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June 2nd. We are leaving for the airport at about 1pm. It's funny, we fly out of Shanghai at 4 pm on Monday, and land in Chicago at about 4:00pm Monday. A time machine of sorts--of course, we do have to sit in a seat for over 13 hours for the time machine magic to occur.
I will keep posting when I get home. I want to capture my entire journey, which includes the prep and goodbyes we all have to go through to come back here in August. This test run was great, but the real deal is for much longer chunks of time.
Last night was so great, I have to share a few details. We went to wine time at the hotel--a daily ritual here at Hotel Jia. Who passes up free wine in a beautiful bar? We asked the hotel staff for recommendations for dinner. We said we wanted noodles, which seemed to stump them at first. Then they came up with 1 place that was really close to our hotel and really cheap but there would be no English menus and no pictures...we weren't really ready for that. So, we went back to Xin
Tian Di (the more trendy area we'd been to a couple times). Turns out, I had the better memory this time as far as where the strip of restaurants was and where our restaurant was. I guess I do have a sense of direction deep down inside, yearning to be free.
Dinner was great. The restaurant was called Ye Shanghai and specialized in Shanghainese cooking. Dim sum to start...veggie dumplings for me, pork for Mark (I am due for another break from meat after this trip). We had some Shanghai noodles which were great and then this eggplant dish that was hot, spicy and a tiny bit sweet. Yum. We were full, but tried the mango pudding because we felt it our duty to at least try a dessert. The dessert was okay. I preferred that ice dessert we had at the beginning of our trip. This was a custard type mush with mango sauce. It came with a giant cherry tomato. Mark dared me to eat the tomato, so of course I did. Didn't go great with mango pudding, but I choked it down.
After dinner we went to get foot massages (finally!). Have been dreaming of
these since we got here, but just didn't have time. So after 9 days of intense walking (sometimes in less than ideal shoes), the feet got a treat. We returned to the same massage place we went to before--but we took a cab rather than gypsy motorcycles. We had a different private room. This time with a flat screen tv and dvd player. We brought in a dvd we had just purchased, and away we went! We started with soaking our feet in hot, scented water with rose petals. We each had neck, back and arm massages while soaking the tootsies. Then we changed directions and the feet each got about 30 minutes of love. It was amazing. There were hot towels, lotions, lots of foot massaging...heaven. It was 90 minutes long. Cost about $20 each. There are cheaper places, but this seemed to be quite a bargain price for the experience. Oh, and we had jasmine tea during the session.
I am going to have some time on my own today. It seems the perfect day for a solo cab ride or 2...will report back when I'm home on how that goes! Okay, I'm really done for now. I have developed quite a habit with this blogging. I really enjoy it. I'm a chatter by nature, and I get to chat with everyone at once....of course it's mostly one-way, but that's not so different from many of my conversations since I am a chronic chatter.
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hihi
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Hihi
very interesting blog. keep it up! :)