Shanghai Snaps

* Just back from Shanghai yesterday and went around a few places but all in all a pretty cloudy trip. There were fireworks on the evening of the 11th that I could see from the room window, shooting up among the tower blocks, these were probably flat block associations' mini-firework shows. Each only lasted one or two minutes, and then another batch would start maybe a km away. Little tufts of red and green and blue, before disappearing again into silence.
* We had the equivalent of a Chinese white New Year, waking up in the morning of the 12th only to find the view of the city clothed in a light garment of white snow. Went down to the Bund and looked across the Huangpu River - as I did more or less exactly ten years ago to the date - and found a Puxi area transformed. Where there once were a few scaffolds around a towering Shanghai TV tower, now the TV tower jostled for supremacy amid glittering high rises, office towers and other vertical icons of business. However, everything was dull, shrouded in a white-blue mist which made you squint...
* The main downtown throughfare and shopping street of Nanjing Lu was also very pictoresque, although much more beautiful at night, where reds and purples, golds, greens and pinks flash on and off thousands of billboards, as I saw on the evening of my arrival on the 10th.
* Now back to the office on this Sunday before work, so back to the job it is!