Shanghai Shopping - the last day

Sunday... I wake up late, 9:30am, still kinda tired, but whatever. I text Jorge, he's up for something today. We figure we'll hit the museum and then the shopping district. I skipped breakfast, I was already running late. So I meet up with Jorge in the lobby and we head off for people's square. We get near people's square and we go into a tunnel under the street. There's a few places where the intersections are too dangerous or something that they build tunnels for pedestrians. Grumble grumble says my stomach... great, skipping breakfast was a bad plan.

I see a McDonalds and figure, what the hell... fast food in Shanghai, why not? I head to the McDonalds, and they only have pictures for 4 meals, the rest is just written in Chinese. Ok, I can see the big mac, and something that is most likely a quarter pounder, but what are the other two sandwiches? Never seen em before in my life and I've been to quite a few McDonalds. I've seen rib sandwiches, lobster rolls, and a gammet of beef and chicken burgers, but never these two things. To be honest it was really just one new sandwich, I couldn't tell the difference between the two pictures. So I grab Jorge and ask him what they are. Pan fried chicken leg sandwich. Sold! The difference is one is spicy, the other is not.

I grab the non-spicy leg sandwich with a coke and some fries. Breakfast of champions! The fries taste almost exactly like american McDonalds fries. The coke tastes almost like american fountain coke, closer to US coke than Chinese coke. (Obviously, we all know Canada coke is the best) The burger, well it was tiny. Tasted pretty good though. Much healthier than its deep fried cousins. But it probably wouldn't pass muster in the US because it's so small... maybe if they put two chicken legs in one sandwich it would work.

As I'm eating I see miss China-Emo. She's sitting there eating her McDonalds food with what I can only assume to be her boyfriend. Her face has white makeup on it, not sto strange since apparently in China, white is beautiful. But she has the hugest eyeliner ever, and it's pitch black. She also has a funky hairdo, kinda anime style with hair folded over in all sorts of directions so that it's spiking out all over the place. I was gonna take a picture, but the place was a little crowded, it woulda been about as obvious as walking up to her and saying "Hi, you look like a freak, can I take your picture?" Probably wouldn't go over so well. Come to think of it she was the first Chinese girl I've seen with any amount of makeup on. Mostly it's the older women who wear makeup.

Off we go to the Museum, we walk around people's square (it's a huge park type place, not much of a square). There's people flying kites, and one guy has the craziest rig. He's got a huge fishing reel style device, it's the size of a frisbee. He's got a handle bar on the far end and a flat piece that he can rest on his stomach on the other end. He's got a backback with a kite tube on it, and he's wearing gloves. I try to see his kite and I can't really make out which one is his, so I go right behind him. I follow the line, and finally I see it. It's crazy far away. And it's high enough to clip low flying planes. There's a kite that's even higher up than his, easily clearing sky scrapers. These guys must be flying 100 stories high. Holy crap!

So we watch crazy kite guy for a while, we have no luck spotting the kite flyer that has the highest kite, but whatever. We head off towards the museum again. We get to the door and it turns out it's the exit door. The entrance is on the other side of the humongous building, and we have to walk around... thanks guy. So we roam around the building and spot some statues. One statue called "Lion" is a weird almost native american style carving of a lion eating something. The something that's being eaten even has a face, it's awesome. My kind of statue.

We walk in the museum, and as always we guess what the price will be. I guess 50 rmb based on my Hangzhou experiences. Jorge guesses 20 based on some place he went to yesterday. Neither of us win, well... really both of us win, it's free! We just have to walk through an airport style security check. They even make people drink from their water bottles to make sure it's not explosive or something. There was a sign, no guns. Where would anyone find a gun in China. Not only that but it's pretty much illegal to carry a gun outside the museum, why would they have to specify that guns aren't allowed inside as well? Crazy Chinese, even their cops don't have guns.

The museum is pretty cool, a must stop for anyone hitting Shanghai. If you thought your country had history, you thought wrong. China has clay pots that are 8000 years old. That's 1000 times older than your average 8 year old kid. It's also way older than any recorded history in North America. I'm no historian but that museum was cool. Pottery, money, jade, scrolls, everything you see in your average role-playing game. The first coins were in the shape of farm tools like spades and blades, pretty cool. They were cast out of bronze. Not platinum, gold or silver. Not even copper (though bronze is made from copper). Just big bronze spades. By big I mean the smallest ones were the size of a cell phone and the biggest ones were the size of my hand. That's pretty big as far as coins go.

So we tour the museum, this little kid has shoes that sound like squeeky toys. It was entertaining for a while, but then it got pretty anoying. If I were her had, I would never have bought those shoes because they would drive me insane. But like pretty much all tiny little asian girls, she was pretty cute. (Hi Kylee! as Trish would say) Are you 4 and a half and a PC? Didn't think so... seeing as this blog really isn't meant to be read by 4 and a half year olds.

Anyways, we leave the museum and head for the subway. We're going to uh... I forget the name of this place. To be honest every time Jorge told me the name I promptly forgot it. Let's call this place XuYiZhu XYZ for short, cus I like short. So we take the subway heading towards XYZ, and it's pretty quiet. There's not enough room to sit, but still quiet. There's these two girls in the subway, one is leaning against the door (the one that doesn't open at every stop) and the other is facing her with her hand on the door next to the first girl's face. So it kinda looks like they're "together". Anyways, it was pretty funny, because during the whole ride, they're playing with each other's hair and fussing around with each other clothes. Odds are they are not lesbians, and that it's just culture differences. But it was kinda funny to watch.

We get to XYZ, an upscale shopping district in Shanghai. We look around, we find the electronics emporium. We get lost in the electronics emporium. We probably walked by the same shop at least three times. We see a preview for Grand Tourismo 5. We saw a Canon EOS 40D for 13000 rmb, the last shop I checked was 8000 rmb. So apparently upscale means expensive and overpriced. We looked around some more. Changed buildings, more shops.

This new building looked like a giant ball from the outside and there was an elevator going through it, so we found the glass elevator. Rode the elevator to the top floor. Pressed some buttons, stopped at almost every floor on the way down. Laughed like a couple of kids who pressed all the buttons in the elevator. Enjoyed the view of some construction outside the giant ball shaped building. We roamed around some more and found a place to eat. Macau style food was on the menu.

We had some pigeon, it's still delicious. We had some curried beef of some sort and we had some crispy fried fish. Everything was delicious. For drinks I ordered a grapefruit drink and Jorge ordered a corn based drink. Who makes a drink out of corn? I mean really... corn. So our drinks got mixed up and I ended up drinking the corn drink. It tasted like lemonade because they shoved tiny little limes in the drink. The limes are called calamancy or something like that in Tagalog. I don't know if they have a Chinese name, but I bet they do. Anyways, the drink was mostly sugar, with some lemon taste. Pretty good corn drink.

So we leave and start walking down the street looking for the subway. We see plaza 6 and I recalled that there was a subway exit that went to a plaza 6, so we go in. Turns out I was wrong. But plaza 6 was interesting none the less. It was huge, and had large empty spaces. It also had 3 audi cars parked in the front lobby. Shanghai is pretty space effecient, every available inch normally serves a purpose. This place on the other hand had alot of poorly used space.

We soon figured out how the poorly used space was being used efficiently. It efficiently said "We are so fancy and so rich that we can waste space". Truely a symbol of sheer oppulence. The bathroom was pretty much more of the same, and it was probably the only thing we could afford in this entire building, since it was free. There was a waiting lounge outside the loo where people could sit on leather couches to wait for their friends to finish using the facilities. The washrooms themselves looked like they had "next gen" urinals. They even had something to dry your hands with! An air blade hand dryer. These are pretty new, I've only seen them in airports so far, and well, in this center of oppulence.

We left rich kid central, and headed towards the subway again. Found the train we needed and started heading home. We got to Nanjing east (Oppulence land was Nanjing west). We looked around some more for the knife shop. Sorry Emily, I never did find your knives. Maybe next time I'll ask you for detailed instructions when you say "You can't miss it" I never even found the bank. Our shopping mission for knives and T-shirts had failed. But we had fun.

For supper we had ramen noodles. I was getting a little sick of Chinese food. Turns out I wasn't really sick of Chinese food... more sick of Chinese ingredients. So to me, the wannabe Japanese ramen tasted like Chinese food. After supper we just headed back to the hotel for a well deserved rest.

Next stop, home... I'll have to write that up soon so I don't forget.