For our first travel break (Sept 26-Oct 2) I went to Shanghai with a few friends. It was a grand ol time, but I think I want to take more time to do nothing but rest, read and hang out at a beach next time! Nonetheless, we had some good times in this large city with a ridiculous population. Here are some highlights!
1. A couple of us started off our week by visiting an International church with a great worship time that felt more like home. That said, I love my church here and the community.
2. We got free tickets to the EXPO from a friend who is a chef at the Canadian Pavilion (Andrew Newman - we went to Bible School together in England and also traveled to Egypt with a few others during our Christmas break that year). The EXPO was pretty cool – basically a showcase of each country, though some are much more elaborate than others. So for those of you who may have thought there would be a Ferris wheel and rides, the answer is NO. Sorry, I was sad about that one too! We waited a good 2.5 hours to see the Korean Pavilion and by the time we actually got inside we just wanted to get out to use the bathroom and fill our bellies with food! We convinced ourselves to stay a little longer though to see an inspirational animated video where super fairies make the little girl happy and give her hope… how meaningful. Thank you Asia. The African pavilion was my favourite because we actually got to talk to people from those countries. We made a friend from Namibia and she gave us free mugs and told us about her country – who knew, they speak English! (sorry if you all knew this… I didn’t)
3. FOOD!!! We enjoyed (maybe a little too much) the diverse restaurants in Shanghai. We had some amazing Thai, Vietnamese, dumplings, salads and even poutine at a Canadian place (though not quite as amazing). We also found a new favourite Taiwanese bakery café chain called 85 C (degrees) that sells tasty and cheap Lattes!! (On a side note, while I say I don’t like coffee, I love flavoured Lattes and other sweetened coffee beverages. This is at times confuses people, so I may have to rethink my official statement on this topic. Just a side note.)
4. When we moved to our new hostel on Wednesday it took us the same amount of time to trek across the city as it took our friend to fly back to Dalian. Unfortunately this was not because of the size of Shanghai because the hostels were actually quite close. Instead, we were so proud of our Chinese communication skills with our taxi driver that we failed to notice that the 2 roads we had said to drive to intersect at 2 different locations in the city – one East and one West. So as you may have guessed, we got dropped off at the WRONG intersection! So because we love spending our day sleeping in and getting lost, we used our trusty map skills and muscles to drag our luggage to the metro for Part 2 of our journey to our hostel. We quite enjoyed making videos of moments such as these on our trip!
5. We took a day trip to Suzhou – or at least that’s where we intended to go. We got off the train and had no idea where to go. So after buying a map that we didn’t end up using, we met a Canadian guy outside the washroom who told us about the tour he was going on that would be amazing. So we got tickets and jumped aboard an 1.5 bus ride to a water village - Zhou Zhang. We weren’t sure what to think at first with our new friend and all his stories, but our final destination was legit and totally worth the visit!
Overall, a fantastic trip with mostly pleasant surprises! I am blessed to have the means to go on such adventures!
We returned on the Saturday to Dalian and a ridiculous amount of rain. The first taxi we got in drove us a few kilometers and then brought us back to the airport because he was too afraid to drive in the large puddles. We realized that this was slightly reasonable once we had recruited a braver driver and we saw the flooded streets with random cars stranded because the water was right up to the car. I tried to encourage the our second driver to keep going by cheering him on… haha… though my excitement died down a little when the speed increased and I thought we could easily hydroplane! Yikes! Only in China!!
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