Maybe that was the last beautiful sunny weekend of the year but given that we're in December already, nobody's complaining. No better way to spend it than wandering the almost untouched hutong behind Nanjing Road that we've been calling the next Tianzifang for the past 6 months.
Briccocafé has been serving both sides of the river for years now, and we recently headed to the off-Huaihai Lu branch to try their new menu. We were pleasantly surprised.
Having recently completed an intense course on conflict resolution and negotiation I thought I'd try none of it at the builders upstairs. They've been excavating the apartments on the floor above the drok embassy for 4 months and the end is still not in sight.
This lucky boy got bought an extra special trip to Japan for Christmas. We'll be sliding through powpow, pulling into a natural onsen and being served green tea by snow monkeys. Might have to buy a new lens and definitely heading down to Kejiguan to top up on Spyder skipants. Any tips on Hakuba? ...let me know.
Thanks to Katy and Jon's suggestion, we took a roll up to the Malu Vineyards - home of Ai Weiwei's Shanghai Studio. The creator of the Tate's porcelain sunflower-seed carpet and advisor to the birds nest has seemingly been sailing too close to the wind recently. His newly built space is to be demolished thanks to point 55 of the seventh chapter of the don't-tick-off the-government rulebook which reads: "don't tick off the government".
With friends in town we revisited the back-streets of old Shanghai.
To celebrate Alex winning another bike in the Shanghai Alleycat (and because it was halloween) we smacked it in C's with a brummie Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a guy who's freckles bleed one day every year and a Teletubby.