Partying in Shanghai and seeing the acrobats

The birthday party for Dan (a friend and colleague of Ashley) o Saturday night turned out to be just perfect. We started off by going to an "all you can eat and drink" Indian restaurant where you pay 80 yuan for an Indian buffet (which was delicious) and free beer. A nice way to start the evening, and after a while more than 25 people turned up. Great to meet the friends of Ashley - they were all so friendly (most of them were English teacher but also the occasional Japanese teacher and one or two locals). From there we went to a bar called Windows Temple or something like that which might have been one of the best bars I've been to. They played good music, there was a dance floor, the music wasn't too loud so you could actually sit down and talk without a problem, there was a (good) pool table where you could play some pool to catch your breath after dancing, the drinks were only 10 yuan each and most importantly - they were showing some snooker games on TV! Got to see the game between Hendry and O'Sullivan and then a game with Hendry and Ding Junhui if I recall it correctly. I was just stunned - didn't realize I missed snooker so much! :)

Sunday was great as well. After a nice brunch me and Dan strolled along the famous Nanjing Road down to the riverside street known as the Bund. Ashley went back to sleep a bit more, so we had a few hours of just walking around town, seeing some great views (view over Renmin Square from a hotel reception on the 38th floor), drinking some coffee at Starbucks, seeing the "old Shanghai" at the Bund and being annoyed with the smog and the fog that made photographing close to impossible.

Had dinner with Ashley at a Chinese pizza place, cheap, good pizzas and they actually had enus in English which helped a bit. Peas on a pizza isn't that bad actually! From there we went to the circus where we saw a show called the Intersection of Time. It was just awesome - two hours of pure astonishment! The acrobats were just amazing, all the tricks, flips and other stuff they did was great and it was all nicely mixed with live music - a mix of modern beats and traditional music, some nice light shows, intereesting use of lights and shadows to empasize on different parts of the show and a neverending stream of great performances. The romantic side of me was mostly impressed with the part were a guy and a girl were swinging about in "silk curtains" - it was just beautiful! The technology side of me was much impressed with eight motobikes inside a small "steel ball" - driving around in crazy speed and patterns in a space so small that only one driver at a time could be "on the bottom" of the baal! Amazing! Other numbers included juggling with ming-wases, doing crazy flips through rings (seemed like great fun), doing triple flips with some twists up to the top of four people on top of each other shoulders and much more that I can't even put words to. Wow! No photos were allowed though - so you will just have to trust me that it was all extremely interesting, amazing, great, beautiful and a handful of other superlatives!

Today I'm plaaning to do a day trip to the West Lake, so I will write more about that later I suppose. Pictures will be uploaded as soon as I get to a real computer (i.e. not a Mac)!