China

So as most of my friends know I decided to take a trip to China.  More specifically Shanghai.  My friend, Julian is here with his wife and 1.5 yr old son Daley teaching at the Shanghai American School.  I'm not exactly sure when he started here but I'm going to guess over 3 years now.  Since I missed him so much I thought I'd come out to visit him.

It also turned out the my co-worker from work has his nephew here teaching English.  I think he's been here just over 2 years.  Since Percy (my co-worker) and I spend a lot time together at work (we sit beside one another) and have done some road trips together we thought this would be a fun trip to take together.  Since this was a vacation and not a work trip we decided to spoil ourselves and fly business class, it also helps that we have a bunch of Aeroplan miles. 

We decided to leave April 15th and we arrived here April 16th.  Yep, I'm writing this today from Shanghai China.  It took me a while to figure out that China censors what users can see on the internet.  So no youtube, facebook, or blogs.  Apparently you need a program to work around these social media sights.  Yep, you guessed it, I just figured out the work around (well, the guys we're staying with just showed me).  I'm trying this e-mail to blog program so even if I can't access my blog site I should be able to e-mail my updates, I've never tried it but we'll see how it goes.

I know I'm notoriously bad for updating my blog but I think at nights I'll have a bit more free time to update my blogs.

The flight over here wasn't so bad.  When you're in business class it's a whole different level of service and comfort, but don't get me wrong, you're still on a plane for 14 hours with limited space and tight bathrooms.  I think between the 4 or 5 cat naps, the 3-4 meals I ate, and watching 2 movies (Good faith and The Fighter) the time passed pretty well for me.  I was actually thinking that'd I'd get some work done on a proposal for work, but lets get serious… I'm on HOLIDAYS!!.

Percy's nephew (also named Alex) was great and met us right at the airport. We had to jump on this high speed train to get into town.  The highspeed train, known as the Maglev, hit speeds of 438km/hr but it was so smooth.  Really neat train.  Apparently they want to build one from here to Beijing and one to Hong Kong. 

Inside the Maglev.

Alex (Percy's nephew) lives in an apartment complex with 2 other room mates (1 Canadian and 1 South African/Zambian guy) and they're both really nice guys who also teach English but at a different school then Alex.
After putting our bags down and settling in we decided to go out and get a prepaid cell phone as it'll help us on our travels and keep us in contact with Alex, my friend Julian, and anyone else that we need to get a hold of.  We also got a Metro pass which is basically a reloadable transit card which makes life so much easier when moving through the subways.  Plus, subway rides cost us about 4 RMB (or know as YUAN as well) which is less the $1 CDN (I think it's about 6.5RMB = $1.00CDN).
I forgot to mention that Alex speaks pretty good Mandarin, considering he's Italian and Bolivian.  Me, not so much.  There are certain words that sound familiar to me, but since my parents spoke mainly Taiwanese to me, that's pretty much what I understand.  Even though there's similarities in the language there's a lot of words that I don't know and don't recall.
Basically everything is pretty cheap here, the taxi's, the food, the fake goods (more on that later).  Apparently electronics isn't any cheaper here.  I guess if you're going to spend a lot on electronics you don't really want to buy it overseas.
Our first meal in Shanghai was at a place called Ajisen Ramen.  It was really good. I got a Curry Beef Noodle dish and Percy got some fried rice.  We also got a few dumplings to share around. I think in total for the 3 of us our bill was less the 200RMB, but I can't remember exactly.

Curry Beef Noodles

After dinner we walked through this pedestrian street near the People's Square (I think) which was really neat to see.  Lots of high end stores and lots of people asking us if we wanted fake watches, purses, or even "pretty women".  We declined these offers of course.

Percy and his nephew Alex

Walking through this area took us to the waterfront area called the Bund.  I think it was a redeveloped waterfront completed for the expo.  It was nice to walk along and look across the river where a lot of lit up buildings were.

The Bund

Well it looks like we're heading out now to go get some lunch.  I'll write more whenever I get a chance. Which I'm sure will be today as we're just taking it easy today.