22th Aug Fri
Recalling yesterdae (thursday’s) Hangzhou trip.. After breakfast, we went to the Xihu to meet our tour guide Mr Zheng. (oh, we change tour guides like changing clothes everydae. So when we go to a new town, we meet a new tour guide) came to the bridge named Su Di. Sat on an air con boat and we saw 3 islands that made up Xihu. After taking photos, we went to the tea platation. Then we went to the place where Liang Shan Bo and Zhu Ying Tai studied at and met. And then they fell in love. The story was soooooo interesting! Let me recall.. Liang is a very dumb and retarded guy who doesn’t noe or have any clue that Zhu likes him and tho she showed obvious signs that she is a girl by the way she sit, her ear has a earhole and eyebrows are thin, he didn’t pay much attention to the abnormalities. after they graduated from the same school, Zhu foresee that they will be going on their separate ways and back then it’s very difficult to communicate. They actually walked up and down a short bridge 18 times before separating. The bridge was a short one but the feelings for each other is very loooooonggggg. (qiao duan qing bu duan) And i guess during that time, Liang still doesn’t noe Zhu is a girl and she likes him. Zhu didn’t make it obvious to him and confess to him. Instead, not giving away ‘his’ identity as a female, Zhu challenged Liang to go for the official exam and be a scholar. And only after accomplishing tat will ‘he’ promise to xu pei ‘his’ 9th sister (which is Zhu herself) to Liang. Liang was very delighted and he worked hard and came back as a scholar after several years. BUT sadly, Zhu was already married to another rich dude whom her father has xu pei her to him. Back then they emphasised on ‘Men Dang Hu Dui’ which means the rich shall marry only the rich. Liang was from a very poor background. Hence his proposal very unlikely might be accepted by her father. After all, she’s married to another man. Zhu didn’t want to disobey her father so she had to marry Ma.... hence, in order to not leave a bad name to Zhu’s family and bring disgrace to her father, she elapsed with Liang and they committed suicide by jumping into a river together. Awwww... wad a beautiful story! Well, i won’t want to commit suicide tho. Just find that this love is too fairytale le. How can it come alive in todae’s time? Pple give up on their feelings and relationships easily now.. tat’s too sad to be even mentioned. Alright, back to Hangzhou. After which, we had dinner at lou wai lou. A 100 years old restaurant aka bai yuan lou given that the price of any dish will definitely cost at least 100 RMB. Had nice dinner with the fish(lots of bones), pork (3 layers!), veggi and soup. =) always cannot finish our food coz they are always in very big portions! Then we went for the Xihu Zhi Ye. It’s an indoor show of zha ji which re-enacted and gave a Nice summary of the whole Xihu history from Song Fei sergeant to Liang Zhu to thousand hands god to guanyin to Longjin tea plantation. Went back to hotel! This time to Tailong Business Hotel. Not too bad too.. just not as grand as the Huadu.
Now onto Fridae itself. We are finally at Shanghai! Went to this ancient lady’s garden and met the future-telling master (notice it’s not fortune teller). Haa.. he’s quite accurate. he said my name consists of tu huo jing (earth,fire,gold) and cannot marry someone born in the year of dragon. Will prosper if i enter banking, accounting and stocks sectors. LOL! Next, we moved on to lunch at Tong Ren Tang. We had a good, tasty meal. Then we went for this complimentary FREE leg message oso as part of the program. One Chinese physician, relatively a young man came and greet us, intro a bit then he brought another older man. He’s a more senior physician there. Came in and greeted us too. Encouraging us to ask him questions regarding health problems ets. Felt my pulse and saw my face colour then started to terrorize me to buy medicine. I was stupid enought o show a timid face. When asked to buy 1 bottle of the medicine which costs 880RMB (equivalent to S$182), i timidly said i’ll think bout it. Tat BAKA doc raised his voice at the timid me and said, ‘STILL NEED TO THINK?? IT’S YOUR HEALTH! MONEY IS BODY OUT THING HEALTH IS A LOT MORE IMPORTANT!!’ and my stupid head just had to nod along in agreement. Sigh. And there. I was ROBbed of my 880RMB. Very sad. Till now, i’m still remorseful over it. Roar. ROAR!! Next we move on to familiarise ourselves with 2 of the shopping places with our tour guide, Xiao Xiong which surname is Zheng. We hang around for half an hour since we’ll be going back to ChengHuangMiao (which isn’t a miao but just a shopping centre in the structure of a temple) . the other place is Nanjing Street. Not much things tho it’s a long stretch of shopping centres and shops. But i managed to get a LINING black dri fit shirt with golder words ‘China’ in English at the left sleeve and in Chinese at the back, all in gold. Nice shirt costing 129RMB. Not bad not bad. After which we set off for dinner at Di Long. It’s actually in the shape of a dragon boat. 4 storey high i think. Food was good. Set off to the cruise ship to enjoy the scenery of Shanghai buildings at Huangpu river. Fantastic view of the famous buildings filled with so much ever-changing colours from the buildings! Next we went to our last hotel which is Huajing Grand Hotel. Since the night is still young we went opposite our hotel to roam around their big ‘Giant’ and tried looking for international phone card for Enyun. At the side of the road, there’s this street small eat!! Tho i heard comments on avoiding the street food, i still tried anyway! They look delicious!! That young man was barbequing the sticks of food as you order. We orders lamb satays and the following... indeed, the jing zhen gu and squid tasted SOOOOOOOOOO super nice and tasty!!!! Wah! Wanted to have second round since it’s just opposite my hotel. But just plain lazy. And i comforted myself tat good things cannot eat too much one! You’ll take them for granted or may even get sick of them since they come by so easily and conveniently. Haah!! Talking bout human principles to treasure people around you! Hee. Yahhh NOW. RIGHT NOW, i missed the food!! =)
23rd Aug, Sat
slept and woke up at 820am!! Oh oh.. not at 645am as planned everydae! Slept so soundly that i didn’t even hear my alarm. It was drizzling out there. We got ready, had breakfast and took Da Zhong taxi (there’s at least 8 different types and colours of taxis in Shanghai but xiao xiong told us that Da Zhong is the most reliable one and won’t purposely bring you round and round the town like wad the other private taxis might do to tourists.) to Cheng Huang Miao to collect my Chinese name chop! Haha. Bought it on the previous day at 50RMB after bargaining in a very TAITAI manner. Hee. You see, as for me, not having it is nothing big deal at all. But seeing that the salesgirl was so desperate and persistent, i decided to play along and de hun jin chi!! At first the offered price for the not so nice ones was 75RMB tho the price tag is 450RMB. I said it was too expensive. She pressed in and asked for the price i wan. I said 30 or 40. She said too low and demanded 60. No thanks! Then she said Ok, 50. Lowest give you 50. I kinda agreed and then went forward to take a closer look but this time on to the NICER ones! Haha! And decided on a rice-white one with a small sketching of a valley with waterfall on it. It’s round based. They said cannot coz these are the nicer ones, cost more! Then i said.. oh then never mind, na jiu bu yong mian qiang le xie xie ni! (no need to force yourself to give me discount.thanks!) started to walk away. They said. Too low le.. but i said Ok, never mind then. THEN after some tuo tuo la la, they finally agreed to the price of selling it at 50 RMB! Haha!! See?? I’m such a good bargainer!but firstly must see their attitude lahh..if they are desperate then can be so demanding. But i regretted not cutting more since they still earn from at least S$10. But since the name is carved out, just pay for the craftsmanship bah...next we went to buy the famous Xiao Long Bao! 16 XLB costs 12RMB!!! How cheap is tat!! Haha! Then roam around and shopped at the shopping mall which is also part of the CHM. Next took a taxi to Si Chuan street where i managed to get my white-blue stripes oants and my mother’s inner beauties! Yippee! Thank God i found them and the saleslady is very friendly and approachable! :D next we managed to get a shirt for Esther and a pair of grey balloon shorts for Peijin. Then went around the 3 mega shopping centres to look for ben ten watches for my nephews but to no avail. The funny thing is all 3 of them have kids section. 1 even specializes in children’s stuff! Roar! Cannot find any Toy r’us! We went to eat mac before buying my mummy’s inner beauties. The average mac set meal costs around 22 RMB which is roughly the same price as ours. BUT BUT BUT the standard of food really REALLY CANNOT MAKE IT!!! Roar! TOTALLY CAN! The fries sucks and the big mac burger i ate sucks too!! Even the coke tastes not so very nice! Or maybe i’m just whiney lah but seriously, it’s not nice! Missed Singapore mac already! Then after shopping and dragging myself around even tho i was suddenly confronted by right side migraine, we took taxi back to hotel at 330pm as we’re suppose to meet Mr 7 at 4pm at the hotel lobby. But when we called him, he said he needs another 40 mins to get here. So we went opposite our hotel and tried getting a farewell cum gratitude card for Mr 7 at the ‘Giant’ but couldn’t find any!! It’s such a lousy ‘Giant’. So we bought a green notebook. Managed to use up all the pages writing our thanks to him. Basically enyun only used up one page. But i tot leaving blank pages is really pathetic so i did wad i could to fill up the roughly 40-pages notebook (by writing one Chinese character on each page haha! But not all lahhhh) when we finally met him, he brought us to s illegal counterfeit shop tat’s constantly on the move to prevent getting caught. since he has the contacts, he drove us there and indeed tho it’s ulu, those counterfeit shops are shops instead of along the tunnel or something like tat as i tot. Haha. Hee that rhymes! Then went to search for Coach bags and purse for my sista. At the same time looked out for Burberry too. So in the end settled on buying a colourful but trendy Coach bag, a brown Coach purse and a Burberry purse. At first the saleslady offered 1500++RMB but again. HAHA! I bargained with a strict face. 1000RMB i said. She said no, they dun earn much from these blah blah.. remember: they always use the same excuses. But since i’m most likely the very few customers they have, i did it. And after much reluctance and my firm stand on 1000RMB again, plus the help of Mr 7 who said they are still students, blah blahs... so she was whining away saying ok ok 1000 1000 lah.. sigh.. HAHA!! But still it’s at least S$200 leh! And enyun got a top for her dad. So happily we went off. Then went back to the same hotel and had dinner. It’s sat so super packed. Thank God once again that Mr 7 has contacts and he noes the manager of one of the restaurants, we managed to finally sit together and eat. Just the 3 of us. As always, in fact this time is worst, the whole air con restaurant was filled with cigarette smell!! Both me and enyun cannot stand it but still eat tolerantly. By the way, Mr 7 oso smokes alot. When asked why, he said he smoke only when stressed or bored. hA! Quite true. When nothing to do, he’ll reach into his pocket and start smoking. He noes we hate the smell and he tried not to smoke in front of us.
Labels: China trip part two (22nd and 23rd Aug)
