Sunday Jan 11th…
I woke up early to go to church. There is a Catholic cathedral about 4 blocks away from campus in XuJiaHui. The tour book said there was a service at 8:00AM but I got there at 7:45AM and it had started at 7:30AM. When I walked in late there was the smell of incense lingering…it smelled very good. I think I was one of two westerners. Naturally the service was in Chinese but it held my interest. I enjoyed seeing the differences and even though I couldn’t understand what the priest was saying I was able to pick out words here and there and also from knowing a mass I was able to tell what was going on. Some big differences that stood out in my mind are…there were monitors all over the cathedral with what the congregation’s response should be. Another difference was when extending the peace be with you everyone bowed to each other and no one shook hands. Throughout the mass instead of making the sign of the cross the Chinese congregation bowed. The last big thing that stood out about the mass was the communion. No one waits in line going pew by pew it is a free for all, whoever can get there first, just like everything else in China. The cathedral was nice, but cold. It looked like it had not been cleaned in a while. It was dark with old wooden pews. There were some side chapels and a few stained glass windows. I will try to get a picture if I remember my camera at that hour of the morning…good think I found out that there is a 10:00AM mass and a 6:00PM mass on Sunday! After leaving church I was confused about the religion and communist thing and how that works out. Turns out religions can be practiced in establishments approved by the government. China is declared as an atheist country but going to services in churches approved by the government is alright to do. Also, there are churches that are not approved but to enter one of these you need to have a foreign passport. If the government finds out that a Chinese person is worshiping in one of these churches the church will be shut down. It has been very fascinating to find out little things, like that, about the government.
After mass I met up with everyone to head to lunch in the dinning hall. We then hung out for a while and decided to become tourists again. We were going to go on a walking tour that was mapped out in a tour book but instead we decided to just go in that direction and wander the streets of old shanghai on our own. We usually see the most out of China when we just wander on our own, we get to see what China is really like on a daily basis.
We ended up in the Yu Bazaar area. We decided not to go to the gardens; we will save that for another day. But the Yu Bazaar was really neat to see again. I was there last time I was in Shanghai but during the day so I didn’t see it all lit up at night. We also saw it lit up at night on Saturday when we were looking at the city from the pearl tower. At the bazaar we finally were able to find soup dumplings. Anthony Bourdain was not lying about how delicious these things are!!! They are unlike any dumpling we have had so far. They are a must have when in Shanghai.
After the Yu Bazaar area we started wandering the streets. We ran in to a street market. This one had a lot of live fish. The grossest thing was the dead eels wrapped around each other on the tables. I am okay seeing everything else chopped up or live or hanging in front of me, but that was really gross! They had dead fish chopped up and hanging to dry out on the power lines running over the streets. We were joking by saying that man learned quickly to use a wooden stick to get those things down. Again we were getting more stares than we ever thought imaginable.
I always love seeing the young kids speak the 2 words of English they know to us. We were walking down one of the streets and two kids…probably about 6 years old kept following us and continually said hello and goodbye. They were super cute. We tried talking to them a little bit but they would get shy and scatter.
We walked all over the city! I don’t know the distance but we were out wandering for atleast 7 hours…if not more. It is the best way to see everything and experience everything. On the way back Kyle and I decided to get off at a random subway stop and explore a new part of Shanghai. Well this slightly backfired, on the new part thing. We got off the subway and ended up a block away from that dive bar Luckys. Who would have known there was a subway stop right there!!! We decided to go in and see if our bartenders were there. And they were. They didn’t recognize us at first but then they remembered us!! It was fun the bartender that spoke the most English showed us a dice game…kind of like poker but with dice and she also gave us her phone number. She is excited to go KTV’ing with us and also I think Caitlin and I might have another girl to shop with J Wu Xiao (her name) also works at a spa place. She gave us gift cards to this place, she said there was 500 kuai on each gift card. We are going to go there on Saturday and see if she is telling us the truth or if it was just a scam to get us to the spa and spend money. We think this is legit though…we will find out.
Something we have noticed is the locals our age are always willing to give us there number so they can have American friends. They want to show us the city and interact with us a lot. These gestures really make us feel welcomed to the area. And we will definitely walk away with some great Chinese friends.
We eventually left Luckys and what else were we going to do at about 1:00AM on a Sunday night when we had not eaten dinner yet…that’s right, street food!!! Mmm lamb on a stick and some of the best fried rice I have ever tried. I just wish these street food vendors were out all day…their food would make a perfect lunch J
It was a packed weekend but we will have time to sleep when we are on the MinHang campus a little removed from the heart of the city.
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