After breakfast, we finally had a chance to wander around Shanghai, something we had planned to do yesterday, but had gotten tied up with getting arrested.
There are plenty of exciting stores around Shanghai, my favorite of which was Love Jam Wedding Story. Can you guess what they sold there? I can't either.
People in Shanghai manage to schlep all kinds of things around on their motor scooters and bicycles. It's not too uncommon to see an entire family riding around on one together, or to see a fellow loaded up with what looked like 16 water-cooler bottles filled with water. Here are some kids watching some cages full of little birds that somebody left on the back of his bicycle:
A man and his Fu Dog:
Reaching out for the ever mouth-watering Bakkwa
Viagra going for about $12 bucks a pill:
Ariel holding a giant lollipop:
One of my favorite things we did in Shanghai was we got to see the neighborhood Ping grew up in. She says that all there was was just one room shared by three generations, and Ping got to sleep under the table. They shared a kitchen in another building with some other families, and everything they cooked had to be carried very carefully up the stairs to where they lived. This is what the neighborhood looks like:
In this picture, Ping and Ariel standing right next to the building she used to live in. As we were leaving, a woman and her mother stepped out of a nearby building. She'd grown up with Ping and was still living in the same neighborhood.
After wandering around the city, we didn't have much time before noon, our checkout deadline. Fortunately, we got in around five of, and sprinted up to our rooms... to find that they'd deactivated our key cards early.
After some bickering, during which they tried to charge us extra for getting back to our rooms, because it was NOW after checkout time, we got our stuff and headed off to the train station for our 20-hour train ride to Chengdu.
I'll tell you about that in the next post. I might as well just put the whole train ride in one post. Plus I'm getting super sleepy. Sorry this blog is still a couple days behind. We'll catch up soon!
Love,
-Oliver St. John
Blogger Extraordinaire/Adventurer
Kinship of Rivers
No comments:
Post a Comment