What am I Eating?

Our flight to Shanghai was uneventful...But if you ever have the option to fly Quantas I would highly recommend them. They offer a lot of amenities for free.

Yesterday we spent the whole day exploring Shanghai. We started in a bakery for breakfast and had some weird milk teas and my bakery selection (something with cheese) wasn't that great. It smelt good though - like garlic, but I didn't taste any. Then we went to Nanjing Road, which is like a big pedestrian mall. Because we're Caucasian, countless people came up to us to sell watches, bags, suitcases, etc. There were also a few relentless ones who wanted us to visit their shop. We finally followed one guy and he was selling t-shirts and other tourist stuff. Kar and Alex wanted shirts so the haggling began. They still didn't get a very good deal but we spent a long time haggling over the price. Having a currency converter with makes a huge difference! We'd be lost without it. Then we continued up Nanjing Road, which really could have been in any city in the world, it's nothing special, just a huge shopping arcade. We got to a major intersection and decided to pull out a map just to see how far we'd walked and two Chinese girls, about our ages, came up to us. They asked if we were lost and we told them we just wanted to find our self on the map. We just started talking too them and they really wanted to practice their English (which was very good) and we wound up going to a traditional government chinese tea tasting ceremony. We thought that maybe they worked for the place we went but after discussing it we're pretty sure they were just super friendly. There english teacher is from Washington, DC I guess. So the tea ceremony was awesome. The 6 of us went into a small room and sat around a table that had all the tea in the middle. The two Chinese girls translated most of the information to us and we learned a lot! We tried 6 different teas; ginseng, jasmine, fruit, green tea, black tea/lychee, and some kind of flower. Different teas are drank in different ways and men and women should hold their cups differently. Also, the pot they are poured out of also has significance. One of the pots symbolizes the sky and earth and then the people so it's considered a peace pot because all of the people of the world should live in peace. One of the girls, "Daisy", suggested it should be given to George Bush! We also learned about what medicinal purposes the teas have. After we tried the teas we all decided to buy our favorites; I bought the fruit tea. The girls also wrote our names in Chinese and taught us words like "thank you" and "Cheers". We exchanged e mail addresses with them as well.
After that we went to the museum of Urban Development. Wow! I think only true architecture nerds can really appreciate what was going on in there but it was 5 large floors with amazing models of the city and it's redevelopment. In 2010 Shanghai will will be hosting the World Expo and they are redoing thier riverfront and putting up some pretty cool buildings. There was even an entire section dedicated to green building. One part I found particularly interesting was how they are going to improve quality of life here. They will put a pitched a pitched roof on flat roofed buildings. They had renderings of what it will look like and it's a very European theme. It was a very simple statement and there really wasn't any explanation about why that would improve quality of life. It will just make building look nicer. So my theory is that they know that Europeans have a higher quality of life and that is what their housing looks likes. So, if they recreate the look, quality of life goes up. Communism is fascinating.

After we finished at the museum we went to a food court for a late lunch. I don't know what I ate, and I doubt I ever will. None of it looked good but I had #8 and it didn't taste too bad. The drink i got with it was awful though! The dish was pretty spicy but I was starving so I ate it, held my breath and drank the stuff anyway. Kar tried to find bottled water but couldn't. It was some kind of noodle with what looked liked beans and rice from a distance. It definitely wasn't but that's about all I can say.

Then we went to an old tourist part of town that has a temple. It was quite a walk and traffic (Cars, bikes and scooters)is beyond insane. Actually, I'm going to leave off here because James is online so we can chat. I'll catch up on my next opportunity.