Meeting an old friend.

A friend of our family, Gary Wu, moved to Shanghai 3 years ago on an assignment with GM. I met Gary while working on a project together with him about 6 years ago. When Gary was living by himself in Troy, he invited our family over for dinner and cooked us an authentic Chinese meal that could have fed an army.

Emma was the only one in our family that tried every single thing that he made and Gary still remembers that to this day.

I got a chance to go out to lunch with him today - he was going to a church service for persons holding Chinese passports with another employee that has moved to Shanghai. The picked me up at noon at the hotel.

So, I didn't want to waste the morning waiting for them so I went for a walk down Zhangyang road to the river and took a ferry across. It was only half a yuan. From there, I walked to YuYuan Garden, a place in the city that they have placed some old pagoda style architecture. I took many pictures. I've included one here. I was told that this is where they have good dumplings, but I was pretty sure I didn't want this one.... Again, click the image to see a bigger version.

Right on the the noon hour, Gary and King picked me up and he asked me where I wanted to go. I told him I wanted to go to a good chinese restaurant because I have no way of knowing if the restaurants I've seen are good or bad or in between. We went to a restaurant at the top of the Super Brand Mall, called South Beauty.

We had several good things to eat - deep fried thinly sliced steak prepared at the table - the oil was kept hot with large stones submerged in the oil, then chili peppers and onions and spices and beef were added to it.

We also had some barbequed ribs, with a flavor I haven't tasted before but it was delicious. Desert was some kind of thing made with sticky rice in lotus leaves - again pretty good. Oh, there was a second part of desert which was sticky rice (basically like a doughy ball made from rice flour) in a rice wine (but not really fermented for some reason) which was also quite good. The sticky rice has a really strange texture.

Then King stayed at the mall to shop for some roller blades and Gary and I left so that he could take me to church. On the way there he asked if I wanted to instead come to his house to see his family as this would probably be the only day that we could do that while I was here. I went ahead to his house and saw his wife Serena, and his daughters Elena and Lindsey. Elena is a chatty 4 year old who speaks both English and Mandarin. She taught me how to count to 10 in Mandarin She's quite a cute little girl.

I then left their house at about 4:30 pm and got back to the hotel at 5. I decided to take a subway to the Huihui road section of Shanghai, look for some dinner, and then eventually make my way back to the hotel.

I really tried to eat at a chinese restaurant, but nothing looked good to eat. I did buy a woman some chicken (I think - I couldn't tell) who was begging for something to eat in the Nanjing Road section of town. That's the section that looks lit up like Las Vegas. I was sitting down taking some pictures of that section of town when she approached me and made a hand sign that she was hungry. I motioned for her to follow me to a store across the street that sold all kinds of really strange looking (and smelling) food. She followed me there then I motioned with my hand for her to pick out what she wanted. She took a little bit of time then selected a package of what I think was chicken pieces. It cost about $4.50 or so. She thanked me then I made myself scarce in the crowd. She was the first beggar that I had seen that didn't seem to have some physical malady of some kind.

I then took the subway back to the Pudong side and stopped at SuperBrand Mall because I had heard they had a supermarket in the basement. They also had a couple fast food joints that I could fall back on if I had to.

I bought some juices and cracker/cookie type things at the supermarket then headed upstairs, again, in search of even authentic chinese fast food.

Burger King it was. It was awful - the burger that is. I got what I thought was a bacon bbq burger. Well the bbq sauce tasted odd, and I think they forgot to fry the bacon because it was raw! I pulled that off the burger and tried eating the burger. I got about half-way through it and stopped. Blech.

Time to get back to the hotel where I did some work and then typed this up. Got to get to sleep.