The Calm After

On Wednesday we woke up to blazing sunshine and a place transformed.  The beach WAS just outside our doors.

Wednesday was our day to take the students out of their comfort zones and into some water sports.  Cue opportunities for my non-sporty Asian girls to feign periods, stress, I-forgot-my-bathing-suit style complaints.  Into the water they went.

Unfortunately for us still though, the waves were too unpredictable to surf and too big to get sailboats past.  Thus, we pool surfed and sat under some trees learning how to tie bowlines by two tow-headed rah boys, Callum and Callum, only Callum the second went by K2.

I was grateful for sun; this is the closest I've come to summer holidays this year.

Wednesday came and went without major incident and we rolled onto the promise of Thursday with even better weather.  We tried our hand at a bit of geocaching up to a temple and viewpoint before reassembling at the sailboats.

                

Before the wind died on a catamaran on the South China Sea, one of my students, a particularly quietly arty Asian girl with glasses and a long fringe, decided that temple walking in the baking sun was for chumps, that she was sick of me, that she was going to slump up three hundred steps and murder me with her eyes at the top.

But she made it to the top; it was my biggest accomplishment of the week.

 

Thursday evening took us to the beach, where I stole a few spare moments to salute the sun, amongst other yoga poses, whilst our students built sand castles in some style of uber competition.

Our holiday sort of ended there, except for the next morning's 7am beach meet up, the 3-hour near death ride experience to the airport and the gigantic cluster (add another word to the end here) that was the China Eastern Airlines check in desk.  There, I experienced my first China Day, a day so bureaucratic that it defies logic, before getting 20 kids through security, around the airport terminal, onto a flight, off a flight and through another airport before hopping on another bus and sitting for two hours in gridlock traffic before arriving back at school.  

Seeing my patience at its limit, Karen and Clare took pity on me and delivered my aching body to Yasmine's, a delightful Jinqiao steakhouse that does wine, gimugous onion rings and the odd salmon steak.  We talked it out over wine, bottles of, and struggled back to our respective abodes.     

I think it may take me a year to recover.  

The Beach

In China, the beach is a curious place.  None of those Western conventions exist--at peak sun hours, you can stroll for miles and miles without running into a soul; there's no dodging blankets or children or plastic alligators; the hermit crabs rule the sand.

In China, on the beach, you are free to ride off into the sunset.

But once the sun sets, watch out.  Families, work groups, rowdy friends drinking buckets of beer crawl out of the sunless spaces they occupied.  Having tanned skin is not fashionable in China, in fact, it smacks of peasant field laborer.  So the impossibly slim porcelain beauties come out at night to cavort, carouse and crack their fireworks until late into the night.  And swim.

And, obviously, do things like tai chi on a unicycle.  Because China wouldn't be China if there weren't people doing odd forms of exercise in the oddest places.

Shenzhen--Twin Moon Bay

My first in-China-out-of-Shanghai excursion happened to take the form of a work trip, a rather illustrious five-day journey with 100 Year 10 students trailing at various speeds behind a group of harassed looking teachers.  The school dubs the week its crowning glory.  Sitting on my couch, upon reflection and a lot of wine, I'm not so sure.

We were told we'd be situated in a rather comfortable hotel right on the beach.  That it was in a beautiful location.

Monday: Arrival in a typhoon. This is a lot like what you'd expect it to be: windy, rainy, a little bit miserable.  Cue zero visibility.  Beach, what? Add driving around bends with a dodgy driver who liked to: text; clean his fingernails; pass cars on a blind curve on a very windy road in torrential rain and you've just about got the picture.

We checked into our hotel, situated our students and made for sleep.

Tuesday: Survival Day, in a typhoon.  This is also a lot like what you'd expect it to be only we chose, CHOSE to 'survive' outdoors.  This was optional.  Our group leader could've exercised good judgment and said something to the effect of: 'there's a typhoon. Let's plan some indoor activities instead.'  Nah.

It started off inauspiciously enough.  My group of students were positive and smiley.  Only when I was in the middle of the forest, knee deep in banana spiders with the rain pelting/fuming/hurling down on top of us did I want to crawl under the nearest available rock.  Our guide told us not to worry about the banana spiders, that they were large but slow moving.  Um...

This is not okay.

It also didn't help that all my proper hiking gear was in boxes on a cargo ship on the way to Shanghai--I walked in running trainers and a wind-breaker the London Marathon Committee dubbed as 'useful'.  Maybe useful in London sludge.  Maybe useful in London drizzle. Within seconds, I was soaked from head to toe.  The hairspray holding back my fringe began to leak down and into my eyes and mouth.  My contact struggled to remain in my eyes.  

And then we got lost. My students remained chipper, bless them.  

Nine hours of walking, village negotiating, river rafting, shelter building and cooking at a 'campsite' which was located in the middle of a village's cow pasture (all through intermittent bands of torrential typhoon rain), we packed it in.

And as the rain continued to lash down, I slept like a baby under the air conditioning.

Shanghai, Pudong side

The Pudong (east) side promenade gets virtually no attention as a place to go.  Because the glorious skyline is better seen from The Bund, tourists flock there by the thousands.  So Kimberley and I decided to see if the hype was just as worth it gazing on the gazers gazing at us.  We weren't disappointed:

Sunset was better:

  

 High tide shenanigans: 

Hello Bunders!

And nowhere else in the city can you find longevity fruit:

 

Yep, less people, sunset views, pretty spectacular. 

The Bund

The Bund is a fancy way of saying riverside promenade where tourists the world, and more specifically, China-wide, come to parade around and be amongst the modern.  We perched from the vantage point of Glamour Bar, a rather expensive but lovely venue six floors above sea level.

By day: 

And as the lights go down: 

 

 The view to Luijiazi in Pudong, the city's financial hub

 Down the Bund-view: 

I can handle paying the 45% alcohol import tax for views like this.