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Exploring Shanghai

Shanghai Skyline

Exploring Shanghai

So I’ve settled in quickly!

Following on from my first impressions blog, here I will talk about my first weekend, which was spent exploring the fabric market, the Bund, enjoying some delicious Cantonese food and of course celebrating AUSTRALIA DAY!!

So out of the new group of interns, it mostly consists of Australians and a few Americans – haha great fun. I’ll keep this civil but there is plenty of banter between the two nations and both parties seem to enjoy it. Though it’s not hard to imagine which bunch cops it the most. After our group dinner on Friday night, which was thoroughly enjoyable, we had most of the weekend free. This meant one thing – exploring our new city!

We set about on Sunday venturing towards the Fabric Market. Getting a taxi in Shanghai is extremely easy as the free ones have a green light on top. Not only are they easy to hop into, they are extremely cheap compared to Australia. A quick 10-15 min drive only costs around 20RMB! We all wanted to get tailor made suits and we knew Shanghai was the best place for this. For this, the Fabric Market is the place to go. We were advised by one of the older interns to visit a certain tailor with whom she had built a rapport with during her stay and that’s exactly what we did.

Following on from getting suits we decided to visit the bund. The Bund is a waterfront area in Shanghai and it faces Pudong. It is one of the most famous tourist destinations in Shanghai. It has an amazing view at night when all the lights are on and it looks exceptional.

Along the bund, we walked through the French Concession. The architecture was a resemblance of European buildings with many small cafés and restaurants along the way. After walking for a while we met up with others at a Cantonese restaurant. The food was phenomenal. A few of the interns in the program declared that Cantonese food was now their favorite cuisine. My quest for learning how to use chopsticks well continued though I’m positive I have improved. Amongst all this we realized that it was the 26th of January, which meant it was Australia Day. Suddenly I missed the beach, kicking a footy around and drinking beverages with my mates back at home embracing the sun. Shanghai was 5°C and its safe to say the beach was out of the question. Never mind, one of the older interns declared that they had spent the day at Sliders – an Australian pub. So it was decided, that following on from dinner we would all head to Sliders to celebrate the last few hours of Australia Day.

Luckily we had been following Triple J’s hottest 100 all day through our mobile phones so we weren’t missing all the action completely. We spent the rest of the night at Sliders slamming down some drinks and celebrating Australia day. Some of the interns even tattooed the Australian flag on themselves much to the amusement of the Americans in our group. This was new to them though they did embrace it as well. It was a fantastic weekend and a great start to my Shanghai adventure. Till next time…

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