Day 8 – Our own private tour of Shanghai

We met our guide, Eee yore, this morning at 9:00 am. She just finished university last year. Her major was foreign trade, but she can make more money being a tour guide as few as 7 days a month than the salary for a starting position in her field of study. There was a slightly awkward moment when Sam, our Friendly Planet tour guide came down and saw us with her, but oh well. We jumped into a taxi and headed for the French Concession. Our first stop was Fuxing Park. It is an amazing park. It was so great. There were so many there doing their “morning exercises.” This means people were out practicing revolution songs of their youth, practicing calligraphy using water on the sidewalk, practicing tai chi, ballroom dancing, line dancing to “Santa Claus is coming to town”, playing badminton and practicing kung fu. It was just so cool. We walked around. A man who was drawing calligraphy on the sidewalk stopped us and wanted to write a special message for us. He wrote “Happy New Year” and “Wishing you Happy Travels”.

We walked down the street to a many set of alleys filled with shops and restaurants called Tianzi Fang. It was tiny little shops where the owners lived upstairs. It is also the home to many artists and their galleries. After that, we headed to Jade Buddha Temple. It’s the first Buddha temple we visited. The smell of incense hung in the air. We first visited the Hall of Kings – where the four kings reside. Together, each of the characters of their names forms the phrase “Everything will be alright.” Then off to see many different Buddha with the final Buddha – the jade Buddha in the reclining position. It was a little disconcerting to see such a relic smack dab in the middle of a gift shop.

Feeling hungry, we headed to Old Town – the location of the Yu Garden we saw the first day. We tried stinky tofu from a street vendor. It tastes a lot like regular fried tofu except it smells terrible as it cooks. Then we went to a Shanghai restaurant for lunch. We tried soup dumplings. These tiny dumplings magically hold liquid so it’s a burst of soup when you bite into them. We also had fried noodles and regular dumplings. Feeling fortified, we walked around Old Town. Glenn bargained with a street vendor to get a New Year’s decoration. The vendor started at 160 RMB, but Glenn quickly got him down to 25 RMB just by walking away. Yay! We walked down “Food Street” which was filled with street vendors. It was fine because it was winter, but with all the raw food out, I definitely would have been squeamish if it was summer.

We hopped on the ferry to go to the other side of the river to visit the Oriental Pearl Tower. We took the local ferry since it was only 8 cents a person. However, this was also the ferry all the motorbikes so we had to dodge the bikes and the gas fumes getting off the ferry. We walked over to the Oriental Pearl Tower – one of the tallest TV towers in the world. We headed up to the observation deck. It was a pretty good view even with the pollution. One of the coolest parts was one floor down where they have a skywalk – an observation deck with a see through floor. It was really cool and a little scary. Back down on ground level, we wandered through the museum. It had stamps from the Communist regime where people were paid with stamps instead of currency. For instance, you could get a stamp for food, furniture, bus pass, a bike, etc. Then we walked through the depictions of Shanghai over the years. It really is incredible the influence the international community had on the development of this city. After this excursion, we decided to call it a day and headed back to the hotel. All said and done, hiring a private guide and paying for all our transportation and admissions cost us only $44 more than if we had taken the optional tour offered through Friendly Planet plus we got to see more, eat better food, and do it all at our own pace. Tonight we are going out to dinner and drinks with our Friendly Planet tour guide Sam. We are pretty excited to get to just hang out with him.

Dinner with Sam was great. He had heard of a street with bars and restaurants in the French Concession so we hopped in a cab and headed there. Our cab quickly came to a dead stop because a dump truck was blocking the entire road as the demolition crew was using a front loader to fill it – right in the middle of the street. Finally after five minutes of non-stop honking the dump truck took a loop around the block to clear traffic. WE arrived at the street which was just outside a shopping mall. We perused all the restaurants and the busiest restaurant was a German Beer Hall so we ended up there. We think it was Sam’s first time with German food and beer. We ordered a cold cut and cheese platter and pretzels. It was really good. We had a really nice time with Sam just chatting about his family and our life back in the States. We called it an early night because he had to be up early to see some of the tour off on their flights to Hong Kong. This morning we had a leisurely breakfast and finishing getting packed. We have a flight from Shanghai to Beijing, a three hour layover and then our 12 hour flight from Beijing to Los Angeles. We have definitely loved China and will put it on our list of places to visit again.