SH: Saturday: Vacation Day #1 - Yay!

Had a nice long video chat with my Dad! Cool! Quality would have been better on gmail than on Skype - but CHINA blocks gmail randomly, so skype it had to be.


On Saturday two colleagues took us to a small village outside of the city, recontructed to look like a Chinese village of 1000 years ago. I am not being deliberately obtuse about the name, it escapes me right now - and it is long and complicated.

There was a smidge of traffic getting there (ah, reminds me of home - miss you 401! [not]) - interesting, it seems like randomly a cop will block an entrace to the highway for some minutes, to aid in regulating traffic flow. Kind of like that light that lets you on the QEW one at a time from Mississauga Rd, but in this instance the cop stands where the on ramp is for ten minutes or so. We were debating in the car, and we don't know if they do it randomly or with traffic theory in mind.

The little village was pretty cool! Except that parts of it smelled like stinky tofu. You know. There was a river running through the little village, and stone bridges every so often. People actually work and live in the village. There were little shops and things. I bought some cute things, and a new purse - hahah, not a knock off, a real regular purse, from a local Shanghai designer. We had lunch overlooking the river (or is it a canal?) - that was nice, but a wee bit on the chilly side. We had our tea to keep warm, it was ok.

We also took a boat ride, that was really fun. There is a guy in the back making the boat go - sort of like a gondelier, except he's not punting along the river, he's sort of turning this oar thing to propel us. To me it seems like maybe not the most efficient way of getting a boat down the river, but I'm no mechanical engineer, I can't really say.

YangBo dropped us off in a French area of town, since I have been hearing about this French Concession, and wanted to see it. By then we'd all had a little snooze in the car on the way back from the town, so we needed to stop for a coffee for a little pick me up.

We walked around a bit - I have no real conclusions to draw from it. I'm not 100% sure we were in the right place. Anyhoo, Wallace came up with the idea of us all getting foot massages, so we went off to find a reputable place. The first place we decided was not reputable - hahaha. You know, these things can be a bit sketch.

Anyhoo, the place we ended up in was AWESOME. Apparently a foot massage is sort of a China specialty. It was a 75 min massage, which started with a neck massage. This was my #2 fav thing we did in Shanghai - awesome! And the rooms were all super nice and decorated, all three of us (Wallace, Matthew and myself) were in one room, so we could chat. Fun! AND food/drinks (limited selection, but still) were included. So essentially we ate dinner while our feet were being massaged. Hrmm...I think this could be an addition to brighten any meal! :) They also gave us a bag of hot stones for our lower backs while the massage was going on. So neat. And they were so attentive - when I ran out of juice, the girl would notice and press a button, and a guy would come with more juice. So luxurious!

Back to the hotel sort of early since I was planning on waking up at 4am. I actually did most of my packing at ~2am, then went back to sleep. Hopefully in Taiwan I'll be catching up on all this sleep I am missing!