A beautiful night downtown

On Tuesday night, the AQI was very low and there were crystal clear views of the Bund and the Pudong skyline. We were lucky to be downtown to enjoy dinner at a fabulous Yunnanese restaurant with a former student who is now working as a college admissions officer. She came to Shanghai to represent her college at the Concordia university fair and stayed with us for a few nights, and it was such a delight to catch up with her.

Hiking in the Yellow Mountains...

Five hours by fast train from Shanghai is a place called Huangshan and the Yellow Mountains. The scenery here is truly spectacular, and we enjoyed a wonderful weekend of hiking in November. There are some nice hotels at the top of the mountain and many jaw-dropping views, as well as concrete hiking paths suspended off the sides of sheer rock faces (we tried not to think about that too much as we traversed the mountain paths).  

Date night in Puxi!

Shanghai is a city for foodies. There are so many good restaurants in this town! This week is also Restaurant Week, a week each year when many restaurants offer special fixed menus at reduced prices (great excuse to go try some new places), so we decided to spend Saturday night over in Puxi at Hunan House. This is a fun, cozy restaurant where the normal menu is very affordable. For our first visit, the set menu was awesome because we tried so many dishes. We started with 3 appetizers (grilled eggplant, spicy beef skewers and grilled prawns), followed by beans, cauliflower, beef stew and grilled fish, followed by spicy Hunan noodles and dumplings with a nuclear red sauce (so delicious). Dessert was steamed buns with a custard dipping sauce, along with sesame dumplings in pumpkin broth. Wow, wow, wow. The flavours were amazing and we will definitely go back. Topped off with a funky cocktail at a fun local bar, this date night was an awesome success. What a great city.