It’s crazy already being back in Nantong after that crazy fun week of traveling, but I have a feeling I’ll be doing a lot of sleeping in the next few days… Luckily it’s only Saturday so tomorrow I can sleep in as late as possible! But yea, as for the rest of our trip in Shanghai, we definitely did a lot of walking and sight seeing. Yesterday (Friday) I started the day off by having the good western style breakfast at the hotel (good means best I’d had yet… definitely nothing compared to mom’s scrambled eggs and bacon!) and then headed to the subway station with a group of people to check out a science and technology museum the Professors recommended that we see. The subway was surprisingly clean (I think it was cleaner than Chicago’s subway station Jennifer!) but the museum wasn’t all that cool… It really reminded us of the Seattle Science Center but there was a lot of stuff still under construction, so I felt like we weren’t able to see most of the cool exhibits that weren’t done yet. But they did have a spider one, where they had a preserved body of the largest spider in the world… yea it was definitely dinner plate size- not cool!
After taking the subway back to Nanjing, a popular shopping street in Shanghai, we got lunch at McDonald’s (which miraculously tasted just like the McDonald’s in America) and shopped one last time before going back to the hotel to get ready for the Acrobatic show we were seeing with the whole group. The show was pretty cool, but we had seen a lot of it already in the one we saw back in Hangzhou so only a few acts really stood out, like one where 5 guys on motorcycles drove around a giant metal cage somehow without ever missing a beat or hitting each other! That night I decided to stay in to give my foot a rest and just hung out with Shaina and Kristian and watched movies on HBO.
Today was check out day, so once again we were woken up by a phone call, packed, got some breakfast, and met the group down in the lobby. Before heading back to Nantong though we still had some sight seeing planned, the first being the famous Pearl Tower landmark of the city. It really reminded me a lot of visiting the space needle, but supposedly it’s over twice as high- I just wish there wasn’t so much pollution to I could’ve seen more of the city then what was just around the tower! After that, we stopped by the maglev train station, which claimed to have a ‘bullet train’ that could reach 430 km/hr. Well the ride was ridiculously short and we actually reached 431 km/hr, which I believe is around 260 miles/hr… yea, pretty crazy stuff! It was weird just to take the train to a destination and head back, but cool just so we could say we had at least been on it and not just seen it. By this point I think most people were ready to head home, but we had lunch and then another visit planned to a huge museum full of ancient Chinese artifacts covering 4 whole floors… So my plan was to take the express tour and at least LOOK at everything and only read portions of the information they had on each exhibit. My technique worked well, but unfortunately the people I was with couldn’t keep up so I got a little ahead of them. While this happened, a women passed me who I swear looked familiar, but I couldn’t figure out exactly who it was… Well I passed her again, and again, and finally it hit me- was that Cameron Diaz? Suddenly I found myself more interested in finding out if I was right instead of reading about the history of the Chinese monetary system… but none of the guys thought it was her. Yea I was ready to bet 500 yuan it was until Tony, a guy on our group agreed with me, and we even heard her talk which basically guaranteed that it was- no one can copy that voice! So that was pretty random, but it turns out she was traveling all throughout Asia promoting the release of Shrek 3- who would’ve thought she’d visit that museum!? SO random…
Well after powering through the museum and getting my 3rd starbucks of the trip (yea, I found 3 different locations… I now know where I’d live in China if I had to!), we took the bus back to Nantong which is where I am now, exhausted and looking forward to lots of sleep. Once I post this there will hopefully be three more before it and if I get on it, two more photo album links will be posted as well- so enjoy, and thanks for reading my rambling.. I really appreciate it! Feel free to give me feedback on the pictures and posts, and maybe even a couple videos that I hope to post soon too- love and miss you all!
2 comments:
So glad you are back where you have internet access! Life is slowing to a crawl as we wait for McKenzie to arrive and I need things to keep me entertained : ) Your blog certainly does! It sounds like you are really seeing China and will have lots of great stories to share when you come home. Can't wait to see new pictures.
I haven't gotten to the newly posted pictures yet, but there had better be a picture of that spider! Maybe you could talk it's little brother into coming home in your suitcase to visit your family :-)
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