It’s no joke when you keep turning the corner to find a basset hound staring at you.  I’m pretty sure that this was Mason working as a secret service basset in Shanghai.  Watching over our every move.  To see whether we were buying sufficient treats to take home for him.  He’s going to be sorely [...]

Chinese parks are a community hub.  People come together to talk in the shade of the trees, to exercise, to dance, to watch movies and to write.  It’s a wonderful thing to see people milling around enjoying the company and the location.  Although parks are often located to busy roads they have a tranquility about [...]

For all the historical references that remain in Shanghai there were many traditional Chinese historical treasures that did not survive the Cultural Revolution.  A little like the main historical sites like the Forbidden City and Summer Palace in Bejing some of the historical places in Shanghai have been rebuilt for posterity rather than you being [...]

Streets all around Shanghai are being repaved, or re-cobbled or re-bricked.  This is all part of the spruce up effort for the expo.  At the end I’m sure Shanghai will have some of the smartest pavements around. There seems to be a huge effort to conserve and preserve some of the most traditional parts of [...]

Shanghai seems like a million miles and lifetimes ago.  Blogging about our adventures keeps the memories alive which is good because right now I’m living life like an out of body experience. The jet lag has kicked in big time making it hard to sleep at the appropriate times of day and even harder to [...]

After what seems to be an age we arrived in London safe and sound.  Just the small matter of having no luggage right now but I live in hope that the global baggage tracking system won’t let us down. International air travel is like a parallel universe where time gets confused and your body subjected [...]

It would have been nice to have more time in Shanghai.  So we did.  Not by choice though.  The cargo doors on our plane refused to close so after several hours sitting on the plane we were decamped to a hotel for the night. We’re now waiting to catch another flight with another airline to [...]

After foot slogging around for a while it’s always nice to find a shady spot to glug back a bottle of cold water.  This park was the perfect place for us to rest our weary legs.  Just like the buildings in Shanghai the parks are being spruced up for the Expo. I love people watching [...]

I wished I’d become an architect.  I desperately want to understand how people make buildings like these.  How you piece together developments on an uber scale and what makes an architect create buildings like these.  If I could make sense of the fundamentals I think I’d make more sense of Pudong. This is Shanghai at [...]

Shanghai has been an economic powerhouse of China for hundreds of years.   First as a trading port and now as the financial hub of the world’s economic hothouse. Right now there are feverish preparations across the city to showcase Shanghai’s economic might at the World Expo in 2010. My sense is that this trumps the [...]