They would still be poor compared to Shak’s Shanghai Party !

Bearing in mind we are in a supposedly barren part of the world for nightlife the evening started at Casa 13, a very nice chilled out bar restaurant situated just off a side-street which was off a main road, typical Shanghai style if you don’t know it you’ll never find it without longitude and latitude coordinates and the taxi driver will probably give up looking, dump you anywhere and just point and say “it over there” then drive off quickly.

The company was a great mix of guys and girls from far flung corners such as the UK, Sweden, Norway, China etc. the food was excellent, the conversation and wine flowed so freely that we overran and had to leave quickly to make it to Bar Rouge for the New year countdown, the main road to the Bund was blocked with traffic so we arrived about 10 minutes to the hour to find a massive queue to get in so Shak used some of his Mandarin Mojo and got us VIP’d in double quick time right to our table.

 The waiters were then well bribed to go fetch the champagne pronto as we only had about 3 minutes to go, (seems the power of the bung worked well here even though tipping is looked on as a bizarre act by most Chinese) the bottles arrived at 1 minute to midnight so we poured quickly, toasted just in time and then the next 6 hours were a blur of laughing, drinking, great conversation and more laughs, I lost count of the number of bottles drunk & the confetti fire crackers shot, the entire place was a complete mess when we left.

We exited around 6am and went to get some food at a diner and here’s where the great “Chinese factor” came into play again,  they have food on the menu that you CAN order but you’ll either never get it or it turns up and it’s and it’s nothing like what it’s supposed to be, seems in China they substitute things regularly i.e. you want a tuna pizza and if they run out they’ll just do a bolognese one instead and still send it you so by 730am when our food had still not arrived and was nowhere in sight we left in a huff.

I got a taxi back to my hotel, had room service and went to bed but the rest were feeling wide awake (or too drunk to know what time it was) so went to chill out in a bathhouse, which is much like a day spa where you can get a haircut, massage, pedicure, manicure, ears sorted etc. 24 hours per day.. sheer bliss when hungover, drunk, ill, tired etc.

I was too tired, way too hungover and feeling much too ill to even think about it so spent the next day in bed from about 8am until 5pm recovering.

Thanks to Shak for organising such a great night, it was a crazy fusion of Chinese, British, Swedish, Norwegian, Scottish, Singaporean etc. It could have been any club in any country yet here we are in a communist country, backwards and unsophisticated, so much of the media and politicians of the west would have us all believe, discussing business and partying so hard we forgot where we were, so well done Shanghai, it’s not an easy task to manage to make people forget they aren’t at home yet it was just that well run a quality night this is exactly what happened !

Looking forward to the next one