Monday September 14, 2015
Today we slept in finally after a couple of crazy days. Today and tomorrow are actually bonus days since Daniel was originally scheduled to fly back to the USA today but due to the flight change, he doesn’t go back until Wednesday. Thankfully, I didn’t get much grief for taking a couple of extra days off work to hang out. We decided to do a bit more touristy things in Shanghai and since Mom is coming to Shanghai in October, she had wanted me to look at a couple of hotels she is considering to stay at during her time in Shanghai. One of the hotels she was looking at is the iconic Westin Bund Center (its the building with the crown on it near the Bund) so we headed to Yu Gardens which was in the same area as the hotel.
When we arrived at the metro station for Yu Gardens, we were approached by some people who started to strike up a conversation and asked us to take photos of them. Now being a temporary resident of the city, I knew this was one of the known scams for westerners. Sure enough, they were friendly and tried to entice us to go to a bar to get some beer and I was like I don’t really drink alcohol. They didn’t have a good answer for that so we left them behind and headed down the street. After perusing Yu Garden we walked over to the Westin to take some photos for Mom.
We then headed to one of my favorite shopping areas/old parts of Shanghai – Tianzifang. One of my favorite shops in this area is a photo gallery that has some amazing shots of various places of China. I wanted to get some for my room to decorate and I will have to come back some other time. We then headed over to another one of my favorite malls, iapm – this mall is on Huaihai Middle Road which is a big shopping street in the Puxi area of Shanghai. Its one of my favorite areas to eat and wander around so I wanted to take Daniel down the street. We stopped in at the huge Uniqlo shop just to see the big Disney exhibit on the top floor.
By then, Daniel was over touring the area and we headed back to my apartment to relax. We watched a show called “America’s Next Weatherman” on cable before heading to the Life Hub mall next door to try out the KTV. Unlike some of the ritzier KTV locations in this city, the one in Life Hub was geared to a more local crowd and such finding English or even Japanese songs to sing proved difficult. We did what we could for an hour or so before giving up. We then grabbed a pizza for dinner and then decided to stay in for the rest of the night.
We are not sure what we will do tomorrow, but likely play it by ear to see what we feel like doing.
