trip to shanghai/week of school

This weekend the school ("central's" group) went to Shanghai on Saturday and Sunday to visit a few different places. Starting from Saturday we got up and left at about 7 and took our 2 hour drive to Shanghai. When we first got to Shanghai we went to what is called Yu garden, it is a garden area that has a lot of little shops (though they are very overpriced and hard to bargain with). but after walking around for a while we arrived at the garden itself, which has a lot of old chinese style houses and artifact styled things. the garden was very nice and i took a few pictures while walking around. After the garden the group went to a city planning museum and got to view the plans that were made for the Shanghai expo which had many building plans from each countries contributed plans. this was very interesting and inclued a HUGE overview of Shanghai. To put this into perspective, think of a miniature planning of a single building, and then take that times the number of buildings in Shanghai and you have the 4th floor (i think 4th... maybe 3rd) of this building. after this we went to eat at a restaurant that had a lazy susan. We ordered a lot of food and much of it tasted very good, including sweet and sour pork. After eating here we went to a street that had a lot of shops and clothing style stores that had a lot of lights and neon signs. the stores did not look very interesting but we did get to eat "soup baozi". they are basically the bread and meat buns with some soup inside it. the authentic ones are made with only soup inside that you are supposed to drink with a straw, but ours were kind of a mix and had meat and soup inside. we then went to a very nice massage place and i got a massage for an hour (it was MUCH better than the one near school because it didnt hurt at all). after this we went to bed (after some problems which i shouldnt really talk about because we may or may not have had to do some law dodging things to get a hotel) at a very nice hotel which had breakfast in the morning. after eating breakfast (and drinking 2 large glasses of real milk, which is hard to find). we drove to a museum of science which was about 5 floors high and extremely large with a lot of different sciences, including things from space down to the process of digestion that occurs in the body. everything had english translations which was very nice. After the museum we went to an aquarium which was incredibly large and included the passages where you walked under water (under glass of course) to see the fish, and what was even more interesting was an escalator with a tube of glass over it and as you went down you would slowly go under the water and be able to view all of the fish around you. After spending a lot of time in the aquarium we went to a shopping mall and walked around for a while before stopping at a food place at the bottom floor and had a special dish that was a soup of rice noodles. the other interesting thing about this dish was that they bring out about 15 small dishes of food that had everything from small slices of fish to sausage, to squid and tiny shrimp. the soup came out so hot that even though the dishes were raw, it would cook it over time and allow it to be eaten (though it could be eaten raw). after finally doing all of this we headed back to Hangzhou to finish homework and go to sleep.
Last week I had classes every day, and nothing new happened, though on thursday and friday before going to Shanghai we had some cool events that happened. on thursday we got to go hiking up a mountain that is right behind our school and i got some good pictures taken. the hike up the mountain took about 700 steps (they had counters) up and then another 700 down after walking around the top for a while. on friday we were supposed to go boating but it was too windy so we ended up not going. instead we went to a korean restaurant which was very nice, it cost about 50yuan but what you got was a table and a hot plate with large coals beneath it. we then went to what can be considered a buffet of meat and vegetables (health codes dont exist here luckily, so tasty places like this can exist) where you pile up what you want on a plate and then go and cook it yourself. It is very nice and has a lot of good meats, when you are done with your plate you are able to go back and get more as many times as you want.

this was a quick over view of what I did this weekend, and this week seems that it will be a normal week without many events besides classes. tonight though i went with some of my classmates and my teacher to a place that translates to "grandmas kitchen" where we had many different dishes that the teacher ordered for us. a lot of it was very strange food, such as jellyfish, but overall it was pretty good.