We’re on our way to Shanghai – our last city before heading home. Even though it is raining pretty hard, the locals are still riding bikes and scooters to work. Many of scooters are actually electric bikes with small motors for automatic travel and pedals for manual control.
...It’s 2½ hours later and we’re still in Hangzhou. Evidently all the rain is causing the roads to flood, including the entrance ramps to the expressway. But our driver is fed up, so he just drove through the high water and got us up onto the expressway (hope our luggage in the lower compartment survived).
We stopped at another rest area. Everyone is desperately searching for American snacks. Bruce is inside looking for granola bars, but the closest thing he could find was some kind of sesame cookie with black bean paste. There was a sign in the parking lot that I thought was very funny. It read, “Please check the number of passengers before leaving.”
When we finally got to Shanghai, we went straight to lunch at a Dai Minority themed restaurant. The waitresses wear Dai minority clothing and every few minutes the girls do traditional Dai minority dances on the restaurant stage. Unfortunately, we arrived too late to see the dancing, but the food was good.
Our next stop was a shopping trip to Nanjing Road. This area looked a lot like Times Square (lots of chain stores) only without the traffic. Shanghai has a wonderful subway system, so there are a lot fewer cars on the road. Plus you have to pay a lot of money in taxes each year if you want to drive a car.
We stopped at the Bund, a pedestrian plaza along the water. We saw the Monument to the People’s Heroes, a concrete structure built to commemorate revolutionary martyrs and those who lost their lives fighting national disasters. The shape is supposed to represent 3 rifles leaning against each other.
Our final activity was a cruise down the Yangtze River. We all laughed, because our ship looked like a Mississippi riverboat. This cruise was at night, so we got to see the lights on all the downtown buildings.
