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!