| Breakfast was quite interesting :) At our hotel, they offer a complementary breakfast with a PLETHORA of options to choose from. Ally and I walked right past the Rice Krispies, the bacon, and the toast, and went straight for the steamed veggies, soups, dumplings, and tea. I've learned that trying to use chopsticks while you're groggy is definitely far from ideal. I thought I was going to starve if I couldn't pick up the food. We left our hotel around 9am and rode to the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. It was pretty cool, with the exception of us not being able to speak Chinese. Despite the fact that the museum was incredibly large, you couldn't go anywhere without being less than a foot away from another person. It was PACKED (which I actually found really cool :P). We left the museum and headed to the Bund area. Bund translates to "waterfront" in English, and so we soon found out that this was a very beautiful viewing area that overlooked the Huang Pu river. We stopped at a little marketplace called, and I quote, "The Cool Docks" (wasn't THAT cool, but it was cool, hehe), where we had some more absolutely scrumptious Shanghai cuisine. After lunch, we headed to the Yu Garden, and let me say, it was GORGEOUS. Virtually every aspect of the garden was symbolic of something. A zig-zag bridge is meant to prevent evil spirits from crossing, because they can only travel straight. The height of the threshold going into a home is representative of the social status of the family that owned it. Coy fish are decorative fish placed in gardens to bring prosperity and good luck. Etc. Etc. Etc. We then drove to The New Place (Xintiandi), which is a multifunctional area with both historic architecture and new developments. We got an opportunity to explore an old home that was once owned by a wealthy family, but is now a museum. How nifty! I also saw a Haagen Dazs... I'm now suddenly craving ice cream. We took a group consensus and decided to go trinket shopping in the local marketplace rather than go to the Shanghai museum before dinner (don't judge us). We stopped in this cool little shop that sold real pearl and jade jewelry dirt cheap, and we all even got to learn how to distinguish fake pearls from real pearls, and lower quality to higher quality pearls. Hey, the more you know, right? And finally, dinner! We went to a restaurant called Shanghai Min, where we all sat around a round table with a lazy susan in the middle, similar to the others we've sat around for our other meals in Shanghai so far, and the waiters and waitresses seemed to just keep serving food. Seriously, I wasn't sure if they were ever going to stop for a minute. The food was amazing (what a shocker). I will admit one thing. I am NOT a fan of the way they chop up the pork, beef, and chicken in China. They just chop right through the bone, and you get chunks of the meat with bits of bone still inside it. I'm trying to be adventurous with what I eat, but man, that meat is hard to stomach. We then ended our long day and drove back to the San Want Hotel around 9pm, we check out tomorrow morning. |