Getting Shanghai-ed

I just got off a 24-hour train ride from Shanghai to Gullin and am now on a bus for a 1.5 hour ride to Yangshuo. Or at least I will be when the driver finishes walking around looking for additional customers. Enough about that, though. My present is the blog’s future. Let’s see. Where did I leave off?

Oh, yes. It was the seventeen-hour train ride from Xi’an to Shanghai. Shanghai was sort of wasted for me. We only spent one full day in the city, so I didn’t really get to do much, and I had a bad string of not finishing what I had started. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the city. I just needed some more time.

We arrived around mid-day on September 9. We took a little time to get cleaned up and had lunch at the hostel in which we were staying. We followed this up with a little walking tour of Shanghai. We went out near the People’s Square and walked down a pedestrian walkway towards Pudong, where all of the skyscrapers were located. I have to say that the Shanghai skyline is one of the few that I’ve seen that compare favorably with New York. The highlights are the Pearl Tower and the World Financial Center, which is known locally as the bottle opener for obvious reasons.

We continued the walk to a famous market area. Not so famous that I had ever heard of it, or even remember the name of it, but we didn’t have much time and I just had a green tea at Starbucks, anyway. We weren’t there for long and we went on to a theater to see the Shanghai Acrobats. There were several acts including gymnasts, pole climbers and dancers performing from ropes hanging from the ceiling. The highlight of the show was at the end when five motorcyclists drove around in a steel sphere called the “Ball of Death.” In all, I’m not sure that I can say that everything that I saw is what I would call “acrobatics,” but I did have a good time.

Afterwards, I retired to the hostel bar for some Tsingtao and Tiger beer. Gradually, more people showed up and we went to the pool table. I beat everybody who wanted to play once; refused to allow any rematches, and went to bed as the hostel billiards champion.

The next morning, I got up for breakfast of cereal and fried dough sticks. The fried dough sticks were awesome, but I should have tried them with the soy milk. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until afterwards. I planned to try again the next day, correctly, but I overslept and missed breakfast. That was just one of my missed opportunities in Shanghai. We’ll get to the others in my next post.