In one of our many daily emails, Nik mentioned today that he ate lunch on the roof of his building at work. I replied that I wish I had eaten my lunch on the roof, to which he replied, “Is there a roof(top deck) on our building I wonder. It would have a cool view, but I doubt there is one.”

Luckily for him, I am procrastinating today, so I went up to the 37th floor to investigate. As I stepped off the elevator, the hallway looked exactly the same as the 18th floor, but the fire escape door was wide open and daylight was pouring through. I walked up one short flight of stairs to find that there is a rooftop deck. In fact there are two, but that the doors to it had been locked with a dead bolt. The consolation is that the top landing of the stair is enclosed with windows, and the one to the north was completely gone, and the one to the east had been shattered so the views were still impressive!

When Nik gets home we’ll have to go up to see the city at night.

ONCE UPON A TUESDAY IN SHANGHAI…

And finally, I made my way back home and my beau was there. We cooked dinner and lived happily ever after.

THE END

Update: I changed the order of the photos and a few captions because they bugged me. Sorry for any confusion!

Tuesday morning, I set out to explore the area south-south-west of our apartment. My specific destination was a small green spot on my map, Guilin Garden. It turns out that Guilin Garden is a small public park that used to be the home of a Shanghai gangster, Huang Jinrong. The walled garden was devastated by the Japanese in the mid-1900’s and then restored and opened to the public in 1988. The elaborate gardens surrounding the main house, which is now a tea house, contain a series of courts with various focal points. In one, a raised and covered wooden pathway flanked with built in benches meanders through heavily landscaped areas and over a stream. In another, an “athletic pavilion” floats in the middle of a large pond. In a third, a large stone-paved court is surrounded by picnic tables where small groups gather to play cards, and in a fourth a flat grass lawn is surrounded by large shade trees. Even mid week, the garden was teaming with people, but there were so many discreet areas that it was easy to find a peaceful place to be alone to read my book, The Good Earth (which by the way is a fantastic book about a Chinese farmer in the early 1900’s). I will certainly return to this park throughout the summer to watch the gardens change as the trees bloom and evolve for the season.

Saturday morning, I talked Nik into exploring the south-south-west area with me. This time we didn’t have a specific destination, but wanted to get as close to the Huangpu river as possible. The thought was that we would see some pretty impressive industrial areas, but what we found were small neighborhoods, construction and markets that line the South Shanghai Railway. We were out for most of the morning, and here is what we saw.

Nik has also done a post about this week, mostly photos of yesterday: Biking, Gaming, Resting, Saturday in Shanghai