Weekend Trip

I did it! I made it from Shanghai to Nanjing and back to Shanghai. I somehow made it through crowds and crowds of people, all speaking a language that I barely know how anything about. First I took a subway to the Railway Station, then I waited in line for about an hour to buy my ticket, in Chinese. I feel like I have the vocabulary of a four year old. I want go Nanjng. Today. But it worked. The high speed rail only took just over an hour! When I arrived in Shanghai, my friend was running a little late so she told me to wait for her there. It was not one of the most fun times of my life, being stared at by many, people walking by shouting “halllooww” and I’m pretty sure every beggar within two miles came to visit me and ask me for money. Oh yeah, and it was like 110 degrees. I was so thankful when I was able to meet up with my friend.

Here we are, finally re-united at last.

She took me out to eat Hot Pot for dinner. One of my favorite dishes. You have a pot of boiling water/soup on your table (at restaurants there is a burner in the middle of your table) and then you order many different raw meats, raw veggies, tofu, noodles, etc. You cook the food by putting it in the pot until it is done. The soup usually has some different spices and flavors, but you can also have some sauce to dip your cooked goodies into. Yumm Yumm.

After Hot Pot we went to the hostel that we stayed at over the weekend. The next morning went to the ticket office and bought my ticket for the train ride home. This was so that I wouldn’t have to spend a long time waiting in line at the train station. Then we had some breakfast, another one of my favorites.

Then we went to a Mausoleum for Dr. Sun Yat Sen. We talked about him in my history class last semester, so I thought it was kind of cool that it was someone who I actually knew a little bit about.
Visiting this monument involved climbing approximately 4 bajillion stairs.

But the view at the top was amazing! You could see really far, out over the city. Here is a video of the view from the top.

And here’s Dr. Sun Yat Sen… or a statue of him. His body is in a room behind the statute, which was closed.

After this big adventure we went back to the hostel to take a rest. For like 5 hours. Then we went out for the night to an area with many different shops and restaurants. We ate steamed dumplings at a restaurant, then thick rice noodles covered in sauce from a street vendor, and then finished off our progressive dinner at a restaurant where we had fried dumplings and the hot porridge with red bean, berries, lotus seeds, and glutinous rice balls. We looked around at the different shops, ranging from stalls to clothing stores, shoe stores, they had everything. My friend bought a new pair of shoes from Disney Sport store.

Here is a picture from that night. I have to put these in two posts, so the next one down has more pictures.

Here are the rest of the pictures from the last night. I ran out of room on my last post.

These are fried dumplings and baozi (bread balls with meat filling inside).

This is a tree where lovers could hang wishes on it for the success of their relationship. Or that’s what my friend told me.

This is a picture of what we had for lunch on Sunday. The dish on the left is tu dou si (a potato dish) and the dish on the right side is fried green beans (gan bian dou jiao). The green bean dish is one of my favorite Chinese foods! YUMM!

And this is gong bao ji ding (kung pao chicken-peanuts, sauce and chicken). I love how the name is so similar  Maybe the English name is a foreigners poor pronunciation of Chinese.

And this is me enjoying our meal together. And I must be thinking that I’m Chinese.