Down low, Shang hai

One of Lee's friends from AIESEC now lives in Shanghai and we stayed with her during our time here. RVenus was a lovely and gracious host and we really appreciated her help and info about the city - whether it was ordering food for us and showing us around or writing names of cities and sentences in Chinese characters so that we could book train tickets. She even caught a taxi to the ferry terminal to meet us so we didn't get lost!
The first afternoon, for lunch, RVenus took us down the street from the apartment that she shares with two others to a small run-down store where you pick the noodles, vegetables and meats that you want from a (rather unhygeinic looking) cabinet and they cook it up for you. It was really tasty.. I love local food! We had a bit of a walk around and visited a temple based in the centre of the city before heading back to the apartment. Later that night we met up with RVenus's other Aussie mate, D'anne, and walked down to a neat food street lined with stalls, shops and restaurants. Lots and lots of long metal skewers with cooked meat and vegetables! Mmmm. And the dumplings.. Minced pork mixed with some sort of gelatine so that as the dumpling is steamed the gelatine liquifies into a soup. Basically, a pork dumpling with soup inside that you suck out. It's great! But be careful, it will scold you if you bite into it too quickly!
The next day we left late from the apartment and had a bit of a wander around the pedestrian mall that is East Nanjing Road. Very commercialised. And there are people handing out small business-card flyers everywhere. They will shove them into your hands if you don't want them and even if you can't read them! I walked away frustrated and then a little shocked to find that three of them had been slipped into the side pocket of my daypack - where I keep my camera - without me even realising.. From then on, we both decided to wear our bags on our front in situations like that.. Since that point we've been noticing even a lot of the locals walking with their bags on their front or at least their hands covering them. I don't think I could live in a place where you had to always be on guard like this. Oh, Adelaide...
After that little cheap and painless wake-up call, we got slightly lost looking for the Yuyuan Gardens. We ended up finding an old-school Chinese area called the Dragon Gate mall where we browsed the knickknacks and many assorted teas on offer. After lunch, the picturesque Yuyuan gardens revealed itself to us and we paid our entrance fee. The gardens reminded me slightly of a traditional Japanese garden with its carp-filled ponds and temple-like buildings.. Maybe it is just more of a general "Asian" garden, but lovely nonetheless.
We had planned to catch an Acrobat show this night but were a few minutes late and, not wanting to miss the start of the show, decided to put it off til the next evening. Instead, RVenus took us to an awesome hotpot restaurant - the best one I've ever been to! Later after this, we caught a cab to a Mexican resturant-cum-Nightclub called Zapatas for some free alcohol! I know, sounds too good to be true but it's not.. Free entry, free beer and free girly drinks for a few hours! Pretty good deal if you ask me!
On our last day in Shanghai, before heading off on our first of many trains through the country, we had to actually buy the tickets. The queues in the train stations for purchasing long-distance tickets are so long and again with the pushing, impatience and non-helpfulness... The people behind the counter were impatient with us trying to book one ticket, as were the rest of the people in the line which was evident with the gradual increase in ambient noise and one guy walking to the front of the line and yelling at us and the ticket officer in Chinese. We only took about 3 minutes...
After all of this was done and we had our tickets in our hot little hands, we moved onto Renmin Square within which is a pleasant park seemingly separate from the city, its pollution and noise. The Shanghai Museum is also found in this square. Labelled as a "must-see", I must admit it didn't exactly manage to maintain our interest for too long. It is really well set out and the objects are nicely displayed, but if your not a fan of 4 floors of pottery and old coins, this probably isn't the place for you... That evening we managed to get to the Acrobat show on time, which turned out to be amazing! The things those guys can do is very impressive, as you could well imagine!
Up early (so many early mornings!) for the train to a place we would have never heard about if it weren't for advertisements on the English-speaking Chinese TV channel, CCTV, that we had watched in Singapore with Jianngan. This place was Hangzhou.

Photos:

picking food out for lunch

all sorts of delightful goodies...

construction works

Dragon Gate mall

trying to have a photo taken in the Yuyuan gardens

the view from RV's apartment

in the Renmin Square park

Acrobatics!