"Good Tea Makes Good Friends"

Today was a very interesting day to say the least. We checked out of our hotel around noon and each went around to explore some more of Shanghai before our evening flight to Chengdu. My plan was to walk along Nanjing Street, take the underwater sightseeing tunnel across the river, visit the Chinese Sex and Culture Museum, Pearl Tower, and Shanghai Museum. Ambitious, but I knew my way around pretty well, so I didn't think there would be any problems...

Nanjing Street was nice, and very different during the day than at night, and I even bought a new coat (mainly just because I had packed my coat in my suitcase thinking it would be warm, only to find out that it was a good bit colder than yesterday.) After that, I made it the underwater sightseeing tunnel without any problems, and headed across the river. The tunnel takes you under the river in little tram cars and the whole tunnel is illuminated to look like several different environments. While I'm sure they built it with the greatest of intentions, it mostly just seemed like a really slow and low tech version of Disney's Space Mountain haha.

Once on the other side, I searched with map in hand for nearly an hour trying to find the Chinese Sex and Culture Museum. Eventually I found it, or at least where it used to be - it appears that they demolished the building and are building a new high-rise at the site. Oh well...

After that, I walked around and took some pictures of the Pearl Tower and then took the tunnel back to the other side to go to the Shanghai Museum. This turned out to be quite a hike, but there was plenty of nice scenery, so I didn't mind. Finally, after about 45 minutes of walking, I reached the entrance to the museum and got my camera out to take a picture of it. However, as I did that, four Chinese people came up to me and asked me to take their photo, which I happily did. After taking their photo, we chatted for a bit, and it turns out that they are from Chengdu and one of them is an English teacher there. They were all very nice and they suggested that I probably wouldn't like the museum very much and offered to let me go with them to a Chinese tea house for a traditional tea ceremony.

This seemed like an excellent opportunity, so I happily accepted. The tea ceremony was quite cool and I was really impressed by all the tradition that is associated with it. We got to try six different teas and the man (Peter) interpretted the whole thing for me. We laughed and exchanged stories and had an overall great time. I liked the tea so much that I bought some (in a really fancy box). Actually, we all did. However, it turned out to be insanely expensive, so I spent way more of my travel budget than I was hoping to today. Oh well...

Once we finished the tea ceremony, we exchanged contact information and I headed to the hotel to meet Katie and then to the airport for my flight to Chengdu. I'm really excited to be here in Chengdu, since I've heard so much about it from my students. We have a pretty fluid itinerary here, but two definate highlights include a trip to see the baby giant pandas and a trip to see the world's tallest Buddha statue in Leshan. I'm so excited!!