Birthday pics

This is the View of the Bund from the Italian restaurant we had my birthday dinner in. It was the best Italian meal I've had since I got here. I had a great day that day and best of all as I was out celebrating a brand new great nephew was born. My brother John's son and his partner had a baby boy on the 13th.

This is the gang who shared this great Italian meal with me.

pics of our shanghai travels

These are pictures from my week with Mike who is now safe at home in his apartment in Vancouver. I only took a few because my camera to computer cable was lost but I found it. The first picture is a figure in the history museum. Take the glasses off the figure (in your mind) and who do you see. Those of you who don't know him, it could be my brother Joe. The next 2 pictures are from the Garden of the Master of the Nets in Suzhou. I really liked the clear reflection which is why I took the picture. The last picture is the pagoda in Tiger Hill in Suzhou.

Back to work

It is Mon. morning at 7:45. I'm back at work. Mike is at home getting ready to leave for BC. We will have one last lunch together today and he will be gone. We have had a wonderful week together but it is not too hard too say good bye because he has been is usual pesty self - putting clothes pins on the back of my clothes, hiding in the elevator and whatever other annoying things he can come up with. We have done lots of sightseeing - Shanghai Museum, Museum of History and Art Museum, the French Concession, the Old City, Pearl Tower etc. I will give you more details later. We have eaten lots of Shanghaiese food as well as food from other parts of the world. And we are sick of the noise from the firecrackers. We had one side trip to Suzhou and its many gardens. Now that I'm back at work maybe I can take a breather. But not too long because my brother Dave and his partner Karen arrive on Thurs. I will try to blog a little bit each day with a few pics.

Having a great holiday

I did try blogging last Friday but the second time all my typing disappeared I gave up. Mike is here. We have been having a great week sightseeing. Last night we went to dinner with a chinese friend of his from U of T. It was a very interesting night for me. I was in a different part of Shanghai that just demonstrated to me the size of this city and the diversity. The diversity being in the look of the surrounding area as opposed to different people or customs. I felt like this is the normal city not new like where I live and designed in western style and not a tourism area or historic area. His friend, wife and son took us out for dinner in an everyday chinese restaurant. The food was very good and it was to me like the real china which we are always searching for. This friend is teaching canadian lit at Shanghai Normal University and Mike brought a bunch of books over for him including The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence - one of my all time favourite stories. So our evening included some discussion of this book. This is a fantastic story and I recommend it to you. It is especially good if you are caring for aging parents or even more so if your parents are caring for their aging parents. It gives you a very good perspective on life.
New Year's Eve here was very loud with all the fireworks. Mike arrived in time for supper that night which we did in Puxi with about 5 or 6 of my friends. Unfortunately the jet lag settled in so he and I went home while the others proceeded to Yu Garden where apparently it was pretty dead. They then went to the Bund where things were wild and fireworks were everywhere. In the meantime Mike and I arrived home and by 10 o'clock he was sound asleep and missed all the fireworks in and around our complex. I didn't know which was to look as I stood on my balconey because fireworks were going off everywhere. At one point I realized it was even safe standing out there. There was a piece of left over firework on my balconey. We went to a great restaurant (the one I would like to go to for Christmas dinner this year, brothers) for dim sum on New Year's Day. It is behind the Pearl Tower so we spent the rest of that day sightseeing in that area.
Yesterday, we got in free at the Shanghai Art Museum which was very good. I saw 2 pictures I really liked - one for my place (yellow flowers, flying robins) and one for Richard's cousin, Robert of ducks swimming. There were some beautiful winter paintings and some interesting sculptures by a Chilean artist. They were rocks (ordinary rocks) to which he added clay to create various animals. They were excellent. Don't ask me who the artists were. That is just too much information for my little brain to absorb.
Okay, Mike and I are off for another day of sightseeing and a hot oil massage.

Happy Birthday to me

Hello Everyone, It's been a good day for me. Lots of birthday greetings at work, lots of cake, very few children. Many families have already left for their holidays. 12 of us went out to dinner to celebrate my birthday right after work today. We went to Domani's an Italian restaurant in Super Brand Mall. It was great - the best Italian meal I've had since I got here. The view is fantastic at this place overlooking the Bund and the river. I've taken some pictures but I'much too tired to download and then upload right now, especially since I don't even know how to plug the camera into this laptop. We finished the night at Hagen Daz with the chocolate fondue. And then we actually came home on the bus. My first birthday in Shanghai and my first bus ride. Who would have thought that at 61 years of age a person would still be celebrating firsts. I guess I'm still pretty young.
I'm really looking forward to New Year's Eve this Sat. especially since Mike will be here with me. I will send you more info and pictures about that also. I am doing some documentation for our celebrations at work so I'm beginning to understand how it all works. The first full moon of the lunar year and the 31 days of celebration and the door gods to keep the monsters from your house and to ensure a year of plenty ahead of you. It's all quite interesting. Talk to you later and don't forget to wear new underwear on Sunday and don't sweep your floors because you will sweep away the good luck.

Chinese NewYear

So much is going on right now I don't think I can remember everything I want to tell you. On Wed. we had our new year celebrations at K3. The pic on the last blog is from that day. It was actually a very good event for the kids. I had had my doubts because of the dumpling making. I had in my mind a vision of an adult showing the children how to make a dumpling while they watched but actually everyone got in on the action. The children really enjoyed it. The children then performed the chopstick dance and sang the chinese new year songs for their parents. I don't have the words to the song or I'd give them to you. I'm still going to try to get them in english. I have learned about the banners on the doors - one across the top and 1 down each side. These are to keep the monsters away. Firecrackers have been going off more than usual (it seems we are never completely without them) for the past week. We will be hearing a lot more over the next 2 weeks. There should also be some great fireworks displays over the next couple of weeks. Firecrackers are going off as I am typing this. Oh yes, after the above mentioned performance we got to eat those dumplings. They were pretty good.
Today I was out sightseeing with a few of my friends. We went to the Longhua Temple and Pagoda. It was interesting but even more interesting were all the sights and chinese streets around there. When I get the pics from Mary Catherine I'll show them to you. It was one of those times when we said, "Now we're in China". We then went to the Xujiahui Cathedral - "a gothic Jesuit cathedral completed in 1910. It is the city's largest cathedral and a fine example of early European architecture." I took that right out of the yellow pages which is a little book about 3" x 4" that is used for sightseeing. The church was really quite interesting and although it looks small from outside it really is quite large. You can actually go to mass there but it is quite far from here so I doubt that I'll make it. We actually had a lot of fun today, sightseeing. We haven't done that for quite awhile and are feeling like we need to do more as we did when we first got here. We easily got into a rut of work and home and only going to the places around us so not really experiencing the chinese culture. In the stalls around the pagoda we went to, today, there were lots of firecrackers for sale. They have big packages of them in which they come in a big circle of them (they look like a round of bullets). There are packages of 500 and 1000 as well as tons of fireworks that you can buy also. To even it all out though with my electric bill this week there was a notice not to set off firecrackers as they could damange the electrical wires. We see a lot of interesting notices and signs. I will have to take a picture of the sign in our elevator for you to read. It is quite hilarious. That's all for now. I will keep you up to date on the new year happenings.

Making Dumplings

Well, the little empty boxes are gone (although yesterday, they were on google) but now everything is in Chinese.

Okay, I think I know which boxes to click on now. If a blank blog shows up that was my first try to send a picture. This is the ice bar where we went last fall for Emma's birthday.

I actually typed a blog the other day but I still have all the little square boxes. I tried to add a picture and lost everything. I obviously don't remember those boxes well enough. I will try to send separate blogs today so this gets to you and to learn the pictures. I want to send some Chinese New Year pictures from work later this week. I have been busy making plans for my visitors who will soon be here. My bosses birthday was last Wed. so a bunch of us went out to an Indian restaurant in Puxi. It is called hazara and is located in the Rui Jin Hotel and Garden complex. It's quite a place - very old, once ahome to Henry Morris. He was the proprietor of the English language newspaper"North China Daily News", it doesn't say when but this place has had "special significance" since 1930. It is in the French Quarter of town. My birthday is coming up and I have invited friends to an Italian restaurant at Super Brand Mall which apparently has a fantastic view and is the best kept secret in town. Come and join me on the 13th.