Sorry to borrow from Craig Revell-Horwood but I think he sums up my feelings perfectly. Jet fresh back from Shanghai & ‘fab-u-lous’ seems so apt. In fact it was worth missing Strictly in Blackpool for!! Work all good but play even better. Having not been there since 1995, as I expected, the old place has changed! Gone were the vast empty spaces & fields going in from the airport full of soldiers practising manoeuvres and in their place were high rises, lanes of motorways & Gucci & Mont Blanc shops. It put me in mind of Hong Kong in the early 90’s – so much energy & potential. However the overriding first hit of capitalism is very good at helping you forget it’s a communist state. It's hard sometimes to remember this is a country that has just jailed a man for daring to try & bring to justice the big corporation that was responsible for the death of his small child & that has put the wife of the jailed Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo under house arrest for no apparent reason. However as I was not there to try & bring down communism but to help some newly hatched capitalists ply ther trade more effectively I won't dwell on the bad stuff. I will tell of the good stuff we encountered. Firstly restaurants – I cannot believe how well we ate! Unbelievably fabulous food that didn’t break the bank. We had Chinese, we had Indonesian we had Malaysian (sometimes all at the same time!) we had Japanese and I even had crabsticks on a pizza - this culinary delight was at the behest of my trainees - they wanted chicken wings & seafood pizza so who was I to argue! The restaurants were also amazingly stylish although some were far too cool for school. We ended up in one place that was eye wateringly cheap (just over £10 for 2 huge bowls of noodles, 4 sides & 4 beers) but was so painfully, consciously trendy it was comedy. All polished concrete walls & black marble bench tables with white leather stools, and the staff dressed in floor length black aprons. Quite put my very style unconscious husband off his tea! And staying in the French Concession was incredible – it felt like Vietnam; streets full of low rise stunningly beautiful 1920’s villas with art deco gates, but if you looked just behind them the 250 floor glass & chrome skyscrapers loomed. The weather was unbelievably kind – 20 degrees most days – but the layer of pollution took a while to burn off & that unique Asian smell (sewers mixed with garlic & herbs – in HK we used to say it was the smell of money) lingered at every street corner. Will stop now & attempt to construct the next instalment – I will try not to rant about how they treat their pets ..... a lime green Pomeranian anyone?
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