Day 18 to 22: Hangzhou to Shanghai

Hello from Shanghai! We made it! I'm having a great time in Shanghai. We have been here for 3 days already and have already seen a large amount of the city, but this place is huge! And humid! Right when you step outdoors, your body sweats from the humidity, and it also rains every 3 hours or so, but it's worth it since this place is pretty great.

In Shanghai, we visited the Bund, Yuyuan Garden, the French Concession, Jing'an Temple area, walked up and down Nanjing Lu many times, and also went to the Shanghai Museum. We average around 4 miles of walking per day, I'd say, since this place is so big. Our first full day here, we just lounged around in the morning and did some quite necessary laundry, our first time in almost 3 weeks. We were getting really disgusting by then. But now we have clean clothes!

We have also eaten pretty good food here so far. We ate steamed pork dumplings at Yuyuan Garden (shao long baos!) and had great dim sum on Nanjing Xilu today, ate some Thai food and had dinner with Andrew's friend tonight at a diner-type place; I had a West Coast burger with avocado that was delicious! Last night we had dinner at a place called Chamate and the beef curry I had was so good, almost as good as my mom's. And we also found an amazing bakery called 85 Cafe that has the most delicious baked goods for super cheap.

Tomorrow we're meeting up with the friends from dinner tonight to eat more shao long baos at Yuyuan Garden- we're going to have an eating contest to see who can eat the most in 1 hour. I'm hoping to make it to at least 15 so we'll see- I'll update you on what happens. They're the most delicious little dumplings filled with pork and a little soup, delectable! Stephanie, Andrew, and I did the saltine cracker challenge a couple days ago (trying to eat 6 crackers in 1 minute), I couldn't even finish 3 in a minute, Steph made it to 1.5, and Andrew did 6 crackers in 1 minute and 15 seconds. We'll have a rematch soon. But in general, Shanghai is food heaven- you can find any kind of food here, and usually decently priced.

Oh, Hangzhou was also amazing! I don't remember when the last time I was able to update on that, but our last day in Hangzhou was so fun. We rented bikes and biked around the river for just 1 kuai for two hours!! That was a lot of fun and reminded me of when I had my bike in Chengdu. We biked all around West Lake and had fun just getting to move around on a bike.

It's time to go, but I'll try and update pictures tomorrow! Hope all is good! Miss you all and am thinking of you!

-b