It was a week of reunions and re-goodbyes here in Shanghai. Mathieu was back in town after a trek about China (he leaves today – but we expect him back), as was Pierre, and so too the festivities that go along with great personalities. Dinners at Dongbei, drinks at Cotton’s and Senses, and few more exotic events.
Last Sunday (Sept 3) Mathieu organized a group to head out and enjoy the Shanghai Boat & Yatch Club’s “Open Day” on Lake Dianshan (淀山湖) – SBYC’s base of operations about an hour from Shanghai. The lake sits exactly over the border to Jiangsu Province, with Suzhou just on the other side. After a pancake breakfast (pics later…) and a bus ride past some fairly strange mushroom and elephant shaped buildings (no pictures, unfortunately) we found ourselves to one side of the Shanghai Olympic Aquatics Training Facility.
The gorgeous weather brought a near-record turn out, 70 people (fortunately we made it into the first bus), and the day kicked off with everyone clambering for spots on too few boats. Our team (ahem, Steve) mis-interpreted the whiteboard’s “cat” for catamaran and we unexpectedly found ourselves on Bill Crampton’s tubby New England cat-boat. Bill won’t mind me saying this because while the Monicat isn’t a trampolined speed machine, she does indeed embody the pleasurable antithesis of an adrenaline thrill ride and we owe him a big thanks for an incredibly welcome and relaxing experience – even if he did make us scrub the decks… literally 
A fine day out day she does provide.
Apparently, Bill’s uncle, Hans Christian, is a semi-famous boat designer in the New England area and Bill and Hans custom designed and built Monicat at a local factory in Shanghai. She and her newer sister are probably the only cat-boats in China. The factory, thanks to Bill, is now a successful boat manufacturer.
We spent the day tacking back and forth just off-shore, playing chicken with enormous concrete buoys, observing fleets of floating backhoes dredging a new channel (the entire 62 sq-km lake is only 3-5 meters deep), heeding the confusing calls of local fishermen, dodging unusually placed iron pipes sunk into the lake floor – and lurking just beneath water level, and admiring the remnants of an elaborate network of fishing nets that used to cover the entire surface of the lake before it was officially designated an aquatic recreation zone in about 1998.
Among the lake’s other strange attractions is an old Russian Ekranoplan, aka Ground Effect Vehicle, anchored at a PRC army recreational facility (the one we saw didn’t quite look like any of these, but it’s an interesting technology that’s still being researched). Though it hasn’t appeared to move in the last four year, the Ekranoplan can evidently reach the other side of the lake in just 8 minutes while flying at an altitude of about 2 meters. GEVs were originally used by the Soviet army to transfer ground troops across the Caspian Sea. They’re still used in some parts of the world, especially Australia, as an efficient form of travel over smooth bodies of water.
Back on shore, this land lubber finally re-joined a gym, not Your Gym this time, but Fitness First.
Last Wednesday we had the old gang around, avec Pierre and Mathieu, for some internet-delivery Thai food from the friendly folks at Thai FoodStation (we discovered TFS a few months back at another newish Shanghai pleasure, the Garden Bookstore flea market – every 3rd Saturday of the month). Lou baked up a tofu chocolate storm and Mathieu shared his incredible new – and plasmotically fresh – tattoo.
Stories from this weekend’s apartment hunting and Dino-beach “Splash” experience will have to wait. The highlight: Shanghai has suddenly become quite chilly. I’ll check in soon with new pictures. In the meantime I’ll be pulling my sweaters out of storage; I’m suddenly having trouble believing this season will bring an “Autumn Tiger“.
