Flood at SSIS!

It has been too long since I posted. I have a couple unfinished drafts of posts that I just couldn't find the words or motivation to finish. One is about the results of the Marathon that I ran over 3 months ago.

Since then I have had a summer vacation relaxing in Canada as well as a switch of apartments. Today was the first day of school of my second school year in Shanghai at Shanghai Singapore International School (SSIS) and here is the eventful story:

Big Bus Tours

Big Bus Tours are tours that a variety of cities offer that allow you to get on and off the bus whenever you like. They stop and pick people up at the different attractions throughout the city. The buses are double-decker, with the option of sitting outside on the top deck.

I have done a tour with this company twice, and overall they were good. Especially because the trips I took were small trips. They gave me the chance to choose what to do as I went.

Marathon Training

 It has been a busy couple weeks since I returned from Canada. This is why I haven't updated the blog in nearly a month. As soon as I got back to school I had a lot of deadlines to meet for report cards among other things a 2 week vacation gets you behind in.

Plus, as mentioned in this whole post I have been dedicating my spare time to running!

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As I mentioned in my post about the AQI, I decided to run a marathon on The Great Wall in Beijing. The race will be May 16th, and since I made the decision I have continued to take steps to make this happen.

The first step was find someone to run the marathon with.

Chinese New Year

The school is currently on a 2 week break to celebrate Spring festival, or better known as Chinese New Year. This is the festival celebrating the calendar year changing. It is also called Lunar New Year.

When I was in Korea they called it Solar New Year, among other things. It is usually the same day, except once every 24 years based on the moon.

In China, this year is the year of the goat. Some traditional things that happen during CNY are lighting firecrackers and giving money in red envelopes. There are always fire crackers firing in Shanghai, but there were certainly more firing leading up to the big celebration. The teachers also pooled some money for the bus driver as well as the cleaners and this money was placed into a red envelope.

I flew home on Saturday, which is part of the reason this post is short and late.

My Saturday went like this:

7:30 Woke up.
8:30 Ran 13 KM.
10:00 Finish packing up.
11:30 Walk to the metro to catch line 9. Take line 9 to line 2 and transfer. Take line 2 to the fast train. Get on the fast train to the airport.
13:00 Arrive at the airport, 3 hours before my flight.
13:30 Find an empty check in desk only to find out my flight have been delayed 4 hours.
14:00  Eat at Starbucks.
15:00 Finally check in.
15:50 Check time, see my plane should have been leaving. Continue to kill time, including eating again, this time at Burger King.
19:30 Finally board the plane
21:00 Arrive in Toronto (having also traveled to a time difference of 13 hours)

I'm still attempting to get over jet lag.

Last Thursday the children did a Chinese New Year festival.Here is a small snapshot of it:

Biking Through Shanghai

One of my favourite things about living in this city is biking. As I mentioned in a prior post about the Shanghai roads, there are special bike lanes set up for the different smaller modes of transportation. These are not limited to bicycles. In fact bicycles are probably the minority. There are motorcycles, mopeds and various other electric hybrids.

I wouldn’t want to use these lanes with anything other than a bicycle. Not because they wouldn’t be fun, I’d just prefer to get the exercise that you can only get from a bicycle. Shanghai is really flat, so just a standard bike is needed. No need for a mountain bike.

The Summer Palace

After the Forbidden City I headed back to my hostel, grabbed something to eat and then hopped on the subway again to get to the Summer Palace.

 The Summer Palace is in the North West part of the city, outside the outer ring metro line. It was about a 50 minute metro ride.

Forbidden City

In my last post, I went into way more detail than I expected about the history of Tian'anmen Square. It was on the list of top things to do while in Beijing.

The rest of the list included the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace and hutongs. I didn't pay for any tours, just rode the metro to them, paid the entrance fee (at the places that had them) and wandered around aimlessly. If I was really interested in the tours it was quite easy to eavesdrop on the tour guides and follow them around. This was especially true for the larger tour groups.