Shanghai

A couple of weeks ago, we got back from an epic trip to China.  We spent 4 days in Shanghai, followed by 5 days in Beijing, then returned to Shanghai for another 2 days.

As usual, I took way too many pictures, thus explaining my delay in posting because I have just been putting off weeding through my pictures.  But, finally, I have succeeded and can now post about our great trip.  I've posted a few pictures on my blog, but if you want to see all the pics, you can click on these links to see my albums for Beijing and Shanghai.

The first day, we arrived in Shanghai and were greeted by some college friends. They took us out to an awesome hot pot restaurant (to which I failed to bring my camera and thus have no pictures to show).  This place was off the hook! The waitress brought out hair ties for women with long hair and eye glass wipes for those with glasses.  Not only was the food amazing, but they even had a hip-hop-dancing-gymnastics-noodle-pulling-man.  If you order the la mian (pulled noodles), the guy comes out with a piece of dough and whips it around doing a whole dance routine and turns it into some noodles that he dunks into your hot pot.  Great food, great entertainment, and great service (which apparently is rare in China).

The next day, I did lots of shopping, hit up the fabric market:

I am clearly in fabric heaven here.

We hung out with our friends, or I should say, our friends took us to all the places we wanted to go....like the fabric market, the pearl market, got massages.....it was fabulous!  Then at night we ate some steamed dumplings for dinner and went to The Bund for drinks and desserts:

Us on the Bund

Pretty night views

The next day, we spent more time with friends.  One friend and I had a little girl time and did a little more shopping at the craft/beads/notions market and checked out the scene at Yuyuan gardens.  I should really say that I did all the shopping and my friend was a trooper and tagged along, providing me with wonderful company.  Andy chose to spend some downtime playing Wii at our friends' apartment.

Yuyuan gardens - lot of people!

Afterwards, we all met up again for dinner and had some great Mexican food.  It's funny how Mexican has now become a delicacy for us.

While I was waiting for the rest of our party to join us before dinner, I snapped a shot of the scene at the street intersection.  Traffic is pretty crazy in Shanghai.  Even if the green man says walk, you better look both ways and watch out for those bikers....they don't stop for anyone.

There are people going in every direction possible here.

The next day, we headed out to Beijing.  We spent 5 days there, but I'll skip forward to our second weekend in Shanghai and leave Beijing for its own post.  For our second entry to Shanghai, we opted to take the Maglev train from the airport to the city.  The train takes about 8 minutes to do what would take about 40 minutes in a cab.  It goes up to 431 km/h (268 mph):

For our final full day in Shanghai, we took a hi-speed train out to Suzhou.  It's not as fast as the Maglev, but still gets up to 300 km/h.  It should have only taken 20 minutes to get from Shanghai to Suzhou, but we were too busy chatting with friends and didn't realize we got off one stop too early.  So...we sat around waiting for the next train to show.

The Gao Tie - or G Train

Once we got to Suzhou, the transportation woes continued.  It was a national holiday and the locals and tourists were out en masse.  We skipped the mile-long taxi line and opted for the bus, thinking it would only be a short ride.  The first bus rolled around, but we couldn't force our way onto it because it was so packed.  We then had to "illegaly" push our way onto the back of the second bus, getting yelled at by the bus captain because we were supposed to board in the front.  We didn't care though, as long as we made it on we were happy.  Then, about 30 minutes later, we managed to travel the 3 stops necessary to get where we wanted.  Now I see why the tour books warn against travelling in China during national holidays.

Canals of Suzhou.  They call it the Venice of the East.

Suzhou is known for its gardens so we checked out the Humble Administrator's Garden, which is one of the more famous ones.

All in all, our time in Shanghai was awesome.  We got to spend lots of time with our college friends, ate good food, and did lots of shopping.  We were definitely sad to leave.