some catch up

Alright, I haven't been able to post since Tuesday so I'll give y'all a run down of the past few days:

-Wednesday, 08.29-
Early in the morning we visited the Shanghai Museum, where they had a lot of old Chinese artifacts like old currency, furniture and jade. It was really cool to be able to see all the artifacts I had studied when I took History of Chinese Art about a year ago. There was also a collection of currency from the Silk Road which I thought was really cool. I think my favorite exhibit was the ethnic minorities and masks - the collection was pretty extensive and I had never seen anything like it.
After the Shanghai Museum we went to the Shanghai Art Museum, which featured some really cool modern paintings using traditional Chinese ink brush media. We were on our own for lunch, so the lot of us students went to Yunnan Road (which is a famous street filled with restaurants) and got some food. Luckily our good-ole GTF Edwin was with us, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to order anything...

In the afternoon we took a taxi over to the art district - what an amazing place. I mean, it wasn't really nice or anything, in fact it was quite rundown and grungy, but what better a place for artists? There was a lot of cool graffiti around there, something that's very rare in China. What surprised me though was that there was little to no graffiti that I saw written in Chinese - it was all Western language. Still, very cool. We walked around a bunch of studio galleries and got a good look at the Chinese avant-garde scene - there was some pretty amazing stuff. Afterwards we visited a famous Chinese artist (I think his name was Wen Di....not sure) who has gained international acclaim through his hair calligraphy art. Got some tea, took a taxi back, had dinner, and then a few of us went to visit the ritzy business bar district. A little too classy even for my tastes, but we were able to find a trendy club called the ARK and had a round of drinks while watching some live music. All in all another fun day in Shanghai.

-Thursday, 8.30-
What an interesting day. We had to wake up at the crack of dawn to catch the 6am bus to Watertown, a historical town with 200 year old buildings built along a canal about 2 hours from Shanghai. IT WAS SO HOT AND HUMID. We split up for a little bit before we had to meet back for lunch, so my crew explored and found some breakfast. I got to practice some of my Chinese and we had these amazingly good noodles for only 10 yuan each (~$1.30).
Then things got interesting. We crossed over a bridge through our exploration and noticed that it didn't look like Watertown anymore. Instead of backtracking, I asked for directions, while the locals just laughed at us. Then a midget came up to us, showed us a handful of coins and pointed to our soda bottles. Confused, we didn't know what to do. Then he just took our almost empty sodas and ran off laughing and showed all the locals he just took our bottles. Classic. My guess is that he wanted the bottles to recycle and collect the money.
So after that incident, we kept wandering and NOT backtracking, leading us further and further away from where we were supposed to be. Throughout our two hours of being almost completely lost, we saw a lot of old buildings and duck farms, all while getting weird looks and hollers from locals that probably very seldom see foreigners. Eventually, we made it to the highway and to a hotel gate, where I asked how to get back. Turns out we weren't TOO horribly far away. When we finally got back with the rest of the group, I explored Watertown a little more and got a cool little personal stamp carved. Then we had some lunch, but I was too tired and hot from our little adventure to eat much. Afterwards we toured the east side of the Watertown, saw the 1000 Hours of Labor bed among other things, saw the traditional method for imprinting textile patterns into cloth, and visited a famous local distillery, where I got to sample some of the rice wine. Woo! Strong stuff.
Slept a little on the ride back and got some delicious dinner with the guys. Afterwards we waited for the girls to get back from their dinner so we could all go out to the bars, but they took too long so we left without them. Edwin asked some locals where a good local bar scene was (where we went the night before was kind of a business/ tourist trap) and took the subway over there. We found some really cool bars. The first one seemed a little for the older people, with some appropriate live music to accompany it. We then went to this dance bar club with some cool music but it was really dark inside and a lot of people were just sitting down looking all drugged up or something. The last bar we went to was called the 88 Bar, which was by far the most fun. It had the cheapest drinks of all the bars too. Had some B-52's, a couple cocktails and whatnot, and learned how to play this crazy dice game that the Chinese play in almost all the bars. Joel had an entire conversation with one of the barmaids by pointing to sentences in his Chinese Phrases book, and the barmaid would respond by doing the same thing. I thought that was pretty funny. There was also this really drunk guy dancing in his stool across the room, and the barmaids had to wipe his mouth and take his drinks away, haha. Once we were done, we took a taxi back and called it a night!

-Friday, 8.31-

This was our first free day to sleep in, explore and work on our Shanghai project (hence why we went out drinking the night before). Our group went to the art shop street and got a bunch of inexpensive art supplies for our projects. Afterwards, some went to go find the Silk Market at Chi Pu while the rest of us went to work. At lunchtime, I went to a street vendor and got some grilled lamb on a stick. It was really good, but I learned a valuable lesson: eat your meat on a stick next to the stand like the locals. I walked around with mine while eating them and as I passed some beggars with monkeys they stole my food right out of my hand. What assholes! I wasn't really in a situation to fight back either, so I just walked away hungry and pissed off. Eventually, I ended up eating at this hole-in-the-wall place called the Chicken Pot. Unfortunately my Chinese is really bad and had a lot of trouble trying to order anything. Luckily, one of the customers knew some English and helped me order a chicken hot pot and a beer. What a nice young lady. Satisfied, I went back to the hotel, took a nap, and got to work on my project.
For dinner a small group of us went out to this restaurant with live animals displayed in the front. Jesse and I saw a snake! And then of course we ordered it. It was really good but there wasn't a lot of meat on it...not too surprising though. What WAS surprising was the price of that one dish: 450 yuan...that's about $60! After the mess of the situation we sorted things out, went back to the hotel and I finished my Shanghai project that night.