Hot Summer Sale - stay 3 nights and get the 4th night free!

Coming to Shanghai this summer to visit friends and family or take short-term courses?  Quintet wants to be your home away from home!

For the upcoming months of July and August, for every three consecutive nights you book with us, get the 4th night FREE!  By spending at least four nights with us, you will also enjoy the following benefits during your stay:

-FREE local SIM card rental so you can call and be reached without paying for expensive roaming charges!

-FREE one-day bicycle usage so you can tour the city on wheels!

-20% off all minibar charges so you can cool down with more icy beers!

-10% off all laundry bills so you will always have fresh clothes to wear!

We only have five rooms so hurry up and book now!

* Mention "Hot Summer Sale" when you book to receive the discounts.

** This offer cannot be combined with other discounts or offers

May 27/28 Handmade accessories workshop by visiting Japanese artist

My former guest Hiroko Ibuki, a crafts designer who lives in Tokyo is hosting her first workshop on accessories in Shanghai.  She just finished a personal exhibition of her work in Japan.  You can see photos of her work on her blog (in Japanese) here:  http://love-live-laugh.cocolog-nifty.com/hirokoibuki/

Her work is very beautiful and I want to put a plug in for her upcoming workshop in Shanghai.  If you happen to be in town during that time, feel free to check out her workshop!

Here's the Workshop information:

Let's make a pretty viola ring and a hair accessory at a cafe in Hongqiao!

Pretty violas are made with  lovely  wire edged ribbons and they are sawn on to a ring and a small comb.
They are very easy to make, but when you learn how to make them, you can use them to decorate many things. You can glue them on to a basket or make a necklace, a bracelet, a head dress and so on...


Date: 2009. 5 27( Thurs ) or 28( Fri)  10:30-12:30
Place: cafe+ gallery Himawari

上海市长宁区剑河路2000弄69号　夏都花园　(Changning District, Jianhe Rd, Alley 2000, Number 69)

Tel　021-62622377
Fee: 250RMB per person
Please bring: sawing needles, scissors, ruler, pencil, sawing threads( pink, yellow, dark green, if you have any)
For more information, please send Hiroko e-mail at: hirokoibuki@mac.com

Good deals for tourists in Shanghai

When I was working for the corporate world, I never got to see Shanghai during the day Monday-Friday.  Since I started becoming an "entreprenuer," my schedule is more flexible and allows me to roam around the city any odd time of the day.  I thought I'd share some of the great deals I've been enjoying with people who are visiting Shanghai (or those who can get out of the office before 6pm).

1. 2 hour foot + body massage for $100RMB - This is a happy hour package that the Butterfly Massage offers Monday-Friday before 6pm.  Normally, one hour of foot or body massage is somewhere around $80RMB per hour so this is a really sweet deal.  It's also very close to Quintet so I'd highly recommend it to my guests.  Their massage therapists on average are very good -- therapeutic but not as brutal as some of the more local places.  The place has a spa-like atmosphere and I especially like their little touches such as a heated neck pillow (filled with some sort of grains) when you're getting the foot massage and also heated sack for the back during the body massage.  My favorite guy is #2, and according to the manager, he is the "technical director" of the shop.

2.  Happy hour "Tidbits" at the Glamour Bar on the Bund - Glamour is usually more packed as the night goes on so the place is practically empty around 5-8pm.  That's why they offer a small spread of snack buffet for free during this time Monday-Friday.  For the price of the drinks (typically $70RMB/drink and up), you not only get free food, you can also get the gorgeous bund/Oriental Pearl view all to yourself (sofas next to the windows are hard to come by late at night).  Why not beat the crowd?

3.  English high tea on the 53rd in Jinmao Hyatt - we discovered this one after seeing the 2-hour line to get up to the new Shanghai World Financial Center observation deck.  At SWFC, you'd pay $180RMB to go up to the 100th floor -- and it doesn't even come with a drink!  For $150RMB + 15%, you can sit comfortably in Hyatt's relaxing and jazzy Piano Bar  with a still very nice view of the Huang Pu River while enjoying excellent tea sandwiches, hot scones and sausage rolls, as well as a good selection of desserts, fruits, and ice cream.  I think I'll wait until when the crowds subside more (or discounts are offered) before trying the SWFC again.

Tea ceremony scam around People's Park

Last week, one of my older guests came back from his first day of touring in Shanghai. He had been to the museums around People's Park and Square area. He told me about this tea ceremony he attended at the invitation of two students who struck up a conversation with him in the park. Right away, I knew he had been scammed, because last year, one of my apartment guests also got approached in a similar fashion. My guest said he kind of knew it was a scam toward the end as well, when they told him the bill was $1700RMB. He managed to talk the price down to $680RMB and was escorted to the ATM to withdraw money to pay. I asked him if he wanted to report them to the police (he had the biz card of the tea shop also) but he said other than the price tag, he had a wonderful time with the people, who spoke excellent English. He even took photos with the people who scammed him. I felt bad about not warning him ahead of time, so I'm doing this post now to help future tourists avoid it.

Given the price is reasonable (I think $100-200RMB per person including snacks is ok, and you really don't need to go for expensive teas if you are a novice at tea), attending a tea ceremony is really a pleasant thing. You get to sample and learn about the different teas from China -- the dragon well green tea from Hangzhou, the amber-color, semi-fremanted oolong or iron goddess (tie kuan yin), and the aged, earthy tasting puerh tea, among many many others. My personal favorite is the Yunnan black tea "dian hong", which is a lot milder than the Indian black teas and very aromatic. A good way to try out the teas is to find a neighborhood tea shop (ideally away from the very touristy areas) and ask the owner to let you do some tasting before you buy.

L-shaped shower curtain rod

I've always liked stand-alone clawfoot bathtubs, and now I get a chance to own four of them!  Since the bathrooms aren't big enough to have both a tub and a shower stall (a glass shower stall probably doesn't fit the house anyways), we needed to also outfit the tub with shower curtains.  Simple, right?  Normally, a tub in a modern house/apartment is tucked in between two walls, so all you need is a straight rod and you're done.  In our case, the free standing tubs needed L-shaped rod since there's no wall on one end.  Thus began my endless quest for that perfect L-shaped rod.

The construction guy first put up some some white paint-coated aluminum tubes with a right angle connector, but the corner was too sharp that the curtain couldn't really make the turn smoothly.  Also without a vertical support, the rod was droopy and would fall off eventually.  I went on-line to see what Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware were selling and discovered that their designs, while good looking, were very unusable -- you'd need a vertical rod that is affixed to the ceiling to support the L-shape, which means you can't pull the curtain all the way through.  Nowhere in their product descriptions did they explain how you're supposed to cope with that problem.  However, in several of the L-shape curtain rod discussions I found on-line (yes, you can find anything discussed on-line!) said that you need a vertical support or the rod will invariably droop down the road.  I was then convinced the only way to do that is to make use of a railing with under-track (normally used with fabric curtains) and run a wire through above the track for vertical support.  Quickly, these new under-tracks were ordered and nailed to the wood strips on the bathroom wall, and then we found out that the ceilings were too weak to hold up the support wires; without the support wires, the under-tracks cannot hold up the weight of the curtains.  As a result, these 2nd batch of rods dangled in mid-air for another few weeks.

Finally, I found on taobao.com, the eBay of China, that there's a manufacturer in nearby Zhejiang province who can custom make steel rods.  To be on the cautious side, I ordered one first to see if this version would work.  Initially, the construction guys looked at the 6cm expansion nails that needed to go into the walls and said that the old mud'n'straw walls cannot support the nails.  I kept pressing them to come up other solutions, and finally the construction boss said he'll try to find 12cm nails and maybe those can hit the bricks deep inside the walls.  I ignored the uncertainty in his tone and boldly went back to order more curtains rods.  This is how things work here -- you need to leave them with no ifs and buts and they'd magically find a way to do it.

When these 3rd generation rods were nicely secured on the walls with those super long nails, I almost cried out of joy.  They don't even need vertical support rods!  Even the construction boss admitted that it was a lot better looking than the previous two versions (these guys normally have NO sense of esthetics).  Before this struggle to find the perfect rod, I always deferred to Don or the construction guys for finding solutions.  Now I do feel that I am the owner of this house and I have control over its destiny.

The opening is delayed!

The construction was supposed to be done by 7/20 but by 8/1, it didn't look like it was anywhere near finished.  I have to admit that I've been in La La Land and thought somehow things will just finish by themselves.  So I cracked my whip for the first time and threatened the crew to have the rooms be ready for furniture delivery by 8/9 or else.  I also made an project open item list to keep track of everything to bring up to the construction boss.  For the entire week, I never saw the crew worked harder.  The fabrics were put up on the walls, wooden floors were sanded, and walls were painted.  The place was buzzing with machines, people -- the way it should've been last month.  And then I went to work on scheduling the different deliveries -- first the bed frames and desks, then the antique tables and chairs, the mattresses and the appliances, and then finally the bedding and curtains.  Some of the items were so big and heavy that I swore that they were to never leave this house again!  There were even sweat marks on the hallway walls to prove how gruelling moving stuff up the narrow staircase was.

There were more things to buy and get into the house.  Trash cans, teapots, cleaning supplies, trays and boxes, LCD TVs, DVD players, satellite boxes, arghhh~  standard items are easier to find, while deco items are scattered and harder to find, since we wanted stuff that bring in some Chinese elements but also work with the art deco styles of the house.  Don cautioned against Chinese-kitch.

Short-term goal is to get the rooms into a photo-ready state so we can finish the website!

History of Old Shanghai and the French Concession

While the construction was taking place, I started digging into the history of so-called Old Shanghai. Shanghai went through a pretty fascinating hundred years, from the Opium War in 1840 up until end of WWII in 1945. As the resulting of a weakening Qing Dynasty, China lost a series of wars and was forced to open up Shanghai to western countries as an important international port of call. The French and British, among other European countries, set up concession zones in Shanghai and ran these areas according to their own rules.

The interesting thing about the French Concession was that the French population (no more than 2000 at the peak) was outnumbered by the Russians (who fled from the new communist Russia), British, Americans, and even the Germans. There were also a significant number of successful middle-class Chinese professionals who lived in the area. Nevertheless, the French ran their own municipal counsel and named all the streets after French generals, martyred soldiers, and other famous personalities.

By the 1930’s, Shanghai and the French Concession were at the height of their glamour and also decadence. I found this old Fortune Magazine article published in 1935 that described a day in the life of a “Taipan” (typically refers to a westerner who is a boss or an employee of a foreign trading company). It bears striking similarities to the expat life in Shanghai today (minus the dozen or so of the servants the typical old-day taipan kept) ;-)

For Quintet, I wanted to bring in names and places of that wild time in Old Shanghai; there was plenty of glitz and romance, but to be sure, there was also lots of shady business taking place, not to mention sorrow of the lost and deprived. Old Shanghai was like opium (ok, also like a beautiful woman) – you know it’s perilous to your health, yet you can’t get away from it…

The modern-day Shanghai is every bit as exciting as the old one to the rest of the world. You see the optimism and entrepreneur spirits in the eyes of every hopeful newcomer. I hope this time around, the good times are here to stay for a long time to come…