i fail at being veggie

and at all of my other attempts to be a conscientious consumer. i've been eating meat since the 3rd day here. it was just wayyyyy more effort than i really wanted to expend trying to not eat meat. and i would miss out on all the bomb food. i held out on my boycott of coke products a little longer.....until thursday, when i had a coke at lunch.  oh dang.  the pictures from our day tour of shanghai last thursday. 

yu yuan gardens

dragon wars!!!!

this is in old town...kind of touristy area...but very cool

ok...so blogger officially sucks....and it is impossible for me to load pictures.....which is why its taken me 3 days to write this stupid entry!! so now i am making a separate picasa web album for pictures and the blog will be mostly text.

some people from our group took a trip to a lake this weekend....but me and 2 friends, adam and arek stayed behind to explore shanghai a little more. on sunday we attempted to go to this big open air bazaar called the Xiangyang Market (which is in the french concession), where there is supposed to be great knock-off shopping!  well lonely planet has failed us once again....and apparently this market shutdown in 2006, so when we got there it was just a huge construction zone!!!!! (ahhhhhhhh!!! im ready to burn my lonely planet and use it for heat, which i think would be a much more effective use for it!) anyway...we were starving and wandered around for awhile.  this part of shanghai is really nice and there were a lot of expensive boutiques...sort of like the SoHo of Shanghai.  we eventually went into an italian restaurant and had a really delicious meal of bruschetta, fried calamari, and sandwiches...a nice break from the constant adventure of getting chinese food.  after that we went to this area called Xintiandi, which has all of these old style shanghai architecture buildings called Shikumen, which have all been renovated and are being used as restaurants and bars. it's a pretty ritzy area...kind of reminiscent of 3rd street promenade and the grove.  it was getting pretty cold and late at this point and we were about to go back to the dorms, when we opted at the last minute to go to the Bund instead.  the Bund is about a mile long area that runs along the west side of the huangpu river, which divides shanghai into the east and west parts. when you see pictures of the skyline if shanghai....its always a picture of Pudong (the east part) taken from the bund.  all of the huge skyscrapers that are in pudong were ALL built in the last 15 years or so.  before 1994 pudong was completely agricultural land. anyway.....we were approached by some chinese people who spoke english and just wanted to chat.  it's really easy to meet locals here...because they just come up and talk to us because we're white.  they are always really impressed when they see i can "speak" chinese.  even though i know i'm horrible and mispronouncing everything....they are always really nice and tell me how good my chinese is. they are usually just shocked that white people even try to learn chinese.  these people were really nice and really really funny!  they invited us to go tea tasting with them and sicne we had nothing to do....we went.  this was one of the coolest things we have done in shanghai so far!!! we tasted 6 kinds of tea...and learned all about tea history and tea customs (luckily our chinese friends translated for us).  we spent 2 hours drinking tea....and all bought some at the end!! we got really cool, fancy, chinese boxes to put it in!! and now i have pretty much a lifetime supply of jasmine tea...if anybody wants some!

on monday we went to old town, which we already visited on our organized tour of shanghai, but we didnt get to see much.  we did the walking tour outlined in our lonely planet guide. we wandered through narrow chinese alleys, visited a temple, saw this old wall that was built in 1553 and used as a fortress to protect shanghai from invaders, and did a little souvenir shopping.  the weather was pretty miserable though....it was freezing and rained all day!! when does it get warm in this city????  then we made our 2nd attempt to go bargain shopping. we went to pudong to this HUUUUUUUUGGGEEEEE market that was under the science and technology museum.  it was nuts!! just endless stores selling knock-off bags, watches, shoes, jackets, sunglasses, etc!!! i bought a silk robe, a mao messenger bag, a t-shirt with pandas doing the 24 different taichi poses, neon green shoelaces (so i can be as cool as serena), a fake chloe wallet, a pair of shoes, and DVDS: season 3 of the office, harry potter and the order of the phoenix, the devil wears prada, and the prestige!!!

well....thats all for now. i'm about to go meet my chinese teacher from berkeley, who is now a grad student at fudan university, for some tea! and i have my first class today: chinese!!!