A Tour of Shanghai

Yesterday (Saturday), the gang headed out for a fun filled day in Shanghai. The Munozes have a friend of a friend that lives in Shanghai and out of the kindness of her heart, took us all around to see the city. Her English name was Avery, and her friend who came along with us was Echo (sp?). Both spoke broken english, but it was very good, especially compared to our Chinese! They were both so sweet and so much fun! I think I had more fun learning Chinese with them and learning about their culture than I did seeing the city!

We first went to the Yuyuan Garden and Temple area which was beautiful. It was built for one person during the Ming dynasty. It was a quaint garden with rock formations and little gazebo type things and ponds with plenty of giant goldfish (I know they weren't goldfish, but that's what they looked like).

We walked around outside the garden where there were a bunch of little shops and street vendors, selling anything from expensive memorabilia to cheap junk. So we did some shopping with the help of Avery and Echo, who did all our bartering for us. That was extremely helpful. Not that we couldn't do it on our own, they were just very good at it and would tell us if a price was good or not.

We then made our way to the Oriental Pearl Tower across the river in Shanghai. We went close to the top where we could get a full city view of Shanghai. I'm sure it would have been great site, but the air was so smoggy and foggy that it was hard to see much, or make for a very pretty view.

We then headed to dinner at a Thai restaurant, where Avery and Echo did all the ordering for us. There were Thai dancers on stage for our entertainment, which was quite amusing. Dinner was a hodge-podge of dishes put on a lazy-susan in the middle of the table that everyone shared. That's pretty much the style of eating around here: community dining.

After dinner, we walked through an area that I would describe as the Hyde Park of Shanghai. There were a ton of bars, restaurants, and western people. It was a very quaint area, one that we'll have to hit up at another time. We just walked through to see it, but on our way through, the guys ran into Jocheim, their German colleague at Grohe. So us wives got to meet him.

After a long day, we trekked back to the apartment and crashed. It was a good day.

(Side note: Now, loading pictures is kind of a pain with our internet being slow, and Matthew didn't feel like writing in his blog, only posting pictures. So, we decided that I would write, and he would post pictures. You can see his blog at web.mac.com/mrobbins4031)