Old and New

To celebrate the 10^th anniversary of Shanghai Jazz English school, the staff took all the English teachers to a small river town called Zhujiajiao in the morning and then to the tallest building in China later that day. It was SUCH a nice gesture of them to let us have a day off and take us to do touristy things in our city.

Old

At 8:30 we all loaded a big bus and made about an hour journey to the river town. Zhujiajiao is known as the “Venice of Shanghai”. I was so excited to get out of Shanghai and see more of China. (Fun fact: Last season on the Amazing Race, the contestants went here! Obviously, I was excited :) My mom and I are Amazing Race nerds).

At Zhujiajiao we had a ticket to do everything in the city. It’s amazing that this little city is now a tourist attraction where you have to pay to get in! We had an English-speaking tour guide named Tony who gave us a bunch of history about the town and places. We visited a large garden, an old teahouse, a temple and were able to take a boat ride down the canals (my favorite part)! We also did quite a bit of walking through the city streets looking at all the shops filled with food and trinkets.

pictures from the boat ride

The city was so beautiful! The only sad part about it was that it was very “foggy’ that day. I like to be polite about the “fog” which in truth is smog aka pollution. Yuck.  After our tour we had a very nice lunch. This building was reserved for government officials and such, but the owner of our company was able to get us to eat there. It was some pretty crazy food. One of the dishes being snails, which the Chinese girls were calling them “screws”.

 

Hmmmm To eat these guys you had to stick a toothpick in the opening of the shell and pull out the “meat”, being careful you only pulled so far so that the “poop” separated from the body…. Awesome… haha I had Cissy, one of the Chinese teachers make sure I didn’t have the “poop”. And then, I ate the snail! I will try anything once. It wasn’t too bad. It really didn’t taste like anything.

group picture!

the classic jump picture, but BETTER!

New

After lunch, we made our way to Pudong to see the Shanghai World Financial Center. It is the tallest building in China. 

the SWFC

When Jennifer was here, we visited the second tallest which is right next to it, the Jin Mao. The view of the SWFC would have been incredible if the “fog” wasn’t so awful that day. You couldn’t see anything! Nonetheless, it was so amazing being up that high. 

They had a glass floor again, but nothing compared to the Pearl Tower floor. The girls and I took some funny pictures.  I want to go back one night when the “fog” isn’t bad to see the view, but I don’t know if it’s worth the 150kuai (equiv. $25. By the way, the school paid for everything!)

obviously, we were pretending to be falling :)

Overall, it was such a great day seeing some more of China and being with all my friends. It was way better than being in the classroom all day.