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Published: December 1st 2009
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Barbarossa all lit up
The restaurant was tucked away in the middle of this garden or something. It was dark so I couldn't make out the surroundings very clearly, but there was a pond and lots of trees. I haven't added an entry for a couple weeks now...so I have a nice little collection of videos and photos from November to post about. 😊
Video 1 Because of the upcoming Expo, Shanghai is in a frenzy to beautify the city. So that means LOTS of construction, noise, dust, traffic jams (more than usual I suppose), dangerous streets....
I took this video during our walk from the fabric market to Huaihai Lu (where we wanted to go shopping)--we had to walk because there were no available taxis and we couldn't figure out where the bus stops were. Anyway, because the construction crew had dug up parts of the road and sidewalks--we were basically walking wherever there was pavement (even if it meant walking on part of the road with honking cars behind/beside us). I stopped to take this video to let you see how insane it is! To the left was a building that was being built & all the debris, pipes, wires, etc. were out in the open and workers were drilling away as people were walking by. They didn't have any baricades to block off the construction zone. And then, there was a mass of people right
Barbarossa
Julie (one of the English teachers at another campus), Chris (a Chinese teacher from my school), Me in front of this construction zone waiting for taxis...additionally, there were people with carts selling street meat.
One insane, scary sight! (Don't get me wrong though...it doesn't look/sound like this everywhere in Shanghai...)
Video 2 That's how people here announce to the world that they're getting married!--firecrackers in the early morning. It's funny how the groom was piggy-backing the bride and it looked like they were running away....ehhehe
Actually the firecrackers weren't that loud; sometimes people light big boxes of fireworks and they shoot off continuously for like 10 mins. & it sounds like there's a war going on outside.
People in the fireworks industry must make a lot of money here because it seems like fireworks go off every other day (and often they are done either VERY late at night or VERY early in the morning--one time it was as early as 6am! arghhh)
ABOUT THE PICTURES We had a
girls' night out a few weekends ago! It was so much more fun without having the guys around. hehe Anyway, we went to a nice Moroccan restaurant called
Barbarossa. It's tucked away from the main street, so it was rather difficult to find. We
had to go into one of the western hotels in the area to ask for directions from the concierge. It was quite fancy, even though we weren't really dressed for it.
After dinner, we headed to
Cotton Club for some jazz music. The man who was playing the trumpet was Asian and I think the guitarists were American...? It was a nice club, but it was kind of smoky and most of the patrons were middle-aged.
Two weekends ago, we went to the
ShiLiuPu fabric market. To get there, we had to take the bus. It was our first time! It was pretty easy to find the bus stop (after this old Chinese man told us we were on the wrong side of the street) and the buses come very frequently. But because of the traffic, it took a while to get to the fabric market. There were so many people on the bus, so we had to stand the whole way there.
The fabric market was pretty neat! I wanted to get a longer wool coat made since it's gotten cold here! I have never had clothing custom-made before, so it was a cool experience.
Barbarossa's Menu
so pretty and glittery...I had to take a picture of it! There are 3 floors of fabric and tailor stalls--so there was lots of choice! Though that made it difficult to make a decision. Anyway, we ended up going with this shop that's run by a man and his daughter-in-law. They didn't budge much on the price, but they seemed to have the best-quality cashmere wool and I liked their selection of coat designs (they had catalogues upon catalogues of coat designs). I chose a black cashmere wool for the fabric and I chose a knee-length coat design. It has balloon sleeves and a ruched collar with a belt that you can tie up in a bow. I also requested to have a detachable hood--since hats look terrible on me, coat hoods are the only thing I can use to protect my head from the cold.
We picked up our orders this past Saturday and when we got there, they said the tailor had to do some finishing touches. So we had about an hour to explore around the area and we found a quaint little old street of shops and eateries. There were was a
2RMB store (2RMB is about 30 cents...so that's pretty crazy!)
After we got
our coats, we decided to go to Huaihai Lu to get to a subway station. This time we were able to find a bus...BUT it was one horrible bus ride! It didn't make a stop for like over 30 mins. and when we saw that it passed Huaihai Lu and turned right...Genelle and I quickly motioned and yelled that we wanted to get off. The bus was SO crowded and we could barely move. I was feeling a bit claustrophobic and I could tell Genelle was getting very angry & frantic . We tried to ask for help, but no one around us spoke English. So I yelled at the top of my lungs: "Does anyone speak English?" We wanted to get off right there. Someone spoke up in English and said the bus wasn't stopping because there wasn't a bus stop yet. Well, I understood that the bus couldn't stop if there wasn't a bus stop....but why was it that there were no bus stops for over half an hour????
Well, we eventually stopped and were able to get off. We were at People's Square area and we just went into a mall
(Raffles City) to find out how
to get to the nearest subway station. I was pretty excited because there were Christmas trees and lights inside & outside of the mall! 😊
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