Shanghai Grand Prix 2018

Two weeks have passed since my last post - what a busy time we are having.  Time seems to move extra quick in China!  We have already done 2 weeks of Term 3, and only have another 8 until our first school year in China is finished. Crazy isn't it!!!

During our first week back, Mum and Dad went off to Beijing for 5 days, and had a wonderful time.  I got sick again (of course) and Matt and I spent our evenings going to bed at 8pm!  It's exhausting having visitors.  Wonderful, but exhausting.

Mum and Dad came back on the Friday, and it was then Formula 1 weekend!  Ahhhhhhh. We were so excited.  Unfortunately, Matt was working a football tournament at school on the Saturday, so just the 3 of us headed to the qualifying.  It was so cold.  I mean really arctic, and we didn't have the right clothes at all.  There wasn't much going on around the track compared to other grand prixs, but there were a few stands/promotion places and shops to look around.  There was a very Chinese show with traditional dress and singing.  Qualifying itself was exciting as it was the first time any of us had seen F1 live.  The noise the cars make is crazy. They are so loud.  Lewis Hamilton didn't do as well as we had hoped, ending up 5th on the starting grid, but there was all to play for on Sunday.

Matt was with us on Sunday, and the weather had greatly improved.  We all had our hats, gloves and ski jackets and looked ridiculous because everyone else was in shorts. I was just right in my ski jacket when we were in the stands because we were in the shade, and it was a bit of a wind tunnel.

The race was great - a bit boring maybe on TV to start off with, but the second half was really exciting. We had such a great view of pretty much the entire track from our seats. I would definitely go for the same spot again. We were right opposite the pit lane, and I spent quite a while getting some arty photos of blurred cars going into the pit stops.  I also kept missing the cars because they were going so fast, so I have about 50 photos of blank track!

Lewis Hamilton ended up coming 4th, so we didn't get to see him on the podium, which was a shame. But I really like Daniel Ricciardo, and he won in the end, so we got to watch him drink champagne out of his sweaty shoe, as he always does on the podium, yuck!

After the race we decided to stay around and avoid the huge queues going to the station, so we met up with a friend from work and went to the Chandon tent, where we proceeded to get quite drunk on free glasses of champagne!

It was such a fun weekend, but we were exhausted by the end of it!

Monday night was Mum and Dads last night with us. We were at school, but went out for Korean BBQ in the evening, which was lovely.  The flat is now very quiet, but it's nice to be back to normal too.  This week has been super busy with lots going on at school.  The weekend has been nice and quiet for me. Matt was coaching rugby on Saturday. I met him after for lunch at the local Mexican place and a jug of Margaritas. Yum!  Today, I am at home relaxing and trying to shift a sore throat that I think may be going to my chest. Matt is out playing cricket with the team from school. They won! Matt says that he made a couple of good runs too, which is fab. 

Qibao Water Town

On Friday, we went off to Qibao, our closest water town.  Shanghai is surrounded by canal towns, but most are an hour or so away on the train.  Qibao is actually on the metro line, although it still took an hour door to door.  The town is quite small, but very interesting.  It has a few nice bridges and lots of little alleyways to wander along.  One was full of food stalls, with some very interesting, and not always pleasant food smells.  There were some very unidentifiable meats there too!  We couldn't quite cope with the food offerings, so went to Starbucks for lunch instead - how boring of us!

We wandered to the local temple, which was very interesting, and very quiet compared to the rest of the town.

The tower had a different god on each floor, which were surrounded by tiny versions of it all over the walls.  I guess people had paid to have their mini statue there.  The view was just of building sites, but it was interesting to see anyway.

We suddenly heard a gong sounding very loudly, and it turned out to be this procession, probably happening because it was a religious festival on Thursday.  The procession was full of monks playing instruments and holding holy items.  They went around the block, then back into the main temple for some very relaxing singing/chanting.  It was fascinating, and very well timed on our part!

One of the buildings was full of statues representing the different animals of the years.  So, 2018 is the year of the dog.  Below was my birth year, and it's the year of the dragon.

We finished off the day with some green ice cream, which we had no idea what flavour it was - turns out it was green tea flavour, and was quite nice too!