I am so serious when I say that I have not done a single school/work-related thing since forever...It's kinda stressful, but there's so much stuff to do other than study! ._. After Taiwan I'll work hard...
SO. I met up with some certain people last week in Shanghai who stalked me back to Hong Kong and made me hang out with them alllll week long:
Let's start from the beginning.
My flight to Shanghai was at 8:30 AM so that everybody would arrive at the same time (10:30 AM). This means I had to get up at 5 AM to take the one hour bus ride to the airport so that I could get there at 6 AM and have sufficient time to check in/wait around for an hour because checking in really doesn't take that long. Waking up at 5 AM is disgusting and if I didn't eat a couple of Ritz crackers I probably would've thrown up. Here's what the bus stop looks like at 5:
Interesting, no?
I feel like last week was so long ago that I don't really remember anything.
OH YEAH. Apparently a recurring theme of the Shanghai portion of the trip was to walk around in a huge circle and eventually not get to where you want to be. I GUESS it really only happened twice:
1) When we first got to Shanghai we had to take the subway to our hotel. We tried to find the entrance to the station closest to us but found out the whole perimeter was fenced off by WALKING THE WHOLE PERIMETER. It was the length of a whole block on each side...
2) That same day we tried to find some garden or restaurant or something and ended up walking around an even bigger circle. So big that we just decided to give up because we were so tired.
I'm not gonna do a day-by-day of Shanghai because we spent most of our time shopping and eating, so I'm gonna try to make this short:
Here are some pictures of our hotel room. Too fancy, considering we were only there for sleeping. The living room and hot tub were definitely unnecessary. Luckily we each got our own beds this time.
I really had no idea what kind of place Shanghai was, except a friend told me it was A LOT nicer than Beijing (I've never been so even then there's no comparison). But the Expo is coming up so there's so much construction going on, and since it's China you are literally walking on top of the rubble they're digging up. The air was HORRIBLE and we seriously almost got run over by one of these while waiting at a stop light:
On top of that there's the spitting. Being in Guangzhou prepared me for it, but it's still so bad that you can't help but be grossed out. Everybody spits everywhere! Nobody pays attention to the signs:
But even though the bad parts were pretty bad, I really liked the feel of Shanghai. Hong Kong has the big city feel too, but Shanghai feels even bigger because the roads are so wide and everything isn't so squished together like it is here. The architecture is also so different and really so COOOOOOOOL.
<3
Yuyuan Garden:
Interesting mix of traditional Chinese architecture and...Western tastes? All very touristy (though I'm looking at pictures of the garden online and wondering why we didn't get to see the nice places there...)
Fooooooooooooood:
Supposedly really good xiao long bao. Honestly, I'm not a very good judge of xiao long bao, even though I've had it enough times to make comparisons. But Amy and Ann agreed that the thickness/hardness of the skin is important. These were good (by my standards). We ordered 6 baskets (6 dumplings each):
AND THIS REALLY GOOD EGG ROLL (?):
I liked it better than the xiao long bao. Two bad I ate half of the egg roll and 9 xiao long baos.
We had dinner with Amy's friend who works in Shanghai. They picked out this train restaurant:
That served corn juice:
O_O
And traditional Chinese food. So no surprises there really.
I try to make small talk with Amy's friends (we had dinner with another friend while we were in Hong Kong) so it's not so awkward, but it's very tiring and you end up asking stupid questions when you can't think of anything else to say. So yes, I do know that Malaysia is really hot -_-
Have some Pizza Hut:
So overall, I liked Shanghai. Just wish we had more time to go exploring the more cultural aspects of the city (wish the air was better too...). Next up: Hong Kong!
