A few days into our trip, Ola stated that while last year was all about seeing stuff, this year was going to be all about eating. So far we've been doing justice to that proclamation. In addition to all my coworkers, my friends Phoebe, Nick and Mike, were visiting Shanghai this past week. This of course meant that we had to escalate the creative eating ventures. We went to the Dolar Shop for awesome hotpot, one of the places with all the ducks and pork bits hanging in the window for roasted bbq meats, a bun shop for xiao long bao (delicious soup filled dumplings), and a Sichuan (Szechuan back home) restaurant where everything on the menu could have simply been named, "burning fire balls from hell". If nothing else, I'm certainly keeping well fed on this trip.

Feeling that perhaps we ought to fill our time with more than just edibles, we spent Friday afternoon at the Shanghai Aquarium. It's a fairly well appointed museum with many fish tunnels to walk (or ride the not-so-fast-paced travellator) through, walls of jelly fish, huge tanks of manta rays and life sized figurines representing aquatic animals of the region- common creatures you'd expect to find in East Asian oceans like giraffes or gorillas.

The aquarium is in Pudong, on the other side of the river near the Pearl Tower, so we had to get on the subway to go back to the French Concession where we live. We headed down into the station to find seething masses of humanity trying to crowd into the already tightly packed cars. We joined the hoard and started to push. Somehow we achieved what seemed impossible; we actually managed to squeeze in. If you've never had the pleasure of riding a subway in an Asian megalopolis at rush hour, I can simply say that's it's an experience one does not quickly forget.

My friends left yesterday, back to reality, but my time in Asia is only a quarter of the way done, so the festival of eating will continue. Last night ended with Paul, Anthony and me locking ourselves in a small room at a KTV…for many, many, many hours. We stumbled home at 4 in the morning, so hoarse we could barely say goodnight to each other, so needless to say, today has been another low-key Sunday with a good sleep in, a late brunch, and a lot of sitting in pyjamas.

Well, I think it's time for a snack. More next time lovelies…