Busy day in Shanghai
“Ok, so what did we do today?”
Yes, today was so packed that I had to ask around to remember all of the activities. At least I didn’t have to ask where we were. Nope, personal opinion here, but I am really liking Shanghai. I was pretty excited to see more of this city, so after seeing some students from St Cloud State at breakfast (small world), we headed off to the bus to start our day.
Hah, you know what I just did? I wrote up this whole blog and completely forgot to mention the very first activity! Some help those people were, I tell ya. Anyway, our first activity of the day was visiting a small town in the middle of Shanghai. This was pretty interesting – we went from huge city to a small, somewhat rundown, town that was full of street venders. It was quite the contrast. We spent some time there looking at the arts and crafts and some crazy foods. Crazy as in whole birds fried and pig snouts. Surprisingly, no one really tried anything. Ok, so maybe not so surprisingly.
Next was a silk factory in the heart of the city. The worker there took us through the whole process of gathering the raw material from the silk worms to creating bed comforters. We watched the machines unravel the thread from the cocoons and employees stretch silk to have the fabric lay the length of a bed. Most shopped around for souvenirs and gifts for others while I picked out the really nice things for myself. I’m generous in that way. We stayed here and shopped until lunch.
Once we were finished with that excellent lunch, we headed off to the Communications Tower. The tower happens to be one of the largest in the world. Our group went up to the second highest viewing platform to take pictures of the city down below. I was pretty impressed on how exactly timed the speech in the elevator was. “Enjoy your time here, thank you.” Ding! Doors opened a beat later and we all piled out to enjoy the view. The weather was nice all day long so we were able to see out pretty far.
The Shanghai history museum was in the lower level of the tower. It was pretty interesting. There were actual sets for each portion of the museum and it was neat (!) to see the step by step transformation of this city. It has been one of the most developed cities we’ve visited.
The teahouse was pretty similar to the one that went to in Beijing, but we were able to try more tea. That’s all I really needed. We sampled jasmine, lychee, black, and the ginseng oolong teas. This one also had these little peanuts covered in sesame seeds that my side of the table devoured in between each sample. Luckily they didn’t seem to have any readily available or I would’ve needed to buy another suitcase to carry my purchases home.
To cap off the day, our final event was an acrobatics show. It was amazing. There really isn’t any other way to describe it. They would trade off acts that had lots of flips and jumps with acts that required crazy strength and flexibility. I felt sore for one performer in particular. She practically held herself up with one arm for nearly 10 minutes. My favorite performance was more of a dance with the curtains that you may see in Cirque du Soleil. Overall, it was a nice end to our busy day.