Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 7

Again, a pretty normal week at work. Friday I took a few hours off in the afternoon and decided to treat myself to a facial. I was given a business card for someone who does facials in the building next to us, so after a few email exchanges, I had a 4pm appointment. Her name is Anna and she is Russian/Latvian, lived in Germany, married an American and lived in Ohio, and has been here in Shanghai for about 6 years or so. Fromour talk, she works (or worked) in some of the spa's specifically in the hotels here locally. She has a room in her apartment setup for facials and so it is VERY convenient. Her prices are slightly less than in the US, so definitely not "cheap". But the facial was quite nice so it was worth it. Was also a nice way to end the week.

Saturday, we headed over to get Tom his haircut then walked/metro'd down to the Shanghai Museum stop to where Tom's Tailor is (yes, that is actually the name of the place). We had ordered a new Sports jacket for Tom and a skirt and shirt (casual) for Susan. The jacket was perfect .. great size, nice quality, looks really nice. The skirt fit nicely but the shirt there was a minor problem .... the tie at the waist was in the back instead of the front, so they're going to fix that and I'll pick it up later in the week. It's on the way back from work, so no issues picking it up later. We then grabbeda cab over to the Biyun Road area and we were looking for this little European bakery for lunch (we had a coupon). Unfortunately, we didn't find the restaurant so we grabbed a sandwich at a place next door to where it was supposed to be, and then walked over to Carrefour for our "stock up" shopping.

For dinner, we headed over to a Sichuan restaurant that is in one of the travel books. The food was quite good although a bit on the spicy side, which is to be expected. It was a very nice restaurant on the inside, here is a picture. Up at the top of the stairs it looks like they have some small private rooms for small parties of people.

Sunday, we headed over to the Puxi side on the ferry and went to the other fabric market. We were supposed to pick up a shirt for Tom and another skirt for Susan .. but neither was there and so we'll end up going back over there next week. At least it is pretty easy to get to.

From there, we headed over to check out 2 restaurants: one Indian and one Balinese/Indonesian, for lunch. We decided on the Indian restaurant, and so here is picture of the inside. They have both normal tables and also the short-tables where you sit on these big mats. We did the normal tables. Really nice food!

These two restaurants were in a very unique little area. The entrance is just a number on a main road, but once you go inside, it is a maze of little alleyways with tons of little shops and restaurants. All of them are in "shikumen" which are traditional brick row-houses. The word Shikumen literally means "stone gate", and it is an architectural style for residential buildings in Shanghai combining Western and Chinese elements that first appeared in the 1860s. At the height of their popularity, there were 9000 shikumen-style buildings in Shanghai, although many now have been torn down to build high-rise apartments or large apartment blocks.

Here is the sign for the restaurant that we went to, called "Lotus Land" but another picture trying to capture the little area of alleyways.

A little store on the corner, these are all over. The sizes of the store vary from something you can walk into that is semi long and narrow, so multi-room stores that look more like still the house, to something that to me resembles a hallway closet, almost not big enough to fit more than 1 person in.

I tried to capture how narrow these are, you can see the row of seats on the right-hand side and really just enough for 1 or two people to fit by on the left.

And this is how it looks form the outside. This picture was taken from across the street from the entrance. It has just the number, 248. Normally the addresses are like "248 Dongmen Road" which is a very western form of an address. These addresses all are a little different because the 248 is not the building number, it is literally the alley number, and then each store or restaurant has another number to indicate which number on that alley. There are 3 or 4 of these "alley entrances" off the main road that all go into the maze of intersecting alleys behind.
Sunday was a very hazy or smoggy day, could barely see things. But we decided to take a walk on the Pudong side of the river where they also have built up a park with a walkway and restaurants. Here are a couple pictures of the river, with the Bund on the other side of the river.

There are quite a few trees in this area also, making it a little park area.

It was very hot, so we stopped at Haagen Daz for ice cream, deciding finally to share the Very Berries, which is a smoothie with ice cream and sorbet on top.

After ice cream, we noticed this little TINY McDonalds thing, where you can get a soft-serve code for 3 Yuan (less than 50 cents) ... I was tempted to get MORE ice cream for that price!!

Then back to the apartment complex, where we decided to capture a few more pictures of the pond area, looking from the far side where we don't walk very often.

Our two swans were out and about today. We have two of them that seem to be part of the complex.

On the side of the pond there is a little house ... not sure if it is the duck house or the swan house ...we've never seen anyone going in or out.

There is also a little family of baby ducks .. not sure where their parents are, but they tend to play in the pond and sometimes get chased by the swans.

Dinner Sunday night was at a greek restaurant in The Cool Docks area that we'd eaten at before, called Mythos. They took us up about 5 sets of stairs to get to the top floor. We had a nice view of the river, and the inside ceiling was nicely decorated ... reminded us a little of the colors in Santorini.

Now the walk home....we left the restaurant and headed back to the ferry terminal. We got near and thought the ferry was getting ready to go, so here we run to the terminal, use our Transportation cards to go through and pay the fare and then got on the ferry. But we looked around and it looked odd inside. There are 3 ferries that all go across near the same locations. Two that go from near our apartment to the other side, one going to the North side of the Bund and the other to the South side of the Bund. There is also another that leaves from a complex 3 complexes south of ours and goes straight across to the South side of the Bund. We knew that the first 2 looked different inside: the North-side ferry is all seats and doesn't allow vehicles but the South bund one has SOME seats but allows bikes and scooters. This one when we got on, there were NO seats .. so I'm like .. oh no, this must be the OTHER ferry! I also thought something was up with the price of the ferry as well, which was a bit lower than normal. So we get back off that ferry and walk a little further up and find the ferry terminal we want. But .. it is CLOSED! Oh no, all dark, no ferry. Darn, they must stop operating prior to 8pm on Sunday night. So now we could go back to the other ferry we were just on, but then that is a long walk from where it lands on the Pudong side to our apartment. We know this because Tom walked from that complex a few weeks back and it was a very long walk. So instead, we walked up to the North-side ferry. However, it seemed like that walk lasted forever ... probably longer than if we would have walked home from the wrong ferry. But anyway .. we finally got home ... very tired, but we got our cardio for the day.