Tag Archives: Travel

Guilin to Yangshuo on the Li River

9 Sep

Original Post: August 9, 2007

After departing from Xian we arrived in Guilin to spend a mere 12 hours so we could catch an early morning boat to Yangshuo. We were met at the airport by the service staff from the hotel. It was nice of them to pick us up from the airport, but their real motive was to attempt to up-sell us some much more expensive boat tickets. The Li River cruise is an absurdly popular way to see the mountains in this area, and we had pre-booked the basic boat cruise through Jenny’s travel agent. The guy from the hotel tried to tell us that cruise we had already booked was the super-bottom-of-the-line boat filled with drunkards and thieves who would be puking all over the place. He even went so far as to tell us that they hadn’t even sold any tickets for this particular cruise for more than 6th months. He was so full of crap that you could smell it a mile away. We stuck to our guns and he finally, after nearly an hour of refusing to upgrade, booked us the trip we wanted.

The boat people came and picked us up at the crack of dawn the next morning and sure enough, all very nice looking people, no scummy drunkards to be seen. The tour was not in English, we were the only Westerners on the bus and so we had no idea what was going on. We might not have even figured out which boat was ours (there were at least 20 boats at the docks and we were left in the parking lot with all our luggage and some sort of instruction in Mandarin and general pointing towards the docks) but luckily there was a young couple from Hong Kong who took pity on us and helped us find our way since they were on the same boat as us.

I tend to get violently ill on boats, so I was a little nervous about the prospect of being on one in the middle of China for 5 hours.  Fortunately the river was very calm so I survived without any major trauma.

We were in a parade of boats.

The scenery is really the only reason to take this cruise since you can get to Yangshuo by car in about an hour. There are these crazy mountains all over the place,  like huge skinny hills that jut out of the ground.  I believe they are made of limestone and interestingly enough look just like the formations in Halong Bay where we went on a cruise with my dad in April of 2010.   This area is what is depicted on the back of their 20RMB bills.  It’s hard to describe how bizarre these things are, and the photos really don’t do them justice.

Spectacular. I have dozens of photos, it's so hard to choose what to post!

A massive meal was included.

 

It was like being in a movie, or a painting, very surreal and beautiful. We spent most of the time on the deck just taking a million pictures, and then inside for a few minutes taking pictures of the food that was served – river crabs, prawns, veggies, something that looked like a hot dog…

We made it to Yangshuo all in one piece, fought our way through the crowds at the docks, and headed off to our hotel to relax and figure out a plan for the next few days.

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Maine. The Way Life Should Be.

7 Sep

Footbridge Beach, Ogunquit, Maine

The state slogan doesn’t lie, summer in Maine really is the way life should be.

Every summer for nearly as long as I can remember my mother would load up the van with our luggage, beach chairs, boogie boards, coolers and sand toys.  My brothers and I and would pile in and we’d wind out of Vermont, through New Hampshire and into lower Maine to whatever house trade had been arranged that summer.  We stayed in a variety of little towns over the years, but the times we spent in Ogunquit hold the strongest memories for me.

We spent most of our time at the Footbridge Beach, aptly named for the footbridge you have to take to cross the saltwater inlet that separates the beach from the town.  My brothers spent hours fishing for crabs off that bridge, tying hot dogs to empty plastic strawberry containers and lowering them into the water.  Pulling the homemade traps up at just the right speed to keep the crabs attached.  Bragging to the other kids that they were able to catch more, and if not more, theirs certainly were bigger.

I spent hours walking up and down the 3-mile stretch of sand with my cutoff jeans and sunburned nose, listening to the latest Guns N’ Roses single on my walkman over and over and over and over.  One summer, a friend of mine came out to Ogunquit with us and we met a boy from Quebec who told us all about escargot.  We pretended to be fascinated and impressed, and then secretly made gagging faces behind his back.

The water in the Atlantic seemed like ice water to me, but we went swimming anyway because there are no beaches in Colorado.  There was always an abundance of seaweed in the ocean and we would drag it out by the fist-full and make it into wigs to decorate my youngest brother’s head when we turned him into a sand-sculpture mermaid.

Lunch was lobster rolls, and fried clams, and grilled cheese at the seafood shack up the street.  Dinner was twin lobsters with baked potatoes and corn, followed by blueberry ice cream from the place right in the center of town.

When I smell sunscreen, I see that beach.  For me, it represents an idyllic point of childhood, some of the best summer memories I have.

When Justin and I arrived in Ogunquit last Friday night, the first time I’ve been in more than 15 years, the first thing we did was walk down to the Footbridge Beach to watch the sunset.  We passed a group of boys catching crabs off the bridge.

“Wow, you have quite a lot there!” I exclaimed.  “What are you using as bait?”

They were using hot dogs.

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Xian – Home of the Warriors

2 Sep

Original Post: August 9, 2007

Xian is a small city near the middle of China, and its big draw is the Terracotta Warriors – literally an army made from clay that was buried more than two thousand years ago! We wanted to take an overnight train from Beijing, but it was completely full – a lesson in booking in advance – so we had to scramble for some last minute plane tickets. We arrived late at night and basically just crashed at our hotel – The Bell Tower Hotel – right in the center of the old town.  You could see the actual bell tower from our hotel room.  Since we only had one full day to spend in Xian, we decided to hire a driver to take us around because the busses are slow and the tours cost more total for three people than splitting the cost of the driver.

Justin looks great in armor!

Our first stop was some sort of museum about an ancient group of people called the Banpo.  It was interesting, if small, but in retrospect we should have skipped that and gone straight for the main site. We rushed through the next stop – one of the places where they make all the terra-cotta figures that you can buy in the stores/on the streets. This was a bit more interesting because you can buy ones that are life-size so they show you how they make it in 8 separate pieces and fit it all together just before they fire it. Surprisingly there wasn’t a lot of pressure to buy their wildly overpriced merchandise.  You can however do the very very touristy thing of pretending to be a warrior.  Which of course we did.

Thousands of these figures have been restored

At last we made it to the site of the warriors! The ‘tunnels’ where the warriors were uncovered are still being excavated and they claim that they expect to find at least 8000 total pieces in the first section alone. Essentially, the place is a mausoleum for Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China as a united whole. He had thousands of life-size figures, with real weapons, and horses created and placed into a battle formation to ‘guard’ his tomb. The thing is, after it was all done and buried a bunch of thieves broke in and stole most of the weapons and broke a lot of the pieces. It was forgotten about and not rediscovered until the 1970s when some peasants stumbled upon it! The site is decidedly impressive, they’ve managed to repair a lot of the warriors, but they left some as they found them so you can see what it looked like untouched. All of them are supposed to have unique facial expressions and there are something like 12 different kinds of warriors – archers, foot soldiers, generals, etc. We spent about 4 hours wandering around and honestly, I could have spent at least a few hours more if we’d had the time.

This is one of three areas in which the warriors have been uncovered.

The next day we had a few hours before our flight so we squeezed in the Big Goose Pagoda (another temple…starting to be templed out at this point…) and then headed back to the center to see the Drum and Bell towers. These were quite interesting, and we had missed seeing the towers in Beijing so we wanted to make sure we saw them here.

Justin played the biggest drum

The drums are HUGE, maybe 15 feet tall for the biggest ones, and there are dozens of them that circle the whole top of the square tower. They have a drum show every few hours where performers come out and perform traditional dancing and music. We were lucky to be able to catch one of the shows and it was so loud it made my stomach vibrate. The Bell Tower is basically the same, only with bells.

The vibrations from this bell nearly knocked me off my feet!

I paid the 5Y to gong the biggest bell three times – also super loud, very fun, highly recommended!

At this point our time was up and we headed off to Guilin to spend a few days in the mountains.

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Beating The Summer Heat In Chengde, China

26 Aug

Original Post: August 8, 2007

It was HOT HOT HOT in Beijing, so at the crack of dawn on our 6th day, we set out for the Chengde – in the mountains about 4 hours north of Beijing. The main reason for heading there was to see the Imperial Summer Resort, which is where the Imperial family would go to escape the insane summer heat of the city.

The exterior wall for the Mountain Resort

The Mountain Resort itself is gigantic, you could spend days just wandering around the whole site, which comes with its own little wall.  We had limited time so instead of hiking the perimeter we took the tram which dropped you off at a bunch of key spots and let you wander about for a bit.  There’s one section that has some Mongolian style yurts that you can stay in, which we might have considered doing had we known about it ahead of time.

Mongolian style yurts can be rented out for vacation stays within the boundaries of the Mountain Resort

Part of the Puning Temple complex

We stayed in an awesome little hotel that is housed inside the grounds of the Puning Temple.  The Puning Temple is a functioning (is that the right word?  It’s still in use, not just a historic site!) temple with monks still living there.  The hotel staff were incredibly nice and were all dressed up in costume.  There was a theater in the basement and each night they put on a show about the history of the temple.  It blew away the terrible Kung-Fu show from Beijing and had some beautiful dances, drumming and music.  It was completely in Chinese…so we walked away with a fairly minimal understanding of the whole thing, but it was still great fun.

A feast!

Chengde is a small town to begin with, the the hotel was pretty far off the beaten path so we stuck with the on-site restaurant for dinner.  Unlike in Beijing, there were no English menus to be had, and I kid you not, there seemed to be not a single staff member that spoke a word of English.  We were also the only Western people at the hotel.  This made for an amusing attempt at trying to order food.  The staff and other dining patrons were so accommodating that they took us around the restaurant to show us what other people had ordered, and we gestured and nodded and pointed a lot and they seemed to get the gist of what we were interested in.  We ended up with a giant meal (Justin had to put his hand in there to show the scale) for only the three of us, and I have only a vague sense of what most of it was, but it was great!

The temple itself was beautiful and had many different spaces, as temples here generally do.  In one spot as we were exploring we noticed there was a monk set up by a table with a line of people waiting to do something. You could pay him 10Y and he would tell you to pull a stick from a vase. The stick was long, narrow and smooth and had some writing on it and he would read it and tap the table next to him. The table held two crescent shaped stones and you needed to pick them up and throw them like dice onto the table. You might do this only once, or he would make you repeat the process up to three or four times. When he was satisfied with the way the sticks and stones fell he would choose a slip of paper from a box and send you on your way. Sometimes the stones would not fall favorably and he would send the person away with nothing. We decided to give this a shot and Justin and Jenny both got the paper on their first try. I got sent away with nothing 😦 We asked Mr. Shin what this meant and he said it either meant something very good or very bad but it would be difficult to say for sure.  Helpful.  As for Jenny and Justin’s fortunes, they were very cookie-like and said things like “Hard work is difficult at the beginning but will pay off in the end.”

Guanyin

This particular temple is my favorite from the whole trip. It had a very calm feeling to it and did not seem like just a huge tourist attraction. It also holds the worlds largest statue of Guanyin – the Buddhist Godess of Mercy. It is 22 meters high and has something like 42 arms.  It was one of the most impressive religious statues I’ve ever seen, akin to the gigantic reclining Buddha in Bangkok.  We were only there for 2 days to see the Mountain Resort and the Punin Temple, but you could easily spend more time there and in retrospect I wish we had.

Up next…Xian and the Terracotta Warriors!

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Beijing: Tourist Sites, Nightlife, Shopping!

19 Aug

Original Post: August 7, 2007

Our excursion to the Great Wall took most of the morning and early afternoon, but back in Beijing we had some time to kill before dinner so we decided to take a rickshaw tour (super touristy!) of the Hutong area.  The Hutong is the old area outside of the Forbidden City and it is really run down in parts, but nicely fixed up in others – a bit of an imbalance. There’s a big lake that is surrounded with bars and at night they get all lit up with neon (surprise, surprise) and you can rent little boats and cruise around on the lake. That was super fun, so unlike anything else I’ve done while drinking…  Following the lead of some local teenagers, we loaded up on the cheapest cans of beer known to mankind at a stand just down the road from the boat rentals.  You can get a can for between 15 and 40 cents depending on the brand,  and I assume we got the Schlitz of Chinese beer because we went for 15 cent variety.  We rented our boat and set off, along with dozens of other people.  There were random vendors around the edges of the lake and you could buy fireworks and sparklers from them.  We got 10 boxes of sparklers for $1. We spent about 1 1/2 hours cruising around and watching the madness, and then headed back to shore to check out some of the land-nightlife.   There may have been karaoke, strobe lights, and John dancing on a pole…but I can’t be completely certain.

Of course, Beijing has all the traditional sights as well – The Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, Tiannamen Square, Behai Park etc.  We saw all of them, but our favorites were the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven. They were both set in huge parks so you could get away from the heat if you went into the trees. Did I mention it was A MILLION DEGREES?  Really, you think I’m kidding, but I’m not.  The buildings have mostly been redone and look very sparkling new – it’s amazing how much detail some of the places have. Tiannamen Sq. looks exactly like it does in the movies. We tried to go to Mao’s Mausoleum, but it’s closed at the moment, super bummer.  We did however see some sort of military marching drill that was at once fascinating and a little scary.

There are a million rickshaws waiting to take you around the Hutong area
Fuzzy, but the best that could be done at the time. The lake in the Hutong is lined with bars and clubs, all attempting to lure you in with their amazing display of neon lighting.
Everyone, seriously, EVERYONE is out on a boat at night. There was some serious traffic trying to get under the bridge.
The Forbidden City. Notice the smog…
The Forbidden City from a nearby park. Again, the smog obscures the photo.
Lotus ponds at the Summer Palace
Summer Palace from the lake
Summer Palace
Temple of Heaven

You can’t take me to a city without taking me to the shopping, and Beijing was no exception.  We spent a whole afternoon at the largest outdoor market I’ve ever seen.  On the evening of our last day we went to go see a Kung Fu show. It was probably one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen – totally made for Western tourists, but super funny all the same. There were some good Kung Fu actions, but the story (about a young monk named Kong Kong who works hard to become a Kung Fu master) was absurd and the acting/dancing/costumes/effect were terrible. I am glad we went as we have some amusing photos, but overall a bit of a waste of $$ despite how much the guidebooks hype it up.

We spent 5 full days inBeijing plus a day at the Great Wall and that seemed like a good amount of time. We encountered a few local English speakers, but for the most part we got by with our minimal phrases, a lot of charades, and loads of smiling.

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Beijing: Getting There & The Great Wall

12 Aug

Original Post: August 7, 2007

The Great Wall

Before we left someone told me that a lot of people don’t like Beijing, that it’s ‘too Chinese’ whatever that means.  People said, “It’s big it’s dirty, it’s old, a lot of people don’t speak English.”  Lots of places are old.  Beijing is a huge city, it’s going to be dirty, I mean, have you ever seen a truly clean city? The only clean-ish big cities I’ve ever seen were in Germany and Holland, and I’m sure there were dirty parts I just didn’t notice at the time. As for the not many people speaking English…um… it’s China, why would that be surprising?

After spending a mere 5 days there, I decided that I really liked Beijing as a city.  In fact, it is my favorite huge city in China thus far. Shanghai is fine, but it’s very modern and huge and hard to get around. Shanghai looks a bit like New York. I want to see OLD China reflected in at least some parts of an ancient city, and you do get that in many parts of Beijing. There are of course many modern buildings, especially with the preparations for the Olympics, but it still retains a feel of the old world.

We took an overnight train to Beijing from Shanghai, which I highly recommend.  We splurged and got the fancy sleeper car, still only about $50 per person.  I have always loved to travel by trains and this was no exception.  The car was comfortable and came with an electric tea pot and some nice little slippers.  It was a restful journey and we were totally refreshed upon arrival in Beijing.

We arranged for a driver to come and meet us at the train station in the morning and he drove us right out to the Great Wall.  We went to one of the sections that’s a little further out so it wouldn’t be so crowded. It’s pretty incredible, looks just like you would expect it to. Unfortunately, it was hazy so we couldn’t see for miles and miles like you imagine you will be able to.

A hazy day at the Wall

We hiked along the wall for about 4 hours though, even on some sections that seemed to be totally overgrown and forgotten.  The Wall is set on the tops of the peaks and then dips down with the hills, which means it’s basically a million stairs, and they are steep and uneven.

Big f-ing steps.

They have a marathon you can run on the Wall and it’s apparently one of the most difficult marathons in the world, which is not surprising AT ALL. Perhaps the most amusing part of this little escapade is that since the wall is way up on the mountain you can either hike up to it and then back down, or you can take a chair lift up and an alpine slide back down. We opted for the alpine slide considering the crazy heat. It was definitively cheesy, and I thought for sure there was a huge risk of catapulting off the tracks, but it was very much worth it.

Scary!

Up Next…major tourist sites, nightlife, and shopping!

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The Time We Attempted To Eat Locally In Shanghai.

5 Aug

Original Post: July 26, 2007

Yesterday, Justin and I took a taxi into somewhere downtown Shanghai (I mean really, it’s like there are 9 or 10 areas that could be classified as downtown, so we just picked an area and went) to try to find some food. We stumbled upon a restaurant that hadsome pictures and a little bit of English on the menu. We ordered what we thought would be a reasonable amount of food for the two of us, so we were pretty suprised when they brought out gigantic dishes piled with enough to feed at least 4 or 5.  Our waiter was highly amused by our mistake, but in all it only cost us $15, so it was a hell of a deal 🙂 We had chicken (without the head and feet this time) a beef with bamboo dish, some kind of dumpling soup, and fried rice.

It would have helped to understand the menu headings for "large" or "small" portions...

The true highlight of the meal had nothing to do with food.  On our table there sat this funny little chicken thing and if you aligned an arrow dial with your astrological sign and put a coin in its mouth is would spit out your fortune in a little pill capsule. We each got one but as they are in Chinese we have no idea what they are saying…

Tonight we are taking the overnight train toBeijing and will be going to the wall first thing Friday morning! We will be updating from the road, hopefully with some regularity.

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Suzhou and Tong-Li

29 Jul

Original Post: July 25, 2007

Yesterday morning we made it out of bed bright and early and set out for Suzhou, a smaller city about 2 hours east of Shanghai.  Suzhou is famous for it’s freshwater pearls, but it also has a large museum and a few Unesco World Heritage gardens. Mr. Shin dropped us off at the start of the main pedestrian walkway where we were immediately bombarded by touts who wanted us to take a ride in their boats. Suzhou is a canal town, more like Amsterdam than Venice, and there are a lot of little boats you can take. We declined and instead went right to the museum. It was a new building and had a beautiful courtyard with a fishpond and bamboo gardens. The museum is mostly artifacts and was very nice, but the highlight was that it also included an entrance ticket into the Mansion of  Prince Zhong. This was an old palace that has dozens of courtyards and rooms, many of which have old furniture on display or have been resorted to look as they would have 1,000 years ago. There was a huge area with a theater room, a temple room, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I couldn’t understand because there were no English signs, so we had to just do the best to infer some meaning from what we saw.

After the museum we walked up the road to the Humble Administrator’s Garden, which was rather expensive (for China) but enormous. It’s one of the Unesco gardens and is very popular with the Chinese tourists, although we did see a few other foreigners there. These gardens have large ponds filled with lotus flowers, little bridges and walkways that run throughout the garden, a variety of temples and small pagodas, a bonsai garden, and a little hut where you can get a can of beer for 25 cents. It was beautiful, but it was 95 degrees out and super humid, so we were roasting after about an hour. We managed to wander around for a while, but we ultimately gave in to the heat and called Mr. Shin to come and pick us up.

Lotus in the Suzhuo gardens

Woman gathering Lotus to sell in Suzhuo

Feeding the Koi in Suzhuo

After we left Suzhou we headed out to Tong-Li, an ancient water-town (that you have to pay to get into…?) that was only about 30 minutes away. We decided to stop and have a real Chinese lunch at a non-western restaurant.  Mr. Shin came in and helped us since there was no English menu. We ordered a fish (they brought it out live in a plastic bag for us to look at before they cooked it), a chicken, some sweet pork and peppers, some cooked vegetables, and some dumplings. All of it was rather good, though the chicken came with head and feet still attached. The fish was basically cooked whole and sliced open and you just had to pull it apart with the chopsticks, which was incredibly difficult.

When we finished lunch we headed out to wander around the town. There are a lot of old mansions, and little museums to explore, but it was mostly nice to just walk around the streets and watch people. There are all kinds of little canals here, this village looks more like Venice, and you can hire a boat to take you around.  At one point we saw a little fishing boat that uses these big birds to fish. They tie a string around the bird’s neck so it can’t fully swallow, and then they make it (don’t ask me how) dive down and get a fish. When it comes back up the fisherman grabs the bird by the neck, flips it upside down, and forces the fish out.

Canals of Tong Li

Fishing Birds

Canals of Tong Li

These towns are easy to get to by car, though I’m fairly certain you can take a train or a bus directly from Shanghai.  They are definitely worth a visit, especially if the weather is cooperative.

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How We Made The RTW Decision. The Long Version.

28 Jul

We’ve probably been asked 50 times how we made the decision to leave our regular lives behind and travel the world.  It’s not as concise an answer as most people seem to expect, but nothing ever is.  This is the long version.  If you’d rather stick to the short version, go here.

Initially, our decision to leave New York City had nothing to do with long-term traveling.  We had been talking about a change of pace for many years, specifically a move to Colorado, and we had been building our savings up since we got married in 2009.  In the spring of 2010 we made the final, for real, solid decision that we were going to leave New York at the end of the 2010-2011 school year.  Part of that decision included a mini-break that would allow us to stay in Vermont for the summer and fall before permanently moving to Colorado.  At that point we began to save more seriously in anticipation of living for 3-4 months without jobs in Vermont, and then making sure we’d have enough to take us through a potential of 6 or more months of unemployment in Colorado since we weren’t sure how difficult it would be to find work there.

A little over a year ago a friend of mine from childhood moved to Santiago, Chile with her husband, and I had been hoping to eventually get down there for a visit.  Around the same time, another friend took few months to travel around Chile and Argentina and began posting envy-inducing pictures on Facebook.  Last fall, Justin and I started tossing around the idea of going down to S. America, both to see our friends in Chile, and to take some time to visit Patagonia and other places in Chile and Argentina that had piqued our interest.  It had occurred to us that after our stay in Vermont would be the perfect time since it would be summer there, no jobs meant we could stay for as long as we wanted, and we had already amassed enough savings that we knew we could swing it without a problem.

A few months later we realized that winter in the USA was summer in a lot of places we had always wanted to visit but never had.  Places like Australia.  New Zealand.  South Africa.  We started considering going to New Zealand after the trip to South America.

In December, during my internet research about Patagonia, I found a blog written by a couple who had recently completed a yearlong trip around the world.  We looked at our current savings, and started to try to figure out ways to save even more in the last 6 months we had before we knew we’d be leaving our jobs.  We started checking out travel guides from the New York Public Library  – as an aside, you can check out the most current guidebooks to, well, everywhere.  It’s a great way to get some initial information about a place before you run out and spend a ton of money on guidebooks before you really settle on where you want to go.  It’s also a great way to compare guidebooks and figure out which ones are more in line with your personal travel style.  We took out books about Peru, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia.  Our friends started noticing the stacks of travel books and began to ask questions.

In early January we started to talk to our friends about our idea to travel long-term.  By the end of January we had decided, with some trepidation, that we were going to take a year and see as much as we could.  Over the next few months we continued to make lists of places we wanted to go, things we needed to take care of before we would leave, and of course, we started saving more manically.  By the end of April we had told our parents, and by the end of June nearly all of our friends knew of “The Plan”.

We are almost exactly 3 months out from our departure date, and there are days when I still can’t quite believe we’ve decided to do this.  It seems as if we still have a million things to do, including purchasing the first plane ticket, but I have faith that we’ll somehow get it all done.  In the meantime we are going to enjoy our time in Vermont since, after all, it’s the first leg of our extended travel.

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Markets of Shanghai: Part II

15 Jul

Original Post: July 23, 2007

As if day 1 of shopping wasn’t enough, we spent pretty much the whole next day shopping as well.  We started out by going to a fabric market, a huge complex with three floors of fabric stores and tailors.  On each floor there are stalls of vendors selling everything from basic cotton, print patterns, silks, leather, fur…you name it, they have it.  You can get anything you want copied (say, my most favorite pair of pants) in any fabric you want for about $10 plus the cost of the fabric.  This is a spectacular place and while we could have spent all day here, we needed to move on to bigger and more varied shopping experiences.

Next we were off to Yuyuan market, which is a big mall-style shopping area in Shanghai. It has a lot of traditional architecture that has been restored so it looks new, and it is PACKED with people and vendors. The complex itself is huge and the inside has nice air-conditioned stores and restaurants. Most of the stores sell the same touristy trinkets as everywhere else, but they try to charge you 20 times as much as the stalls just outside the complex. We wandered around for a few hours and bought a whole bunch of things.  Again, you have to bargain like crazy for anything like a reasonable price.  Jenny is pretty good at this and knows all the numbers (as opposed to the, oh, ten that I know) so we mostly just let her take care of that. At one point we went inside part of the complex that is dedicated entirely to jewelry. The whole first floor is diamonds, the second floor is jade, and the third was all kinds of beads. You can pick whatever kind of beads you want and they will string necklaces for you.  We went nuts here.  I ended up with at least a dozen beaded necklaces, and that was before we hit the pearl section.

There are so many of these statue vendors, all claiming to have "real antique" versions...but really, they are all plaster or cement.

The market has been nicely updated and is filled with walkways and ponds

There’s a little town just outside Shanghai that is known for freshwater pearls, we are actually going to take a trip there tomorrow, but apparently it’s cheaper to buy the same pearls in Shanghai.  Jenny has a favorite pearl stand so off we went!  Like the bead stands, the pearls can be bought pre-strung or loose and you can have them made into whatever you like – earrings, necklaces, pendants, you get the idea.  They have every variation of freshwater pearl you can imagine, from traditional white to a range of colors that include pink and black (both naturally that way) and all kinds of dyed pearls.  We ended up purchasing necklaces and earrings for pretty much everyone we’ve ever known…the prices are THAT good.  (Incidentally when I came back to the USA I took one of the necklaces to a shop in NYC to have it evaluated and they gave me a valuation that was higher than the price I paid!  If you go to Shanghai, get yourself LOADS of these…)

After we got the jewelry we headed outside to grab a snack and Justin and I decided to brave the street food. We got some sort of fried tofu sqaures that were bland and mushy, but we also got something that resembeled a dough ball that was rather delicious.  It was fried and crunchy on the outside,  but creamy on the inside, sort-of like cheese…? We declined the roasted pigeon and mini-sparrows on a stick.

Market snacks

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