China Trip Part 6: Chenghuang Miao and the Bund

People Mountain People Sea. I swear it was empty 5 minutes ago.

The great thing about this trip was seeing a lot of new things. We were able to stay at 5 star hotels each night. Breakfast at each hotel varies. Sometimes they had boring items. Sometimes they had very good food. The disappointing things you would get were something like watered down milk or tofu dessert that was not fresh. The good things would be the buffet style breakfast where you can have Chinese and/or Western styled breakfast. Each hotel has their own style of breakfasts like one of them had a larger selection of baked goods and another one had a more Cantonese base. Basically that was what you can expect every morning. Morning call each day was 6:00 am and you have roughly an hour and a half before you get on the bus. It's pretty rough considering that we were staying at different hotels every single night.

The first day of sightseeing was in Shanghai. We were taken to Cheng Huang Miao 城隍庙(City God Temple), a shopping district build just for tourists. The name itself is misleading because "miao" refers to a temple or place of worship. There is no a single religious ornament or building in sight. You find that Wikipedia tells you otherwise, but there were just tons of places to go shopping.

One of the downsides to joining tour groups was the lack of time to explore freely and our tour guides rushing is from place to place. I understand that we are on schedule, but the time given was irrationally issued. We were given a mere 45 minutes to "explore" in a place with over a hundred shops not including street stands and unexpected entertainment. there are lots of local specialties including foods at the concession stands which I regrettably had no time to try.

Some of the stuff you see is not too special like your usual tourist stuff. What did interest me were the trinkets they sold. I wanted to buy one of the hand painted masks, but there was no way I could carry it back home. They were priced roughly 130 RMB each.

If I had more time, I would have grabbed a Shanghainese soup dumpling or bought one of those nice looking pocket watches for 15 RMB. I did get myself bing tang hu lu 冰糖葫芦, candied hawthorn fruit, for I think 18 RMB. I always see actors eat it in costume drama movies. I always thought the sugar glaze would be sweet enough, but after taking a bite, I now know that hawthorn fruit is actually extremely sour. For it to be sugar sweet would require hawthorn fruit simmering into a syrup. I wonder if rhubarb is the same.

I find that in weather in April has huge fluctuations between hot and cold. At night and the early morning, I'm in a hoodie and a windbreaker, but as soon as the sun is out at 8:00 am, it feels blazing hot. It would get worse later on at the Bund 外滩. Our guide, Mr. X, had a habit of mixing a bit of English with his Chinese to make it feel more "easier" for us overseas Chinese to listen to. Honestly, all I got was a local man trying to be foreign and it irks me (And practically most of the Chinese youth is obsessed with foreign culture). C'mon, we all know Mandarin here. He took us to the Bund which we were given half an hour. Our bus was parked in front of the apparently famous Peace Hotel 和平饭店. It's really nothing special, just a few words that say Peace Hotel. It's not the same one from the movie Chow Yun Fat was in. The Bund is a public space by the waters of the Huangpu River. Half an hour was literally Hell's oven. You could have given us more time at Cheng Huang Miao instead. There was absolutely nothing to do at the Bund except walk and take pictures. Across the river you can see the famous Oriental Pearl Tower which is hidden behind a layer of smog. That is basically what I saw almost everywhere on my trip, hazy photos on my phone and camera.  All I remember from the Bund was the sun and how much my hoodie was killing me.

Tons of European styled architecture.

On the bus to the next destination. Lunch time.