Today John and I went to the Shanghai Museum, located in People’s Square. A nice four-storied building with beautiful art galleries displaying calligraphy, ceramics, bronze figures, scultures, etc. But John and I tire easily at museums, so we were in and out in 90 minutes.

Well the pyros are at it again and Remy and Martin are back on high alert here in the war zone. Yesterday marked the fifth day of the new year… celebrated with another night of explosions. Of course safety takes a back seat on ocassions such as this: our neighbor set off a bunch of firecrackers and our kitchen window was showered with fiery debris. In the parking lot below, people lit off strings and strings of crackers, causing all the car alarms to go off. It was crazy. We went out onto our 14th floor walkway and you could smell the gunsmoke and see the dirt clouds rising. The pictures don’t really do justice to the event, but we weren’t about to take our laptop outside to collect sound recordings either.