We’ve been in Shanghai for a couple of days now and we’re having a great time and getting to know our way around.

The shopping is great but you have to have your wits about you because they try to rip you off a fair bit.

After breakfast yesterday we had a bit of spare time so we went down a side alley and I saw a nice watch I liked and I ended up getting them down from 1250RMB to 180RMB. I was pretty happy with that but it was a bit of an eye-opener!

A few of the boys haven’t quite got my flair for bartering - Simon Black bought 2 pairs of undies for 150RMB and then one of the other boys got 10 pairs for 100RMB! Blacky’s excuse was that he was in a rush to get to a meeting but I reckon he’s just a bad barterer.

Another funny one was Jack Redden who paid 200RMB for a watch and then Mitch Golby went and got the exact same one for 70RMB. He wasn’t too happy about that.

The language barrier is not too bad, but we did go into a chemist to try to get cold sore cream and they ended up giving us cold and flu medicine. Luckily we found someone at the hotel to help us but that was a job to sort out, it’s taken two days to get that cream.

We got to see the ground yesterday at training. It’s a bit different to anything we’ve played at before - it’s a lot bigger so they’ve had to bring the goalposts and the boundaries in. We had a really good training session - the boys trained really well and were in high spirits. We’re all really looking forward to the game on Sunday. I’ll be up against Mark Jamar from Melbourne who is an All Australian ruckman so the boys have been trying to wind me up a bit over that but it’ll be a great challenge and some good experience for me.

A few of us are off to the Expo today. We saw it on the drive in from the airport and it looks great so it should be a good day

Check out other Shanghai Diaries so far
- Shanghai Diary: Jesse O'Brien