Oh the times, they are a raining

There was one period where it rained surprisingly often, and being a tit I was unprepared for such inclement weather, so I had to make do with a very small, broken pink umbrella (very much like Hagrid's in Harry Potter) which contributed to my already considerable ability to stick out like a sore thumb. In this period I did my first ever spinning class, which was one of the greatest things I have ever done. I couldn't find my shorts so had to go in tracksuit bottoms and soon discovered that I would have been better off if I'd gone in underwear, as I was sweating profusely within minutes. It was 45 minutes of serious intensity, and to my amazement the scarily fit-looking woman in charge didn't appear to even break a sweat until about 20-25 minutes. Meanwhile, I was dripping sweat onto the bike and floor whilst trying to roll up my steaming trousers. I actually got a kick out of a Lady Gaga song in the middle of it... That's how great it was.
In this period I also went to a Halloween party (as it was Halloween) where the dress code was "scary" and where everyone, surprisingly enough, went as "scary". I, however, had other plans. Due to the fact that I firstly don't like restricting the enormous and wonderful range of possible costumes to scary things and also because I didn't have any costume (I am on a gap year after all), I chose to work with what I had. I ended up going wearing my Sri Lankan shirt and serong, with an odd yellow snow-hat and two entire packets of tea which I had turned into necklaces. I was a (not so) scary Sri Lankan tea vendor. I was also wearing flip flops because it was raining, and when I walked into the wrong building (a really nice hotel) wearing a skirt, an odd hat, flip flops, teabags and carrying beer, I hate to think what was going through the staff's mind. I also had a few salsa-dancing sessions with some lovely East European ladies during this time.
A particularly amusing event that I witnessed was a fight between a French man and a taxi driver. Like all vehicles, taxi drivers in Shanghai have the irritating tendency of driving straight across even when there's a green pedestrian light. One did so on a day when said Frenchman was undoubtedly in a terrible mood, so the Frenchman banged on the car, opened the driver's door and started shouting at him in French. In the middle of one the busiest roads in Shanghai, South Shaanxi Road. The taxi driver went berserk, grabbed him, started making noises of exclamation (such as "eh!oh!") and while also trying to trip the Frenchman, now in the other lane of South Shaanxi Road, started calling the police. At this point, as it was now my green light, in true Chinese fashion I left the Frenchman to fight an unwinnable battle. Foreigners never win in arguments, and usually Chinese manage to squeeze a healthy compensation fine out of them. Old ladies are the worst, but they deserve their own paragraph so we will get to that next.