Friday, August 29, 2008

day 13 - last day in Shanghai - 29.08

Last night we met with another person from CS, local girl Ping. She took us out to eat to the promised Italian restaurant - food was delicious and this place even had desert! We got some cakes :) It was great. We also got whole lot of new information about Chinese culture and ways. She talked quite openly about marriage and family planning for an example as well and Chinese spirituality and connection to religion. Meeting locals adds so much more value to the trip - thank you CS :)

This morning our first trip was to the train station - we bought our train tickets to Hangzhou, train leaves tomorrow at 1pm. Most likely we will spend 1,5 days there. By the tourist guide this is suppose to be the most beautiful city in China - we'll see, famous attraction in town being the legendary West Lake. Population of the town (or rather city) is marked 6.16 million, most likely this number would vary by +1/2 million. Population of Shanghai is marked as 15 million and local girl thought it is more like 19 million in reality - sounds reasonable.

During lunch time we wondered around by the skyscrapers across from the river, by Jinmao Tower and other tall buildings like the funny TV tower with round red bubbles. Later in the evening when it gets darker, we will try to visit Cloud 9 bar that is located on the 87th floor of Jinmao Tower. This is the tallest building in China - 420.5m :)

We also stopped by at China Sex Culture Museum, it ended up being just one exhibition by the tourist tunnel. Now we are hiding from pouring rain in Starbucks Coffee place on the wrong side of the river :) I guess no Bund walk for us today as it is totally pouring outside. Too bad there is no internet, then we would have something to do at least while just sitting around in here. There is suppose to be internet in every Starbucks Coffee but in reality it is not so, even the people who work here were helpless in this regard. So we were taking thousand and one pictures of the rain through the window :)

Later we ran over to the shopping mall across the road in hope for internet there. Shopping mall is 9 stories of shops and each level is probably as big as whole Kaubamaja :D And guess what - there is no internet in the whole area, crazy huh :) Oh and on our way to the shopping mall we got soaked of course. Later we made our way to the hostel, got changed, went out for a small portion of the Bund walk and then headed over to the small streets in search of fried dumplings. After about 30 minutes of searching we found one place - oh boy were those good! This dinner was under 15 EEK for us :) and we were so full afterwards that we could barely walk.

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