Shanghai is known for its good Jazz. Helpfully, one of my colleagues at work, who shall remain nameless, Toby, sent me a link to a decent club. In New York. Fortunately the Lonely Planet came to the rescue and mentioned the Old Jazz Band (average age of 80), in a hotel just round the corner So we went, listened, and scoffed some nice (but expensive) wine.
The Old Jazz Band at the Peace Hotel
Rooftop Bars
Lonely Planet again... to a rooftop bar. The good news was that there were loads of tables outside. The bad news is that it started to rain. Still preferred to stay outside though. They had these fancy lights on the table so we took a few photos too :-)
Mystic Claudia
Liquid Laundry
After eating at the Spice Factory, we discovered a Brew pub. We went back there to try some of the local brews. All in the interests of cultural understanding, you know.
There were very few Chinese. They obviously don't understand the expat culture! In fact there were a few less beers than anticipated as well. Shanghai had some kind of Brew Pub festival going on that week. Still, it hadn't actually run out and we only had time for one beer before the metro stopped working (at 10:15pm). A taxi was also out of the window as I had to be up early at stupid o'clock in order to catch the flight back out. And as it turned out I didn't actually have enough money to pay for that either!
Final Night in Shanghai
The Bund
One of the spectacular displays in Shanghai is the vast wattage of lights on show across the river. All day had been cloudy and threatening us with rain, and the top of the buildings disappeared in cloud colour. No bottle opener to be seen... Still a pretty impressive sight though...
I must apologise - these photos are particularly crap as they were taken with a telephone. Still pretty impressive though!
Jazz Bars (again)
So this person I refused to name (Toby) sent me through another link... this time to a club in Shanghai. After half an hour of negotiation with the metro staff (involving hand signals, impromptu google translations, a lot of shrugging and general failure to communicate, we set off to our destination.
Except it wasn't.
Another half an hour of walking and some more negotiations with restaurant staff who walked us to two bars (both the wrong ones) we gave up and entered a club with live music. And expensive drinks.
The music was good though
In the mood for Murphy's
Chinese Beer
The End End of the night. End of my stay. Claudia will continue on her 3 month trip through Asia, banging her head against the struggle to buy any form of train/bus/plane ticket in China. Whilst she was trying to arrange that, I had a Tsingtao Stout, complete with classic ring pull