Furmished, Part 2 and It's Not the Same

5 July 2010
Grace, our tour director, told me I would receive a 6:30 a.m. wake-up call so I would have time to shower, dress and eat breakfast before our 7:45 orientation. I woke up to go to the bathroom and found that it was 7:23 a.m.!! After freaking out, I called Grace (no answer) and then the front desk, where the Chinese lady on duty assured me that it was 7:25 a.m. I took a fast shower and rushed upstairs to the restaurant. Only the staff was there. I asked the guys what time it was, pointing to my wrist and showing them the time on my phone. No one had a watch and there were no clocks anywhere, so finally the waiter found the charge card machine which showed the current time as 5:40 a.m. Although I had reset my phone upon arrival according to instructions from the pilot of the airplane, somehow I ended up two hours ahead. I went back to sleep for an hour.

Shanghai is beautiful. Parts of it look like Chinatown San Francisco, but mostly it looks like any enormous American or European city with modern buildings, thousands of skyscrapers and drivers trying to run you down if you dare to step into the street. There are many more Volkswagens (Passats!) than any other make of car, and I did see one Maserati. Our hotel, just across from the Wusong River, is in the Bund, the former “Wall Street” of the foreign powers. Adjacent stores include Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Cartier, Chanel and Prada.

We visited the beautiful Yuyuan Garden, built during the Ming Dynasty, a carpet factory/workshop, where I saw a design I loved, but did not buy (yay me!), had lunch Chinese-style, took a paper cutting class at the community center (I didn’t make the tiger, but I could if I had better scissors), had Chinese dinner American-style, and watched Chinese Acrobats.

[I don’t care that I’m having fun or how nice this city is, I’m writing on Word because I cannot open my blog or Facebook in China; not even with a proxy website. That’s a big deal, particularly this day after American Independence Day. I do take our freedom and civil liberties for granted. ]