last day in Shanghai 1/25/18

It snowed so much today, well it was a lot for Shanghai. We decided to go to the aquarium to avoid the cold. The aquarium was huge and had the largest jellyfish display I have ever seen. The Shanghai Aquarium is also home to the world's longest underwater tunnel. I was pretty excited at first however once we got into the tunnel we discovered that you had to stand on this moving walk way that moved super slow. It about half an hour to get through the tunnel on the moving walkway. After the aquarium we went to the Super Brand Mall to lunch at their food court. It took us a long time to find the food court because there were two separate basements and you had to make sure you were on the right escalator that led to the food court. After lunch we tried to go home on the subway but it was so crowded due to the weather that we ended up waiting an hour at the mall before trying to head home. At night it was still snowing so Nick, dad and I walked down to the Bund to take pictures. While we were there we built a snowman and everyone stopped to take pictures . These two Chinese dudes saw us building it and decided to build their own. They must have been artist or something because their final snowman was something that resembled Pikachu.

1/26/18
 Today we woke up very early to get to the train station. We took the high speed train over to HuZhou, it was about an hour long ride. The train was very nice and fast. We then took a cab over to our hotel which looked like a large donut on the lake, it was a very nice, fancy hotel. Mom and I were very tired so we took a nap. When we woke up we went to go get lunch in one of the hotels many restaurants. We went to the fancy Chinese one. Then we went to the hot springs that were a part of the hotel. The hot springs were very nice and fancy. They had giant bags in the water that dyed the water colors and made it smell nice, it was basically a tea bag. Then we went back to the hotel and had dinner at their buffet bar. Dad had cold shrimp from the buffet and got sick!

1/27/18
Today we left the Sheraton ( the donut hotel ) and went to NanXun. While we were waiting for the cab to come pick us up Nick and I built a huge snowman in front of the hotel. NanXun is this cute little river town that is over five hundred years old. We had a little bit of difficulty and it took us a while to find our hotel, but once we did it was very nice. The hotel was set up like an old room with canopy beds. It was so old it had its own well. They also had a hot springs. We had lunch and dinner at two different restaurants but ended up ordering and eating the same things- local greens, fish omelet, egg fried rice, minced pork wrapped in tofu skin.

1/28/18
Today we had a full day at the river town. We woke up at around nine and went to have breakfast at a famous noodle place. Then Dad, Nick and I went to go find an ATM, it took a little while and we had to stop a few people on the streets to ask for directions. When we got back to the hotel we went into their hot springs which were extremely nice and hot. Then we walked around the oldest part of the town and got lunch. We spent a couple hours warming up at the hotel before heading out again for dinner. We went to a place that claimed they had pizza but in reality it was meat and cheese on pita bread. The restaurant was a very cute coffee shop that also sold pizza. Mom found these awesome pineapple bars that are really good and Nick and I ended up eating around 20 of them.


1/29/18
Oh man today was an adventure. We had to wake up early because we were leaving NanXun, so we got up, had breakfast, and got packed up. There was a miscommunication when getting a cab and we ended up with someone who was like the private driver for the hotel. He took us to the train station where we waited around for about an hour. The train ride was around 15 minutes long so we didn't have too long to ride. We got off in DeQing and found a cab to take us up to MoGanShan. The cab was very small but the driver was determined to fit all of our stuff in , we ended up getting two cabs each for 200 yuan. They took us up the mountain and dropped us off outside our hotel. We were a little confused at first because there was no one around and it looked like our hotel was closed. But we followed the signs anyway and started walking up the steps. About halfway up a lady appeared and started asking us why we were there and we explained that we were staying in the hotel. She then informed us that the hotel was not open and then called someone. She left us and then a man walked around the corner and looked at our papers for our reservation and then started making a bunch of phone calls. Then two more people came out and started taking our bags so we just followed them. They led us into the lobby of a different hotel to stay warm while they figured out what to do with us. We stayed there for about twenty minutes while everyone was calling people trying to figure things out. Then a man came to get us and led us to a very nice dining room where they gave us a huge lunch. They gave us about 7 different dishes.  After lunch the first guy that came to help us led us up the mountain to another random hotel that he said belonged to his friends. Now we are staying there and it is very nice and pretty.

27-29/1/2018

We left the fancy hotel at 9 and took a taxi to a water village. The village is kinda like Venice with canals and bridges. The hotel was supposedly 200 years old. The next day(28/1) we ate breakfast at a noodle bar and it was very good. Then we went to the hot spring that was in our hotel and hung out there for a while. Then we walked up the canals until we reached the end and then we walked back to hotel. The next day(29/1) we left the hotel around 9 and caught the train at like 11. When we got to the hotel we discovered that it was under renovation so the owners brought us to some other resort for lunch. After that they brought us to their friends hotel and that's where we're going to stay.

Saved by the "mayor" of Miaoqian Village.

Today was one of the days that reconfirms your faith in people and also reconfirms that travel is a good experience.  We travelled to an area in China called Moganshan. You can see our exact location at 30.592795, 119.844341. It is a mountainous area covered in bamboo. Huge bamboo forests. Supposedly the bamboo forest scenes in Crouching Tiger were filmed here. Original plan was to spend a few days hiking in the bamboo forests. Unfortunately they have had a really unprecedented amount of snow here. A lot of the bamboo is bent all the way to the ground. We were able to get a cab ride up here but there was still lots of snow on the roads and lots of bamboo down on the roads. Then things got even more unfortunate. Turns out many of the guest houses up here close in the winter. I guess I didn’t know that when booking our rooms back in August with Agoda.com. No one from Unique Resort Moganshan or Agoda every contacted me to say that the resort would be closed during the time I booked. So the cab drivers dropped us off and we started walking up the steps to our guest house. Only to meet some lady coming down the steps who told us it was closed.  She then made a phone call and some guy showed up. He took a look at our reservations and started making a bunch of phone calls. Eventually he led us to a nearby hotel. This one is called Map of Mogan Life. You can find it online on Agoda. Its stunningly beautiful. It was clearly shut down too but the hotel staff was there essentially working on cleaning and reorganizing the place in preparation for the spring season. They let us sit in the grand main room. Its a three story vaulted space with book shelves full of books and giant works of calligraphy running up the three story walls. I'll try to go back tomorrow and take some pictures. They offered us tea and sunflower seeds and longans. They asked if we wanted lunch and said it would be $18 per person. Seemed high for China but since we had no where else to go we said yes. Clearly the chef was in the house because we had 6 really fancy courses like a banquet; chicken soup, beef with wintermelon stew, crispy fried shrimp with peanuts, steamed fish, and two vegetable dishes with vegetables they apparently harvested from their garden under the snow. Totally worth every penny. During this time there were apparently all kinds of phone calls being made on our behalf.  After lunch the original guy came back. We don’t know who he is but we decided to say he was the mayor of this little village. He told us he had found us a place to stay. He led us up the hill to another guest house. This one is called Cloud Mirror and is also very beautiful. It looks like in the summer it would be awesome with mountain bikes and picnic areas and a pool.  They checked us in and told us we didn’t have to pay for rooms but we would have to pay for meals. Apparently the “mayor” made a bunch of phone calls and it sounds like the owner of the place we were supposed to stay is going to collect the money we paid to Agoda and then pass it on to the owners of this guest house in turn. So we have an absolutely beautiful room with a view of snow and bamboo covered mountain sides.  Only problem is we will probably run out of cash before our stay is up if we are spending $70 per meal so we may have to run down into the city to find an ATM. No ATM up here. 

This area looks like it would be amazing in the summer. Beautiful hiking trails and mountain biking.  Major fail on my part taking us to a summer resort in January but in some ways it turned out for the best. Just like in Nanxun we pretty much have the place to ourselves. There is a hiking trail behind our resort called "Ancient Road Through the Forest." We hiked about a quarter mile up. We had to walk through snow that was 4 to 12 inches deep the whole way. It runs next to a stream through forested hillsides. It almost seems like hiking in Colorado until you realize that the tall trees are actually gigantic timber bamboo. They look a bit like pine trees from a distance and up close they have trunks like a good sized aspen tree.  After the hike we came home and had dinner.  Four courses this time at Cloud Mirror; chicken soup, tomato omelet, and two other veggie dishes from the snowed under gardens. Not sure what this one will cost since they are just running a tab for us. I'm going to hitch into the nearest town with an ATM tomorrow and max out the ATM card! More hiking after that.

Sign says "Beware of snake" Not a problem today

That's all bamboo behind me

Bamboo the size of telephone poles!

 The kids are a couple of days behind with their entries. I'll have them do a single combined Huzhou entry tomorrow night if we have good internet access in Moganshan. It turns out the snow storm went on for a couple of more days. According to several people this is the most snow they have seen in at least 10 years. We left the ultramodern Sheraton Huzhou(see my last post) and took a cab to Nanxun water village. This is a small village in the center of Nanxun city. Its all interconnected with tiny alleys and canals. The canals connect to the Chinese Grand Canal which actually ran all the way from Beijing to Hangzhou. Nanxun is kind of like a Chinese version of Venice as you will see in the huge list of pictures I'm about to post.  Its considered one of the most scenic areas in China and is often over run with tourists. In our case the snow storm meant it was almost deserted.  We are staying at Shangyuge Hotel.  Our cab drivers had a lot of trouble finding it. They were driving all around and finally gave up and called the hotel. Turns out you can't just drive to the front door. Its in the no vehicles section of the old village. So the hotel staff walked through the snow to the gates of the village and then walked back with us.
  The village itself is interconnected by many stone bridges over the canals. The canals are lined with shops and people's houses. There are many stores catering to tourist with souvenirs and such but also many catering to locals selling produce, baked goods, fish, meat, etc... Its clearly a village people live in as evidenced by the drying fish hanging on their back porches. Many of the building are 400 to 600 years old. Not sure how old our hotel is but its timber framed with a pole and tile roof. No insulation and very drafty. Fortunately every room came with electric heaters. The house is a classic Chinese style with multiple connected courtyards as you go deeper into the house. Rooms are in the walls of the courtyards. There is an actual stone well in the center of the 2nd or 3rd courtyard which is still in use. The furthest back courtyard has a hot springs. It has a stone tub which is clearly modern but I think the spring itself is natural. At least I didn't find any pumps, filters, or heaters anywhere.
 Each room is furnished with what look like real Chinese antiques. The bed is a Chinese style canopy bed.
 We spent two days walking around the village. We would stop and eat and have hot tea or hot fruit juice wherever we wanted. Most of the restaurants had just a few tables and were essentially the front room of people's houses. They would stop whatever they were doing and essentially turn their family room into a restaurant if someone stopped by. I'm betting the place is mobbed with tourists in the spring and summer but it was almost deserted for us. There are several large mansion associated with the village that you can normally tour. These date from its time as a rich village in the middle of the silk trade. Unfortunately with the snow everything was closed so we couldn't tour them.
 What follows is a dump of my favorite pictures from Nanxun. Sorry there are so many

Shangyuge Hotel

Attic room

Well in the courtyard

view from our room

Hot springs in back of Shangyuge Hotel

Boats on the canals

Fish drying on someone's porch

One of many high arched stone bridges

Look at the view from the kitchen of the restaurant where we had breakfast. Its called Two Bridges Noodles and has supposedly been in business for over 100 years

400 year old Chinese Row houses also known as BaiJianLou or 100 room building

Looks like there are Metal Heads even in ancient Chinese villages

We had "pizza" here. Sort of like steak, vegetables, and cheese on pita bread in microwave

Huzhou Sheraton Hot Springs Resort  where an iPad controls all room lights and curtains. The toilet stopped working consistently. It is controlled by a wall touchpad with a dozen buttons. We thought we were hitting the wrong buttons. Turns out it just needed new batteries.

25/1/2018

 Today we woke up and had zhongzi for breakfast. When we were done with breakfast we went to the ShangHai Aquarium. The two coolest parts of the aquarium was probably the world's longest underwater tunnel and the jellyfish display. The tunnel was cool because it felt like it just kept going. and there were a lot of different jellyfish in the jellyfish display. After the aquarium we went to the Bund to see what it looked like in the snow, when my dad thought of the great idea to build a snowman. While we were building the snowman some locals started doing the same thing while others stood by and took pictures. After we were done building our snowman the locals were still building their's so we decided to walk farther up the Bund and come back later. When we came back we saw that the locals had made a snow-Pikachu.

26/1/2018

 Today Dad woke us up at 4 to catch the train to HuZhou. It took us a while to get a taxi that would take us all the way to the train station but we finally found one that would do it. The train was cool, Dad got us 1st class seats so there was lots of legroom. When we got to Huzhou we took a taxi to the hotel. The hotel is very fancy. There are always ten people waiting to help you with anything. After we got settled in we went to a hot spring that had lots of cool pools including red ones, some with rocks in them, and some with waterfalls. After that we went home and went to sleep.

Snow in Shanghai

I guess we ended up in the middle of one of the bigger snow storms in Shanghai in the last several years. Downtown Shanghai got an inch or so of snow on the grass and other other cold areas with a lot of slush everywhere else. Areas a bit west looked like they got several inches of wet slushy snow Its not an area that is used to having snow on the ground and we saw a lot of interesting behavior. In many parts of town and even on the outlying roads we would see teams of people out shoveling the roads. Not the sidewalks or the driveways but the roads! Whole teams of people with grain shovels out shoveling sections of road. There were other teams out with long poles whose only job seemed to be to knock snow off all the trees and bamboo along the roads. The death scooter drivers got less frequent and more careful. I have to say the regular drivers also seemed to become very cautious. People came out on the streets just to take pictures of the snow.
   Since it was snowing and cold we decided to go the Shanghai aquarium. I wasn't sure what to expect since some reviews on trip advisor suggested it wasn't worth the cost, about $25 per person. I was pleasantly surprised.  The first display was on shark conservation. Hopefully it hits home and the Chinese stop eating shark fin soup. After that there were extensive sections on rivers in South America, Asia, and Africa. Then sections on the arctic, open oceans, and coral reefs.  Two of the coolest features were an escalator that went down through a tunnel in a tank and a 150 meter long tunnel through several tanks. They also had the best jelly fish display I've ever seen. Dozens of species in colors you never knew existed in jelly fish.  The only sad part was three rather unhappy looking seals but at least it wasn't Sea World with captive whales.
  In the evening we decided to walk over to the Bund and see what it was like in the snow. There were tons of people there just walking around enjoying the spectacle of the city so rarely covered in snow.  I saw two guys trying to have a snow ball fight. At first I thought maybe we should show them how its done but then I thought we can come up with a better use for the snow. We started rolling big snow balls for a snowman. At first the guys thought we were just making bigger snowballs and they imitated us. Then we started building and decorating the snowman. Before we knew it we had quite a crowd watching us and filming us on their phones. Then one of the spectators jumped in to sculpt arms to replace our stick arms. Finally the two guys that started it all with their snowball fight decided to make their own snowman. They must have been artists of some sort because they ended up sculpting something that looked like Pikachu. Our snowman was the classic 3 ball design but theirs was better.

Somehow in the midst of the biggest snow storm to hit the Shanghai area in years we ended up at the Huzhou Hot Springs resort a few hours outside Shanghai. It has a collection of about 25 hot springs pools under a glass roof. It was great to soak in them and watch the snow outside. They put giant tea bags full of herbs in the pools which dyes them different colors and gives them different smells. Some of them have slices of citrus floating in them. Here are some pictures of the resort, the springs, and the surrounding hillsides

5th day in Shanghai 1/24/18

Today we went to the YuYuan gardens and old town. It was very cold outside so we didn't spend long in the gardens. However when I was there I remembered that I had been there before with my school! It was nice to see a second time. After we got too cold we went to get lunch at a buffet place. The way the place worked was super confusing and we ended up getting some food that was only meant for display, not for eating. After we walked around old town for a few minutes then decided to go to this mall that was filled with strange bizarre stuff. It was mainly all tech stuff so Nick was very happy and excited. Then we went back to the hotel to get caught up with homework.

The kids have made multiple references to eating at food courts in malls so I thought I would talk about that briefly. Its funny because it sounds like we are a bunch of lame travelers afraid to eat in regular places. In truth every morning I walk down to a literal hole in the wall place and order random stuff to go for breakfast in Chinese but mall food courts seem to have taken the place of night markets or street markets here. Plus they are warm and indoors out of the rain. There is literally a mega mall on almost every corner in central Shanghai. Sometimes there are two on opposite corners. These are 7, 8, or even 9 stories tall with hundreds of shops including incredibly high end luxury brands and more regular stuff. All of them have between 1 and 3 stories underground that are almost entirely devoted to food. You can find all kinds of little stands that sell everything from soup dumplings to fried squid to sushi to egg puffs. Everything is made right there and very little of it looks like preprepared fast food or prepackaged stuff just stocked there. Many are like the little stands you would have seen in the night markets.  There are even communal tables like you would find in the night markets. Mixed in are higher end restaurants and even some very fancy looking places. Perhaps the strangest thing is the American chains mixed in. They have recognizable names and logos but otherwise often look completely different. Papa John's looks like a white table cloth Italian restaurant. Taco Bell has a wine list!  Although, as you can see in the attached picture Carl's Jr looks pretty much like a Carl's Jr.  We were having some great soup dumpling sitting right next to the Carl's Jr.

I also wanted to mention all the scooters in town. It looks like almost all the scooters in Shanghai have been converted to electric drive. Many look like they started out as electric scooters but others are clearly gas scooters that have had their guts ripped out and replaced with electric. Even the giant three wheeled motorized bicycles used to haul recycled cardboard have been electrified. Its so universal that when you hear a little gas powered scooter you are surprised. I'm sure this was done to fight the local air pollution. A few million oil burning 2 stroke engines can't be good for the city's air.  That is a great thing but unfortunately that means the scooters are now deadly silent.  That wouldn't be so bad until you experience how they are driven. Scooters go the wrong way on one way streets. They pretty much universally run red lights unless there is a cop directing traffic. They ignore all rules of the road. They ride in the bike lanes. They ride on the side walks.  We call them death scooters and you spend all your time with your head on a swivel looking for silent, stealth scooters coming from any direction. Multiple times per day we are grabbing each other and yanking each other back while yelling, "Look out, Scooter!"

Day 4 in Shanghai

Today was a pretty chill day, we all slept in a lot. After we woke up we got breakfast then went home to do homework. Around 3 o'clock we left and went to go get tickets for an acrobatics show. We had about 3 hours to kill so we went down to a mall to eat  soup dumplings at their food court. We got giant xiao long bao that were so big that they came with a straw.  My mom and I walked into a store that was like a Sally beauty store in a mall to find nail polish. We couldn't find it so we asked the lady and she basically gave us a whole tour of the place. Then when we found the nail polish she then proceeded to take my hand and paint the polish on my fingers. After we chose what we wanted she dragged us over to this little stand just outside the store and said, "how old is your mom?" Mom said,  "I'm 50." Then the lady said, "I'm 60 and I have less eye bags than you!" Then without even asking she put some stuff on her fingers and then just wiped it all around my mom's eye.  Then she said" buy this now and you can get this free" but my mom said "No, I'm fine." The sales lady  said "It'll make you look younger!" but then my mom said "I only look old because I had a bad year, I have cancer." And at this point I'm just trying to breathe because I'm laughing so hard. Then the lady asked, "ohhhh did you get a surgery?" My mom nodded and the lady asked,  "are you good now?" My mom nodded and then the lady asked if my moms boobs were fake but my mom didn't understand and said "yes"and she said, "wow they look good!" Then we left. Dad thinks that if mom said she is 70 years old the saleslady would claim she was 80 years old with less bags under her eyes. After that we went to an acrobat show that was very cool.