My first dinner in Shanghai
Note: Pictures are coming…I promise.
My first dinner in Shanghai was excellent. After getting checked into the Blue Moutain Hostel, my Chinese hosts, Wang Wei and his wife took me to a restaurant known as Chopsticks. Since everything in China uses chopsticks to eat their meals, I guess that is as good a place as any to have your first meal in China.
Wang Wei made some suggestions as I paged through the menu with pictures and English descriptions. Because the Chinese culture is very family oriented and due to the nature of smaller portion sizes, we ordered multiple plates of food for the table to share. I also felt the need to order a celebratory beer – Tsing Sao beer. Our order included shrimp, pig’s tail, fried dumpling, lotus root, and frog – the culinerary adventure and food surviving had officially began.
Actually, I tried everything and was very pleased with the food. For those of you wondering, the came in this soup with other vegetables as well. The soup was a little bit spicy but very good. Frog is actually very boney and has little meat on each piece. There were only 3 of us and we ordered so much. I was glad to see my hosts take the left overs home.
This was such an excellent way to open up a trip to Shanghai and China. I envy people like Anthony Zimmer and Tony Bourdain who get to travel the world, experience other cultures, and talk to the people in those places.
After dinner we drove around Shanghai for me to experience the city at night and mainly because I didn’t quite want to go back to the hotel yet. Shanghai reminds me alot of New York City. The city is very vibrant at night with its lights, people walking around, and drivers both in cars and on bicycles and motorbikes. I can see why they say Shanghai is the New York of Asia/China, but I’d say the city is more cosmopolitan than NYC.
I have seen some funny things here already, but one of the things that stuck out in my mind was when we were driving from the airport into Shanghai. We were on the express way driving while a random guy on a bicycle was in the far right lane biking right down the freeway. I guess this might not sound funny, but when you’ve just gotten off a plane and are suffering from jet lag and hungry at the same time – random things just sound funny.
For my next posts, I’ll talk about seeing some of Shanghai’s sites like The Bund, the Huang River, Yu Gardens, and Shanghai Museum. I also want to discuss a theme I’m seeing here in Shanghai – something I’m describing as East meets West. More on that topic later.
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I miss Memphis, and your post reminded me of a few reasons why I miss it. I’m planning a trip there in the spring of next year. I am looking forward to it.