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Published: November 27th 2006
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Kaffy and I had mastered the subway so well that we had a taxi take us to the station from our hotel. It was raining and we had left our umbrellas at the hotel.
Sorry to bring this up again, but the clothes hanging from each apartment window were gone! And I again did not catch a glimpse of this action. With the probability, there is no way that in that short amount of time, thousands of people could pull in their clothes line without being seen. There must be a time and a place when they all do it at the same time and I missed it.
So, we tried to take the subway to People's Square but got on the wrong way. But, no problem, we just went to the other side and made a trip back.
This was the time when I remembered why we had came to Shanghai. Our mission seemed impossible now. I had emailed the flag factories in Shanghai, and not gotten a response. We had inquired about the factory and were told it was too far. But this was very important to Kaffy and I so we decided to try to find an internet
cafe and maybe I could find an address and find out what the costs would be to get there.
When we finally got to People's Square, we didn't really know what to do. But as soon as we stepped out of the station we were swarmed with umbrella vendors. They knew the places to stand. We bought umbrellas again because we forgot our others at the hotel. And umbrellas are cheap, even when they know you are in a position. We splashed around in puddles and then decided to stop for coffee.
"Xianzai qu nali?" That's what happens when you just come to Shanghai without any plans. Of course, there are hundreds of things to do. We wanted to see Yang, the Chinese lady we had met with the previous night, so we called her for lunch. We got back on the subway to meet her in the same area as before- XuJiaHui. Then she took us to a "traditional" chain restaurant. The food was great and we even ordered this cool-looking ice mountain. I wish I could say it tasted good. It was like a snow cone, but one side had a bean sauce over it and the
other had a some other yellow corn bean sauce on it.
We asked her if she knew if there were any internet cafes around. She didn't but she said we could use her office's internet. So she took us to one of Shanghai's most famous colleges: Shanghai Jiao Tong University. We saw the Old Library and caught a glimpse of the campus. It's a very beautiful campus. As soon as we walked in it was like stepping outside of the city. The air was much stiller and you could hear the rain falling lightly and the leaves dropping from the trees. If you listened hard enough.
We used her internet and I looked up the address of the factory we wanted to go to. I asked her where it was and she asked her colleague. I recieved the same response as always: it's so far! We'd have to take a private bus to get there and most factories don't even like tours. And that's when we gave that up.
But she did suggest that we go to the museum and to the tv tower. So that's what we did. We went back to People's Square and went to the museum.
It was a very nice museum with all the history on Jade, art, calligraphy, currency, porcelain....But it's hard to stay in museums that long so we left and went to the tv tower next. We took the subway to the other side of the river, I really don't know how. Did we go under the water, through the water? It seemed like we were underground crossing the river too. We got there though and the tower definitely looks bigger on the other side of the river. We went up to the top, well the top "pearl" and captured great views of Shanghai. Kaffy made a good point that it resembles the inside of the human body. The veins being the traffic, white blood cells coming in (oncoming traffic), and red blood cells going out.
We left and got on the subway as close to our hotel as possible. Brian, a friend, knows a bar really well in Shanghai and was looking forward to us all meeting him there at 8 o'clock. Kaffy was talking about staying in so I thought I would have to go by myself. But the promise of french toast, omelets, and chicken quesidillas persuaded him to
go. It wasn't a problem finding the place by Brian's directions. When we got there, there was a sign outside of the door, "Welcome Home Brian!"
The bar was very nice, I wish they had more like it in Dalian. Lots of tv's, the arrangement was good and the decor very unique and creative. The french toast was amazing. Still not as good as my mom's though. Hers is impossible to beat though. We talked to the manager, who was from Ohio, and she told us the story of how she ended up owning a bar in Shanghai. Its odd how things work out sometimes.
I talked to a young American teacher, one of Brian's friends that was working in Shanghai. We talked about lollapalooza because we had both been there. He mentioned how girls don't normally attract themselves to him but at lollapalooza, when it was so hot, a girl had caught a glimpse of his cartoon underwear. However, she was too young for him. Luckily for him, I was able to point out a place where he could pick up some more underwear, and maybe some girls. (See picture below)
We played some foosball and then Kaffy and
I left to go back to the hotel. We were meeting up with the Garrett's early the next morning to get on a bus to the river cities.
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