Jo & Simon in Shanghai

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My friend Jo and her brother Simon came to visit Shanghai. It was quite an exhausting 6 days: waking up early everyday...taking the metro here & there...walking (tons of walking)...etc. etc.... 😊 Other than doing things around the city, we also took a day-trip to Hangzhou and we spent one day at the Expo too (We went into 18 or 19 pavilions that day).

It was nice to have them stay with me and to catch up...
There were also quite a few interesting experiences, one of which involved my toilet. haha

I enjoyed showing my friends around the city that I've called home for the past 9 months. Hope they had a great time!

FYI, I'll be seeing everyone at home VERY soon!!!😊 YAYYYY!!!


About the video---Well, I was trying to load a video from Hangzhou..but it didn't work. So you can still read a description of it. ahah
We were just walking along a path and suddenly we heard some bizarre, high-pitched laughing. It sounded like monkeys to me. Turns out, it was coming from these ladies who were screeching and howling/laughing. So strange. We followed the ladies and they all went to a pavilion by the water where there were speakers and musicians set up. They were getting ready for some kind of performance. Putting two and two together....those ladies were doing some kind of voice exercise earlier. ahha

It was really cool to see so much art going on in Hangzhou. All the little pavilions were used up by different artists, dancers, singers, musicians....I don't think they were being paid to do these performances; I think they just wanted to share their passion and talents.

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Photos

the "siu long bao's" are in sight!!!!
they only steamed 10 baskets of the buns at one time. we ended up waiting over an hour to get our hands on some. and there was a lady who tried to convince us to buy her a basket. i told her to get in the line like everyone else had; if we had agreed to buy her some...it would have been so unfair to all the people behind us.

sitting on some steps...devouring our siu long bao's
it was funny cuz we were sitting across from the line of people who were waiting to get their tray of steamed buns. everyone was watching us eat & were probably getting even more hungry (and probably also laughing at us cuz we didn't hold our chopsticks properly!)

on the train, heading to Hangzhou
We thought we would miss our train---we had to run like mad in in the train terminal, trying to figure out where to go. It felt like we were in the Amazing Race. hehe
We paid like 10 RMB extra to get soft seats. the ride was only a little more than hour. We slept for most of the ride; I had waken up at 5am that morning....

pagoda of West Lake
this is the main pagoda of West Lake. (I forget the actual name of the pagoda). Anyway, we spent our day walking around different sections of West Lake as recommended by my Chinese co-teacher who was nice enough to draw us a little map.

golden ceiling
there were 6-7 levels inside the pagoda and this was the ceiling of one of them