One Blonde in a Sea of Brunettes

Friday September 10
    I think we all struggled to wake up this morning. But luckily we only went to the Yuyuan gardens, which I kind of had been to, but only to the shopping part, not the actual gardens. Honestly I want to build a “mountain” scape in my backyard after seeing this. It was an incredible work of art, and though I really don’t know a thing about feng shui this was looking really well put together. Afterwards we ate lunch at a really good Thai restaurant (in a mall of course).  This place also had really cool bathrooms. It felt like you were underwater.
    Then we got a chance to go do some real shopping at the hugest warehouse type place that was set up to look like a mall. But it was all just a lot of people selling knock off brand things. We spent several hours there just trying to find some good purses but it actually didn’t turn out the way we wanted, because they didn’t sell the ones we wanted. Non-the-less though I was able to find a beautiful silk robe as well as another suitcase. We were seriously pooped after that so we headed back to the hotel and took a nap before going to the AMAZING acrobatics show! Des and I dressed up because we figured we should definitely go out afterwards, but we were the only ones. The show was incredible! (did is say that already? Because it deserved another compliment.)
  Afterwards everyone was really tired out and decided not to go out, but Des and I figured we needed to because Shanghai never sleeps! We went to this bar called Windows 2 that was really really fun. They had some pretty good drinks that were relatively cheap and it had a good atmosphere. While we were there we were able to meet a bunch of guys that work at a financial company that help expatriates handle their money. One of them was from England (the boss), one from the Ivory coast, one from Columbia, and the other from the Netherlands. It was really interesting to hear what they had to say about living in Shanghai, and being an intern and whatnot. I really hope I get the opportunity to have a job like theirs someday. They also taught us how to play the dice game that all the Chinese people play as a drinking game. It ended up not being that difficult, though he said that we should never play against a Chinese person because they will always win! I imagine it’s just because of all the practice they’ve had.
When the taxi dropped us off at the Yu garden we were surprised to find that there were absolutely no street vendors out selling food! We were starving! So we decided to get McDonalds delivered to our hotel.