Shanghai

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Trip Start Nov 13, 2008 Previous
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  Shanghai, Shanghai, China
Sunday, November 23, 2008

Day- I have no idea :)

Well it has been a few days since my last entry we have been quite busy and the computers in the hostel in Shanghai were always busy.  I am sure I am missing some stuff that will come to me later, but I gotta get caught up on these!!  I almost like going to an Internet cafe and just paying and not being rushed.  We were in Shanghai for a few days and it was pretty fun.  Of course when we get there it was kinda late so the fast train wasn't running so we had to take an hour taxi ride to the hostel, luckily our non-English speaking taxi driver got us there.  As he was driving around the area started too look a little rough so we knew we were on close.  We didn't have a room for that night since we flew in early but they had one.  Good thing too cause I didn't have another place lined up.

It was a pretty cool hostel, prob the most "backpacking" one we stayed at.  Well we started our day with going to see the another temple, I know shocking.  This one was in the middle of the city and still an active one.  We then made our way after walking around to find the Yu Yuan Gardens.  Got some cool pics of this garden just in the middle of all this business.  I had this street food there that I thought was potatoes but turned out it was some sorta gelatin type cubes.  I have no idea what it was, prob fat or something worse.  That night we went to an area called Po dong to meet up with one of Franks friends for dinner at a dumpling house.  I think she was very excited to see Frank cause she moved over here to teach 3 months ago and is still adjusting.

Shanghai and Beijing are like night and day.  Shanghai was much more of a city feel like Chicago.  The city is growing a lot and there is construction everywhere.  You could tell the people in Shanghai have more money than Beijing.  We didn't really see any homeless people in Beijing because I believe that most live a very very modest lifestyle to say the least.  This trip has definetely opened my eyes to a lot of how others live in the world.  I find myself constantly thinking about how lucky I am and where I live.  People here live on hardly anything and make so little.

The next day we were just having kind of a chill day that involved going to another part of town that is their big shopping district and grabbing lunch.  We then walked to the Peoples Square in the middle of the city.  Afterwords back to the hostel.  As we got off of our stop we saw this foot massage place that we heard this guy at the hostel talking about.  We said why not it was only 20 yuan, which is like $3USD.  The didn't speak English so no real communication was happening.  They immediately went to town on massaging our legs as our feet soaked in boiling hot water.  Then came the foot massage which felt amazing after walking all day.  I have to say I kinda felt bad that this is how they made their living.  It really is quite disgusting rubbing peoples feet, they didn't even wear clothes when they did it.  They prob massage each foot for 30mins before going to the next.  There were times that it hurt some but nothing compared to the beating the Frank was enduring.  The lady was pounding the hell out of Frank's feet and calve muscles with her fist.  All and all well worth the money.  Then we grab a cheap beer 3yuan, which is close to 50 cents and headed to our hostel and ordered a pizza.

We went out to some bars that night that were pretty fun.  So we woke up the next morning which was when we were to fly out.  We wanted to leave by like 11am but was more like an hour late leaving.  Our flight was at 2 ish.  We get to the fast train, which goes over 250mph to the airport.  We get in and go to see what terminal Air Asia was in.  We looked up and down the list of airlines and ours was not to be found.  Then the bad news... Frank pulls out our tickets and we are at the wrong airport.  My heart sank, I was so upset with myself for assuming we were to fly out of the same airport that we flew into there.  We had no time to go to the other airport so I suggested that since this was the biggest airport there we would just go and see if there were flights going to Malaysia from there.  We found a flight and the cost was a little over $500USD each.  I mean now we had almost missed our train because Denise took us to the wrong train which meant we could have missed a flight and now this.  We def need to up our game.  I thought Denise was going to pass out and Frank was still groggy from our night out so he wasn't doing great.  We agreed to buy the tickets because if not we would not get into Malaysia till the following day and miss our Tour.  It was def a low point in the trip because we have been so cheap and doing so well with our money.  It was one mistake that we will NEVER do again, no more assuming!

We had to hang out in the airport for around 6 hours till our flight.  Bye to China and we are ready for warm weather now!

Until the next one!

Nathan

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