Whirlwind china trip

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Hi folks, I've had a whirlwind of a trip in China with limited internet access. I have some time now so will recap some of my trip. First week, I spent in Shanghai. It was my first time there and had an amazing time with the help of my cousin (who works there) and Cathy, my friend from the US of A. Given my failing memory, I actually kept a journal each day so here goes:
day 1: this morning, I went to all of Shanghai's touristy stops by myself. I swear I've never walked this much in my life. I got off the subway at People's square, walked on nanjing lu to the bund, and then yu garden. finally i walked back to nanjing lu and took the subway across the river. I then paid an exorbitant amount for a cup of tea at a bookstore so i could rest my sore feet for 2 hours, the whole time, of course,reading lonely planet's guide to shanghai 😊 at night cathy arrived, and my cousin took us out to dinner. the food was alright -- no one knew what to order as my cousin had never been to the restaurant before. but i lost my appetite when i found a fruit fly in my orange juice :/ bugs in your food by the way is quite common in china, but this was my first day out and naturally was unaccustomed.
day 2: cathy and i started out the day at the shanghai museum. a rare FREE treat! the exhibits were interesting and we had a good time wandering it's air conditioned halls. for lunch we went in search of soup dumplings!! the famous shanghai xiao long bao. the ones we got were mediocre, but a start in our quest! finally we spent the rest of the day looking for the fake brand market, which ended up being an epic fail. the closest we got was some shady guy leading us out of the market to his "goods". after a while, we ended up losing him in the crowd and jumped on the subway. ate dinner at super brand mall and walked the bund at night.
day 3: We started out by getting out nails done at a place across the street from our apt. it was dingy but for $5 what do you expect? the polish is still clinging onto my nails after 2 weeks in the wild so i guess it was worth it. we then started out our day at cloud 9 and huge mall in shanghai (all the malls are huge). i finally got some fried dumplings...mmmm.. we then went to huaihai lu, another shopping district. by this time, we realized that shanghainese are pretty much directionally inept. everytime we ask someone for directions, they have no idea. we started joking at the end that these pple cld be holding a shopping bag from store A and would have no idea how to get there if we asked. we started asking directions from people who looked like tourists... and of course 90% of them didn't speak english. meh... such is life. anyway today we were so exhausted from yesterday's walking that we took it easy for teh rest of the afternoon. we got foot massages which hurt in such a good way. then we saw the movie snowflower and the secret fan which was SO BAD. hugh jackman was in it, but he probs paid his publicist not to reveal that in american markets. finally we met up with my friend for dinner at cloud 9 at an amazing sichuan restaurant. my mouth went numb after the first 2 bites but again, in a good way!
day 4: oh boy this is our last full day in Shanghai! we finally found the fake market and spent all morning bargaining. I couldn't find any chanel/coach/bigger asian brands cuz of the recent crackdowns i guess, but there was ample tory burch, chloe, goyard etc. ended up spending more money than i spent the first few days added together! pretty amazing stuff haha. then we took a cab to chenghuangmiao for street eats. the food was good but seriously overpriced. a long of dumpings was 34 yuan whereas the one we got the first night was 16 yuan. amazing how they rip off tourists!! finally spent the night at home, too exhausted to go out. watched some kungfu panda, some chinese game shows
Day 5: THe next morning, we got on a train to go to our respective home towns. The high speed trains are very impressive. and i didn't know this yet, but will be the apex of my experiences with trains as the rest of my travel via train was horrendous (as i'll elaborate later). i got off at hefei in the afternoon and was immediately coddled by my mom's side of the family. i'll continue writing those entries at a later time...

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