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Today and yesterday included a lot of walking, more walking, a bit of a crisis, and also more walking. I did mention walking, yes?
Well, after a very restful sleep, we got up a bit later than yesterday, and ended up heading out for breakfast around 10-ish. It was wet and rainy so, though we made a detour to the exercise park, there wasn't much there to see aside from the wet equipment. Breakfast was one again had at a bakery, and off we went to walk. We mostly went up and down various streets, looking at shops, learning the lay of the land. We did find another ( gigantic mall ) and amused ourselves for quite a few hours going all around it. It mostly sold clothing, which wasn't a lot of interest, but it did have a large bookshop on the top floor that was interesting to look around. ( It had things like this, for instance. )
Eventually we decided it was lunchtime and wandered back over to a 'snack street' type area, which had a bunch of food-related shops by day, and also had vendors selling various street foods in between the food-related shops by night. Apparently there's a much bigger one in Nanning, which I will see when I get there, but for now we had to make do with this one.
We ended up going into a Korean place (in China for two days and barely eating Chinese, I know), which had the interesting decorations of people scribbling all over the walls. All sorts of languages--mostly Chinese of course, but there was Japanese, Korean, English...I even spotted Hebrew a few times.
The meals wasn't bad, though a bit spicy for me, and we continued on from there, determined to walk everywhere. ( Also, we got drinks. )
More wandering ensued, and we ended up getting really, really lost in the back streets of wherever we were. For several hours. It was really tired, hungry, and with achy feet that we finally managed to find our way back to snack street which was, now, bustling with more activity. ( And picture opportunities )
Dinner done with and very tired, we managed to get back to the hostel. Before we could turn in, however, Brittany had an important question to ask the front desk; whether our train tickets to Qufu had come.
See, because of the new year, we were warned by everyone that train tickets would be near impossible to get. So Brittany had ordered them in advance, to be delivered to the hostel. The tickets were for Qufu, a place (province? town?) farther north than Shanghai, that housed a Shaolin Kung Fu school that we had made arrangements to study at for a week. Ridiculously excited by that, by the way. Studying Kung Fu at a school in China that was made to be studied at--words can't really describe the excitement. Can't.
Anyway. The tickets. There was a slight problem. See. They weren't delivered. And after a few frantic phone calls, turned out they weren't going to be. Brittany had paid for them of course, but they business decided that they didn't really want to bother and canceled the order. Apparently this is a common thing in China, this...laziness, for lack of a better word. And people put up with it because they don't have a choice, and there are so many people there will always be customers so why bother and, okay, I get the culture difference but I don't agree at all in that idea. It's stupid. And, also meant that we didn't have the train tickets for tomorrow that we kind of needed.
More phone calls, more emails, and a lot of computer research later, the plan is this: get up early (early) tomorrow, make it to the ticket station before it opens, wait until it does open, buy the tickets if they have them. There wasn't a plan B, since we needed the high-speed train in order to make it to Qufu by the start off the week. If we had to resort to a normal train, we were looking at hours and hours of travel. Brittany was really worried about getting tickets, since we'd been so warned about the fact that they were "impossible" to get at this time, they'd probably be sold out anyway, negative, negative, negative. She also insisted on going by herself, so I could get more sleep and work off the remains of my jet lag.
Off she goes. The trip is an hour there and an hour back. Two hours later she returns...for my passport. Needed it to purchase the tickets. I kicked myself for not giving it to her in the first place, handed it over, and off she went again while I just packed everything up so we wouldn't have to worry about it later. After I'm packed, I go out and buy a few things from the bakery. Wander around the park again and take some pictures this time. ( Pictures. )
I also bought a package of strawberries from a fruit stand near the hostel for Brittany's triumphant return. The tickets were secured for 345RMB each (about 100RMB saved for buying them in person!), we sat down to strawberries and elation; our time to make it to the train is 2pm. I make sure to engrave the number in my mind, and then it's time for lunch.
With more reason to celebrate, we left lunch (which was again, unfortunately, a bad choice of place to eat, oh well) to go straight to Happy Lemon for drinks. This time I bought a Lemon Honey Juice Tea which turned out to be a very sweetened lemonade drink. From there, we headed straight for Awfully Chocolate, bought a piece of delicious (and cake-like) chocolate cake and ate it happily.
What with all the walking, we certainly earned it. Between the 14th and the 15th, we managed to cover 15 miles.
Anyway, that over, we went to quickly buy some last-minute items for Qufu, mostly snacks for the train and detergent, to wash our clothes while there.
And then, Brittany asks the time. 2pm, I reply. Just on time to start heading back to get our luggage, before going to the train. She blanches.
Uh-oh.
Turns out that, ah, when Brittany had said 2pm, that's the time she meant we needed to be on the metro to the train station, while I had interpreted it as the time to start heading out to the metro to get to the train station.
Cue panic. And much running. We ran from where we were to the hostel. Grabbing our luggage, we dashed to the metro. We sat (well, stood), on the metro and anxiously monitored the stops and the time, while Brittany talked about how it took 45 minutes to get the the station.
The time was 2:30pm. Our train left at 3:20pm. By our calculations, we would have five minutes to get find out where to go and get there. Time ticked by. Stops came and went. More and more panic set in (though I was the calm one, mind you).
And then, all of a sudden, it's one more stop to go, and it's only three o'clock. And, Brittany remembers, the time between this stop and the station was nothing. So we'd have 15 minutes instead of five. Things were looking up.
We get finally arrive and the running resumes. Dragging our luggage, we bolt as fast as we can to the escalator, run around a little trying to make sense of where to go. Finally I just show our tickets to someone in a uniform, who points us to the other side of the floor. Run there, go through security, show the ticket again and get pointed all the way to the other side of the room.
Even though we have some time now, better safe than sorry. Making the mad dash all the way across the room, we get to the gate with about five minutes to spare. I cleverly use these five minutes to buy water bottles for the trip. Then it's tickets in the stile, onto the platform, dash to our compartment, stow the luggage, collapse into our seats. Smile exhausted, but victorious.
Goodbye Shanghai, hello Qufu.
...Qufu will probably not be more restful.
I'm looking forward to it anyway.
Well, after a very restful sleep, we got up a bit later than yesterday, and ended up heading out for breakfast around 10-ish. It was wet and rainy so, though we made a detour to the exercise park, there wasn't much there to see aside from the wet equipment. Breakfast was one again had at a bakery, and off we went to walk. We mostly went up and down various streets, looking at shops, learning the lay of the land. We did find another ( gigantic mall ) and amused ourselves for quite a few hours going all around it. It mostly sold clothing, which wasn't a lot of interest, but it did have a large bookshop on the top floor that was interesting to look around. ( It had things like this, for instance. )
Eventually we decided it was lunchtime and wandered back over to a 'snack street' type area, which had a bunch of food-related shops by day, and also had vendors selling various street foods in between the food-related shops by night. Apparently there's a much bigger one in Nanning, which I will see when I get there, but for now we had to make do with this one.
We ended up going into a Korean place (in China for two days and barely eating Chinese, I know), which had the interesting decorations of people scribbling all over the walls. All sorts of languages--mostly Chinese of course, but there was Japanese, Korean, English...I even spotted Hebrew a few times.
The meals wasn't bad, though a bit spicy for me, and we continued on from there, determined to walk everywhere. ( Also, we got drinks. )
More wandering ensued, and we ended up getting really, really lost in the back streets of wherever we were. For several hours. It was really tired, hungry, and with achy feet that we finally managed to find our way back to snack street which was, now, bustling with more activity. ( And picture opportunities )
Dinner done with and very tired, we managed to get back to the hostel. Before we could turn in, however, Brittany had an important question to ask the front desk; whether our train tickets to Qufu had come.
See, because of the new year, we were warned by everyone that train tickets would be near impossible to get. So Brittany had ordered them in advance, to be delivered to the hostel. The tickets were for Qufu, a place (province? town?) farther north than Shanghai, that housed a Shaolin Kung Fu school that we had made arrangements to study at for a week. Ridiculously excited by that, by the way. Studying Kung Fu at a school in China that was made to be studied at--words can't really describe the excitement. Can't.
Anyway. The tickets. There was a slight problem. See. They weren't delivered. And after a few frantic phone calls, turned out they weren't going to be. Brittany had paid for them of course, but they business decided that they didn't really want to bother and canceled the order. Apparently this is a common thing in China, this...laziness, for lack of a better word. And people put up with it because they don't have a choice, and there are so many people there will always be customers so why bother and, okay, I get the culture difference but I don't agree at all in that idea. It's stupid. And, also meant that we didn't have the train tickets for tomorrow that we kind of needed.
More phone calls, more emails, and a lot of computer research later, the plan is this: get up early (early) tomorrow, make it to the ticket station before it opens, wait until it does open, buy the tickets if they have them. There wasn't a plan B, since we needed the high-speed train in order to make it to Qufu by the start off the week. If we had to resort to a normal train, we were looking at hours and hours of travel. Brittany was really worried about getting tickets, since we'd been so warned about the fact that they were "impossible" to get at this time, they'd probably be sold out anyway, negative, negative, negative. She also insisted on going by herself, so I could get more sleep and work off the remains of my jet lag.
Off she goes. The trip is an hour there and an hour back. Two hours later she returns...for my passport. Needed it to purchase the tickets. I kicked myself for not giving it to her in the first place, handed it over, and off she went again while I just packed everything up so we wouldn't have to worry about it later. After I'm packed, I go out and buy a few things from the bakery. Wander around the park again and take some pictures this time. ( Pictures. )
I also bought a package of strawberries from a fruit stand near the hostel for Brittany's triumphant return. The tickets were secured for 345RMB each (about 100RMB saved for buying them in person!), we sat down to strawberries and elation; our time to make it to the train is 2pm. I make sure to engrave the number in my mind, and then it's time for lunch.
With more reason to celebrate, we left lunch (which was again, unfortunately, a bad choice of place to eat, oh well) to go straight to Happy Lemon for drinks. This time I bought a Lemon Honey Juice Tea which turned out to be a very sweetened lemonade drink. From there, we headed straight for Awfully Chocolate, bought a piece of delicious (and cake-like) chocolate cake and ate it happily.
What with all the walking, we certainly earned it. Between the 14th and the 15th, we managed to cover 15 miles.
Anyway, that over, we went to quickly buy some last-minute items for Qufu, mostly snacks for the train and detergent, to wash our clothes while there.
And then, Brittany asks the time. 2pm, I reply. Just on time to start heading back to get our luggage, before going to the train. She blanches.
Uh-oh.
Turns out that, ah, when Brittany had said 2pm, that's the time she meant we needed to be on the metro to the train station, while I had interpreted it as the time to start heading out to the metro to get to the train station.
Cue panic. And much running. We ran from where we were to the hostel. Grabbing our luggage, we dashed to the metro. We sat (well, stood), on the metro and anxiously monitored the stops and the time, while Brittany talked about how it took 45 minutes to get the the station.
The time was 2:30pm. Our train left at 3:20pm. By our calculations, we would have five minutes to get find out where to go and get there. Time ticked by. Stops came and went. More and more panic set in (though I was the calm one, mind you).
And then, all of a sudden, it's one more stop to go, and it's only three o'clock. And, Brittany remembers, the time between this stop and the station was nothing. So we'd have 15 minutes instead of five. Things were looking up.
We get finally arrive and the running resumes. Dragging our luggage, we bolt as fast as we can to the escalator, run around a little trying to make sense of where to go. Finally I just show our tickets to someone in a uniform, who points us to the other side of the floor. Run there, go through security, show the ticket again and get pointed all the way to the other side of the room.
Even though we have some time now, better safe than sorry. Making the mad dash all the way across the room, we get to the gate with about five minutes to spare. I cleverly use these five minutes to buy water bottles for the trip. Then it's tickets in the stile, onto the platform, dash to our compartment, stow the luggage, collapse into our seats. Smile exhausted, but victorious.
Goodbye Shanghai, hello Qufu.
...Qufu will probably not be more restful.
I'm looking forward to it anyway.