Around the world in 106 days: China- Day 1 and 2 Shanghai

Now that I have finished Japan I feel like I can talk about China. I have 2 days in Shanghai and 2 in Hong Kong (I could have traveled overland for 2 days in-between but I decided to save money and stay on the ship). Yesterday I found out that two of my good friends on the ship who are both Vietnamese are Buddhist. Someone brought up is they believe in fate and people opened up about their religions. But on the good side this post makes me officially caught up in blogging! So no you all know what my life has been like J

Feb 3^rd

We arrived in Shanghai around 8am, me and my roommates have a cabin close to the engine so we know exactly when we are pulling into port because the engine rumbles really loudly then all of a sudden gets pretty quiet. We headed up for breakfast and immigration wanted us off the ship pretty quick so by 9am we were in our cabins waiting for our section of the ship to be called off. We got though immigration at around 9:30 and waited for our whole group to get through. There was 7 of us at first traveling together. My first impression of Shanghai was the smell and the sights. Automatically I could see and smell the difference between Japan and China. There was trash everywhere, we had to step over puke a few times and it smelled pretty bad. Our first stop was a bank so that we can exchange money or take out money. There was no banks open since it was a Sunday so we had to use an ATM. We wandered around attempting to use our map but we failed and ended up asking locals for help, 4 people walked by and wouldn’t even try (one of my friends even spoke Chinese and tried to get their attention but they kept walking).

Finally after asking with no luck, we asked a couple and they told us where to go. They also offered to walk with us because they were going that way too. Initially they told us to take a subway because it was a far walk but we walked with them. The couple was very kind and walked us about 2 miles to our first destination which was a museum that half of our group was looking for. We decided to split up and meet later at a specific time later. So me and 3 others went to explore while 3 others went into a urban planning museum. This ended up being a mess because the two people who spoke some Chinese ended up in one group and the rest of us with no Chinese background ended up in another group. The 4 of us left the museum and went to Starbucks to get some water and a snack. The water in Shanghai we were told was not really good to drink and would probably make you sick. So I got a bottle of water and a muffin. We attempted to use the internet but because china is so strict it was hard to get it to work. We then decided to go to a touristy area nearby which had a bunch or stores and people selling things on the streets. We didn’t spend a lot of time there though because we soon had to meet up with our friends at the museum. So we waited and gave them 30 minutes (what we agreed on). While we waited a Chinese man came up to us and asked where we were from. We told him the USA and he started telling us how bad the USA is because the cooperation’s try to take over china. Me and my friend didn’t know what to say. So later when a man came and asked us where were from we said Canada so we wouldn’t have to deal with peoples negative views of the USA.

After we waited we left and went to find food. We walked about a mile and found a restaurant we decided to try. No one spoke English so we all agreed on three things in the menu we would point at and share. One was a friend rice, one was a sweet chicken and one was a chicken and pepper mixture which no one liked because there was lots of little bones in the chicken and it was really spicy. The rice and sweet chicken was amazing though. On the way back toward the shopping district we were at before we ended up stopping at a burger king to try and use the restroom and they pointed us into a building next door which ended up being a large shopping area that you can haggle for things. We spent about 2 hours in this large shopping area overwhelmed because there was 4 floors and every single person in that building was trying to get your money. Two of the other girls had to leave to meet with a professor for dinner but me and Bridget stayed to shop for a while. I didn’t even buy much but the place was so big (4 floors and over 500 venders) that we really tried to see all that that they had. I ended up buying a pair of beats by dr. dre headphones for 15 bucks, les Miserable for 1.5 USD and 30 Rock season 3 for 5 bucks.

After all of that we decided to head back to the ship since it was almost a 3 mile walk and we wanted to take advantage of free dinner on the ship. On the way we stopped and took pictures by the pier with the Shanghai business district in the background. We made it back to the ship around 6 and ate dinner. The group mates that went to the museum ended up getting back much after. One of my friends Cindy on the ship has a friend from college that is living in Shanghai for vacation because she just graduated. Well this girl, Marie, has an aunt who owns a five star hotel chain that owns a hotel in Shanghai called the Pullman skyline. So Cindy invited us all out to meet up with her and go out for an night on the town. So we took a cab around 9:30 to the hotel (cabs are really cheap, 1 USD per person for a 15 min ride). We waited in the lobby for her. She showed us where the safe clubs and bars were and we ran into fellow SASers at the club. We didn’t stay long though because one of the girls almost got her drink spiked by a guy dancing. So we ended up leaving and we found a bar with a small dance floor and a DJ playing. All 14 of us SASers got drinks and we danced with the locals who were all sitting and doing nothing before we came. We pretty much brought the party haha. We had fun though and around 2am took a taxi back to the ship and went to bed.

Feb 4^th

We had to drag ourselves out of bed at 8am to go to breakfast. Cindy’s friend was meeting us in her hotel’s lobby at 9am so should could give us a small tour of some local areas. We arrived a little late but she was running a bit late too so it worked out. She walked us over to a small area nearby that was small streets of shops and markets. It was really cute and was decorated with lots of new year decorations. We then went into a market and got a real culture shock. Dried full animals hanging, dead animals everywhere, the smell of fish, and we even saw a chicken being killed and then de-feathered with a machine. My friend had to leave within second of going in because it was too much for her. It was pretty shocking to walk around and see all of this so we didn’t stay for long. We walked away and went down the street, there was a small kitty sitting and facing away so we tried meowing to see it and my friend who was still traumatized by the market was not very happy to find out that the small kitty had an eye missing and one foggy eye. So we decided we had enough of this part of town and went back to the hotel so we could move on. Marie (Cindy’s friend) had a personal driver who took half of us to our next destination and the other half took a taxi that followed the BMW. It was a really nice car and the driving was much better than the crazy cab drivers who drive like maniacs.

We arrived at a garden area around noon and found a food court to eat at. We split into groups and all got different foods that we could all try and share. I tried a lot of new foods that day including a crab dumpling, pork dumplings and some kind of almond jello. It was all okay. I enjoyed the pot stickers the best though. We sat and ate for a while because we ordered too much food and so we didn’t want to waste a lot of food. Eventually we left and went out in the main square of the gardens where there was a bunch of shops and huge decorations for the Chinese new year! It was really cool to see huge balloons and lanterns all over in decoration for one of their biggest holidays. It’s something we don’t really think about in the USA or it might be a small event on a calendar but in China it’s huge. I remember in elementary school making lanterns and learning about the Chinese new year and it really did blow my mind that I was actually there to see their actual preparations underway for their main holiday. By the time we finished walking around it was around 2pm and we had to back on the ship by 4 L. So we decided to go back to the shopping building because half of our group never got to go and wanted to haggle. We spent about an hour there and then went back to the ship. Since there is only about 160 people staying on the ship from Shanghai to Hong Kong it was a quick process to get back on. We all relaxed, ate dinner and then watched a movie before bed.

I will write a reflection after HK, even though shanghai and HK are really different from each other. Now it’s time to get some work done.

Love

Casey