Art, Sharks, St. Patrick's...

Last weekend we went to the art district in Shanghai! Tucked away in Putao district, we went to one of many art galleries. One we went to was a glass lacquer gallery called "Two Cities." Their concept was based on the fact that every city has two sides: the good & bad. Their goal was to beautify the bad part of the city and make it culturally enriching. We also went up to Image Tunnel's headquarters, where we met the woman who was the driving force behind the art community in Shanghai. Every week she has film screenings in her little studio of all sorts of documentaries concerning Shanghai. Her goal was to bring more culture to the Shanghai scene - because despite the fact that Shanghai is China's biggest city - it still lacks that creative individualistic flair that most metropolitan cities have. I find this very true - I can't even find any music venues to see good live music! It makes me miss T.T. & the Bears in Boston...

I also got to see the Shanghai Sharks basketball team play! Yao Ming used to play for them. Shanghai was up against Xinjiang, which is a province located northwest in China. The Sharks are ranked second to last in the CBA (Chinese Basketball Association) and they were playing against #4 in the league. The stadium was so tiny! I felt like I was at a high school basketball game, and the cheerleaders looked like they were 12 years old. The Shark mascots were also strangely puny and acted somewhat dorky. After awhile I started yelling random obscenities in English just to amuse myself. The Sharks only lost by 7 pts., surprisingly. Good job! 很好！

ST. PATRICK'S DAY. I realized that America always steals other countries' holidays as an excuse to drink. We tried to maintain this mentality in Shanghai. On Saturday night, the weekend before St. Patty's we went to Bull Dog's Pub. I was ready to party 100% but was met with failure after realizing that this was a legit pub, and we were surrounded by a very much older crowd. We were the only ones wearing green, whilst everyone else wore knitted sweater vests and had salt n' pepper hair. I tried to look older by playing a little pool and hanging out with one of the guys that was smoking a cigar. FAIL. The second chance to celebrate came around on the actual day of St. Pat and we went to O'Malley's. The crowd was much more our scene, sprawling with Wai guo ren (foreigners) and it was only 25RMB for each Irish Car bomb. Not too shabby. There was a giant Guinness mascot walking around, Celtic bands, and I met some Irish people. I had two Irish car bombs and stuck around for maybe 20 minutes and bounced back home. I think the highlight of the night was going to the street vendor to get a bowl of noodles.