Finished the meeting up midway through Saturday afternoon. Rosalie and I spent a whirlwind hour packing up all our gear, and then headed out to a spa for a massage booked for us by Lou of LB/Shanghai. After watching us work for a week she agreed we needed some R&R, so she was kind enough to book us massages at her favorite spa. It was a nice transition from a long grueling week into 24 hours of free time before leaving the country.... The spa was really nice, an upper crust kind of venue called
Dragonfly on Xinle road, but the rub...well, for me it was a little formulaic and didn't even begin to scratch the surface of what was wrong with my body after a week of intercontinental travel, binge drinking, pork knuckles, and typing for 7 hours a day. It's cool, though, it loosened me up, and Rosalie and I found another massage spa closer to the hotel where we got a second one after dinner (two massages in one day! spoiling ourselves, but it was 14 bucks for an hour, and ya can't argue with a deal that good...) the second was infinitely better, or maybe i just needed a lot of work to loosen up the chaotic stresses i fill my body with...
We spent the evening wandering around the Bund, the French Concession area of Puxing that's overrun with tourists, hawkers, and of course, the requisite Armani and Dolce & Gabbana stores. All the greatest retail property in the world seems to be populated by Versace outlets and other high end Italian designers selling their wares... These stores are interspersed with such venerable buildings as the Chinese Customs House, assorted global financial institutions, and glorious restaurants and bars in distinctly European architecture. The Bund is Shanghai's financial district, where the French and others plied their trades in the decades following the hugely humiliating Chinese defeat during the Opium Wars in the 1840's. This was one of the first places opened to foreigners in China, and it's got real character... We wandered around for hours till we finally found the restaurant we were looking for, a great spot called
New Heights. Great food, fantastic view, and a serene way to spend my last night in Shanghai. Although that turned out to be a stopping point on what became a progressively wierder Saturday night...
After walking back to the hotel, we figured we'd savor one last cocktail in the Hotel's 65th floor bar before crashing. Ordered up some very tasty Flashbacks (vodka, triple sec, ginger juice, & lemon) and watched a few couples dance to a DJ spinning classic tracks from the 70's and 80's. Reloaded, the night was called, and there was a blackjack table, a sequence of music straight out of the Disco era, and a lounge singer with a hot slit dress singing "La Isla Bonita" by Madonna, inbetween brief moonwalk bits from a Michael Jackson impersonator. strange strange way to close out a week in China...
Finished the meeting up midway through Saturday afternoon. Rosalie and I spent a whirlwind hour packing up all our gear, and then headed out to a spa for a massage booked for us by Lou of LB/Shanghai. After watching us work for a week she agreed we needed some R&R, so she was kind enough to book us massages at her favorite spa. It was a nice transition from a long grueling week into 24 hours of free time before leaving the country.... The spa was really nice, an upper crust kind of venue called Dragonfly on Xinle road, but the rub...well, for me it was a little formulaic and didn't even begin to scratch the surface of what was wrong with my body after a week of intercontinental travel, binge drinking, pork knuckles, and typing for 7 hours a day. It's cool, though, it loosened me up, and Rosalie and I found another massage spa closer to the hotel where we got a second one after dinner (two massages in one day! spoiling ourselves, but it was 14 bucks for an hour, and ya can't argue with a deal that good...) the second was infinitely better, or maybe i just needed a lot of work to loosen up the chaotic stresses i fill my body with...
We spent the evening wandering around the Bund, the French Concession area of Puxing that's overrun with tourists, hawkers, and of course, the requisite Armani and Dolce & Gabbana stores. All the greatest retail property in the world seems to be populated by Versace outlets and other high end Italian designers selling their wares... These stores are interspersed with such venerable buildings as the Chinese Customs House, assorted global financial institutions, and glorious restaurants and bars in distinctly European architecture. The Bund is Shanghai's financial district, where the French and others plied their trades in the decades following the hugely humiliating Chinese defeat during the Opium Wars in the 1840's. This was one of the first places opened to foreigners in China, and it's got real character... We wandered around for hours till we finally found the restaurant we were looking for, a great spot called New Heights. Great food, fantastic view, and a serene way to spend my last night in Shanghai. Although that turned out to be a stopping point on what became a progressively wierder Saturday night...
After walking back to the hotel, we figured we'd savor one last cocktail in the Hotel's 65th floor bar before crashing. Ordered up some very tasty Flashbacks (vodka, triple sec, ginger juice, & lemon) and watched a few couples dance to a DJ spinning classic tracks from the 70's and 80's. Reloaded, the night was called, and there was a blackjack table, a sequence of music straight out of the Disco era, and a lounge singer with a hot slit dress singing "La Isla Bonita" by Madonna, inbetween brief moonwalk bits from a Michael Jackson impersonator. strange strange way to close out a week in China...
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