More from January 7th...

OK, I'm writing this on the 8th but I'll finish this thought before I take off for company visits. I’m exhausted. I think the time difference and the walking around is catching up. Here’s the rest of the day after I did my little walk about.

We ate breakfast in the Tea Room in the hotel and it was pretty good. I hit the Starbucks near the entrance this morning. God bless Starbucks. Headache gone! Anyway, the Tea Room is going away after today and is going to become an Italian restaurant. Interesting little fact. After that we had some time before we had to meet our tour guides at noon. From there we left for lunch.

We ate lunch at Caihongfang Restaurant. This is a very famous restaurant in Shanghai. It’s been visited by Bill Clinton. The food was good and there was a lot of it.

From lunch we left for our tour of Old Town including Yu Yuan Garden. This was a very cool place and the architecture of the whole place was great. An interesting fact I learned is that the traditional Chinese coins that are round with the square holes in the middle is because the Chinese traditionally believe that heaven is round and the Earth is square. Unfortunately my camera battery died halfway through this so I didn’t get all the pictures I wanted.

Our tour guides also arranged for a tour of a Silk Factory. It was fascinating to learn about how silk is made from when they gather the silk worms in their cocoons to how they extract it and actually create the silk clothing. What’s really funny, and why I wish I had my camera, is how low tech the whole operation was. It was a small room where there were two machines and it was all done manually.

Next we left for dinner at Shanghai Lubolang Restaurant. This was back in the Old Town area. I thought we were going to the dumpling place I mentioned above but we didn’t, although we passed right by it. The food was good but some takes some getting used to. First, there are no seasonings available. Some of the food was bland and the texture was, shall we say...interesting. And I'm a foodie/epicurion/(I like to eat). Lots of meats and fishes with heads attached. If you're a vegetarian, you'll have somewhat limited meal options.

We still got hit by lots of beggars here. It's amazing how aggressive they are. Apparently they were also scoping out some of the guys in the group who had backpacks. It's good to travel in packs and not make yourself a target. What struck me as odd too was how many kids were actually being used to beg for money. I'll get more into that when I have time to give my impression of the city and what I've seen so far.

Our tour guide also arranged for an evening at Eris – International. This is a Chinese acrobatic show. Very impressive. The link is here: http://www.era-shanghai.com/. Very cool show. Although there were a lot of people who were really tired.

I'll have more thoughts on this stuff later but I have to get ready to go. We're going to the US Chamber of Commerce and then Lowe's International today. Should be interesting. I now have two batteries, fully charged, so I shouldn't have camera problems again. I'm trying to post pics now to Flickr but I'll see if I can get past my limit. I'll try to annotate them when I can.