It has been a very long time since I wrote anything on this blog for which I apologize.  September marks the arrival of the new school year and along with it a large influx of new Expat faces into this city.  The Expat organisations such as Brits Abroad and the SEA – the Shanghai Expat Association are all geared up to welcoming all the new people with Welcome drinks and meals, courses and lectures.  And there is an Expat Show for companies and organisations wanting to meet the likes of me.  It is a bit like Freshers Week really.  Every club has been vying for my attention trying to get me to join them with tours to this market or that lecture on how to live in Shanghai.  We of course missed out on all of this, arriving as we did in the middle of January and shunning the only welcome to Shanghai lecture I could find in the Spring as it was held on the day we landed in the country.

Add to that all those Expats who have left Shanghai for the summer to miss the brutal heat and sapping humidity have now also returned.  Having survived a summer here, I can understand why they do it; why my parents left Hong Kong for the summer months and why good friends of ours leave the Far East for their

Shanghai Exhibition Centre

renovated Italian farmhouse for the July and August.  So in the month of September I have been busy renewing acquaintances and making new friends, planning the months ahead, joining groups, going on courses and learning what I should have been doing all along.  For example I now have a book 270 pages long that gives me the address of the British Consulate, where to find an English-speaking vet (if I ever needed one) and that tells me that I should “Maintain my Sense of Humour”.  It does tell me how

Turquoise Building over-looking the SEC

to learn how to use the buses, something I have yet to conquer.

I went along to the three-day Shanghai Expat Show at the very Soviet-style, turquoise-surrounded Shanghai Exhibition Centre where I picked up leaflets and booklets on all manner of things including eating well in China, Liverpool University and “property styling” of all things.  I tasted french wine and organic cheese and chatted to people wanting to take me on holiday to Yunnan and Kashgar, New Zealand and Cambodia and I gave my email address to a man from a Wealth Management company who has since tried to convince me that he should be my friend on LinkedIn.

Another day Richard and I got up early one Saturday to walk over the Community Center Shanghai at Hongqiao to take their Shanghai 123 course which told us how to prepare for emergencies and made us

Preparing For Emergencies

think about all the contacts and copies of paperwork we should have been carrying around with us and the emergency cash we should have had stashed away all these months.  We learned how ambulances work – a taxi is better if you can get yourself in one – and the more susceptible were worried by presentations made by representatives from companies selling air purifiers and “organic” food.

We were also given an interesting talk by a man who had been born in Cuba, but had left the island for the States when he was 10 years old.  But he has been living in China for the past 30 years, married to a Chinese woman.  We were shown

Chinese Problem Solving

30 Years of Development in Shanghai

slides on the Chinese way of problem solving recognisable to us both and how Shanghai had changed in the 30 years since he arrived.  He also gave us some interesting statistics about China which I kind of knew but I thought are worth reiterating here:

China – Your New Home

• 5000+ year history
• 56 ethnic groups
• 664 cities
• 240 cities have over 2 million population
• 1.365 billion people (2014)
• Economy number 2 in GDP (2015)
• Around 600,000 expats are living in China.

At the SEA New Membership Coffee Morning in the Ballroom of a Hotel in Xujiahui I sat down at a table next to a couple of ladies who had a couple of quilts piled on the table.  One turned out to be Dutch and the other Belgian but they were both members of the SEA small group of quilters.  As I had brought out some fabric with me to make a quilt whilst I’m here (I’ve not done any patchwork for 30 years) and it was still sitting in the cupboard looking for some action, I decided to join the ladies who meet once a week in each others’ apartments “to each sew at least 5 stitches” during the 4 hours that they meet.  The lovely Dutch lady is married to a journalist and as we got to know each other I asked if her husband just wrote nice stories about China or sometimes about the darker side of things.  Sometimes the latter she said and revealed that it was very difficult for her knowing when her husband was off on the trail of some of the more challenging stories that he uncovers.  “I watch these Expats with their drivers and their Ayis  (domestic help) who love living in Shanghai.  But they are isolated from what is a nasty little place.  I hate it.”

It is currently Golden Week here.  A type of harvest festival, prompted by the Harvest Moon, when, as at The Spring Festival known to the outside world as Chinese New Year, practically the whole population has taken a week off work.  The traffic on the roads is minimal and many of the people who have stayed in Shanghai for the holiday can be seen lounging around.  It appears to be a week of low energy.  I’ve had my own week of low energy, not because of the moon, but because of a nasty little virus.  It attacked my throat savagely first, then my chest making it painful to breath and then my head affecting my balance, followed by much sweating and it has just finished (more or less) giving me an ear ache.  It has made me think about how vulnerable medically we are here – making an appointment with a GP would be a whole new ball game out here.  And checking through the paperwork in case I eventually had to go and find some antibiotics if it turned out it was a bug rather than a virus that was enjoying my body’s services made us realise that the company’s registration paperwork for our Expat Health Insurance ran out at the end of August………

Which just goes to show you need to have your wits about you living out here……and sometimes those wits seem to go walkabout and need gathering up and taking into the fold once more.