In China - 4

Second day in Shanghai.   Normally I avoid the touristy shopping areas, but my friend wanted to come down here and check it out and I didn't have anything better to suggest.... :-P

We headed down to what used to be the Chinese part of town during the Foreign Concession period...

上海の第二日、友達と一緒お土産と食べ物買い物した：

I think this is technically the nexus of several shopping complexes together in one area... 'Shanghai Old Street' and the Yuyuan Garden Shopping area and these other malls (the #1 gold store in Asia?) and markets... ユヤン公園にたくさん観光人為に店が在る。

I like the fact that this place is constructed with Chinese style architecture,  it at least hints at what a 'real' Chinese shopping area might have been like a 100 or 200 years back...   But I'm guessing that most of these buildings are actually rather new.

It is good that even Starbucks and McDonalds are forced to adapt to a Chinese style... But then again the whole thing has a Disneyland fakeness about it.  I hope not too many tourists mistake this place for an 'authentic' old shopping district.

(note - i use the words 'real' and 'authentic' rather loosely,  as they're pretty subjective and I think you could argue that there's nothing thats really 'authentic' anywhere anymore) :-P

中国風ビル一杯、でも多分本物じゃない。ここで スタバも有る！

This is the pavilion for the Yuyuan garden,  we didn't actually go into the garden though. :-P

The Oriental Pearl Tower across the river was hard to photograph in the background, because of the bright hazy sky, if my camera adjusted the white balance for the building in the foreground, the tower in the back would get washed out. the best i could do was to have one over exposed and the other underexposed. :-P

Down some of the side streets there were things more focused on locals -

春節の物も売ります：

Chinese New Years is right around the corner! I saw a LOT of unauthorized Mickey Mouse CNY stuff for sale. :-P

Drive up Fruit on a Stick!  -- The Chinese have done it again!　便利よ！

This particular part of the artificial tourist shop area was called 'Shanghai Lao Jie' (Shanghai Old Street) which had antique shops as well as souvenir type places, but again, I don't think anything, including the buildings were particularly old. :-P

Along the way I passed a lot of food stalls and what not... some didn't look entirely sanitary (i saw a guy making candy leave giant flour hand prints all over an escalator when he went on his break).

This one looked kind of appetizing though (i'm a sucker for all things 'griddled')... 美味しそう？

and always time to stop and take some pictures of bad english...

In this case its a double shot!  bad spelling AND poor word choice in the translation.

(should be 'crab', not 'crad'... maybe it was a 'crude crab', but I'm guessing they meant 'fresh'). 悪英語の看板。分かる？

And next thing you know it was time for dinner! I was lucky enough to get to have dinner with TWO AnD friends based in Shanghai - Robert ' Askbenny.cn' Vicencio and Li-tong! They invited me and my friend to Hotpot:

晩後時、AnDからの友達と食事した。中国の火鍋ですよ！

The spicy half wasn't my idea,  but it did make for a nice ying-yang thing in the pot. ;-)

We were joined by their Musical Moments colleage Mr. Brian Montgomery.  We headed out to some unique post-dinner entertainment - Rather than the usual drinking and dancing all night, instead Li-tong suggested we do something a bit more interesting:

晩後後弓道遊びました：

Yes that's right,  indoor archery!

Li-tong is a BADASS!

Note to self - if Li-tong ever gets mad at you and has a bow and arrow handy,  you're dead meat! :-P

I am not so bad ass... I needed help from the staff.  I did manage to get an 87 in my 3rd set of arrows. not too bad. :-P

リトンちゃんとてもすごい！僕は余。。。

Archery makes your shoulders tired really fast, its not the side pulling the string that tires out first, its the one holding the bow...  but for some reason instead of heading to get shoulder massages, we went to get foot massages instead.   疲れた後、足マッサージをした：

This place was next door to the archery place, but wasn't as good as the places i've been to in SZ or Xiamen.  Robert let them have it at the end when they refused to give us the discount rate we were supposed to get. 

Note to self - don't piss off Robert! He can go off in English and Mandarin! ;-)

Tomorrow is Hangzhou! stay tuned!