May Day Flags on Gubei Lu

Red Flags on HuaiHai Middle Road

The weekend before we left for our holiday in the UK was a long one, as May 1st on the Friday is a national holiday in China.  The weekend before, Chinese national flags had been hung from the lampposts in Gubei Lu and other streets around Shanghai. Richard and I were

Fuxing Middle Road

heading into the Old French Concession to buy some presents to take back to England with us.  It being Labour Day, nobody was working.  In fact for most of the day many of the major roads that are usually busy with traffic were practically empty.  A few weeks before, these London Plane trees had been shedding their pollen which had blown in great handfuls around the pavements, but now the leaves were fully open making the streets very shady and very appealing in the heat.  We

Sen Cha flavoured desserts

stopped for a snack at the local Starbucks and I was intrigued by the number of Sen Cha (Japanese Green Tea Powder) flavoured desserts they had for sale – the Sen Cha making the products green.  I chose a marbled Cheesecake and the tea added an interesting fresh flavour to the cake and lightened the often cloying texture.  Richard chose a normal cheesecake and we both had their new panna cotta drink.  I wouldn’t normally choose such a dairy-based drink, but it was surprisingly good.

Sen Cha marbled cheesecake

I’m not the only one who photographs food

We had read in our guidebook that it was worth visiting the grounds of the Intercontinental Rujin Hotel, which was originally the early 20th Century home of the Morris family, owners of the North China Daily News.  Mr Morris raised greyhounds in the grounds during Shanghai’s Art Deco heyday and raced them at the Canidrome dog track across the road.  The building escaped the more usual level of destruction during the Cultural Revolution because apparently at the time it was home to a number of high-ranking party officials.

 We were invited inside by the door man (I think that was because I was wearing a dress and had a tasteful floral sun hat on), so we had a chance to have a look at the sumptuous atrium, with its grand floral display:

Atrium of the Intercontinental Rujin hotel

Floral display Rujin Hotel

We went on from there to have a look at the site of the Shanghai Canidrome where Mr Morris raced his greyhounds.  Alongside the dog track had been a casino.  Since then it has worn a number of

Shanghai Culture Square

hats.  After 1949 it became a CCP political site until 1976 when it was then used for government business for a short while, before becoming a venue for Peking Opera performances.  It then had a life as the Shanghai Flower Market for 8 years, before being set aside in 2005 as the Shanghai Culture Center. I had been told that a friend’s son would be performing with his ballet company, The Richmond Ballet, here at the end of the month and had hoped to buy our tickets, but the partially-submerged six-story structure was completely closed and empty except for the man on the roof cutting the hedge who gave Richard the collywobbles about risk assessments and safety hazards.

Front of The Shanghai Culture Center

Hedge-cutter

Grace Vineyard

From here we went onto Grace’s Vineyard – a wine shop. I first heard of Grace’s Vineyard from a television programme about young Chinese Entrepreneurs.  Whilst the youngster in question had been away in the US getting a degree in psychology her father, a coal mining industrialist who had been searching for the right spot for many years, had bought in 1997 a 200 Hectare farm in Shanxi Province (south-west of Beijing) in partnership with a french viticulturist and planted its many acres with 5 varieties of vines: Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon.  When she returned home she worked for Goldman Sachs in HK until 2002 when she resigned to take up her job to market the wine.  She bought in wine-making experts from France to help. None of this makes her an entrepreneur in my book – even the limited facts revealed in the TV programme made me think that she didn’t deserve the title – but never mind, the wines that they are producing are excellent and award winning.

The wines are sold at similar prices to those in the UK  and we took a few home to England as presents and to show that the Chinese do indeed produce some excellent wine, despite the arguments we had heard to the contrary before we left the UK.  We bought a couple of bottles of Merlot and one bottle of  a Merlot – Cabernet Sauvignon mix, which we had the good fortune to share with Richard’s father whilst we were in the UK.  It was a good enough wine to consider it for use at Christmas and rightly deserved its plaudits.