ling, shari & ido

Angie and I had a great time last night with our good friend Gary and three people we just met: Ling, Shari and Ido. Ling is a journalist from San Francisco doing a story on Chinese on-line auctions, Shari and Ido are entrepreneurs from Amsterdam who do trend research and have a small retail space for underground and upstart designers. They're all three here for business/pleasure. Seems a lot of people here have slashes of some sort.

We went to an old standby Shanghai-nese restaurant and had a few typical dishes. What really made the night was just tons and tons of Shanghai stories - crazy stories about how great it is here, crazy stories about how hard it is here.

We hadn't had a night like that in a while; we've been so busy and out of town. And when we've been home, we've been going out with old timers. Just sharing our stories again to people with fresh eyes and ears and laughing at all the mishaps reminded us of what we've gone through, but more importantly, why we came and why we stay.

It definitely re-charged our batteries. I've been exhausted lately with the travel and the visits and the changes at work and all the coursework, so this really couldn't have come at a better time.

Thanks, Ling, Shari, Ido & Gary! (and Angie too!)