Wednesday May 30, 2012
Today was our last day in China. That thought kept hitting me throughout the
day and I definitely didn’t love it. I
can’t believe we have already been here for two weeks. Time has really flown and at the same time it
feels like forever ago since we were in America. I definitely have mixed emotions about
leaving.
This morning it was pouring rain for the first time since we
got here. Rain in China means that there
are a lot less people on the sidewalks and a TON more people in the
subways. I thought the subways were
crowded before, but that was nothing compared to today. When our subway pulled up, I thought, “there’s
no way we are getting on there!” It was
sooo crowded! Somehow we all squeezed
on, but we were so squished! Not too
pleasant. I had barely made it on so I
was pressed up right against the door, and at the next stop this became a
problem. All of the people squished up
behind me wanted to get off, and there were tons of people at the station
wanting to get on. And I was right in
the middle of them trying not to get pushed off with the flood of people, and
at the same time being pushed on with all of the other people getting on. At one point I was literally hanging onto one
of the bars so that I wouldn’t get pulled out, and my purse got caught on the
shirt of a girl walking off. I was being
pulled in two separate directions from hanging onto the subway and being pulled
by my purse. In all honesty, I was a
little terrified. Eventually the doors
closed, and I was lucky enough to still be on the subway when they did. The rest of the ride was absolutely
ridiculous with the amounts of people that continued to pour on when there was
literally not a centimeter of space anywhere.
By the time we finally got off (which was super tricky in itself) we all
felt extremely violated and I vowed to never get on a subway again. It was so awful!
After our subway ride from Hell, we had a meeting at Martin
Hu and Partners Law Firm. Martin Hu
stayed with Rod Smith (SVU’s President until about a year ago) and became very
close friends with their family. He is
now a very successful lawyer in Shanghai.
Our meeting with him was pretty informal, but we had a lot of fun
talking to him and all of the people that work with him. We didn’t learn a lot about being a lawyer in
China, but I still learned a lot.
After our meeting, we had lunch at a fancy little dumpling
restaurant that was pretty good, and then headed back to our shopping place
that we went to yesterday. Our goal
there was to return or replace some of the DVDs that we had bought that weren’t
the best quality. That ended up being
pretty tricky and frustrating, but somewhat successful. I was definitely more successful with some of
my other shopping.
From the shopping place, we wandered over to the urban
planning museum. I wasn’t really in a
museum mood, but it was a super cool museum.
It was just floor after floor of models and designs and layouts and
blueprints of the city of Shanghai and how it was built. There was one floor with a scaled model of
the entire city. The model was HUGE and
took up that entire level. Shanghai is
such a big, modern city. That was really
cool to see. Then we took taxis back to
the clothing district so that the girls who had ordered dresses could get them
fitted. Since I didn’t have a dress, I
just wandered around and waited for a while until we were ready to head back to
the hotel.
We went to a really nice Chinese restaurant for our last
meal here. We were separated into two
separate tables and left to order for ourselves. Our table (the one without Joe and Sharlet)
chose to start our dinner off with these huge cups full of the most delicious
ice cream and a couple of plates of fruit salad over shaved frozen coconut milk
and drizzled with sweetened condensed milk.
Soooo delicious!! The rest of the meal was really good too and we couldn’t
believe how fast we ate all of it. After
we were completely stuffed, we ran across the street to another DVD store that
the boys found. The DVDs were a little
more expensive, but they were also much better quality so that was nice.
Once we got back to the hotel, we all had to undertake the
task of getting all of our stuff (new and old) back into our suitcases. Pretty tricky, but we made it work. Then, at around midnight, a group of us
decided that our last night in China couldn’t be spent in the hotel room. So, we grabbed a couple of taxis and headed
out on the town. We took the taxis back
to The Bund and had fun wandering down it with the boys and their lasers and
masks that they had bought. Because it
was so late, it wasn’t lit up like it had been when we went before, and it was
also really deserted. It’s always weird
to go somewhere in China where there isn’t tons of people. It was kind of fun though. We had one group of kids come up and ask to
take pictures with us, and one prostitute who tried to get the boys to go have
a massage, but other than that it was pretty quiet. It was definitely the perfect way to end our
trip.
 |
| Soooo sad to leave this amazing place |
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