Shang who? "Shang-hai!" Shang who? "Shang-hai!" At Dulwich College on Mingye Road in a salubrious suburb of Shanghai, home of the Shanghai Hairy Crabs Rugby Football Club, an afternoon of GAA action is in full flow as the Irish volunteers at the Special Olympics World Summer Games 2007 take on a scratch team made up of Chinese volunteers, ex-pats and rugby regulars.
The Irish women do well; the men are properly trounced by the classy crustaceans. But everyone joins in the impromptu chorus.
The Irish Special Olympics delegation has made quite a splash in Shanghai. Green T-shirts have colonised the lobby of the Equatorial Hotel, where there's an information tent and a constant buzz of activity.
Go into any of the myriad cafes and bars of the leafy French Concession area of the city, and you're almost guaranteed to bump into a couple of green people sipping coffee.
Head for one of Shanghai's cavernous markets - the "fake" market, with its plethora of designer copies, or the fabric market, where tailors will measure you in seconds and whip up a full-length cashmere coat with pure silk lining, to your precise specifications, in two days - and you'll hear Irish voices haggling away with the best of them.
It would, in truth, be surprising if you didn't hear Irish voices in Shanghai, because there are over 800 Irish people here altogether. When you add up 143 athletes, some 500 family members and 200 volunteers, you get the third biggest delegation in Shanghai after China and the US.
To keep all these people busy, and happy, is no easy task - but the organisational skills of the Special Olympics Ireland are second to none. Before they came to China at all, the 200 volunteers were divided into groups.
One group looks after the athletes' families; another is devoted to information; a third group takes care of us media types. Want to know how to manage the Metro? Ask the transport department. Short on sight-seeing ideas? Sign up for one of the trips organised by the entertainment gang.
Wondering what's in store for you tomorrow? Consult the folks who produce the rosters every evening. A complicated business at the best of times, rostering can be thrown completely out of sync by out-of-the-blue hiccups - such as the arrival in Shanghai of Typhoon Krosa.
The storm has caused severe landslides in Taiwan - and although Shanghai is expected to escape relatively lightly, the Chinese are taking no chances with the safety of Special Olympics athletes and are switching outdoor sports to indoor arenas at short notice. None of which fazes the green people, whose dedication is surpassed only by their capacity for mischief.
Special Olympics days are long days. They begin at 7am, which is when you need to have breakfast if you're headed for the shuttle bus to one of the outer suburban venues, and they may not finish until midnight, which is when the sports schedules for the following day are released by the organising committee.
Yet from early morning until late at night, from the breakfast room to the lobby bar, wherever there are Irish volunteers there'll be jokes and stories of culture shock and cultural exchange and never a dull moment.
There's Andy from Poland, whose surname - O'Sieliec - is the Polish for "O'Kelly". His grandfather, a Corkman, headed for the US in 1848, but got no further than Hamburg, where he fell in love with Andy's grandmother. There are even four "Irish" Chinese, Wei Li Ye, Jin Jin Qian, Yuan Yuan and Jia Wang.
Each of the Irish volunteers raised a minimum of €7,000 to fund the trip to China but for a journalist adrift in Shanghai, their help is beyond price.
They act as go-between with athletes and families, organise interviews, juggle schedules and provide practical advice on every imaginable topic from how to manage mosquito bites, which have been spectacularly big and nastily gooey, to where to get the best bananas in the city centre.
"Prior to 2003," says Niamh McNamara, "there were 1,000 volunteers in Ireland. There are now 18,000. I think the organisation was surprised itself by the enthusiasm which those games generated, and by how many people stayed on afterwards."
In 2003, Niamh was based at the athletics in Santry stadium, meeting the athletes at the finishing line. "It was very emotional because some would be laughing, others would hug you and some wouldn't even know they'd finished the race, so you'd have to stop them from running on," she says.
Back at the rugby club, it's getting dark. On the far side of the pitch vague figures have scurried off into the gloom carrying large boxes. "Typical," says Philip, a business studies student who has given up trying to muster a couple of frisbee teams and is entertaining us with tales of his exploits as a part-time barman.
"We came, we saw, we robbed the place." We squint into the murk, but can see nothing - until the horizon suddenly explodes in an elaborate display of green, white and orange fireworks. Not a bad metaphor, really, for this whole Special Olympics gig.