Saturday, May 14th River Cruise
I woke up and had a lazy morning. Went to breakfast and then hung out in my room until we left for lunch at 11:00. We had a pretty normal Chinese meal. There was jelly fish there, but I didn’t try it. We left lunch quickly and had about an hour to do some street shopping. There were lots of buildings, but since we didn’t have a lot of time I didn’t plan on getting much. But I did find some really pretty fan shops. The first place would not haggle for a discount. So I just left. The second place was just set up in the middle of a square among other shops. I saw a pretty fan and asked how much it was. The guy said 90. I offered 20. He looked at me, said no, then pointed to some other fans saying they were 20 but the one I wanted was higher quality and only for sale at 90. I said no and walked away. He called after me and said 60, but I still said 20. We looked at each other and he told me to go up. I said no and still offered 20. He said no and I walked away.The lady there called me back and said 40, but I still would not go up. They looked confused and frustrated. The guy said it was high quality and 40 was too cheap, so I just walked away again.They quickly called back and said ok. My first solo bartering went pretty well and was kind of fun!
After shopping, we headed to the “bottle opener” building, the Shanghai World Finance Center that reaches 101 floors. The elevator traveled about 6 meters per second and took about a minute to reach floor 94. It wouldn’t go any higher so we took an escalator to floor 97 and took some cool pictures from the windows. We then took a couple hundred stairs to the 101st floor and walked across the skylight. We took lots more cool photos and then headed back down.
We then headed to a small Italian shop and had chicken wings, tuna salad, Hawaiian pizza, and some sort of pasta. It was a lot of food and all quite good, but it was pretty weird eating with forks and, I must say, I would have preferred chopsticks and Chinese. But it was good and I’m not complaining.
Afterwards, we headed to the Hongpu River for an hour cruise. By now it had gotten dark and many of the buildings were lit up with lots of different colors. There were also many different boats on the river with cool lights. We waved and cheered to some of them. It was hard to take pictures because the flash reflected off the smog and completely messed up the picture. Plus, my camera was running out of batteries and was not focusing well. After going down the river for about 30 minute we had to turn around to go back. This was quite an interesting scene because China’s river traffic is just as bad as their street traffic, maybe even worse because the boat horns are a lot louder than car horns. We had to maneuver around and between lots of long freight boats while trying to miss the big cruise boats. Some people were holding their breath and some were cheering. The temperature was cool and there was a wonderful breeze. I sat on the railing and watched the skyscrapers and boats go by. We got back to the hotel around 10:00 and chilled.
Comments