not?  I think it would make more sense to have it at the end of the school year.  Anyways, it was a great day.  The kids gave us cards and a couple gifts, our school gave us a box of fruit, and the Chinese school's principal and VP came around to all the classrooms shaking us teachers' hands and thanking us personally for the good job we were doing of teaching.  That evening, the school took the whole teaching staff out for a nice dinner at a restaurant.  Apparently there are about 200 teachers at this school, so it was more like a big banquet.  Think wedding reception... that's kinda what it looked like.  It was a full traditional Chinese dinner... 11 people to a table with a big lazy susan (turny thing) in the middle of the table.  It was course after course after course of authentic Chinese food.  While I'm a bit hesitant to try tons of new stuff (especially being a vegetarian), Andrew is a whole lot more adventurous when it comes to cuisine.  He happily indulged in the jellyfish, sea-cucumber, and duck-wrap dishes, to name a few.  His most frequent saying these days is "Hey, when in Rome..."  All in all it was a very nice night.  We got to sit with a lot of the Chinese teachers whom we share an office with, and it was nice to get to know them a bit better outside of the office in a social way.  

"Ron, Terry, and Andrew with our Chinese colleagues at the Teacher's Day banquet."

"This banquet was toast-mania for the Chinese- they LOVE making toasts to anything and everything... and making the same toast 5 times in a night is not a problem for them.  For example, Mr. Shen (on the right) made a toast to "healthy happy" every few minutes!  The red wine was the worst we've ever tasted (Mr. Clean would be better I'm sure!), but we went along with it and switched to orange juice ASAP!"

Of all the cards I got, this one was my favorite!  Lots of the Chinese cards that are translated into English are pretty funny.  Usually you can at least understand what they intended to say, but this one.... I'm not so sure.  And what is the meaning of the noose on the bottom?  I'd better watch my back!