Day 9: May 1st - Attempt One for Shanghai

I'm actually writing this the night before. This is because at 8:30 tomorrow, I'll be on a train to Shanghai. Just after getting coffee at McDonalds, we went to the train station and bought tickets to Shanghai. We'll be there for at least a day, likely two or three, and will be shopping and barhopping. It'll be sweet, but I'll have to keep an eye out for beggars/pickpockets. I'll summarize the trip when I get back.



[ Next Day... ]



Well, we missed the train. Even better, we locked ourselves out of the apartment, so we had nothing to do for the day. We reschedules our tickets for 4:30 that afternoon, since it was the earliest we could leave for Shanghai, then set off to figure out what to do for the day. We sat at the train station outside and made fun of people walking by, for about 2 hours. It was actually fairly entertaining. Games like "Find the worst dressed child" and "Find the Asian version of a celebrity". Eventually, I started noting Chinglish on T-shirts, and started a list. Within an hour, I decided I was going to have to be pickier, since my list was growing fast.

Later, we went out for lunch at some multicultural (mostly Japanese) restaurant. I saw deaf people there, which was exciting for me. Jessica kept telling me to approach them, but I didn't want to be the weird foreigner, and as I observed them more, I realized their sign language was considerably different from mine. Still fun to watch though, and I picked up a few signs.

Afterwards, we went to Starbucks, and basically sat around doing crosswords and chilling. I was getting a bit perturbed there, however, since people walking by outside were doing their typical staring and pointing at the white people. The reason it bothered me here was because the windows/walls of Starbucks were giving a fish tank experience. I felt like I was one of the attractions at the zoo, and it was irritating.

At some point, I went out for ice cream, which was in itself boring, but along the way I walked past what I originally thought was an energy drink display. Here, almost every day holds a new giant promotion of some product. As of the day of this writing (May 3rd), it's the Sony Ericcson, a cell phone. May 1st was this drink, which turned out to be a cold green tea (go figure) canned drink. They had stands beside stands along the entire sidewalk, and girls in short skirts giving away free samples. It was quite visually stimulating, but the best part was the music. They were playing Devo's "Whip it" in Chinese. It sounded hilarious.

On the way back from ice cream was the other cool Chinese promotion thing. I spotted a wading pool filled with water, and giant bubbles on it. I got a video of it on my camera, because this was the sweetest thing ever, and I wish they had it when I was a kid. Kids would get into the bubbles, which were leashed to the edge of the pool, and could run around inside the bubbles, or crawl, and the ball would roll. It was near impossible to walk, since it was in water, and nearly frictionless. The whole thing was so simple, but so fun. These kids kept faceplanting inside the bubble, and trying to move around, without much success. Any time a kid falls on their face is a good time to laugh, so this was awesome.

Finally, we killed enough time to go back to the train station. Getting a cab was damn near impossible at this time, as the streets were crammed full of people (thanks to the holiday). There were lines of people in uniforms looking like they were picketing, but it was actually an advertisement for a cellphone. Alex got a picture of part of one of the signs, showing that the cell phone ran Linux, which excited me as a geek. Finally, we caught a cab and made our way to the train station.