Bai Bai Shanghai!

After weeks and months of hard and arduous labour (dramatisation, may not have happened) on Chinese shipyards under inhuman conditions, we are finally ready to leave our positions and start our "Long March" towards Helsinki.

However much we are looking forward to travelling, we must say that Shanghai proved to be a nice place, of which we will keep good memories.

The work, our pro forma "raîson d'être" in Shanghai, was reasonably interesting, mainly because of the rather crazy work environment: shipyards are always buzzing with activity and full of fascinating scenes, but Chinese shipyards definitely add an extra flavour to that picture.
Imagine a remote but unforeseenly charming island with small but crowded villages, quite a nice natural environment and some small rice paddies and a few orange orchards. Add a huge, dusty, messy shipyard, with enormous rusty old ships, some newly erected workshops, a dozen of towering cranes and thousands of yard workers dressed in raggy overalls, covered in dust and engaged in something that resembles welding: there you have your Chinese shipyard.

Being on that kind of place and -at times, we have to be fair here- contribute to building better and safer ships, was in all quite an experience. That is, before the general boredom set in and we basically sat out our time at work, longing for a brighter future.

But apart from work, Shanghai was a nice enough place to stay. There is good food, lots of small shops, cheap massage parlors, charming streets and some nice museums. It has been interesting to get an inside view on the way China is building its future, and to get a feel for the Chinese culture and people.
As we stayed on the shipyards islands for the better part of the week, we never really settled in in the city: we didn't join dance lessons or sports clubs, didn't show up at expat gatherings or things like that. When we were in Shanghai, we were happy enough to see each other and spend time doing things with the two of us.

Now, we are packed and ready to leave.
Or, well, we still need to buy our train tickets to Xi'An, send our parcels back to Europe and we need to find a way to pass the last working days (do I hear 'surfing the internet'?). Oh, and our Iranian visa is still to be approved and collected (Insha'Allah, of course)...