Shanghai: Sunday
Jack met me again the next morning in the lobby and we headed to breakfast, which we both ate this time. I guess no big hamburger today. The first place he took me was to the Century Park. I would later learn from Helen that every major Chinese city has one. Shanghai's was enormous. We walked around for a few hours, I got to feed some pigeons kernels of corn, and we got stuck in the middle of a rain storm. All we had was his tiny umbrella that was falling apart at the ends. Besides that we sat a while and just talked. Probably the most interesting thing he told me pertained to the massage and haircut parlors. Like I said in an earlier post, the hair salons were open unusually late. At 11:00 they're still doing business. Keep in mind, Jack initiated the conversation, so it's not like I suggested the possibility. However, he asked if I had ever noticed a red light on late at night. I had never really looked, but it turns out they're not just selling haircuts or massages in some of those places. He said it wasn't all of them, but for the ones that do, the government just turns a blind eye. In public, such as the news, they denounce this, but a little bribery to the government and local police goes a long way--so Jack tells me. If a foreign ambassador is coming into town, as they often do in Beijing, the government will just tell them to shut down for a few days until the coast is clear. Anyways, after our time in the park we headed to a northern Chinese cuisine restaurant. Interesting dinner. We started off with some fish flavored eggplant, which is usually one of my favorite foods in China. However, it was so spicy that it gave me a shock when I tried it. So I couldn't really eat that. Next they brought out cold pig’s feet. It wasn't as good as it sounds, but I still had three. All it was was the skin on the feet. There really was no meat. And you could still see the grain on the skin. Jack told me that his boss loves this dish so much, when he comes here all he orders is two plates of it. That was disturbing. Anyways, since I couldn't eat the eggplant, the only thing left for me to work on was the stewed bullfrog. Even Jack was scared to order it, and he said that if I ordered it had to eat it all myself. The second picture is of me digging in. Beyond the fact that there were so many annoying little bones, this dish was quite tasty. The funny thing about it was you could still see pieces of the spotted bullfrog skin amidst the onions and bell peppers. After filling up on amphibians, we hit our last stop, which was the dock on the other side of the river. That didn't take long, and I decided to go to the top of the Oriental Pearl--Jack said he was a little frightened so he took a rain check. The view was amazing. All around in the near vicinity there were skyscrapers. Beyond those it was more huge buildings as far as you could see. After hitting that stop I then took a bus to the train station and headed back to Beijing. I met a guy named Drew, but he told me to call him Breaky. I thought that was a pretty funny name, but he said "Drew" translates to something very bad in Chinese. We had a great conversation, and of course he wanted to know all about me. I asked him if he had ever seen Yao Ming, who lives in Shanghai. He told me about 8 years back he saw him at a World of Warcraft convention. Yao apparently likes to play (as most Chinese do) and Breaky was the number one ranked player in Shanghai at the time. He said he knew who Yao was but at the time he wasn’t that famous. It's hard to picture Yao, all 7'5" of him, huddled around a computer. On another note, I slept really well that night.