January 19 - Another Day in Shanghai

We have just returned from our final apartment hunting visits.  We have our short list of apartments… we have put our first three choices in our want priority… there is no guarantee we will get the one we want. Each apartment is owned by individual landlords, so there are negotiations that will occur with the landlord, then all the corporate signatures…..so wish us luck.  It is a great apartment and even has a deck so I can do a bit of gardening… maybe even have some tomatoes and other container veggies.  It would give me some of the things I like to do… digging in the dirt!!!

Here are some snaps from our first choice.. It is really different from my style and decor.. most of the apartments we visited were very modern and contempory.... a real change for us.

Well… we made it to Walmart this afternoon.  The email was not far from the truth.  We did not see any crocs with melons in their mouths… perhaps they are not in season.  We also did not see anything that looked like the table of ‘Guess What?’   But there are open cases of unwrapped meat and lots of seafood that I was not exactly sure what it was… and the signs were in Chinese.  There are a number of displays of foods that I had no idea what I was looking at… clearly cuisine of the Chinese culture.  But one thing was for sure….it was bustling like our US Walmart’s at Christmas rush times.  It was a two story Walmart.  The food was on the lower or main level and everything else was upstairs.  You had a wide selection of appliances and motor bikes in addition to the normal fare available.

We left the local Walmart and headed to the other side of the river to west Shanghai.  We will be living and working in the PuDong District which is the east side of Shanghai just across the river.  So we headed over the bridge to see the older side of Shanghai. Shanghai, although one would think it is an old city with lots of Chinese architecture, it was occupied by the French until 1814, I am told.  The driver took us to an old Shanghai market… it looked like what you expect China to look like, with the pagoda type architecture of reds and gold.  It was a cluster of shops filled with Chinese clothes and people that follow you around trying to sell you something or show you something.  I had a lady follow me a block and a half trying to sell me a RMB10 watch…. That is Chinese currency and with an exchange rate of about 6.5, the watch was dirt cheap! 

The highlight for Michael was that he found a Dairy Queen….yes that’s right…. a Dairy Queen!!!!  He was in hog heaven…. A Blizzard with his name on it… Much to our surprise… our guide said that there are Dairy Queen’s all over Shanghai…. Who would have guessed that, particularly when we do not have them in the northern states. But this discovery sealed the deal with Michael!!