An Easter-y Week

Matt's had two nights out this weekend. Friday night, he spent with Adam in the pub, and yesterday, after our day out in Puxi, he went to watch West Ham win at Tottenham at the pub with a Tottenham fan.  While he was watching the football, I was eating a cream egg and watching my new obsession, RuPaul's Drag Race - it's like America's Next Top Model for drag queens. Love it!

For some reason, we didn't get Easter Monday off school, we got cupcakes instead.  They were so sugary, I felt really sick after mine!

We also had International Day, where we could wear traditional dress or sports dress from our home countries...

On Saturday, Matt and I had a nice day out in Puxi in the sunshine.  We had lunch at Pie Society, which was so delicious, we're going back on Tuesday with Andy and Becky!

We also had a wander around the Jade Buddha Temple, which has an enormous Buddha made from jade - it's a huge piece of stone!  It's a very commercialized temple, but is interesting to have a wander around.

We also stumbled across this very cool F1 car advertising a Bathing Ape, which is a Japanese Clothing brand. I wonder what car is underneath all that paint!

Shanghai Grand Prix Formula 1 - 1000th Race!

I took 600 photos last weekend at the 1000th ever grand prix, and 300 were of blank track!  This happened last year too. It took me a good half of the race to 'warm up' before I started getting just the front wing or an unintentionally blurry car.  I got the hang of it eventually though and started getting some really good shots.  The last photo I got was a perfect one of car 44 - Lewis Hamilton, right in the centre of the frame.  Wonderful!

The race itself wasn't particularly exciting, but we still enjoyed ourselves.  We had good seats, opposite the end of the pit lane and the Torro Rosso garage.  It meant that we had a great view of the start of the race and of the first corner of the track.

It was pretty chilly on the day, but we kept warm in our jumpers and with hot food and the boys had beer.

We've had our friends from England staying with us for the last two weeks, with their 10 month old baby,  George.  It's been great having them here, but also quite tiring.The baby has been awake pretty much every night with jetlag and then teething, so work has been exhausting every day.  We've now got a weekend to ourselves and are making the most of it by doing nothing at all.

My new camera arrived, and it's fabulous!

Here we are at the Cheesecake Factory after Andy, Lucy and George had spent the day at Disney.

Easter Holidays

It's been a really nice week off work.  I'm so glad we didn't go away anywhere (for the first time since moving to China).  It was actually great just to be at home with the kitties, enjoying relaxing and binge-watching Game of Thrones before the new season starts.  We had the usual hospital appointments - for Matt getting his hard cast put on his broken wrist - and a couple of mornings out eating breakfast.  We had lunch at a Californian restaurant with Andy, Becky and Vicky, and I discovered the joys of RuPaul's Drag Race, an American TV show which is basically a modeling competition for drag queens.  It's amazing.

We were also cat-sitting this week for three lovely kitties called Frankie, Richie and Maude.  They are very sweet, and also really tiny compared to our Sooty and Snowball.  They really are enormous cats.  Maude is especially friendly and loves a cuddle.  She is a stray, rescued by our friends about 5 weeks ago.  If we didn't have our boys already, she would be coming to live with us!

Matt went to the pub a few times, and I went to the Hongqiao Flower Market with Ann one day.  It's fabulous, and was absolutely full of succulents.  I couldn't resist buying a couple of pots, especially a huge pink one that is just gorgeous.  Ann and I then went for lunch at a burger place called Fat Cow!

Our lovely friends Andy and Lucy and baby George arrived from Newcastle yesterday, very early in the morning.  Matt wasn't feeling well, but we did manage to get out in the 29 degrees heat for a walk to the Indian restaurant buffet nearby.  We then forced our poor friends to stay awake for as long as possible - which was until about 6.30pm (pretty good considering they arrived at 6am).

We are back at work today for an INSET day (after a general check up at the hospital - which was good).  The kids are back in tomorrow.  It will be nice to see them after nearly two weeks away - one for the holidays and one for being ill!

Medical March Madness

This Sunday was the third (and hopefully final) Sunday in a row that we have spent in hospital.  This time it was for Matt's broken wrist, or to be precise, his 'dorsal radial chip fracture'.  Dorsal just makes me think of dolphins, so it's his dolphin fracture now.  He fell over playing football.

That's 3 out of 4 weekends in March, forever now known as 'Medical March Madness'.  How much bad luck can two people have!!!

Anyway, things seem to have improved going into April.  Snowball and Sooty are cute as ever, and we're having a nice relaxing week off school for the Easter holidays.  We've just been out for breakfast a few times and for dinner at Found 158, a very cool area of restaurants in Puxi.  We went for Turkish, yum!

We're also cat-sitting for some friends for 3 adorable fluffies, which is fun.  We've had dinner/drinks with Andy and Becky a few times, and we're generally relaxing, while also fitting in various hospital appointments.  Feeling much more positive about everything now, but I think we still want a second and probably third opinion for my MS diagnosis.  Something just doesn't seem to add up there.