Scrumptious beef pie, green tea & exploring Shanghai!

Hey hey!

So, I quickly got back into the swing of things after arriving back from my camping holiday. The week flew by as the working week started on Tuesday. After a few days of teaching by day and studying Chinese by night, Friday arrived!

I love my Fridays. It’s like a day dedicated to catching up with work, exploring, Chinese, tutoring, productive stuff, unproductive stuff or just getting myself together. It varies really. This Friday I had my Chinese lesson at Xujiahui in the morning, and then headed to my “technology man” to get my iphone button fixed. After this, as I was close to People’s Square anyway, I headed for lunch and then Fuzhou Lu to work and look at books. I had a wonderful afternoon there drinking some soolong green tea (lu cha).

After this, I headed to my tutoring family’s place. After tutoring the kids for an hour and a half we sat down for dinner. They always cook me such scrumptious food. This time it was beef pie, rice and broccoli. SO SCRUMPTIOUS with a slight of spice! The highlight has to be, though, the kids trying to use knife and fork! Of course they mainly use chopsticks, so it was funny and so cute to see them struggle with their knives and forks. But, it was also nice to see them master it slowly too.

So, the next day was SATURYAY! I love my Saturdays too. If I’m not travelling for the weekend, my Saturdays are pretty much dedicated to exploring Shanghai. Which I still have soooo much more to explore yet by the way! On Saturday I went and explored the Hongkou area. This area is so nice and untouched by tourism. My friend and I started at the Lu Xun park. A beautiful, cultural and lovely wander around this park we had.

After this, we headed towards the Duoloun Road (Hongkou Cultural street) which is a historic street in Hongkou, Shanghai. It used to cater for many famous leftist literature writers. The street is exquisite with international architecture, lovely cafes (one in which we stopped to have brunch in) and beauty. The highlight of this street, for me, has to be the amazing Church. I’ve never seen such an amazing blend between West and East. On the outside the church is remarkable and completely Chinese style. Whilst the inside is European style. We had a lovely explore inside.

After this, we walked to Lu Xun’s residence. There was a really unique, retro and cute café next door to Lu Xun’s former house. We stopped there for some tea, a brownie and a chill. It was so nice and the place had such a great vibe.

After spending some time there, we caught a shortish (but definitely cheap) taxi ride to Huoshan Park. This was in the Jewish Ghetto area. 20,000 Jews were once in this very area in Shanghai in flee from Germany. This historic area has a real European feel to it. The bustling streets were amazing to take a wander on. Before heading to the former synagogue and current museum on Jewish Refugee history in Shanghai, we stopped for lunch at a tasty halal restaurant.

The museum was amazing, especially the video footage being played upstairs in which I learned so much about the history. Genuinely, Shanghai is such an interesting city in that it really is historically and presently so international. So much has happened here in Shanghai due to colonial history and in general. It’s shaped and made Shanghai into a city with so much beauty, character, architecture from all over the world; a real blend of European and Eastern.

So as the day started to wrap up we passed by the eerie and China’s largest, Tilanqiao Prison (still actively a prison amongst the bustle of Shanghai) and the Xiahai Temple. It had been such a wonderful day but due to such an active day and early start, my evening was niceeee and chilled.

Today, was a nice, usual, productive Sunday. Lot’s of Chinese, lesson planning, skype-chats, Starbucks, cleaning and general Sunday stuff!

Catch up with you guys in a week!

Sabrina Xxxx