Shanghai (1/26 - 2/4): Tiffany in Shanghai

As many of you know, I came back to Shanghai for 10 days to help Tiffany get settled in on her training stint in Shanghai. She would be staying at my place and training with Yang Laoshi so I wanted to make sure she had the lay of the land. Plus, it had been a year since I last saw her so it seemed like a good chance to hang out with a good friend.

I had planned my travel from Shenzhen to arrive at PuDong airport just 30 minutes before her flight arrived. It worked out pretty well, and even though my flight was late departing, with her time in customs and baggage claim it all worked out. We met up, she changed some money and we grabbed a cab to my home. We also got some Yang Ro Chao Fan, which was pretty tasty./p>

Then we ran to Carrefore so I could pick up a few supplies (as did she) and then back home again. I made a slight mistake that evening as I was falling asleep, which I would end up paying for pretty heavily in the following several days.

The first night I had forgotten how cold the air would get at night and I didn’t keep the heater on in the living room. I had a comforter over me so my body was warm, but I was inhaling very cold air all night and by the time I woke up my lungs felt not-too-good. I ended up catching a flu and for the next three days I was pretty much bed-ridden with a 101 - 102 degree fever and hacking cough. Not too fun.

Tiffany eating lunch

Kids training

Tiffany training hard … or hardly training?

But the illness wouldn’t really set in until Saturday evening so in the morning I took Tiffany over to the sports school to check things out. We saw some sort of mock-practice training thing that the other group was participating in. I talked a bit to Yang Laoshi too and he said we could come and watch the afternoon class. So Tiff and I went to fake Colonel Sanders’ restaurant, had some food and then relaxed a bit before heading to the wushu guan to watch the practice. By the end of practice I was feeling rather “blah” and we spent most of the evening just hanging out at the house.

Sunday I was definitely feeling pretty sick, but Tam was in town and we thought it would be good to meet up with him and do a bit of shopping to boot. So we went to Xu Jia Hui, grabbed some Japanese food for lunch and then took the subway over to the Science and Technology museum where Tiffany bought a couple of long winter coats for 100 RMB each. Tam was also nice enough to hook me up with some Nyquil he had brought from home.

Tiffany blocks the advances of statue phone girl

Thinking about what to do

We grabbed a cab back to my place (I wasn’t up for a train ride at this point) and as soon as Tam left back for Hangzhou around 6:30 or 7:00 I completely crashed. I ended up sleeping for about 14 hours, but it was a very restless sleep.

The problem with sleeping while you have a fever is that you dream really heavily, so I would have what seemed like 10 hours worth of dreams and then wake up, but only an hour had passed and it was just 8:00 p.m. Bummer. Plus, my body temperature regulation was all wacky so I’d either be sweating profusely or shivering intensely. I slept for about 14 hours, but it felt like I was in bed for 3 days.

On Monday I went to the wushu guan with Tiffany for her first training. It went pretty well and she managed to get a couple looks of approval from the coach (which is almost like applause over here) and then we grabbed some food (although I wasn’t hungry much during these days) and went back to my place.

Zhu Ke Training Hard

Practicing some nanquan

Tiffany practicing

The next couple days are sort of a blur. She trained on Tuesday and Wednesday as well. But then she cought some of my illness and took Thursday and Friday off, but trained again on Saturday.

Zhu Wen Jun came by one time and I gave her the VCD I made of Terence’s greeting for her and Yo Yo. She was kind of drunk, but seemed pretty happy about it. We also hung out a bit with my neighbor Sherry as well.

Sherry and Tiffany at dinner

Kitty on Campus

Tiffany eating dumplings

Oh, and the other thing we did that week was head out to the wushu store at Hankou Stadium and got a bunch of stuff for Tiffany. We went out there with Mark Wu, who some folks might know from the jiayo forums.

Saturday night was pretty fun. Pat, Terence, Raffi, Kevin Morris and a few other folks were in town so they planned an outing. We went to Shintori, one of those ex-pat frequented, over-priced pseudo posh restaurants that I never go to. I suppose it’s okay to drop by and eat at one of these kinds of places every blue moon or so, but I don’t really get the people who eat at these sorts of places all the time. It just seems like such a waste of money when I can get a delicious plate of food at a restaurant near my home for less than the price of my bottle of Evian water at Shintori.

Zhu Wen Jun and Tiffany were my “dates” for the evening and ZWJ was pretty excited to be sitting with Terence. At first I could tell she was pretty nervous, which was funny to see since it doesn’t happen all that much.

Zhu Wen Jun and Terence

Dinner group

Tiffany at dinner

Sake Bombing

Zhu Wen Jun and Tiffany

Kevin and Tiffany

After dinner a bunch of people went to a bar next door but I headed home (via a quick “hello” at the jululu jiu ba row) so that I could get a full night’s rest before my flight to Hong Kong the next day. Tiffany and ZWJ went to a club with ZWJ’s friends and the rest of them went out to who-knows-where (check Kevin or Raffi’s blog for more info).

It was a good thing I got some rest that night or I wouldn’t have survived all the travel the next day. I had scheduled to take the same flight as Pat so we grabbed our plane from PuDong airport to Shenzhen and then went to the ferry terminal where we met up with Stephen (who was just returning from a trip to Harbin). And then we all Turbo-Jetted back to Hong Kong and I took a cab home to my new apartment.

Pat at PuDong Airport

I had been living there for a week, but it was only my second night sleeping there.

And, that was pretty much my 10 days in Shanghai. Mostly sick, but also got to hang with some good friends. I still have a bit of a cough, but it’s improving each day so I don’t think it will last too long.

But lots of work to do this week, so plenty to keep me busy!