Hey, Hi! Shanghai!

      February 28th is Peace Day in Taiwan, this year it fell on a Tuesday, and our wonderful school decided to give us Monday off as well, making it a long weekend!  For our trip to Beijing we needed to get a double entry visa, which meant we still had one entry to China left.  Although our last trip wasn't aaas wonderful as we had hoped and China had left kinda a stinky memory, we decided to use our last entry and return to China!! Actually we had booked this trip before our first trip, so we were stuck going, regardless.
    I had an open mind though, no biases.  This time we were venturing to Shanghai, south of Beijing the weather would be not as freezing and I'd heard good things, aside from it being one of the largest cities in the world with a population of 23 million!
    We arrived Saturday evening, and immediately found friendlier people than in Beijing. We needed help getting from the Metro to our hotel as our directions didn't pan out.  A group of people were trying to googlemap it on their phone, when that didn't work they called the hotel, got us a taxi and told them where to go in Chinese for us!  So wonderful.  The first evening we went to The Bund, what the waterfront area is referred to.  There's an amazing view of the city and it's really beautiful.  We walked around, found something to eat, that was about it.

      Sunday we set out to see some things.  The first stop was the Jade Buddha Temple, pretty much just another temple, but there's a large white jade statue of Buddha that's neat and a big pond full of huge Koi fish that you can feed and people were touching them, though I'm not sure you're really allowed too.

Not the jade Buddha, but some other interesting statues.

   









      Next was the Yuyuan Gardens.  It was really nice, with a lot of detailed rock sculptures and trees, and absent blooming flowers since it's February.

      Then it was time to visit the Oriental Pearl Tower, this is essentially a mix of the Eiffel Tower and the Seattle Space Needle.  Apparently Shanghai is referred to as "The Paris of the East" which..  is I guess believable.  They have a lot of high end stores and luxury things, I guess their fashion is part of what gives it that name.  So this tower is 1,535 ft. high and has a number of observation levels.  Near the top is a revolving restaurant, similar to the one in the space needle.  We decided to be big spenders and eat the buffet up there.  There were tons of different styles of food, including a dessert fondue bar!  After lunch we went down to another level where there's a glass floor that goes out overlooking the city, and you can even see the base of the tower you are standing on!  It was really scary to walk out there.  Part of the floor was wooden, and then it turned to glass, so you could stand on the wood and then jump out and look down like you would just plunge through and it was very frightening!

Eating lunch









                A view from the restaurant

eeee on the glass platform!














   




     After this we went next door to a large aquarium that was full of fun facts and neat creatures! We even got to touch a shark!  Well, a white-spotted Bamboo Shark, I think it may have been dead or asleep, and it felt like a potato.



     
   

I was obsessed with these jellyfish.  I could have stood and watched them all day. They were in a tank that kept changing colors.  It was beautiful.

    Then we went back across the river to The Bund to get a view of the city line during daylight.  Here we got tickets to take an hour boat ride down the main strip.  It left at 6 pm, so we got the very end of daylight and then part of night.  It was a nice scenic ride. Then we went to a shopping district, walked around, ate, and that was Sunday!

City line in day time and the other side of the river on the boat at night.





      Monday was the only day we booked a tour as we wanted to venture to some smaller towns outside of Shanghai.  Our tour guide, named Frank, was very friendly and very interested in us because A. we are Americans, and B. we teach in Taiwan.  He asked a lot of questions about the education systems in both places. There were 6 people on this tour. First up was the city of Suzhou (Sujoh) about an hour and a half outside of Shanghai.  Here we went to the Master of Nets Gardens, renamed from the 10,000 Volumes Gardens.  The guy had a huge library here but renamed it after a fisherman saved his son from the waters.  It looked pretty similar to the Yuyuan Gardens.  Then we got to experience another silk factory.  Now I've been to 3, I know all about silk worms and silk!  Then we ate lunch, where some lady sang at our table then got angry and went bad mouthing us to the other people in the restaurant because we didn't want to pay her.  We also got to see an embroidery factory which was amazing.  We saw the masters at work stitching pictures that take forever to complete!

The Master of Nets Garden

      We then went to another city, Zhujiajiao, or "The Venice of Shanghai."  They like nicknames for their cities.  This is a water town over 1700 years old! We walked around by the water and took a small gondola ride through the streams with a woman navigating the boat.  This lady also wanted to sing for us, but we said no.  Then it was back to Shanghai.  We passed a lot of fields with workers in the cone shaped hats that make me think of China, but I don't think they were harvesting tea.

     Once we were back in the city, Greta and I set off to do some more shopping, but were disappointed in the market we arrived at.  We met up with Anthony back at the hotel and set off together to the Jin Mao Tower.  Another huge building, with the tallest bar in Shanghai on the 88th floor called Cloud 9.  We went there for a drink and a nice view of the city.  We saw a lot of different views of the city on this trip.  I had a classy martini, and it made me miss the martini lounge in St. Cloud.  After this we tried to go to a Snow Bar, where it's -10 C and they give you fur lined North Face parkas to wear and serve over 150 different types of vodka.  Sadly it was closed.
     Our flight left for Taiwan Tuesday afternoon, so we checked out in the morning and went to another shopping market before we needed to leave.  This one was better, and we got some I heart SH shirts! SH standing for my mom, those are her initials, oh and Shanghai too I guess. I also got some jewelry.   And then back to Taiwan!