Tuesday started off with the usual English lesson, interrupted by a couple of phone calls after which Lucy managed to convey that she was going to a university and would I like to come along. It was a gloomy wet day so I was intending to stay home again so in the spirit of adventure I decided this was a good idea. We ended up at the China European International Business School (CEIBS) inquiring about an EMBA for our driver, who turned out to be a business associate. I can’t really work out the relationships that are going on here but Tong (the one that normally drives us around and had told me his job was investing money) met us there for lunch, the menu was completely western in fact the whole place was crawling with Americans both lecturers and students. Then three long boring meetings later I was pleased to note that we were finally heading back to the cars. Lucy took an active interest in one particular form and her name and details were written on it but I am 99% sure that the EMBA was for the driver, does that mean that she is his employer? maybe financial investor? That’s the big disappointment when teaching level 1 students, so many questions are inadequately answered. I was starting to look forward to spending the afternoon at Starbucks with a hot chocolate and the internet but we took a detour into a shabby part of town or maybe it was a more normal suburb as I have become accustom to spending my time in the nicer parts. We were met by a real estate agent or landlord and shown a set of offices obviously meant for the EMBA guy, after a cursory look we were shown to the real estate agents office and fussed over with cups of tea then he disappeared. Three hours later (6pm) he reappeared looking hassled, ushered us out and locked up the office, after a short walk we entered his home and were treated to a meal with homemade wine, by 6.40 we were in the cars finally heading home.
After the lesson on Wednesday morning, we went our separate ways. I got off the metro near the Bund and immediately spotted a double decker sightseeing bus so spent the next hour cruising around the city, then headed to the Bund as I wanted to take the sightseeing tunnel under the river to Pudong. I boarded a capsule on a track with a couple of other people and was treated to a light/film show all the way across, it was hilarious - so garish, even the shots of a ‘scary shark’ was just a white tip. I then teamed up with two Polish guys, Cooper and Peter, and happily went along with their plan to see the city from the world’s third tallest building the World Financial Center. We speed up to the 100th floor standing 474m above ground level and took in the views, the glass floor was little disconcerting. These two guys are just beginning their holiday and are full of infectious enthusiasm – just what I needed. We then visited Jing’an temple set amongst a very new and modern background. After dinner, then we went to a Toastmaster’s meeting! The whole meeting was conducted in a very high standard of English, probably only 3 native English speakers in the room. After two hours and some interesting points of view, unfortunately the most interesting speech on the handling of the bullet train tragedy was delivered by someone those English skills were not as good as most of the others. We declined several invitations to dine with them and speed off to the Bund to capture some photo’s looking over to Pudong. Great interesting day, even accidently missing the last train on my line was Ok because I was encouraged to follow a group of racing chinese (one of them managed to turn back and yell ‘here’ at me) so a jagged another train to a stop I had used before and cabbed it home from there.
