Ni Hao! It's been a couple of days, but I have a legitimate excuse: I have been without an Internet connection since Friday! A lot has happened, and I will try and quickly describe the highlights. Friday night we met up with Linzhen again, after finishing most of our work at the lab. We completed one experiment this week, ran all the analysis we could, and described it all in a report. Now we are waiting for our Chinese colleagues to come up with their part so we can put it all together. The final report and presentation are due Tuesday afternoon. So the end is approaching very rapidly!

Linzhen and her uncle took us to a restaurant on the Hankou side of the Yangtze river. Wuhan is divided in three sections, and this was one of them. After dinner we walked along the 'River Beach', which is a beautiful promenade along the river. The were tons of people playing badminton, and there was music and dancing. The weather was foggy as usual, which made for some beautiful pictures. Many of the buildings were light up, and there also a a special section of the walkway, which was equipped with glass tiles which has colored lights beneath them. The pictures describe it all a lot better, so I'll just place a couple of those instead.

Some of the great pictures I took that night on the promenade

After walking the whole stretch of the promenade, we got to the bar we were going to visit. This bar was called 'Soho', and described by one of Linzhen's friends as the nicest bar in Wuhan. The bar was fantastic, indeed! We were looking forward to drinking some great beers, and perhaps some other drinks, but as soon as we got there a friend of Linzhen's uncle showed up, shook his head, and then he said he would take care of our drinks order for us. To our delight he returned with a Bottle of Johnnie Walker, Black Label!! Wow. Another thing we noticed is that every table in the bar came with cups and dice. Apparently, everyone here likes to play drinking games, but with very expensive liquor instead of the regular beers or shots. The bar also had a couple of live performances, so needless to say it was a great night :) 

At the end of the night we also had something else to celebrate, because it was Dave's birthday. However, since we were expected to get up at 7:30AM again, we wisely decided not to stay out too late.

To be continued..

So yesterday we enjoyed our first night out in Shanghai. We visited the Barbarossa bar, which is located in the People's Park. This was a nice Lounge bar with an open rooftop. They even served draft Erdinger! Trust me, I was a happy happy man. The view was also great, just check the picture below. That's Dave by the way, my fellow student and travel companion for most of this month. It was a pretty laid back night, and we decided not make it too late.

But it turned out to be a short night after all, since I woke up at 6AM again. I guess it will still take a while to get used to that. Today, we will make our way to Wuhan. We are taking the train in a few hours, which should take us about four more to get there. Some people from the Wuhan Technical University will pick us up from the train station, and bring us to the campus. Apparently, the plans got changed, so we will be staying in campus housing instead. We will see. I will keep you posted!