The Aurora Museum, Shanghai

It's been a bit of a week of ups and downs.  There have been exhausting late evenings at school with the club advertising fair, parent-teacher conferences and meetings. Lesson highs - like a strategy paying off - a boy I help in year 6 told his tutor that i'm in his English lessons to help everybody and it's great because it makes him feel confident.  The whole point of being in this lesson is for this one boy, but being in year 6 now, I make sure I give him time on his own to think, and make sure I talk to everyone else in the class too. ... and lesson lows, like my very tricky behavior-problem child - i'm just exhausted after every lesson with him.  We've felt both homesick and sad to be leaving China this week.  We had a wonderful day out on Saturday, but then I was in bed all day with a nasty stomach bug on Sunday.  Actually, i'm still in bed now - didn't make it into work today.  A roller coaster of a week, as you can see.

Saturday though, was great.  We decided to have a day out and tick something off our list of things to do before we leave Shanghai.  We ended up going for our usual weekend bagel at Lean after Matt had gotten a massage and a hair cut.  Then we headed into the skyscraper part of the city to the  Aurora Museum.  I think it's in part of an office building, rather than a hotel, but it's the gold, sparkly building next to the Pearl Tower.  The museum was very nice - with 5 floors of different themed artefacts: pottery models, pottery vases/plates, jade artefacts, Buddhas, and tools of how these artefacts were made.  The pottery sculptures/models were very nice.  There were some lovely statues of musicians, and some very cute models of animals.

Most impressive, and the whole reason for our trip to the museum, was this jade burial suit.  There are only 4 in the world.  This one was for an Emperor's wife.  It is made entirely out of tiny pieces of jade, sewn together using gold thread.  The pieces fit together absolutely perfectly.  It's magnificent.  It was thought that the jade would stop the body decomposing, therefore preserving it for the afterlife.

This was the view from the museum.

And I particularly liked this belt buckle. I thought it had a rather lovely face on it. It's supposedly a dragon, but I think it looks more like a platypus! 

You can see the Aurora building in the background here (the gold one sticking out of my head).  We went for a Starbucks looking out at the Bund after the museum, and then got the boat across to the Bund.  We then headed to Found 158, a collection of bars and restaurants, to celebrate our friend Paul's birthday. We had Homeslice pizza for dinner and then went to see a magic show in a tiny theatre that seated about 30 people.  There were two magicians.  The first, wasn't the best i've ever seen. I definitely saw a few switches here and there.  The second guy was from Belgium, and was fantastic. He made real tiny fish appear from inside bank notes! He was very impressive.  In the same league as Edward, our magician at our birthday party last year (who was amazing!).  All in all, a really fun day.