上海

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是个是个发个是发个饿是个发是饿个和是的发和的日有I DONT KNOW IF ANYONE IS GOING TO FIND THIS FUNNY OR NOT, I CANT EVEN DECIDE, BUT I TYPED A BLOG AND THEN I ACCIDENTELY DID A NUMBER WITH THE KEYS AND SET MY TYPING LANGUAGE IN CHINESE AND I DON'T KNOW HOW TO REVERSE IT. IN MY ATTEMPTS, I ACCIDENTLY ERASED MY BLOG. I FOUND OUT THAT IF I USE CAPS LOCK THEN IT DOESNT PROMPT ME TO CHOOSE A CHARACTER.

I fixed it! So, back to the beginning. I'll have to make it shorter. Kaffy and I left from our apartments around 7:50 am.
"Did you bring your passport, just in case?" Kaffy asked me.
"Yeah, just in case."
An hour later and we were in the air to Shanghai. The "Whore of Asia" (The cool nickname I found for it. Do your own research!)
When we arrived at Pudong National Airport, we hopped on the maglev train and went flying on the ground at 279 miles per hour to...another place. Two inexperienced travelers in one of the biggest cities of the world, not knowing where to go, but we know how to get there. Fast. Then we got in a taxi, flashed our card with the hotel name, and 60 yuan later we were there. (That's when we found out how expensive taxis are in Shanghai.)
In a city with an urban population of 10 million people, every high rise apartment building, thousands of apartments for as far as the eye can see, has a line of clothes hanging to dry. (Can you imagine the energy use if that many people had dryers?) But one thing I find odd is that the probability of catching a glimpse of someone in the act of the chore of hanging clothes is very high. However, I didn't see anyone, only thousands of clothes flapping in the breeze.

Our neighborhood behind the hotel was beautiful. Between every apartment building was a luscious green garden and real birds! We walked along for a while, and decided to hop on a bus. We got off around the 3rd or 4th stop and walked some more. Then we picked a tiny restaurant, pointed randomly at the chinese menu, and waited to see what we got. The food was great and only 6 yuan. Little did we know that it would probably be the cheapest, and the best meal we would have during our whole trip. Dum dum dum....

Walking along the street after our dinner, we couldn't help but notice that we walked by several condom machines, just built into the side of the street. I thought this was very handy, for if anyone gets the urge while walking along a street, Boom! Why worry? Grab a condom and go. Condoms to the left, cigarettes and alcohol at a store to your right, and an abandoned nook just up ahead. Safety first. Ha ha ha.

Next we hopped into a taxi and went to the Bund. The Bund is an Yangtze river sided avenue with huge historic buildings representing countries throughout the world. From here you can look out across the river and see Shanghai's Tv tower, the Oriental Pearl Tower, the symbol of Shanghai. By the way, "shang" means "on" in mandarin chinese, and "hai" means "sea".

We stopped at a restaurant for coffee and then made our way towards this view. Walking along the bund of the river, we noticed several Indian-looking-vendors on carts with huge cakes made of some sort of walnut. Looking for cultural food, we had them cut off a piece and expected to pay, maybe 2-5 yuan. However, they wanted 25 or 30 yuan and I couldn't bargain them down enough to what I thought was reasonable. C'mon, we're students on a budget! Well they were getting mad because they already cut the piece and we wouldn't take it for their price. So we...turned and ran. We went up to the river side and hopped on a boat to take a cruise along the Yangtze. Returning an hour later, the dark was setting in and the buildings were lighting up. Walking back along the bund again, we noticed the Indians up ahead and tried to take a route to avoid them. Our route wasn't too clever, as we made ourselves seen by hundreds of cars traveling along the very busy highway, and they gave away our position by honking several times as they flew past.

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