Shanghai (12/7 - 12/11): A Return to Shanghai

Just some of the highlights of the past several days …

12/7: Dinner with Tam

Tam was in town for a few hours on Thursday evening so we met up and went to the steak-house / dim sum place around the corner for some grub and catching up. For those of you who don’t keep up with Tam’s non-existent blog, he has been working at a company in Hangzhou, Zhejiang for the past month or so and seems to be really enjoying it.

I also didn’t realize how close I was to Hangzhou (even though I’ve been there before). He just catches a long-distance bus from the terminal down the street from me and for 60 RMB (about $8.00 USD) he gets a comfortable two hour ride to Hangzhou. I’m definitely going to try to visit him while he’s there so he can show me around (once he knows where to go). For $8.00 USD and 2 hours of my trouble it’s certainly worth it to hang out in a new city and do some exploring.

12/8: Commando Cleaners

After I returned from my trip I thought that instead of cleaning up the home myself I would hire an A-yi to come in and take care of some of the less-fun tasks for me. With Zhu Wen Jun’s help and China’s 114 Directory Assistance, we set up a time for someone to come clean up my home at 10:00 on Friday morning. We assumed that it would be a single person who would spend a few hours cleaning up my kitchen and bathroom as well as the floors and windows.

What we got was an elite group of 6 cleaning commandos who were in and out in the space of an hour. When they showed up I was thinking “Uh … why are there so many people coming in?” but it turned out that this is the way this particular company does things. They had two people cleaning my bathroom, two in the kitchen, one on my patio, one doing the windows and a supervisor who sat back and watched (now there is a cushy job). And they cleaned every surface, from the ceiling to the floor. It was pretty impressive. They even vacumed and wiped my floors before leaving. Hard to believe I got all that done for just 150 RMB (about $20 USD). (How they split $20 between 6 people for an hour of work is beyond me, but scales of financial compensation are different here than the U.S.)

From what I can tell these are probably the people you would call if you just finished building your apartment and want to clean it before you furnish it and look for tennants. I’m definitely going to hire them again before I leave this place and attempt to get my deposit back. (hahaha)

Commandos in action

It was so inspiring that I’ve been spending most of the rest of the week and weekend organizing and cleaning my stuff. The OCD in me is feeling quite satisfied.

12/09: A Night Out

It was a long time since I had gone out around Shanghai at night so I spent Saturday evening touring around to different locations in Shanghai. I dropped by and said hello to a few friends around Tong Ren Lu and also did a bit of walking around in other parts of the city. Before I knew it 3:30 had reared it’s early head at me and I headed home getting to bed around 5:00. As a result of going out late and not getting all that much sleep I was a bit light headed for the next day or two. Getting over a cold probably had something to do with it as well. It was nice to go out and about, but next time I think I will probably limit it to times when I’m 100% healthy.

12/10: Pamper-ville

Since I hadn’t been in Shanghai for a while it was time (I had decided) for a day at my haircut place on Wei Hai Lu. I got my hairwashed, ears cleaned, body massaged and hair colored and cut. It was a nice way to spend 2 or 3 hours of the day and it felt good to do it. I was considering the facial but decided against it as I had other things I wanted to do and Wei Hai Lu is rather far from my home.

Liu Li Li cleaning my ears. It feels soooooo good.

After the hair treatment I went to another place to get a massage. One of the nice things about being in China is that you can spend a whole day getting pampered like this and still barely break the bank. I think the total damage for everything was still less than $40 USD.

12/11: A False Start in Shanghai

Monday was back and so I got myself ready to head back to Yang Laoshi’s class. I came by for the 3:00 class but it turned out that it wasn’t a good day for me to be there. He said I could come by the next day though so I sat in the wushu guan for a bit watching the class (the kids had improved noticeably in the month I’d been gone) but then headed out to get some food and go back home.

And that rounded up most of my first week in Shanghai. I’m not blogging about all the random stuff I did, like organizing my clothes and cleaning my desk and stuff like that. Not really blog-worthy writing, but the non bloggable stuff was what I spent most of my time doing. So while it seems like I didn’t do much over the week, fret not because I was actually quite busy.

The other thing is that, while I’m walking around and doing things I think of all these ideas for what to write in my blog, but for some reason when I’m actually sitting at my computer my mind draws a blank. I should probably jot them down for future reference, but doing that just seems like I’m taking the whole blogging thing just one step too far. I don’t mind spending the time here on my computer putting together an entry, but spending time while I’m actually doing the stuff I blog about to work on my blog seems … excessive.

(I say this now, but just you wait. In another few months I’ll probably end up doing it anyway.)