Frack me. I wrote half the post and it got lost somehow. (everything disappeared)
Secondly, get on msn you fools.
Day 3: SHANGHAI GET! was pretty intense. I had some weird ass sandwhich for breakfast. It had filling on top as well as inside.
The airport was pretty cool. But the flight was not. We were on shanghai airlines and the service was pretty terrible. The food was really bad; it had this weird red grape shapped thing that I assumed was a tomato. They turned out to be tomatoes but since they are grape shapped, they are henceforth named grapmatoes.
The reason why the photo is so janky is because a flight attendant told me off for having my phone on and forced me to turn it off, despite my insistance that in was in flight mode. I then snuck a photo in later. Also there was this broken chair. As we exhumed ourselves from the airport, we saw these huge-ass ventilation pipes. Huge-ass:
((the picture really doesn’t do it justice))
After the crappy flight, we spent an hour in traffic getting to our hotel which was pretty cool, it had a staircase leading to 2 bedrooms, with a living area downstairs. Obligatory toilet photo below:
Please excuse my lack of pictures henceforth, I borrowed my cousins DSLR and don’t have it here with me.
We then walked around a few blocks down from our hotel for a restaurant and there was this lady who was super nice. She suggested us some places to eat but kept on emphasising this one place. That seemed a little shady. After we ditched her, we went to the place she was talking about and found the place to be pretty empty with the prices of each dish ridiculously high. So we asked around some more and found this fantastic authentic shanhainese restaurant where there was this old dude who was dressed up and stuff =D.
Dinner was good but rather boring so let me skip ahead a little.
After dinner, I got pwned. Hard. We decided to go to the “Oriental Pearl Tower”, calling it crowded is a sevre understatement. You buy tickets on the outside, where there is a line of at most 10 people; when you get inside however, its a totally different story. I lined up for around an hour in just the lobby. Almost one more to get to the elevator and 20 mins to get to the actual overvation deck. Two and a half hours. faskljfsad. It then took us almost an hour to get down. We spent 3+ hours lining up for say…20 mins at the observation tower at most. It was very pretty at the top though.
Afterwards we had a brief visit to shanhai’s 外滩1 which is on the opposite shore of the river on which the fracking pearl tower stands.
Day 4: QUEUE HARDER
On day 4, I went to the world expo, the entire reason I went to shanghai. We asked our various taxi drivers which pavillion was the best and determined that we’d go for the Jap. pav. Which reminds me, taxi drivers are so funny, they have their own rules within their own subset community, just like bus drivers!2. Anywho, we took a taxi to the fourth gate and got our portable fold up stools ready and sat in line waiting to be let in. At 9:00 the gates opened though there wasn’t much of a mad dash, not for those at the back anyways. See at uh any or every significant structure, there’s a security check involving metal dectectors and ecks ray scanners, just like airports.
It took us 2.5 hours to get into the Jap pavillion. P.B. If I might say so myself =D. No seriously, it’s pretty short considering it might’ve taken up to 5 hours. Lining up involved walking through a CRAZY LONG maze. I can’t even draw it to scale properly. As I lined up, I put mah head phones on I hit play all and shuffle on my phone and the songs perfectly suited my situation. FRANTIC! Songs included: Clapfusion, Discombobulate and others that I didn’t note down :33 The pavillion itself was really cool, video of a “holographic” display below. At very bottom, Firefox 3+/Chrome req.
Neat huh?
We also visited some “smaller” pavillions with little or no queues =D I highly reccommend it has little or no queues and has air con.
Now, ever since I was little, I’d complain after walking more than say.. 2 hours. My feet would hurt. I had no idea this didn’t happen to other people, my parents just thought I was whining because I was bored, but I’m aparently flat arched so the front flat bit and heels of my feet really hurt after walking for more that 2 hours. So you can imagine what’d my feet felt like after both lining up at the pearl tower and the expo :/
Oh OH! I almost forgot, I did my first uh…set? of number twos in one of those squatting toilets4. Proud and shameless I totally am. =D
My feet were hurting alot and I was getting cranky, so we left at 9 absolutely smashed. All in all we visited the Japan, Pacific, South africa, African combined, Myamar, Vietnam pavillions. ALSO KOREAN PAV LOOKED SUPER COOL5
I almost forgot, before I went souvenier shopping,6 I came down with a severe case of heat stroke :/ The days I was in shanghai, I think I got heat stroke everyday… I ended up sleeping on a bench for a hobo for an hour, I think I’ve checked off several things on my bucket list that day…
Day 5: TOILET YES NOT SO HYGENIC
Ya, as we leave our hotel room in the morning, I got a stomach ache. This foreshadowed my state for several days. I did a small pooper and left our hotel room. That day, we visited some hugeass shopping…street which was mainly skyscrapers which kinda lame. To be perferctly frank, I’m quite sick of skyscrapers and much rather see some classic oriental streets… After a brief trip on the subway, we arrived at the Shanghai World Financial Centre. Yea it’s that building that looks like a bottle opener. We werer herded by some peeps looking to make some easy money and joined a temporary tour group for a whopping discount of 20 RMB per person to get up the tower; other perks included a waiting room instead of a suposedly massive queue =d Once we arrived at the 94th floor, we needed to wait in queue for an elevator up to the top. There was a set of staircases which also lead to the top but my mum convinced me otherwise.
The top was like any other skyscraper with gimicky glass floors and panoramic views. *Yawn*. My feet was burning at this time so I raced down the stairwell to the souvenier shop where thankfully there were couches. I attempted to take off my shoes but some dude told me off so I lazily put ‘em back on. Stupid expensive tower with stupid rules. The rest of day was uneventful except for one incident at the airport involving poorly designed toilets, stomach troubles and a mysterious noise. I’d rather explain this in person ;P
That concludes my Shanghai trip, sorry for the huge delay, but the thought of writing this massive post scared me back into procrastination mode =D
Look out for a beijing post soon!
[