Not far enough from the madding crowd

I think the crucial thing to know about eating in China is that it’s important to arrive at a meal having eaten a pre-meal entree, consisting of snack food from Keebler or some ice cream if you can locate it. It’s key that you have no need for sustenance whatsoever.  And then it’s also important to remember that, even though a restaurant might bill itself as Pizza Man restaurant, it is foolhardy to therefore assume that you can, in fact, get pizza there.  It is more akin to the dating websites, where you see a profile of a woman, age 35, and surely she was 35 at some point in her life, but not now, and likewise the owner of Pizza Man restaurant has definitely seen a pizza before in his life but that does not mean he is selling any.

Here is Ron today, bravely trying to purchase ice cream for us at a Dairy Queen we came across.  We had to resort to the “picture menu”, much like at McDonald’s last night but we successfully purchased two vanilla cones dipped in coating, which was a victory, especially when you consider that last night at the Dunkin’ Donuts, one of the offerings was a donut with shredded pork on top of it, deceivingly set up to look like brightly colored candy.

         
Here is Ron with the fruit of his efforts – look how happy that man is!

We saw a a lot of great stuff today.  One of the highlights for me was the Bund river area, with a great view of the crazy Shanghai skyline and the European buildings that line the river walk, which are left over from the days when the British had an outpost here.  The fantastic tower with the futuristic look to the left in picture one is the Shanghai tower and it is my favorite.

Shanghai is big on greenery.  We’ve seen a lot of these living walls:

Another thing I really liked today was seeing a Chinese park/garden, right in the middle of the city.  It’s crazy because one minute you’re standing  in the middle of the wild bazaar, with people hawking junk and tons of food stalls and crap stalls and then boom!…you’re in the garden. Our guide had told us, as he let us off the bus, that shopping and bargaining were ok here but that we should NEVER follow one of the aggressive salesfolk who would be pestering us and so it was with much shame that I found myself following some tiny little woman who kept saying “t-shirt t-shirt t-shirt” to us.  I feel that my actions were meritorious here, though, as we were simply trailing behind Ruby, who had decided, for reasons that are still not clear to me, to follow the woman and I did not want Ruby to get lost, especially since she is my ice water source here in China. Here’s some of the craziness…notice that Starbucks has moved into one of the buildings:

So we leave the market and enter the garden and we find this:

We spent a bit of time here and as we exited we saw this little koi pond, full of happy fish, and I marveled at the idyll of the Chinese garden culture and then this woman, standing a few feet away from me threw in a few bread crumbs and this ferocious frenzy of goldfish erupted and I was amazed and rapt but I did not realize it was to be a harbinger of my future activities.  But first, the fish:

And so we move on from the gardens and find ourselves back at the hotel for a bit and we need to be downstairs in the lobby for a 6pm departure for a cruise down whatever the hell river goes right through the middle of Shanghai.  It takes us about 40 minutes to go maybe 7 miles and at one intersection in particular we sit through cycles and cycles of green lights because the GO light is irrelevant since the cross traffic never, ever clears the intersection.  We make it to the river and our guide walks us to the entrance gates for the boats that sail the river at night and there’s thousands of Chinese tourists lined up to get through the gates and one single guard deciding who gets to go in.  There’s no line in the traditional sense of a line, but instead there’s just vacuum-packed humanity, pushing and elbowing.  Our guide Hao stands at the front of our group, right near the guard in charge and the guard has decided to make us wait while other groups get to go in and so Hao stands up on a light post and he’s yelling and arguing with the guard who finally relents and lets us in and, all the while I am thinking this might have been a mistake, but we are moving forward and I realize I have become one of the goldfish from the koi pond.

But then we take off down the river and I see what the fuss is about.  I don’t know how much discretionary money the city and businesses of Shanghai have but they are definitely spending it on lighting.  It’s a spectacular night skyline – the best one I have ever seen.

In addition to these stops today

, we also got to go to the Temple of the Jade Buddha, which features a 2 ton white jade Buddha and an active group of monks.  Our guide took us up to see the Buddha (no pics allowed) and in the room around the Buddha there are 588 small little gold Buddhas like you might find at the bazaar from earlier in the day except that these 588 Buddhas are a funding source for the monastery because they “rent” each one out for $3000 per year and I am tired but I know that 3000×588 annually is a pretty large sum…Mike?  Answer?

That’s pretty much it from here, I think.  I leave you with this inevitable picture.  I can’t believe it took me 8 days to get the right to hold the Smartours flag and take things over.

Here’s one you’ll never get, Grace.  INTISTHFC.  Here’s your hint: weather.