The thing about Shanghai is that it is effectively two worlds superimposed. One is the international, cosmopolitan world city, and the other is a regular Chinese city. I love the fact that you can move from one to the other really easily, from one block to the next. This does mean that it is a little difficult to work out what things are likely to cost – for example for food, you can pay European meal prices at some restaurants or pennies in others.

A couple of days ago I went to buy a couple of things  – a plunger and some thread (exciting huh?). I was actually pretty excited that I found exactly what I was looking for in a local shop. Very often when you go to pay the shop assistants show you the price on a calculator. (Actually I am mostly OK with numbers but it is still useful). The guy tapped in 55. I thought – Ok that’s about 7 dollars. Sounds completely reasonable. The guy looked at me like I was completely insane as I messed around with various different bank notes. It turns out that the total for the two items was actually 5.5 RMB. That’s a tiny amount of money and I was out by a whole decimal point.  I am now wondering how often I’ve done this and they have just taken the cash…

One of the things I really like about Shanghai is the energy, driven to a large extent by the pace of change. I’ve always said I like change but actually sometimes it is nice if things just stay as they were when you left them.

I was away for just a couple of weeks recently and my favourite local . During this time my favourite restaurant, that was just 3 minutes walk away, had closed and moved to somewhere miles across town and there are shops disappearing and new ones popping up on a daily basis. Just the other night we went out and thought we’d check out a new bar that was getting great reviews. We did find a great bar at the address we had, although it was a brand new one. Things change so fast that the old one is still in all the online and print listings.