Initially I thought it was what I was searching for, but quickly realised that it was a proper football stadium, home to one of Shanghai's professional football (soccer) sides.

Another interesting side, is that I found out a few local sporting groups used the same field, namely the Shanghai Shooters & the Shanghai Ultimate Group. Linda and I checked out this stadium last weekend while we searched for an entrance to the Phantom fields. It looked pretty good - a large football/soccer pitch surrounded by a running track! Lovely. I resolved myself to see if I could use this facility at some point. So when I was surfing around the internet looking for some more info on the Phantom fields, I also learnt that the ultimate disc club here has an open night on Monday nights at this stadium. So, I took full advantage of our apartment's proximity to the stadium (1 city block) and a nice work situation which has me attending a course in downtown Puxi instead of my usual workplace out in the boonies of Pudong.

Attending the Monday night 8pm start, I struck up a few conversations with the participants. It was a good mix of locals and foreigners and everyone was really friendly. The aforementioned football pitch was halved lengthways to produce two fields. One half contained novices like me learning the game and having a few 'teaching' matches. The more experienced players played a highly technical and dynamic set of matches on the second field area.

My only disappointment for the evening was discovering what appeared to be a nice lush green piece of turf from far away, but up-close it turned out to be astro-turf. Apart from being artificial grass, I also quickly learnt that astro-turf doesn't really have much give. I really wanted to feel grass under my feet again. I miss that. I guess that means I'll have to focus upon discovering the secret of the 3 grassed fields I stare at from my window each morning.

Ultimate disc had always appeared to me to be a moderate game, and I was rudely awakened. It was pretty tough on your fitness - and I felt the effects of a lack of exercise very quickly. It involves a lot of running - and that was what I needed. Most of the exercise of done since arriving in Shanghai has centred around my daily walks to Jing' An Temple station, and infrequent attendance of a half-court basketball game, and even more infrequent visits to the gym. What I really wanted was a good aerobic workout. I got it. Ultimate is a game where you spend a lot of time running - in fact, constantly running. This was a big shock to my system. I haven't felt this body sore in such a long time. I also blame part of my soreness on the concrete underlay of the stadium, which in my mind was a little too close to the astroturf.

Anyhow, that was last week. I went along again last night with Da-Dan. We had fun, and I also reconfirmed my lack of fitness. A plus was that I had a lot of fun running around aimlessly and dropping the disc. A minus is that I got yelled at a lot by the 'helpful' experienced players. Nice guys - I wonder if the term tosser applies in this sport? There's some real intensity out there. I'll look forward to playing more of the B-level games until I can actually run the length of the field 3 times before passing out. After the fact, I'm not as sore as I thought I would have been, but then again, its usually 36 hours post-sweating that I start to feel the effects of age exercise.

I'll be there again next week.