Advertisement
Published: October 7th 2007
We've just spent three days in the city of Shanghai. It is a huge metropolis! We found a nice little hostel near the metro station.
Duane got his hair cut shortly after we arrived. There was a bit of miscommunication, and Duane's hair is now a bit shorter than he'd like, but he's used to his new cut already.
While we've been here we've checked out some interesting attractions. We went to the Shanghai Urban Planning Centre. This place had an enormous model of the city, it was awesome. They also had a model of the city ten years from now.
The Shanghai Museum was also a highlight, it had a spanish art exibit, chinese scuptures, chinese costumes, a bronze hall, a jade hall and pottery from thousands of years ago.
Today we visited the Yu Garden, a beautiful classical chinese garden with ponds, rock formations and plenty of pagodas.
We also did some shopping here. It took awhile to find the souvenirs we were looking for. The shopping here is intense, lots of bargaining which we're getting better at. The walk away technique is key. For example, we looked at some paintings on silk scrolls,
the asking price was 180 yuan for one, and then when we did some hard bargaining and then started walking away she yelled "60 for two". One wonders what the vendors pay for these items.......
After lunch one day we saw a place called U.B.C. Coffee, so we went in, sat down and ordered a pot of coffee. Coffee is relatively expensive here, as tea is much more popular. After a few awkward moments while the waitress looked at us expectantly, she went and grabbed another employee, presumably one who knew more english than herself. So in a very strange/hilarius way combining an accusational tone and the most polite awkward english she says "excuse me... what is wrong with you?". This was actually really funny but after a few more awkward moments we figured out that we were required to order both drinks AND food, and being as we just ate we got up to leave. Then we are almost out the door and then she comes and says she will ask someone if that is ok. So in the end we sipped our pot of coffee quite awkwardly and got the heck out of there, oh yeah did
I mention it was
ACKWARD! China was basically everything we hoped for and expected with a few surprises: the food could've been a bit better, the cities were
way more metro than we expected, sometimes there was more/ or less english speakers than hoped for, and China is so huge the time we spent travelling actually amounted to a large portion of our time here. Luckily we met some Kiwis (New Zealanders) here who were really nice and said we could call them for help when we get there. Now we are looking forward to our continued adventures in Thailand!!!
Sorry about the lack of photos, we cannot figure out how to resize the photos on this chinese computer! More to come later!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.109s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 8; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0522s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
adam
non-member comment
I see Duane has brought back his Amish beard.