DATELINE:SHANGHAI - end of the Official China Tour

Yeah, so today was the final day of our official tour of China. I’ll still be lingering for the rest of the week, as we depart for May’s hometown Dongxing, in Guangxi tomorrow (bright an’ early!! Flight is like 7am) Anyway today we got up, showered and headed out for the day’s duties. After visiting a Silk factory (May and I sat out on the bus, and read our books) our group checked out the Yu Garden, a nice little nature park – more of the same temple-y looking stuff we’d seen, smooshed into the middle of a very modern city. The place was very ornate, very beautiful, with its ponds of fat-looking fish that kept sticking their heads above water in hopes of getting some delectable morsels (they were not too lucky, today). It was a gross, rainy grey day, so not too psyched to be trodding about it in it too much, but it did sort of enhance the mood of the places we visited (made for some cool looking photography, at least!) After this, passed through some crazy bustling marketplace selling all manner of items. Clothes, TShirts, little flashy wheel-things you could put in your shoes, lots of crazy touristy junk and trinkets. We grabbed our final “official tour meal” as a group, it was nothing extraordinary but definitely one of the better we’ve eaten. Then headed out to get a mini-cruise around the river that runs through the town, it kinda stunk since it was raining so it wasn’t very conducive to sitting upstairs in the open-air viewing area, also the city was shrouded in fogginess. Add to this, the general exhaustion we were collectively feeling – the cruise wrapped up and we returned to the hotel, our group dwindled a bit and we bade our tour guide fairwell.

Later that night a few of our group went out for dinner at a local place, we had a very good meal (I got some, err, interesting pictures of the menu items with my camera). We decided to forego eating Worms or Dogmeat, and went for Bees instead. Yep, we ate fried bees! They tasted like Tater Tots. Headed back to the hotel after, i had a couple of drinks at the club inside and tried to chat it up with the locals (their limited English was much better than my severely limited Chinese). I met a girl who told me she was the Devil.. aren't they all though? I got back with my group for a farewell drink, then we said goodbye as we parted ways and headed for bed.

Now it is Tuesday morning, I am sitting at Cheer Way in the airport waiting for our flight outta Shanghai. I am sad to leave this place, Shangha is a cool and interesting place - other than recounting the events "then we did this, then we did that" I have much to say about the people and environment here, more on that later..