Shanghai

Oriental Pearl Tower - a shaft with some balls

For the second leg of my Asian adventure I met up with my two good friends from work. I will call them Gunmetal Gary and Colonel Canadia. Both had been in Shanghai for a day by the time I met them and Gunmetal had the same death disease I picked up in Seoul. I got in at around 10pm on Tuesday to a surprisingly nice hotel. After a confusing and frightening late night meal where we pointed at a menu while a chef hacked turkey necks 5 feet away from us with a giant knife, we all decided to take it easy for the night.

The next day we toured around the city and covered pretty much every major site there is to see in Shanghai. I was disappointed to find that nothing was very impressive. One of the most impressively shitty things I saw was the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel pictured below.

"METEOR SHOWER!"

If you like to move slowly through a tunnel of blinking lights while a cheesy 1970s computer sound effect plays, you have to check out the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel. Suffice it to say there are absolutely no real sights to see in this stupid tunnel. If you're having trouble falling asleep check out the youtube clip.

Monks at the Jade Buddha Temple

This is a famous tourist site which was actually alright. Those are monks doing monk stuff. I should know more about what these monks are doing but I was too busy throwing coins at these statue things that Gunmetal and Canadia thought you were supposed to throw coins at...I'm still pretty sure you were supposed to place the coins gently on them.

That night we met up with a friend of a friend to go out in Shanghai. We went to the safe, vanilla face portion of town where we sat a table with this Chinese girl and her boyfriend and had a serious cultural exchange. We taught each other how to play drinking dice games with whiskey.

After this place we went to an after hours bar where the Chinese girls made it no secret that you were to buy them drinks before talking to them. I made some sarcastic comments to them which they didn't like. I think sarcasm is a few years off there...Anyway, my normal superb A game was turned into Z game by my death disease. So after an hour I left Gunmetal and Canadia to make very regrettable decisions while I went home to get an awesome night's sleep. But my sleep was ruined by Gunmetal and Canadia returning to the room and raiding the not-so-cheap minibar for the rest of the night.

The next day (Thursday) we woke up at 11am, went and got food, and proceeded to sleep until the next day at 9am. There was nothing left to do in Shanghai. Also we were all either sick with the flu or sick over decisions made the night before.

We were all very happy when it was time to leave Shanghai for Hong Kong on Friday morning. We wanted to take the Maglev train to the airport but our taxi driver convinced us to take him all the way to the airport because of traffic going to the maglev station. We were all too tired and sick to care. He didn't disappoint though and after the scariest taxi ride of all time we agreed that he was just slightly faster than the maglev.