Memorial Day Tournament!

While I was in Shanghai, my co-worker, Lea, and one of her climbing buddies, Heather, realized that I knew both of them. I still haven't figured out how they chanced upon this, but Heather's team was short for an ultimate frisbee tournament, so she got my contact information from Lea. She emailed me asking if I'd play in a one day tournament on Memorial Day, and I figured that a one day tournament couldn't hurt. If you hate the team, it's ok, because it's only one day! It was also really close to where we live and in a nice sports complex, so I said I'd play.

The team's name is Rule # 5, while I'll never understand why, because nobody knows what rule #5 is. NOBODY. Anyways, they were actually a lot of fun to play with. They play very hard, yet they are really happy and carefree, and don't care too much about whether or not we win. It's no fun to play on a team where people get frustrated and angry, and that is actually why I haven't played ultimate in a while. I didn't like the teams at RIT too much because they had a lot of drama and fights. Then I joined that draft league and had a lot of fun playing that. I didn't think I'd join another team, though, until I found Rule #5. Their playing style so closely matches mine that when they asked if I'd play for them while I lived in the bay area, I jumped at the opportunity! They practice on weekends, go to a few tournaments, and have a lot of fun, so I am excited!

We played pretty well that day - they had a lot of newcomers (to the team, not the sport) so we learned how to play with each other and what throws everyone has, what cuts people like, etc. It was a lot of fun, and we definitely improved over the day!

At one point in the day, there was this perfect halo around the sun. I looked it up and it was caused by moisture, but it was funny because everyone was saying, "look at the sun!" We all spent so much time looking at it because it was perfect and amazing that we all stumbled around the fields blind for a while.

After the end of play, I found myself really sore. I haven't played that much in one day, and running is a lot more high impact than biking or swimming, so I have to get used to it again!

China, Day 11!

Dan knew how badly I wanted to learn to make some chinese dumplings, so when I woke up, some of the house staff was ready to teach me to make jiao zi! It was really fun. It was a pork dumpling with lots of cabbage, and they boil the dumplings after making them. The hardest part was learning to fold the dumplings correctly! Tim came in to try, and learned really fast, but I had a harder time. After eating some of the dumplings for lunch, we biked to a shoe store that has lots of nice shoes for really cheap. There were a bunch of french people in the store buying 4 or 5 pairs of shoes each! Normally the shoes go for 80 or more dollars, but here they were like 2 or 3 bucks. Very cheap! After we waited for the french people to finish up and leave, Timmy went in and bought himself some nice cheap shoes. On the bike ride home, we stopped at Dan's campus (where he has been studying Chinese) and went to a dumpling place he frequents to have more ziao ling bao! I was so excited! These were even better than the ones we had at the yu yuan gardens. We also got some delicious bubble tea, and sat on a bench in the shade watching people while drinking. After a while, Dan had to head to class, and Tim and I biked home on our own.

This was our last full day in China, and we really wanted to get up high and see Shanghai from above. There is an observatory on the top of the tower in Pudong that looks like a bottle opener, but it was really expensive. Dan told us that you could go almost as high as the observatory in the same building by going to the bar of one of the hotels in the building. We figured that we'd spend less money on some drinks, actually get drinks, and look at the view from the bar! When we got home, we changed into the nicer clothes that we had, and headed out to take the metro into Pudong! We were slightly baffled at first as to how to get into the hotel section of the building, but after we walked around, we found the entrance. We had to put all of our bags through an xray machine, and walk through a metal detector...they do that a lot in Shanghai, including every time you go into the metro. We took the very fast elevator up to the bar, and got a table near the window! The view was pretty great, but I never realized how much pollution there is. I had known that I had a sore throat, and that it was bothering me, but I didn't realize how much SMOG there was. Wow! Tim ordered some alcoholic drink, and I ordered an apple juice. It was one of those times where you get exactly what you want, but not what you're expecting. I was expecting an amber colored apple juice like we have in America, but I got actual, fresh squeezed juice from a granny smith apple. I didn't like it.

We relaxed and watched the view for a while, but there was a very rude couple that wanted our exact table and was standing nearby staring us down. We tried to make our drinks last a long time because of how rude they were being, but eventually it got on our nerves and we left. It was fun! On the way home, I grabbed some coffee at a Starbucks, and we spent a little time wandering around Pudong. When we tired, we took the metro back home and relaxed for the night. We tried to stay up late so that we'd be tired when we got to the airport in the morning so we could sleep on the plane, but I couldn't. I fell asleep early! Yay, Shanghai!

China, Day 10!

Yesterday, Dan went out and grabbed tickets for Tim and I to go to Hangzhou today, so we woke up early to get a cab to the train station! It was time for the morning commute, so it was surprisingly hard to catch a cab. We wandered all over, but the cabs were all full! We were getting worried, but then we hatched a plan to walk to the hotel nearby. There are always taxis at hotels looking for tourists, and we were right! We hopped into a taxi and with a surge of relief, we were on our way. This was a different train station than the one we had gone to when catching a train to Suzhou. Apparently it's a lot harder to get to by metro, so Dan recommended we just take a cab since they are so cheap in Shanghai anyway. It was kind of nice to just take a car somewhere, rather than having to change metros a few times to get somewhere.

After a few frights in the cab (they drive so crazy in Shanghai!) we arrived at the train station and were promptly confused. Our ticket numbers were on the board, but there was a weird Chinese symbol after it, and it was in red. We didn't know if it was canceled, or delayed, or what. We finally tried showing our tickets to be let in, and they let us in, so we knew that was a good sign. So we wandered around looking for our numbers, and after a while we found them, but were confused even more! Our numbers were outside the door of a VIP lounge?? We showed them our tickets, and got let in, which was even more confusing because it was just a lounge. A room. With no entry to a train track. We stood around awkwardly while people watched us be confused with amused faces. Finally, everyone started pouring out of the room so we followed them and they all headed towards the track and the correct train. I still don't understand what happened, but we got on the correct train, got our seats, and we were on our way!

When we got to Hangzhou, we had to push our way through people telling us to get into cabs to be taken to fancy places via pictures on brochures, and then we were walking in the approximate right direction to the lake, which is where we wanted to go. It was a long, hot walk, with lots of tunnels underneath the street (since WHEN did cars become more important than pedestrians? I'd like to walk in the sun, not navigate two sets of stairs and a dark, dank tunnel every time I need to cross a street!) and eventually we arrived at the lake! It was so picturesque. It was exactly what I needed - a quiet, cute, scenic place where you could stroll around this huge lake and just get away from the hustle bustle of the city. It was so nice! We roamed around the path circling the lake. I saw a Starbucks, and since I was dying for something American, I went and got a frappachino! It tasted delicious. The whipped cream...was kind of odd...but the coffee itself was good! :) I still haven't figured out the whipped cream. We had some in various places and it was never good.

We really relaxed while walking around the lake. We took some photos, but I will have to add them later if I add any at all. The lake was so big and the weather was so bright that it was hard to take a good photo. There were lots of interesting boats moored at the side of the lake, or taking people across the lake. We contemplated taking a boat across the lake, but we didn't want to spend the money. I can't remember what it was that we ate for breakfast that morning, but whatever it was was so filling that we weren't really hungry for lunch. However, we were hot and thirsty, so we got some ice cream and soda from a vendor, and sat down to eat. We didn't have enough time to walk around the entire lake, so we turned around after a while and headed back to the train. Everyone stared at us the entire time because we were big, white people. The feeling of being gawked at so constantly is getting really old.

We made it back to the train just in time, and took the train home. The train back took us to the train station we had taken the first time, so we took one metro line to another metro line, then walked to a bus, and took the bus home! The public transportation in Shanghai is really complete.

Dinner was steak and potatoes with creamed spinach, courtesy of Dan's chef. It was pretty good!

China, Day 9!

Dan got some bad news that his grandmother had passed away, so our plans kind of fell apart for the day. We had planned to take the train to Hangzhou, but Dan wasn't feeling up to it. Tim and I couldn't buy the tickets without him, so we just spent the morning laying around. I finished a book that I had been reading, and then Tim and I went and swam for a little while. We were really bored, and it wasn't looking like Dan was going to want to do anything, so we went out on a long walk. We headed in a direction we hadn't really gone before, and found a big shopping plaza that was more American in that you weren't crushed by millions of people in tiny walkways. There was a little swatch store, and Tim loves watches so we went in and took a peek around. There was a Dairy Queen, so we got a frosty! I think its funny how proud Dairy Queen is that their frosties are so thick that they can give them to you upside down. The girl that made our frosty seemed really scared that it wouldn't stay when she had to turn it upside down. It always makes me smile.

We sat at a bench eating the frosty for a while, and then we wandered around some more. On the roof, there was a big ice rink, and a miniature golf course! We decided to play some miniature golf to pass the time, and it ended up being a lot of fun. Some of the courses were ridiculously hard. Normally, the sides of the courses have walls, but some of these were plateaus. It was so difficult because you couldn't overshoot the ball, or it would fall off the course! On one of these, there was also a hill that you had to get over. If you didn't hit it hard enough, it would roll backwards, and fall off the plateau. If you hit it too hard, it would just shoot up and off the plateau. It was so infuriating that I thought I was going to flip out and scream and throw a temper tantrum while Tim sat there giggling himself silly at my predicament. He didn't have any issues with it. We ended up having a lot of fun, which was a relief; I had thought that we might have a kind of slow, boring day.

After we finished the golf course, we took a peep at all the children ice skating. They were pretty terrible. We had to leave so that we wouldn't laugh at them.

We headed back home after walking around for a while, and had some lunch. Then Sam told us that there was a Zoo that was a 10 minute walk away, so we headed over. We got some tickets and headed in! It was really spacious, but a lot of it was just open space for people. There was a wedding going on in a garden inside of the zoo. I thought that was a little weird because it's such a public space and everyone was gawking at them, but they looked happy!

I was amused that the fish tank section had a lot of fish that Americans constantly keep in their home aquariums...like neon tetras!

We wandered around the zoo, and I found the pandas really interesting. I don't mean I found them interesting because I like pandas, but it's interesting how differently American zoos treat pandas when compared to the Shanghai zoo. In the san diego zoo, if you want to see one of their pandas, you have to wait in a huge line. They've got it so that only a few people can see the pandas at a time, and you have to be really quiet. Here, they've got like 20 pandas thrown into a glass cage with a yucky concrete floor and very little entertainment. There is no crowd control and there are people screaming and banging on the windows of their cage. No wonder their pandas don't reproduce.

Another thing I found interesting is how the Chinese blatantly ignored all the huge signs stating to please not feed the animals. Children were ripping leaves off trees and hand feeding camels. People were feeding the monkeys Doritos! Some other monkeys were being fed large pieces of bread. All of these animals were on the nets of their cage reaching out with grabby hands trying to get morsels of food.

The saddest part of the zoo was the pet section. Dan said that in retrospect, he should have told us not to go in, but since we had no idea what to expect, we wandered through. They had all these dogs in tiny cages, all alone, with days of poop and pee everywhere. All of the dogs had really dirty coats, and they all looked really sad. They had no toys. They had a concrete floor, a small dirty bed, and that was it. Dogs are herding animals! It made me really sad.

We didn't really find much to take photographs of. The san diego zoo has much prettier landscapes and cages, so we couldn't really bring ourselves to take photos of anything.

After the zoo, we headed home and had dinner with Dan and Sam. After dinner, I went upstairs and read in the bath for a while, and headed to bed. Yay!

China, Day 8!

Today was a pretty laid back day. We relaxed after eating breakfast, and then Dan, Tim and I headed into the city to go to the Shanghai Propaganda Museum. We walked around for long enough that I had started to wonder if Dan was lost, but eventually we walked into this weird lot behind all of these buildings. Turns out the museum was in the basement of a dingy building! It was cool to see all the war posters they had from way back when. There were a lot of Anti - America posters, sad! I had a lot of trouble keeping the Chinese leaders straight - of course I know who Chairman Mao is, but I have a really hard time distinguishing the faces of all of the leaders. Dan knew them all, but Tim and I constantly got confused.

When we were finished with the museum, we decided to wander around for a while. We found a place to get some bubble tea, and decided to order some. I had been absolutely dying for something chocolate, so when I saw a chocolate oreo bubble tea, I jumped at the chance to have something chocolate. Word of advice: don't do that. We also headed over to a bakery and got some pastries to munch on for lunch, which was yummy.

We were pretty worn out, so we headed home early, and spent a lot of time reading. We also headed over to the pool, and swam for a while, which was really nice and relaxing. I haven't been used to the humidity since California is so much drier, so it was nice to get in a cold pool and swim some laps!

China, Day 7!

Today Tim and I woke up and headed into the city after breakfast to go to the Shanghai Urban Planning museum! We knew the general location of the museum, but we weren't sure of the exact location. Of course, we started looking in the farthest away possible, and we had to wander through the entire park looking at all the buildings before we found it all the way in the opposite corner that we started! They have so many big fancy buildings with crazy architecture that sometimes its hard to single one out.

When we finally found it, we got some tickets, and headed in. The first floor had a little model of parts of Shanghai, but we weren't extremely impressed so we headed upstairs. They had a lot of photograph series of Shanghai "then and now" which was pretty fun to look at. The part that annoyed me was how they presented the photographs; in order to look at them, you had to go up to these little cabinets and slide out vertical drawers that had the photos on them. The drawers didn't slide very nicely and you felt the wood grating on other wood, and after I pulled out a few drawers of photos, I didn't really want to go through the entire set. I did though, because the photos were interesting, but what an awkward presentation. It was especially weird because they didn't make much use of the space they had; it's not like they needed to conserve any space.

The next floor was much cooler; it had a huge model of ALL of Shanghai! Tim and I commented that the only thing that could make it even cooler was if it resembled night and day with the lighting. After we walked around staring at it for a while, the lights started dimming! Of course, they had thought of the same idea we had. The buildings slowly started lighting up as "night fell" and then you could see all the brightly neon lit buildings. It was pretty cool. They even had the expo modeled! The photograph below shows the view of the model's version of Pudong, all lit up just like the buildings light up!

This photo is of the expo at night. The only thing different is in the model, the rainbow bridge doesn't change colors. Lame!


This is a large part of the model during "daytime." The tall buildings in the top are in Pudong.

Neat, huh? It must have been pretty crazy to make each one of those buildings. They also had this little dome that you could walk inside, and watch a 3d show of Shanghai. It made me really dizzy. I'm fine with roller coasters and all those fast, fun rides, but if I'm standing still and something is making me think that I'm moving...I don't feel so well! They kept having sweeping shots where you swept down onto the expo and up and looked at it from above and I couldn't stand still or hold my body still and I basically wanted the show to end.

After roaming around for a while longer, we left the museum and met Dan to go to the yu yuan garden. I heard the word "garden" and was not expecting the "garden" to be a shopping plaza. It was more of the millions of shops full of junk and chemical smells and bustling vendors and shoppers and crowded walkways. It was pretty old fashioned in architecture, which was pretty cool. We found a place that had the traditional shanghai dumplings that we hadn't gotten to try yet, and ordered a few! We sat down to eat and man, were they wonderful! They are called Zaio Ling Bao (little dragons). They are a soup dumpling, so you have to nibble off a little piece of the wrapping, drink the scalding hot soup out of it, dunk the dumpling into some rice vinegar, and eat! It is so good. I spent a lot of time blowing on the dumplings though so that the soup wouldn't be so scathing.

After wandering around the market (and getting dizzy from all the chemical odors), we headed home. Dan had decided to make his chef confused by asking him to make us pizza for dinner. They don't have tomato sauce in China, nor do they really have any pizza. We ended up with little pieces of dough that were mounded with pineapple sauce, some sort of pepperoni and some sort of ham, but nothing else, really. They weren't bad, it's just funny to see how their chef interprets American meals!

China, day 6!

Today, Tim and I got ready, and headed outside to catch the bus to the 2 line. Three or four busses passed us going the other way, and there was a large crowd waiting for our bus. It was very, very late, and when it came everyone crammed onto it. It seemed like they would hustle around to make enough room for everyone but us. When we tried to get on, they stared at us angrily, so we didn't bother. Fortunately, that one bus was just backed up, and another emptier bus soon came along. We hopped onto that, and then transferred to the metro. We realized a little too late that there were two train stations in shanghai and we weren't perfectly sure which one we wanted, but we took an educated guess and went to the train station!

When we got off the metro, there was a swarm of Chinese people with luggage outside of the train station. It was a crazy mess, but we figured it out and got inside. We waited for our train, and when it came we boarded and rode the train to Suzhou! When we arrived and exited the train station, we were mobbed by people thrusting papers with photographs of all the landmarks trying to shove us into a taxi. We had been warned about this happening, but it was still a shock. We managed to get through the mob and started walking around. We had a little trouble at first, but we eventually managed to find the first place we wanted to see, the humble administrator's garden. It was a very zen area, and my only problem with it was that there were so many people. They had carted all of the rocks in from the ocean side, which makes you wonder how they did it. They either had horse or oxen drawn carts that they levered the rocks onto but...wow. They had all sorts of cool rocks that had caves and little tunnels you could walk through. We went through one, and it was so dark inside that I smashed my head and saw stars for a while after. People laughed when we exited because we were so much bigger that we had a harder time getting through. We spent a few hours wandering through the garden, which was very nice and zen.






When we left the garden, we walked through a maze of vendor carts, and finally emerged onto the street again. They really make it so that you have to walk through an entire shopping plaza before you can leave the garden. We figured out where we were on the map and headed towards the center of Suzhou, which was supposed to be the old city. It didn't look very old when we got there, and it was really just a lot of shopping. We were completely uninterested in shopping, especially since all shopping in Shanghai seems to be identical, so we found a restaurant and sat down to eat lunch. I ordered a steak curry and a matza coffee. I didn't know what matza was and I figured I'd be adventurous and try it. The Matza coffee came out of the kitchen and it was green. It wasn't very good. Tim was convinced it was seaweed, and I was convinced I'd never again order anything with the word matza in it. I tried to Google it to figure out what it was, but I keep getting results with the unleavened bread so whatever was in that coffee will always be a mystery.

After lunch and relaxing, we decided to walk to the other corner of the city to see the old city gates. We wandered down the streets and were amazed at the things you can buy right off the streets. They also have an astonishing lack of concern for the dangers of working with organic solvents and don't follow any safety protocols. Eventually we got to the general region of the city gate, but we couldn't figure out how to get in! We walked across a bridge to the other side of the moat, and walked through a park on the other side, figuring that we could see the gate and figure out how to get in! The idea was successful with a nice peaceful walk through the park. After a while we got to a little bridge that we could walk back over the moat into the city gate. We paid more than we thought it was worth to get into the gate area, and explored for a while! It was cute to see, and we took a few photos. There was a land gate and a water gate, with a few ways to defend each gate.




We realized that time was running out before our train left, so we wandered back through the city to the train station. The train ride back to the center of Shanghai was pretty uneventful, and when we got home, dinner was ready! It was chicken, asparagus, and mashed potatoes. I was pretty worn out, so I went to bed after reading for a while.

China, day 5!

Today, Tim and I woke up, got ready, and headed to the metro. We rode quite far on the metro, somehow managed to walk right past the biggest market in Shanghai without noticing it (can you tell we aren't shoppers?) and went to the Science and Technology Museum! The building was huge, with lots of windows, but it looked like most of it was unused space, which is always a little bit of a shock. We wandered in, purchased tickets, promptly got lost looking for the exhibits, and finally found the first exhibit. This exhibit started with a scene of a gazillion African "animals" (I'm not sure if they were fake, or real and stuffed, or what) and transformed into a rain forest and finally into a rock maze of some sort. The rain forest had fake lightning and really loud recorded thunder, so there were a few terrified children. There were very large (human child sized) models of praying mantises and other insects climbing the walls of the rock maze. There was a spider exhibit with an enormous spider that would raise and lower into the middle of the room. I'm not sure what they were doing with all of the over-sized insect/spider models but I'm pretty sure Chinese children have nightmares of huge spiders and praying mantises coming to eat them alive.

The rest of the exhibits were a lot more fun. We were pretty unimpressed with the first section of the museum, but the rest of the exhibits were very hands on or interesting. One exhibit had all sorts of sciency things including a guitar that was on the wall and you turned a strobe light on and when you strummed the string, you could see the string vibrations and the nodes very clearly. That was pretty cool. There was an exhibit where you got onto a bike that had a very large weight hanging from it, and because the center of mass was so low, you could bike out on a rope without falling. It was fun to watch people climb onto the bike because they were a little afraid that they would fall, but they never did. There was another part that had all these chairs set up to gearing systems. The first set of chairs was a 1:1 gearing system, so you had to pull really hard on the rope to lift all of your weight off the ground. The second was some other gearing system, maybe 4:1 or so, and when you went to pull the rope to lift yourself off the ground, it was a lot easier. The little kids seemed to like that exhibit. Behind that was this fun section where you would wind a corkscrew and use it to raise a ball to the top of a contraption and then watch it roll all the way down like those little marble ramp sets we all had as children. They included some pretty fun gizmos in the contraption so it was fun to watch. There were a lot of sound-related exhibits, so I was slightly left out, and I became bored far sooner than Tim did. Don't be fooled though, there were hundreds of these little exhibits, I just can't explain them all!

We walked through another exhibit and discovered a section where they had these little rides that were supposed to replicate things that astronauts encounter in space. They had this ride that spun you around while you were trying to shoot balls at a target, so Tim hopped on and gave it a try! They didn't spin it fast enough for you to be able to see the effect, so it was somewhat pathetic, and Tim got bored really fast. He signaled that they could stop the ride, but they ignored him and he got spun in circles for 5 minutes longer. He looked happy to get off the ride when they finally let him off! There was also a game where you had a soccer ball, and there was a video on the wall with a goalie that was supposed to be able to track your moves and the ball's motion and defend the goal. Tim took a few shots and the goalie had such a delayed response that Tim won by a million goals. He got bored and we played with some other virtual reality like games, including a game where you pedaled and steered a bike down a virtual trail on the wall in front of you. I think my bike was broken because it didn't go where I wanted, but Tim said I was broken, not the bike.

We wandered around some more, and found a ride that took you through your digestive system! It reminded us of chocolate world from hershey park, so we hopped into a little four person car in the shape of a vegetable that we had all to ourselves! The car started rattling down into the ride and the walls were covered in bulbuous balls of gross pink colors. We were spun in circles while we traveled through the intestines and were stopped periodically to watch 3d videos with our goofy glasses on (why were mine so wet??). When we got to the stomach, we watched a little video of some goofy round ball guy swimming in a pool of green goo. Then we traveled through the bladder, and then we finally exited through the butt, where we were stopped to watch a very surprising video. We weren't quite sure what we were seeing at first, but after a while we figured it out. We were outside, looking at the butt, while it was spewing stuff at us. There was even a suggestive breeze on our faces, which Tim said was matched with farting noises. Tim took a photo of the video.

We were pretty flabberghasted at this point, and the ride continued. Suddenly, there were flashes! When we exited the ride, we discovered that they had a camera at the end of the ride. We didn't want to buy the photo, but Tim snapped a picture of the photo from the lcd screen. It's not good quality, but you can see our reactions from the ride!


Tim is just flabbergasted, and I am laughing hysterically.

We spent some more time wandering around the museum, and found a little robotics section. They had a robot that would play some chinese game against you, but half of them were broken and there were a lot of kids waiting to play. I got to play one for a while but some little kid butted me out. Oh well! There was another robot that would pick a purse off the conveyor belt that was the color of your choosing (you said the color into the microphone) but it only understood chinese, so it never gave me the color I wanted. Another would take a photograph of your face and then sketch it out with a marker. It was really slow though, so it was hard to watch. One area had a little doggy on a video, and when you gave it a command it would do what you said! You could ask it to sit, beg, come, walk forward, etc, but once again, it only understood Chinese. There were lots of kids standing in front of the screen screaming out commands, so the poor puppy was pretty confused. After a while, we'd wandered through the entire museum and we found that we were hungry. We left the museum, stopped at a Starbucks for some frappachinos, and looked for something to eat. Eventually, we found some yummy looking dumplings so we grabbed some and ate them in the street. They were really juicy and our hands and faces were a mess, so thank goodness I had a nalgene full of water to clean up with! We grabbed some pastries at a bakery down the street to finish our lunch, and headed home.

When we got home, we were pretty hot, so we went for a swim in the complex pools. They have two pools; one is a big recreational pool in a silly shape that is outside, and the other is an indoor lap pool. We started in the recreational pool, but since we didn't have goggles, we couldn't really do laps easily. We settled for backstroking across the pool. Since I am incapable of backstroking in a straight line, I bumped into the wall everywhere. That pool was really cold, so after a while we switched to the indoor pool, which was warmer. Now that I had ceiling tiles to stare at, I could backstroke in a straighter line, so I got a few more laps in. After we tired of backstroke, we discovered that there was a hot tub, so we soaked for a while.

We walked home after swimming, and dinner was ready! Dinner was some sort of chicken taco, and it was pretty good. After dinner, we watched fanboys on youku, walked down the street to get some ice cream and beer, and then I fell asleep.

China, day 4!

We found ourselves awake early, as usual, on Monday morning, and eating breakfast at the table while reading the newspapers. Dan had classes in the morning, so after we'd eaten our fill we got ready and set out to the metro. We took the metro to People's Park, and when we got off the metro we decided we'd walk to the museum outside, rather than through the tunnels like Dan had taken us. It turned out to be a lot more difficult to walk outside because they don't let you cross the streets in that location of the city; you have to walk through the tunnels to get underneath the streets. It's kind of a pain in the butt because this is a huge park, and anytime you want to get anywhere you have to go under tunnels? You end up walking a lot more because all of the tunnels are on one side of the park...so if you came out on the east side and wanted to go somewhere on the east side, you still had to walk to the west side to get to the tunnels and then back through the park. We figured it out eventually and we were walking through the park when these two chinese girls came up to us and started talking to us in english. They seemed nice, which was a little weird because chinese people pay no attention to us other than staring at us because we are big and white. We just said hi, and they started asking us where we had gone, and telling us places we should go in Shanghai. We were kind of suspiciuos so we were watching all of our belongings. All of a sudden, a black car pulls up behind us, a driver runs out of the car, grabs the two girls, and throws them into the backseat roughly. We were pretty thrown off, and the driver guestured at us to go about what we had been doing...so we kept walking? It really threw us off, so when other people approached us to talk, we just hurried on our way. We also checked and made sure we still had all of our money and our passports just in case it was a pickpocketing scam. We had everything, so we decided to stop at a little vendor for an ice cream and head over to the Shanghai Museum.

The museum was free, which is always nice! There were a lot of exhibits on pieces of chinese history including jade, porcelain, coins and currency, traditional masks and clothing, seals, painted scrolls, and other such things. There was also an exhibit on Matteo Ricci. They allowed photography in most exhibits, so there are a few things for you to take a look at!

We wandered through all of the exhibits offered at the Shanghai Museum, and eventually wandered out. We took the metro home to wait for Dan to finish with classes, and read our books for a while. When Dan got home, we all hopped onto the bikes and biked through the city to the bund. We biked through a street that had a lot of musical stores, so Tim went into a few and played pianos. We spent a few hours biking around and through the city, which was a lot of fun. It was really hot and humid, though, so we stopped a few times to buy drinks! In China, you can drink alcohol in the streets, so the second time we stopped for drinks, Tim and Dan came out of the 7-11 drinking beer! On the way home, we walked through the campus that Dan is taking his classes at. It was a pretty ugly campus...it looked like a jail. We got back on the roads and biked among the scooter armada to get back to the house.

Dinner was some sort of sweet and sour chicken that was served with a bowl filled with bacon, peas, green beans, and mushrooms.

Then I fell asleep.

China, day 3!

On Saturday, we were up early once again! It looks as if our schedule in Shanghai will consist of waking up around 6:30a and my falling asleep before 10p! We headed downstairs for breakfast, and then Dan, Tim and I headed to the metro and went to downtown Shanghai. The plan originally was to go to the Shanghai Mueseum, but when we got there the line was incredibly long. Tim and I decided that it would be less crowded on a weekday, so Dan suggested that we go to the Rockbund Art Museum instead. We agreed, so we wandered through the city in the right direction and eventually found the museum. The current exhibit at the Rockbund was called "Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis" and outside of the museum there was a little wooden airplane and a little crafty helicopter on exhibit. Both apparently work! I got pretty excited for the museum when I saw these, and we went in to purchase tickets and see the rest.

We couldn't take photographs inside, but the website for the museum's exhibit is here: Rockbund Art Museum The website has a few photographs! The museum was a small building; each floor had one big room and then a little room with a stairwell, and I think there were five floors. Each floor had a slightly different exhibit. The first floor was just the lobby, but after buying tickets, we headed upstairs! The second floor had a really cool kite exhibit. There were all these little stands that had a string leading to a kite. At the top of each stand, there was a little fan that was blowing all of the kites. We couldn't figure out if the kites were actually flying, or if they were hanging from the ceiling and the fans were just making them move around a little. Tim and I were convinced the kites were hanging down from the ceiling, but the strings were really difficult to see. Dan was convinced that we were wrong. Anyhow, there were images projected onto every kite. Apparently, each kite represented one of the inventors that had worked on the exhibit. It was really cool and I really wish I could have taken a photo.

The room on the third floor was filled with all sorts of little hand made mechanical robots. There were robots that would create abstract paintings by slowly dipping a paintbrush into a cup of paint, lifting it out, and then snapping the brush so that paint drips scattered across a piece of canvas in front of them. There were little mice robots that would jump across the floor. Another table was covered in random mechanical things including a very cute merry go round. Three girls who worked for the museum were in the room, and they followed the three of us around very closely making sure we didn't break anything. Sadly, a lot of the mechanical robots were already broken but we got to play with a few that weren't. There was also a robot that would spit a stream of water across the room, which really entertained Tim. He kept varying the amount of water that could leave the robot's mouth and he absolutely soaked a part of the floor. The three girls were looking on in horror, but they couldn't stop him because the purpose of the robot was to spit water. They looked pretty relieved when he was done, but I think the only reason he stopped was because the robot ran out of water!

The fourth floor was an exhibit of airplanes, flying saucers, submarines, and helicopters. Some of them worked and some were failures, and you could read about every one on the walls of the room. The room also had a lot of birds in it, and the center of the floor was a little lawn of grass! There was bird poop all over the planes and other machines in the exhibit! It was pretty cool, though. We looked at every machine and tried to decide if we thought it would work, and then read the summary of the machine on the wall to see if we were right. There was one really fancy helicopter that we were all really impressed with. My least favorite were the "flying saucers" which were just little platforms that spun aruond and around and looked like a ufo. After we had looked at all the machines, we headed up to the fifth floor which offered a view of the same exhibit from above, so you could see the machines that were higher up a little easier. There was a little tea shop on the fifth floor as well on a balcony. We went out on the balcony to see the view, but passed on the tea.

We were really impressed with the museum, and I think we all wished that there was more! We eventually wandered out of the museum and back to the streets of Shanghai. We caught the metro into Pudong and wandered over to the Shanghai Aquarium. The prices of the tickets gave us pause, but eventually we shelled out the money and headed inside.

I have terrible luck at taking photographs in aquariums, so if you want to look at photos, you should look at Tim's, which are posted here: Tim's Aquarium Photos. At that link there are also photos of the plane and helicopter that were outside of the Rockbund Art Museum. The aquarium was pretty nice, and one cool thing about it was that it had a lot of tunnels that you walked through where there were fish swimming all around you and over you. Apparently, it has the longest such tunnel in an aquarium in the world! The longest tunnel had this little moving walkway so that you could just stand and watch the fish swim while being moved at a snail's pace through the tunnel. At first, I thought it was pretty ridiculous to have such a slow moving walkway but after I realized you could watch fish for a long time and take photographs without things being a big blur, I realized that it was pretty nice!


We wandered through the entire aquarium and when we were done, we were pretty tired. We took the metro back to Dan's place, and discovered the wonders of youku. Youku is kind of like youtube, but it is filled with all sorts of illegal movie streaming, so you can basically watch any movie you want for free. We decided to watch "How to Tame a Dragon" which I thought was really cute, but Tim hated it because he thought it lacked a plot. The chef at Dan's place made us a white lasagna of some type for dinner, which was good if a little bit bland. We added some hot sauce to it so that it would have more flavor. After dinner, we all just lazed around Dan's house, reading books and playing on the internet.

China, day 2!

On Saturday, Tim and I woke up early again, and Dan grudgingly dragged himself out of bed earlier than usual. We ate breakfast and then walked to a bus stop so that we could head to a nearby water town called Zhujiajiao. I was really excited to see something a little less city-like and with more traditional and historical roots. The bus ride was about 45 minutes, and when we got off, we wandered around town for a while finding our way. Dan has a pretty good sense of where things are, so if you let him walk around enough, he always ends up getting you where you want to go. It turned out that the water town was farther away from the bus stop, so after finding out that we had to walk 5 km farther to get there, we decided to get a taxi, since they are cheap. When we went to signal for a taxi, two guys on scooters pulled up and said they would take us! So Tim and I hopped onto a scooter with one guy, and Dan hopped on the other. The rides were pretty fun! When we arrived at the water town, we headed to a convenience store to get some drinks because we were parched! After that, we walked over a bridge and we were in the water town!

It was almost like a chinese version of Venice; it had a lot of traditional and older buildings, and lots of canals. The streets were lined with vendors peddling all sorts of touristy trinkets, and all sorts of food. There were stalls for buying fish, and they smelled so terrible! There were these women sitting around with these vats of goo. I couldn't figure out what they were, but I kept seeing people walking around with goo they got from the vendors, eating it. The goo was given to you on two chopsticks, and you had to keep spinning it around the chopsticks so that it wouldn't drip and fall on the ground! Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me and I tried some. It was almost like honey, but not quite. Very sweet, but pretty yummy. It was fun to eat.

There were also some birds hanging in a cage by a vendor that could speak chinese. We know they could say Ni Hao, but we weren't sure what else they were saying. They didn't know any english!

Around this area, there was a man who was floating across the river in a handmade boat! It was very cute.

After we wandered around and explored for a while, we eventually came to the end of the traditional water town and headed back to the bus stop. Near the bus stop was this crazy outdoor gym. There were all these contraptions and jungle gym-like things that you can use to exercise. There were things like see-saws, other machines like weight lifting machines except there were no weights, a stand that had a cylinder and a little support handle so you could hold on to the handle while running on the cylinder. I couldn't manage it without falling off. It was really weird, and a lot of fun to play on. After a while we headed to the bus station and hopped on a bus home.

When we got home, we were a little tired, so we lazed around for a while. After an hour or so, we went into the garage and got out some bikes! It was funny because the map that Tim and I had of Shanghai had a little note in the corner saying that because of the increased amount of car traffic and electric scooters, and the lack of a structured rule system for the road, only the most confident of cyclists should attempt biking in Shanghai. Dan bikes every day, and Tim and I felt fine with the idea, so we headed off to the iranian sweater store! Tim and Dan have an obsession with finding shirts that do not make sense, and China is full of them. People are walking around with tshirts that have english phrases on them that do not make sense whatsoever. My favorites that I saw over the trip were "Super Dry AntiFreeze!" and "Splendid Firing Gas!" There were a lot of weird tshirts, and Tim wanted to find some to bring home. The bike ride to the Iranian sweater store was pretty crazy - you have to watch everything and just slip through the traffic. If you get stopped at a red light, you get surrounded by a tightly packed scooter and cyclist armada, and you have about centimeters of free space around you. It is really weird to start up when the light turns green when you have so little room! It was awkward at first but we got used to it and I actually enjoyed it. I'd need to get a little more used to the roads, but the traffic actually flows a lot nicer than it does in cities here. Biking in cities here can be really frustrating because you stop at every stop sign and you get stopped by every light and you can actually get somewhere faster in Shanghai on a bike. In the cities in America, your only real advantage on a bike is that you don't have to find a parking spot and walk a long ways to your destination, and you don't really have to fight traffic.

When we got to the market, Tim and Dan didn't find any shirts, but they did find a jacket with the phrase "MONKEY PANIC!" on it. It didn't fit either of them, so of course they wanted me to have it. It was so cheap that I figured I'd make them happy and become the proud owner of a blue track jacket that states "MONKEY PANIC!" on it. It's kind of silly.

We headed home after wandering around for a few hours, and had dinner at Dan's house with his mom and Sam. I was pretty tired, so once again I passed out pretty soon after dinner.

China, day 1!

On Friday, we woke up around 5 am! Dan's mother had correctly predicted that we would be up early, so she had told us that we could catch a ride into the city with her in the morning, and walk down E. Nanjing Road to the bund and look at the sights. We both showered in our fancy bathroom, and headed downstairs to have some breakfast so that we'd be ready to leave by 7a. Dan had classes in the morning, so we decided we'd just come back after exploring and hang out with him in the afternoon. Dan's mom, Bea, is the American consulate general in Shanghai. She had a meeting somewhere in the city, so when she was ready we headed outside and I was surprised to see a consulate car waiting to whisk us off! It had the cute little American flag waving on one side and all! When we got to the location of her meeting, the driver parked the car so that Tim could get a photo!

After taking the photo, Tim and I headed out to the road to start walking. It was pretty early still, so nothing on the street was open. It was a very fancy americanized shopping street. The only difference was that it was incredibly crowded with cars, electric scooters, cyclists, and pedestrians.


We didn't like it very much, so we veered off onto a side street, and it was much more what we were interested in seeing within the city. There were street vendors selling all sorts of unique foods, people rushing to work, and it seemed so much less Americanized.


After walking on side streets for a while, we headed back to E. Nanjing Road because Bea had told us that if we followed E. Nanjing, we would come to a walking only road with lots of shopping. We weren't too interested in shopping, but what we were interested in was that a few blocks past this area was the Bund, and we were definitely interested in seeing the waterfront and the view of Pudong!

The walking road was actually really nice, because it was wide and had no cars driving all over the place. I can't believe the traffic in this place - there are so many people using so many different modes of transportation to get everywhere! It's so crowded! There are so few rules, too! They view street lights as suggestions. You really have to watch your back because if you're in the way, they expect you to get out of the way before they get there. Whew! So the walking road was a nice change of pace.


We kept walking, and we finally got to the Bund! The Bund is a mile or so long walkway along the river, and you can see the view of Pudong. It was really cool to walk along and take photos of the view. The tower on the left that has lots of round sphere-dome thingies was called the Oriental Pearl. I'm not really sure what it was, and it seems like a waste of space, but it's Shanghai! They like silly things! The second tallest building in the photo looks a lot like a bottle opener, doesn't it? Also, the gold building on the far right kind of ruined a second or two because it has AURORA written on the top and I didn't want to be reminded of work while I was on vacation! :)


After wandering around the Bund for a while, we decided to head home. We went back to E. Nanjing Road and found the metro station. We had nice little metro cards, so we got onto a metro without any problem and rode to a station about a mile away from Dan's house, and walked back to meet Dan.

When we got back to their house, Dan was ready, and we turned around and walked right back to the Metro we had come from. We took it all the way into Pudong and walked to the site of the Expo. We got tickets for 100 kuai each and headed into the site. We had a little bit of trouble at security because I had hand sanitizer, and Tim had an unopened bottle of sun screen. They couldn't read the bottles because they were completely covered in english writing. They told me to use the hand sanitizer so I put some on and rubbed it on my hands, and they were satisfied. The sunscreen was unopened, though, and we didn't want to open it. We spent a few minutes trying to convince them that it was just sunblock but eventually we gave up the battle, opened it, sprayed some all over Tim, and they waved us through.

The expo was nice, but it was definitely not my thing. Each country could make a pavilion, and a lot of them were really boring. If you wanted to go into a really cool pavilion, the lines were crazy long. For example, Saudia Arabia had the most popular pavilion. They had some sort of a 3d theatre inside or something, but to get in, you had to wait in a line for 2 or 3 hours...and none of us wanted to wait in lines! We went into a few less popular pavilions and were unimpressed, so we decided we'd try one of the cool pavilions that had a 45 minute wait or so, and decided to go into Canada's pavilion. It was pretty cool inside after the wait; they had all these little bicycles that you could pedal and steer and a big screen in front of you would take you around some park based on where you steered. They also had a lot of cool water effects and whatnot. I didn't take many photos at the Expo, but Tim took a few. If you want to see them, you should look at his photos from the Expo here: http://picasaweb.google.com/tim.brackbill/WanderingAroundShanghaiAndExpo2010#

After wandering around for a while, we started to get hungry and looked for something interesting to eat. After rejecting a bunch of expo restaurants because they were too pricey, and rejecting Burger King because we didn't want to eat there, we finally found a little malasian food stand! The prices looked good, and the food looked great, so we got a few dishes to eat! When we ordered, the chinese kids that were working the stand couldn't say 18 or 80 correctly. Tim was confused because he thought they were saying 80 kuai but it was really 18 (or the other way around). They straightened it out by typing the number out on a calculator, and then Tim taught them how to say both correctly! The food was fantastic and it set my mouth on fire. I think my mouth burned for 45 minutes after eating, but it was worth it. While we were eating, Dan and Tim were pretending to be obnoxious americans, and I snapped this photo. You will never understand how much I love this photo.


After dinner, we were supposed to meet Dan's mother and his friend Sam across the river, so we headed to the ferry and took it across the river. The ferry went right next to the LuPu bridge, which was the bridge with dazzling lights that Tim and I drove across in the taxi. Tim took a few photos, so I've included them here so you can see how elaborate the lighting job was! I feel that I need to mention that the bridge wasn't just going from one color and changing completely to another - it was slowly morphing colors, and then it would turn into stripes which would slide across the bridge while morphing into stripes of other colors and then into rainbow stripes while still sliding across the bridge and all sorts of other elaborate color schemes. It was crazy.


When the ferry landed, we wandered around the expo a little more before heading over to the theatre to meet Sam and Dan's mother. We were planning to go to a Herbie Hancock concert that Dan's mother had VIP tickets to. Tim was really excited to hear Herbie Hancock, and I brought my hearing aids along so that I could listen, too! It was pretty awesome, but I was so tired when it was over! I could barely keep my eyes open. When the concert was over, the five of us piled into the consulate car and headed home, where I barely managed to say "good night!" before passing out!

traveling to china!

Our flight took off from SFO around 1p, so we decided we'd need to leave around 9:30a to get to the Bart station, and arrive at SFO around 10:30a or so. The flight was going to be around 14 hours long so Tim decided that we should wake up really early and go for a long mountain bike ride in Tilden in the morning so that we'd be a little more tired for our flight. I wasn't thrilled about the idea, but I knew it was probably for the best, so I agreed. Tim woke me up far earlier than I wanted to be awake, and we sleepily dressed, hopped on our bikes, and headed to the trails.

After I got over my initial shock of biking at dawn, I started to enjoy the ride. We pedaled our way down into the valley, and up the other side. When we got to the top, we stopped for a little breather, and then I headed down the other side. I turned around partway down the descent and looked for Tim, and didn't see him. I stopped and waited for a while, and he still didn't come. After waiting for 10 minutes or so, I started pedaling up to the top again looking for him. I came over a hill and I saw him off his bike, trying to fix it. He hadn't fallen, but his derailleur hangar had snapped and the entire derailleur had come off. It twisted the chain badly, so it was pretty gnarly. We tried to turn the bike into a single speed so we could get home, but we couldn't get enough length of chain to complete the build. At this point we weren't sure if we could fix the bike, so I said that I would bike home to get the car and park near where we were. He could walk up the hills, and then cruise down them to the road. Tim thought it was a good plan, so I pedaled home, and he walked and cruised to the road. Once he got to the road he tried to fix his bike while waiting.

Jon and Jill were at the apartment, so I had left my keys on the kitchen sink so that they could get out if they needed. Of course, I forgot to ask for Tim's keys, so when I got home, I had to knock on lots of windows to wake Jon and Jill up so that I could get in! I felt so terrible. I got in, grabbed my keys, and headed over to pick Tim up, only to find him happily cruising down a hill. We ended up putting his bike on top the car anyway and headed home. I was super nervous about whether we had enough time, but Tim told me we had more than enough time. We finished packing, showered, sadly said goodbye to Navi, and then Jon drove us to the bart station. We were off!

The airport posed no problems, and we had a good amount of time to wait at the gate. We boarded on time, and we were seated next to a woman with a six month old baby. He was pretty cute, and I don't really think babies are cute, so that's saying something. The only times he cried during the entire flight were while we were taking off and landing, and I'm pretty sure it was because of the pressure in his ears. He cried one other time, actually. The mother had him sleeping in a little basket, and I think she needed to use the bathroom, so she asked Tim to keep an eye on her baby. I was asleep, and Tim woke me up to tell me to look at how cute the baby was sleeping. Of course, as soon as the mother left, he woke up and started screaming! We didn't know what to do. I didn't want to pick the baby up, so I just tried rubbing his stomach, but eventually the mother came back and dealt with it. Everyone in the plane was giving us murderous looks.

The rest of the flight was pretty uneventful. We sat around, tried to sleep, read a little, tried to sleep some more. Eventually we landed in Seoul, and we got some frappachinos at Starbucks, and wandered around the entire airport because we didn't want to sit down! The next flight took off on time, and we arrived in Shanghai!

The first thing we needed to do was get some money from an ATM, and it took us two or three passes through the airport to find the ATM! It was hidden away in a corner! Then we needed to find a taxi to take us to Dan's place. These travel agencies had people following all the big white folks around saying that they could take us wherever we needed to go. They told us it would be 500 kuai, which was far too expensive. We went outside instead and got our own taxi, which had a fixed starting rate and a meter, because we knew that the ride would be less than 300 kuai. The driver drove us through Shanghai and we stared in wonder at all the buildings because they were all lit up with these bright blinking lights that changed colors or darted around. The lu-pu bridge was even covered in lights! The bridge would go rainbow colored, then change to blue and yellow, and the colors would all move...it also would change colors from purple to blue to yellow, etc...and sometimes it would be red and yellow stripes that moved all over the place. It was kind of crazy. I guess it's special because of the expo!

We finally arrived at Dan's place, and the ride was only 200 kuai! Yay for not paying 500 kuai! Dan was still out to dinner, but his mom let us in, and showed us around the house. We had a really nice bedroom with our own bathroom! The house was gorgeous. Dan got home pretty soon after we arrived, and he told us that they had waited up for us late the night before! Since we took off on Wednesday the 12th, they had waited up the night of Wednesday the 12th in Shanghai, but because of the time change, we actually landed on Thursday night in Shanghai! So silly. After chatting about what we might do the next day for a while, I decided I was exhausted, and I took a shower and quickly passed out!