tip of the day: how to avoid peeping toms

Well this is just amazing... I'm glad the government cares enough to tell us how to stop people from looking up our skirts. Complete with diagrams and geometry!

random pix: more Shanghai

I saw Leighton Meister and Ed Westwick at the opening of a Harry Winston store. Random.

The phone booths all are wifi hot spots.

Lots of Paulaner pubs in the city, yay :)

Shanghai adventure pt 4

My last full day in Shanghai I explored hostel #3 and the surrounding city quite a bit. It was just a few blocks down from a temple, a large park, a few malls, great restaurants and bars... a great location in short.

alley location of hostel #3

definitely made use of this

too cute

After checking out the area, I grabbed dinner at a nearby organic, vegan restaurant and then went back to my hostel in hopes of meeting people to make some plans for the evening. There were definitely a few hours in the afternoon/evening when traveling alone got to me and I was just ridiculously lonely. I called a friend in Songyuan to cheer myself up, and apparently everyone else in there had taken short weekend trips for the holiday so he was lonely as well. He had gone out that day and bought a turtle to keep him company, ha.

My hostel had a terrace bar, so I went upstairs and struck up a conversation with the one other person up there (bar fail). She wasn't planning on going out, but two Frenchman came up shortly after and I started talking to them so we made plans to go out. We checked out three other bars and clubs that night, ranging from a rooftop club on the Bund to a small hidden club in a house with mostly Chinese and Koreans. We had a great time. We actually ended up meeting up with friends of the Spaniard that I had met earlier in the day as well.

The next day we went to lunch at a gorgeous restaurant on the water in the park, played some pool and then it was time to be off. All in all I had a great holiday, but it would have been much better if I had been with someone else.

restaurant

lunch :)

Shanghai adventure pt 3

The latter half of my Shanghai trip is going markedly better than the former. And I was already in love with the city; I WILL be back.

Today I left my friend's hotel and went to check out the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre. I'm not really into history, but art and design I'm all about. They had descriptions that discussed a bit of both, which was nice. The place was pretty well hidden, it was in the basement of one building in an apartment complex. It seemed pretty dodgy going downstairs in the tiny elevator, but I did get out with all my organs in tact, so that's a bonus. It was actually pretty busy, there were other Americans, French, Germans and Dutch people there while I was there. And it's not a big place. I'd be interested to know how they all heard about it, since I heard from a friend of mine that I think had been.

Then I came to my next hostel (I blew off hostel #2 last night due to missing check in time whilst at the Pearl Market and stayed with my friend again). Hostel #3 is a total win. It's in the middle of the city, but down a really cool looking alley, full of foreigners and Chinese, it has a bar, wifi, is clean, they gave me a towel (ha)... in short I'm quite happy.

Right off the bat I set out to find some lunch, which can be challenging. I can tell if something is a restaurant from the outside usually, but if the menu doesn't have pictures I'm kind of screwed. My food vocabulary consists of "bread," "noodles," "chicken," "pork" and "beef." About a block away from the hostel I came up behind a guy I had seen inside and heard speaking English, so I started up a conversation with him. As luck would have it, he was en route to get lunch as well.

He actually does IT stuff for one of the really big, private English chain schools in China. He invited me to a brunch tomorrow with everyone he works with, mostly IT and content management (did someone say writing?!) people; unfortunately it's in the afternoon and I have to leave for the airport around 3pm. Sad panda.

So we came back to the hostel and he went to do god knows what and I came to use the wifi a bit before I wander out again. While I've been sitting here, I've had the pleasure of doing something I haven't been able to do in a REALLY long time: eavesdropping.

There is what sounds like a French kid here that seems to be stalking a Chinese girl, and perhaps she led him on a bit first. He's changing hostels because he thinks this one is expensive (I think it's like $11 USD a night right now, and that's holiday rates, not what I'd call pricey), he wants her to go with him and also somewhere in there it sounds like he's trying to take a trip to Hong Kong without a visa and wants her to buy his ticket? Bizarre.

Because I so rarely hear English or anything I can understand, I tune out 99% of the sounds around me in China. Even if I don't have my headphones in, it can take me a minute to realize someone's calling my name or something because I'm just so used to not paying attention. The one thing I AM super in tune to is music. Whether it's in English or not, they play a lot of western music here, and I'm always the first to notice. I think when I go back to the States next on holiday, the amount of audio stimuli is going to be very overwhelming.

random pix: Shanghai

This kid was just adorable, I had to take his picture. I know, I know, I'm a creep.

Clowns are creepy in any country.

They have some really nifty architecture here.

The Aussie from the first night out. This about sums up a lot of the touristy areas, lots of homeless. I hadn't seen a lot of differently abled people in China so far, I was thinking they must hide them away or something. Not in Shanghai though, here they're all beggars. It's really sad, but then you do get the same people coming up to you like three four times in an hour if you're stationary because all white people look the same to them. Even after my friend gave some of they money they came back up to us.

Not my grandma...

Nuff said.

This is from my room in hostel #1. What kind of emergency might I need these for?! Also, who's stealing them?

random pix: Huan Le Gu Shanghai

Someone learned the important words in English class...

"Hiphop fairy room"??? In. So in.

Shanghai adventure pt 2

So yesterday was quite the random day. I ended up having two Chinese roommates in my hostel the other night. I went to bed so early that they both got back to the room after I was asleep. They both showered when they got in at night, which made the already damp room pretty effing humid. Then it rained. It was just gross in there by the morning. I also got attacked by a mosquito. I woke up with the bites and was kind of jazzed that they didn't really itch. Now, a full 24 hours later, they completely do and I look like I have chicken pox.

My roommates and I all three woke up about the same time yesterday morning; one of them spoke a litttttttle bit of English, the other not so much. They seemed to both be university students on holiday. I was chatting with the girl that spoke English; we ended up grabbing breakfast together and then I headed back to my friend's hotel "base camp."

Every time I go in his room I nullify his key card, and every time he goes in he nullifies mine; it's kind of a funny little game of tag we're playing and completely confusing the hotel staff since we have to go downstairs and get our cards reactivated each time.

While I was getting ready it started raining, and my plans for the day had been to check out another small, authentic town very nearby. I'd heard great things about it from friends in Songyuan. I almost didn't go, but I figured I had to do something, so might as well take the chance that it wouldn't be raining there.

The town was one that a Chinese friend of mine that lived in Shanghai at one point had told me about. My American friends had recommended another, but he said I would like this one better. I got directions from the concierge and I was off. It was about a 40 minute subway turned light rail ride away, and the above ground bit of the ride was absolutely gorgeous. Everything was green, all the architecture along the way was very European, there were lots of canals and waterways and some were even Venice style through the houses. Oh yeah, did I mention, THERE WERE HOUSES?! First ones I have seen in China.

When I arrived at my destination, it wasn't super apparent where I wanted to go, so I called my friend and he directed a taxi driver for me. And then I got my big surprise. Huan Le Gu was in fact not a rustic, authentic Chinese town. It was an amusement park, like absolutely legit, huge, Six Flags Great America style amusement park.

I called my friend again and was like, "Wth?" and his response was just to giggle and tell me he thought I'd like this better. So, with not much else to do in BFE Shanghai, I had a day at the amusement park, by myself.

I actually had quite a blast. I made some friends in line for my first roller coaster. I was definitely quite the spectacle, I think in the whole park I saw maybe two other foreigners. My new friends didn't really speak English, and they had the ultimate worst phone translator ever. At least half of the things they tried to ask me I could not figure out for the life of me what they were getting at based on the translator's interpretation. But communicating a love of roller coasters and other things of the like is pretty easy! The roller coasters were as awesome as American roller coasters, but we did have to stretch before riding them (no joke) and there were a ridiculous amount of instructions.

Yes, there are literally 12 steps to riding this roller coaster. And the second last is indeed to retrieve your belongings, and the last is to exit. Common sense much?

In the afternoon, I got a text from my friend from the States inviting me to join him and his coworkers on an excursion to the Pearl Market in the evening, so I made the trip back to his hotel and met the four of them. The Pearl Market is in a huge mall, but is exactly what you might expect from a Chinese market: three floors of insanity, in general the higher up you go, the nicer the products get. The first floor tends to be all clothes, the second jewelry and the third all the knock off bags, watches, shoes, gadgets, etc. you could ever want. Naturally, the jewelry floor had a lot of pearls (mostly real) hence the name. The deeper into haggling you get with someone or the more serious you appear, they all have these crazy secret back rooms, and back rooms within back rooms, that they can take you into with more and better merchandise; it's a trip.

This was the crew's fourth trip to the market, they all love haggling and they love name brand (or knock off) goods. They knew personal details about a lot of the people at the booths ("did you ask her about her toothache?" "she's not due for another two months yet, but does she have a name picked out?") and they knew them all by name. I'm not a big shopper or haggler and I really don't care much for Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, or whatever, but it was still a fun excursion.

Afterwards we walked down another really cool street with all kinds of foreign restaurants to find a spot for dinner. We ended up at a Mexican restaurant, which made me unbelievably happy. I absolutely love Mexican food, and I haven't had any since I arrived in China almost three months ago. It wasn't the best I've ever had or anything, but it was definitely a welcome meal.

Since everyone I was with is here on business, they have been putting everything on their corporate cards to expense it (not the shopping of course), and dinner and drinks were no different. Until all of their corporate cards got denied. I think they spent about an hour on the phone with Am Ex trying to determine what happened, all the while calling and emailing their people in the States as well. Apparently their corporate office is going through some changes in management and whatnot, so it's a result of that, but it leaves these four people SOL in China. The fact that it's a holiday in both countries doesn't really help either. They're all supposed to check out of their hotel tomorrow, where they have been staying for some 20 odd days, and it's a nice hotel… with no more corporate cards, that's going to be fun.