With the weather finally improving (temperatures went up to a whooping 21C this week), things are looking up again… trees and shrubs are starting to bloom and life on the streets is slowly resuming after several months of hibernation:
Happy Birthday Blog – or why I don’t do F*cebook
With the social networking site turning 5 last week and this blog turning 1 today, I felt compelled to write something about …
A significant date in world history certainly: the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is finally under construction, Einstein arrives in the US after fleeing Germany, the original version of King Kong is premiered at Radio City Music Hall in New York, beer is legalised in the US … I could go on, but …Â
Shanghai’s World Financial Centre
or ‘The Bottle Opener‘ as I like to call it. With Launce having a soft spot for tall buildings, I got my arm twisted to go and see what Shanghai from the top of an almost 500m tall building looks like. Little did I know that our journey would take us on a time travel, using a psychedelic elevator, make us see the floor of an alien space ship and then finally take us to a replica of Hugo Drax’s Moonraker space station.Â
我爱 上海 – wo ai Shanghai
Shanghai is so multifaceted that every time I go and spend time there, I discover new and exciting things; so before flying out to Frankfurt from Pudong for a new year break, I spent a long weekend in Shanghai.
Got up at 6am to have the best breakfast in that tiny little tea house I had explored the day before. We had tea, pancakes, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, toast, jam … you name it, we had it. And we needed it too, since although Shegar is that tiny little mountain town just before you drive off to Everest, it is actually a 3 hour drive to base camp and with there being no hot water and electricity, we needed to warm up somehow.
Not my most memorable place, other than for the fabulous Tashilhunpo monastery, Shigatse is about 250km southwest of Lhasa and Tibet’s second largest town.
Day 4 of our trip to the top of the world and we were on the road to Gyantse, one of the more pleasant towns around Tibet. Half way there we passed one of the holiest lakes in the area: Yamdrok-Tso.
and to get us going and acclimatised to ever higher altitudes, we were driven about 20 km outside of Lhasa to Drak Yerpa monastery, a mountain face littered with caves like a swiss cheese full of little Buddha statues and prayer and meditation rooms.Â