Our Unexpected yet Interesting Tour of Shanghai

Our exciting news before we left for Christmas break is that we will move from our apartment and rent a house in a neighboring subdivision. We will move at the beginning of March. We are so excited to have a free standing home with no apartment below being worked on, or neighbor's to hear, or hear us and most of all our own yard. With the new house we decided to go with an unfurnsished place. Our current one provides all the furniture, but as it is rented, it is not in great condition and it is not at all our style. We have also found that the Chinese description of things like desk and sofa bed are quite different from ours, so we are looking forward to furnishing the our new place with furniture that reflects more of us. While we are excited about this part, it is also quite an undertaking before we move in March. Dustin and I plan to, like many other expats, have some of the furniture made. It is extremely inexpensive by US standards here, so we are excited by this prospect. Today we decided to travel to three different places to compare their work and the all important aspect of cost. Dustin and I left Josh home with Hong Li, our ayi, and decided to take the metro (Shanghai's subway) to get to our destinations.

We called the farthest place located on the other side of the city, about an hour and half subway ride. They spoke excellent English, but were not open today. So we decided to still venture to the others located closer to us.

We headed out to be greeted by stand still traffic. This caused us to switch the roads we took and hence also the subway station. This therefore added 40 minutes to our first destination. We arrived at the first location and stepped out into the street. It was a typical Chinese street, which means practically chaois. Trucks were trying to back up a one way street, while pedestrians tried to get past (this was an alley type street, so no room for sidewalks) while bikes, motorcyles, scooters and electrical bikes all whizzed past us. We safely made it across the street and started looking for the store shops.

Shops here in Shanghai are these little postage size shops that hold an amazing array of items. We went along counting down to where our shop was suppose to be located and then it unexpectedly jumped in numbers. We could not find the shop to save our lives. We looked down alleys and across the street, and even relooked up the address. We finally gave up and decided to go one stop down in the subway to get lunch and look for some plastic golf clubs from Toys r us.

We got out of the subway station and went to cross the street to the mall. They are currently building a pedestrian walkway because the street is so dangerous to cross. It of course is not finished, so we will brave the street crossing with everyone else. I describe this street a little like the old game of Frogger, but a lot more dangerous as the speed of the cars, trucks, mopeds and bikes are all at different speeds that are coming at you. Of course before we got to the street we got to walk through fresh concrete. All I can say is only in China. Now they did place bamboo mats down, but the cement was still oozing through this and onto the bottom of our shoes, yet this was not really a problem compared to the fact that they did not have these mats reach all the way to the street. As Dustin said we have now made a permanent impact on Shanghai. Of course, this is only until they decide to tear it up again, which could be a soon as next week.

We made it across the street in one piece only to find the sandwich shop closed. We ate Burger King instead and then struck out at Toys r us as well. We hopped back on the subway and headed to the next stop.

This again was a cool traditional Shanghai street. We got a little turned around, but finally found the shop. We were so excited as the sign and door looked promising, until we read that it is closed until Wednesday. Strike 3, time to go home.

We called Tom to meet us a little earlier than we planned at the subway station. We rode back, sort of in utter amazement that everything we tried to do today did not work out. As Dustin noted, this is often typical here in the city. We found Tom right away and we headed back home.

Of course, typical Shanghai style we got stuck in unreal traffic. We sat for maybe thirty minutes and then Tom was able to get to a point where we could turn around. We followed this one vehicle through some streets and then ended up at the new massive Train station. This will be the hub for numerous trains coming into the city from all over the country. The funny part of this is that we had a pretty good hunch we were not suppose to continue on this route, but the security guard was sitting in his chair smoking with the gate up and obviously did not care, and the car we were following just drove straight through, so Tom just continued on as well.

What we experienced in our barely holding it together ancient minivan, I am sure should only be left for such rugged off road vehicles as a hummer, or the large dump truck we ended up following for a while, as the other more off road type car we were following literally left us in the dust. We did make it through the construction zone (and I mean literal construction zone). And as we expected when we finally arrived at the other end of the site, two security guards, who were taking their job more seriously, were stopping cars from coming in towards the site we were attempting to exit. We jut smiled and tried to look straight ahead while Tom drove us straight on.

We made it home in time to pick up Danny and marvel at our less than successful, yet quite interesting trip. We did not accomplish anything we set out to do, but it was a great picture of the city from the streets, to the massive unofficial construction site tour, and we were able to spend some time together, which in this crazy city can be hard to do at times. I guess we call it a blessing in disguise.