Advertisement
Published: June 24th 2010
Edit Blog Post
Blue Steel
Avery on his terrible bike. Today was the last day that blue steel was actually ridable. It broke later that night and was trashed shortly afterward. So Friday night we went out to karaoke with the students who are going to NC State this summer. Its a place called MBTV. There were tons of different rooms so groups could have private karaoke rooms. MBTV was also an all you can eat buffet, and there was a line where you could get whatever you wanted and then a line where you needed tickets to enter. We had about 8 tickets and I got plenty of food, and with the tickets I got watermelon juice (a Chinese favorite), ice cream, and steak. I felt really confident today for some reason and I sang a lot. I sang Queen, Jason Mraz, Fergie, Black Eyed Peas, Linkin Park, Beatles, and Crazy Town. I think that's all of them. The Chinese students sang a lot too, and the girl had a really great voice. I made friends with one of the Chinese students by singing Linkin Park with him when nobody else wanted to. At the end of the night I had made friends with two Chinese students whose names were Robert and Mercury, which is a pretty cool name. Went to bed early because the next day we were going to
Shanghai.
It takes about 2 hours to get to Shanghai by bus from Hangzhou. Our first objective was to take the MagLev, or the train that runs through magnetic levitation. It was pretty much a standard train experience except it was incredibly smooth. We took it for about 20 minutes to the airport, got maps of Shanghai, then took it back to the train station. We ate lunch at a Lazy Susan for lunch and the engineers decided to eat with the teachers. My train of thought was that if we ran out of food, the teachers would have the ordering power to get more food. This was partially true. The engineers and the teachers eating together decimated every dish that hit the table. When we finished, we noticed some tables had some food left, so we confiscated it and finished it. I had two fish heads that day. For future meals with groups around Lazy Susans, i have two recommendations:
1) Sit with the vegetarians, not with the teachers
2) Sit in the seat most easily accessible for someone walking out of the kitchen. This way, the waiters (fuwuyuan) will put the food right in front of you
Holly and Sunny
Sunny sang a whole lot of Chinese songs. I wanna learn just one song I can karaoke to so I can impress Chinese people. on the Lazy Susan. There's nothing more depressing than seeing your favorite dish come out and be too far away to get some of it.
After lunch we had a couple free hours. We explored the streets and parks of Shanghai. It was very difficult to get pictures with ladies in Shanghai for some reason. We spent a lot of time in the park close to our hotel. We went to some software store and John bought a copy of Solidworks 2008 for 3 dollars. We stopped at DQ and got some blizzards and our first ladies of the day. I came back to the hotel and played league of legends with my brother for about an hour until it was dinner time. He tends to play around 4 in the morning, which is 4 in the evening over here, so we can play at the same time on some days. Dinner was held in the Swan hotel dining room and was fairly boring. Onto the good stuff.
One of the things that the engineers enjoy doing is adding the tag "people's" to any kind of object. Their inspiration for this fad was people's square. As such, we
Mr. and Mrs. Brown Duet
They sang some kind of old love song to each other, it was nice. thought it would be appropriate to visit People's square. We took the subway for 3 yuan per person per trip. We arrived somewhat close but ended up near this really busy shopping street. We snapped pictures with ladies, explored, and got harassed by many salesmen and saleswomen selling the same products. Right now, the big things are wheel strap-ons to shoes that turn them into skate shoes, laser pointers that make interesting patterns, and various versions of haibao (the mascot for the world expo). As we were walking, these two women who were dressed fairly well bumped into me. I thought i would take advantage of it and catch some pictures with them. Most of the time, the ladies I take pictures with will thank us for the pictures and leave, but these girls kind of lingered. They were throwing out a lot of compliments, telling matt he looked strong, had good skin, and spoke good chinese. After a little while, it became apparent that these women wanted something from us. One spoke very little english and the other spoke fairly good english. They gave us directions to People's Square but said that it wasn't interesting this time of night
I'm yours
That's Jason Mraz right there. and we should come with them to get some coffee or something. Tan had assessed the situation already and came to the conclusion these were prostitutes, and was saying things like "we need to go meet john NOW" as codewords to tell us to get the hell outta there. We left for people's square...
Or people's "square" i should call it. Its not even a square! Its a circle. How much further away from a square could it have possibly been? After some disappointment and pictures, we returned to the busy street. The highlight of the night was when matt was getting incredibly irritated with the dozens of street vendors bothering us americans, and decided to use some reverse psychology and sell them things. This drove some of them away, and the others interpreted it incorrectly as him wanting to buy laser pointers from them. Good stuff. One incredibly insistent guy got a nice angry "GUIN!" from matt, which is chinese for "get far away from me!" and is supposed to be very impolite. Needless to say, the tiny guy skidaddled and left us alone. Using my incredible sense of direction, i retraced our steps to the subway station
More Singing
I sang more than i've ever sung at a Karaoke place before. and we caught one back to the hotel. There was a night market on one of the roads on the way back and I took some good engrish pictures which can be found below. When we got back to the hotel, there were half a dozen girls taking pictures of each other right in front of the hotel, it was like a sign of how the rest of the weekend would be. I snagged a photo and then headed off to bed to rest for the upcoming world expo. Stay tuned!
No Knee Mcgee
AKA Qin Lang (my chinese name)
P.S.- I have a really great video showing most of the chinese students we're working with, but i'm having a lot of trouble uploading it. This one may not work either, but i'll keep trying.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.044s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0237s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
KJ Ashish
non-member comment
Asia Rocks !!!
Thanks to Japanese, who have discovered and propagated this awesome technology of Karaoke. I love it...... ~ Karaoke Jockey Ashish