Hello again, This post goes out to Chase Gregory who apparently told my mother that I haven't been posting enough. Thus, properly guilt tripped, I am back to writing. I will attempt to make this my extra-long-catch-up-post and then update more frequently. That probably won't happen, but it's the thought that counts... Right?

I have been pretty busy lately, Two weeks ago my parents came into town so I spent all of my time with them. It was great to see them again in person rather than on skype, and it was a blast to show them around Shanghai, as I have come to know it, and get to spend some quality time.

Last week were my midterms for my Chinese classes. Since my parents came the week before, I pretty much did not study anywhere near as much as I should have... But I did fine anyway, and I remembered why I used to actually enjoy finals week in high school: You go in for two hours in the morning and then essentially have a free day.

Megan and I decided to put our free day to good use and go see some part of Shanghai that we would never go to otherwise. Megan remembered looking out the side of a metro and seeing a cool looking area, so we went to the metro, looked at the map, and picked a stop that we thought was somewhere near that area, and just got off.

Shanghai did not develop like a normal city would. Usually cities develop from the center outwards, with the new replacing the old, and so on. However, Shanghai didn't work that way. One of the results of having the Chinese government structured the way it is, is that the government can pretty much point and say" I would like a huge, modern, beautiful, apartment complex right there." "Make it so." And a portion of old shanghai is then removed to make way for said complex. One of the side effects is that there are random pockets of old Shanghai that are left untouched.

The are that Megan and I ended up in was one such area. We wandered into a tiny winding road that ran between really tiny little one or two room homes that were kind of attached. I did not have my camera at the time, but I would like to go back and take pictures to post. We realized that the road we were on was not really a road so much as it was the hallway of an apartment complex. It really was fascinating to me how the people were living. From their homes you could look up and see the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, but yet they did not have running water... I am pretty sure we were the first westerners to wander through that are, if not the first foreigners some of the people there had ever seen. The fact that the people who lived in the are were staring at us made me feel better about staring into their homes.

We had all been kind of avoiding eating too much of the street food in Shanghai, if only because so many people we know (mostly in the states) keep telling us that eating it was tantamount to death, but we decided that since the majority of the population of Shanghai actually lives on the stuff, it really can't be deadly if you choose carefully and avoid meat that has been sitting out etc. So when we turned a corner and were in the middle of a massive street devoted entirely to street food we decided that since we were exploring the "real" shanghai we would eat accordingly, and munched our way from one end to the other.

The food was completely amazing (for the record, I didn't get sick) and I really enjoyed trying all the different flavors. We started with buns, and then we say a man with a massive wok of boiling oil who was pulling dough into super thin strands and cooking them. We pretty much had to buy some, if only out of respect for the man's dough pulling skills. If you have ever been to a Chinese restaurant in the states and gotten little crunchy fried noodle things, these were everything that those were supposed to be... and so much more. They were hot and fresh and delicious.

We finished up our walk with some dumplings. Megan and I each picked one up, started walking, and bit into them... Just in time to realize that they had exploded broth/juice out of the other end. Fortunately, since China is a country that never has paper goods when you need them, both Megan and I had, by that point, learned the important lesson that: no good Chinese girl ever leaves the house without her pocket sized pack of tissues, and were prepared.

Saturday the five of us and our host families went to Wu Zhen. Wu Zhen is an ancient Chinese town built on canals. They call it the Venice of the East. I wouldn't go quite that far, but it was definitely a great trip. It was fun to travel with all of the host parents and siblings as well.

We took a bus there in the morning and then went straight to lunch. Lunch was a massive affair. We ate and ate and ate and ate, and then we ate. And then desert came, and it was sugar cane which was delicious, and we were really happy because, a) we really liked the sugar cane, and b) it meant that lunch was over. Or so we thought... then the rest of the main courses came...

My favorite parts of the town were the boat ride and the bamboo forest. After lunch we got onto a little boat (think Chinese style gondola) and went down the canals of the city. It was a beautiful ride, and fascinating as well. One of the things that I find the most interesting about China is that people live in all of their preserved ancient towns. They may convert half the city to museums, and channel bus loads of tourists through everyday, but that doesn't change the fact that there are parts of the tourist attractions that are still viable living quarters, and in a country with a population as large as China, that means that they will be inhabited.

The second thing that I enjoyed a lot was the tiny little piece of bamboo forest preserved in the center of the town. When I wandered into even that little patch of bamboo I could understand the inspiration for movies like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

A lot of the homes in Wu Zhen had been converted into Museums which were a lot of fun to walk around. They had a wood carving museum, an ancient bed museum, and a museum of old currency, local and foreign, on top of the restored library and firehouse.

After that trip, I will never in my life question what my host mother can contain in her bag. She got on the bus in the morning with a slightly larger than middle sized tote bag. She proceeded to pull out breakfast 2: Juice boxes of coffee for all of us, two boxes of poky, a large bag of chips, and a large bag of tangerines. I thought that that meant that the tote was empty except for the usual stuff one would carry: wallet, keys, phone... How wrong I was. Throughout the day she pulled probably a weeks worth of food from that bag including everything from a chocolate bar that my French teacher had introduced me to in France (yay Bueno Bars) to individual hermetically sealed packs of beef jerky and duck.

My Host dad just called me for lunch, so:

To Be Continued