First day!

8/28/07

Woke up about 6:45am Shanghai time (again that would be 3:45pm Oregon time, we are 15 hours ahead). Breakfast was a large one and excellent. Now I can say I’ve had freshly made fried rice for breakfast.

Our day was packed with stuff to do. We started out walking through the city to get to the Yuan Garden (pictured). First of all it was already, probably about 85 degrees F and quite humid at 8:30 am. The streets and allies were quite packed and some smelled really bad. Most people here do not have dryers (and more than likely washers either) so there were lots of clothes of all types hanging from clothes lines out of windows.

Yuan garden is beautiful; I’ll share more of the 70 pictures I took when I return home. The architecture in the area is really beautiful (pictured).

We had lunch at a very popular dumpling house. A lot of stuff in China are still equivalent to the prices of the US, but the food and drink are cheap! My meal was 22 Yuan for the dumplings and 5 Yuan for each of my two sodas totally at 32 Yuan, which is about $4.25 US, and this is in a good restaurant, mind you. In shops, all food and drink are cheap. They sell large bottles of different types of beer for fewer than 50 cents (some of our group stocked up).

We left and went to barter for an hour. I got two shirts in case my luggage didn’t come for a few days. It was my first time bartering so I wasn’t sure if I could be good at in or not. I was. I got a pretty nice shirt that was marked for 398 Yuan down to 150 Yuan ($20), so that was cool. I also got another shirt for about $4. By the way, it’s about 7.5 yuan to the dollar.

So we walked around the city a little more, had our first really authentic Chinese food for dinner, it was good, but definitely a different kind of taste. They offered chicken “claws” and bullfrog but we didn’t have that yet. Ying told our waiter that we don’t really want anything that still has its head and/or feet.

After dinner we went up the currently tallest building in Shanghai (pictured). It’s the fourth tallest building in the world, I think it is just 10 meters shorter than the Sears Tower. Another skyscraper is being built next to it that is almost done and will be the tallest in the world.

We got back and were going to go out to the clubs and bars but were once again exhausted at 10:30 so we went to sleep.