Shanghai Tang

The Bund

Quote of the week:

"I like it. But I want you to be comfortable living here too."
"I can live anywhere if you're there."

Shanghai has everything that a regular Singaporean girl like me could possibly need/want to feel alright/like she's never left home. You've got the food, the bars, the restaurants, the angmohs, the Bee Cheng Hiang bak kwa, the Watson's, the Sasa, the BreadTalk, the subways and buses that uses the Shanghai version of the ezylink cards, Shanghai's version of Funan IT mall, expensive Ashtanga yoga, rockclimbing gyms. And amazon.com delivers to China. What more could you want?

Shanghai has also got stuff that Singapore doesn't. It's got great jazz bars, original music CDs that cost 25rmb, Sephora (!), the Bund, super stylish, atas joints that make wannabes in Singapore look like kopitiams, super cheap and super yummy street food - more than xiaolongbaos - parks in every district - the government is doing something about this "greening" thing - possibly Asia's longest shopping street, an awesome fabric market populated by locals and foreigners, Asia's biggest library - can read there, cannot borrow out.

We also saw the bureau - where I finally get the corner office! Uh, not that it matters - visited something like 12 "apartment estates" in almost every district near the bureau - the best way to see the city, I swear - picked three that we liked the most and decided that Shanghai is a city we both could live, at least for a couple of years before it drives us crazy or gets too expensive.