shanghai!

we arrived in shanghai and luckily our hostel was only a short 3 stops away on the metro. we got to the hostel to find that i had messed up and only booked one bed instead of two, but it turned out to be a happy mistake as we were put in a room with less beds than originally reserved. we got settled in a went for a walk to the bund to see the skyline everyone has seen a million times. we walked up took a photo and ran away from the ridiculous crowds. we then began mission tex mex! we got a map and found the place where it was supposed to be. it then became apparent that my book was 3 years old and the all you can eat tex mex that had been filling our dreams for weeks was no longer in business. we were heartbroken to say the least! we settled for some beef sandwiches at a sports bar nearby. defeated we returned to the hostel. mike took a nap and i went out to roam the streets on my skateboard, which turned out to be one of my favorite experience as so far in my travels. i had never been able to skate around a true downtown like that, weaving through traffic and people, ollieing every man hole i passed.

later that night we grabbed some beers and food at the bar in the hostel. we started to group up for our first night out in shanghai, we played some kings cup with two canadian guys a little before we went. on a recomendation from the austrian students in guangzhou we checked out a club called g plus, the rest of the group went to some bar they were unsure about on the bund, which they later found out wasnt what they expected at all and wound up meeting up with me and mike. the club was really fun, lots of electronic break beat stuff. bubbles, foam, and confetti for all of the epic songs. we all danced until 4am when the club closed though by that time we had thinned out to a group of 4. first night down

we went back to get what sleep we could. mike and i arose around 1030 or so and set out to check out the local art colony much like the brewery. it was so-so there was nothing that really wowed us. we hoped on the subway and went over to the huge radio tower thingy to find out that it was ridiculously overpriced to go up in so we went to the nearby H&M and shopped instead =). on the way home we stopped at the history of sex culture in the tourism tunnel across the river. there were a ton of really ridiculous sex objects from thousands of year ago until the current day. i cant even imagine where they found all of this shit. they had a bunch of wonderfully intricate vases and then in the center there are two people having sex in a field. the also had a wooden scuplture of a man wrapped in chains with a distrubingly large penis. mike bough these funny ceramic fruits that had people having sex on the inside, apparently they were used in the old days to teach newly weds about sex and positions.

getting a little tired we once again returned to the hostel and got some of the amazing dumplings from around the corner and proceed to rest up for our second night. i passed out for a few hours and mike went out to shop some more. later we meetup wtih some fellow americans!, the fist i have encountered in my hostel travels and played some more kings cup, with my bad luck i pulled the last king. we got moved around about 4 times until we ended up outside due to the noise where even then we got stopped. by this time its was almost eleven and we got a tip from a local friend of one of our roommates about a bar that was pretty fun called windows.

we all piled into taxi and started our convoy to the bar. to change things up this was a hip hop bar but they played some really fun songs. i havent heard will smith's get jiggy with it in forever, and somehow i still knew all the words, wow im a loser. once again we danced until 4am and then regrouped at the local mcdonalds for some han bao bao (hamburgers). by the time we got back it was already getting light out. we had a really cool conversation with a guy who had been pretty much everywhere in the world in the last 6 months, i was so jealous. got back and crashed until 10 or so, packed and said goodbye to everyone and set out for suzhou.

we got to the metro station to realize that we didnt have the directions to our next hostel, i booked it back on my skateboard and had to deal with the shitty internet as it took 5 minutes to load my email, grrrrrr.

so pretty much we had good night out on the town just as we planned in shanghai, meet some really awesome people, and just plain had a good time.