KTV

Ktv is by far one of my most fav things to do in China. Over the course of my vacation, we went ktv'd 5 times @____@. Twice in Shanghai at Haoledi's (2 different ones), once in Xi'an at Qiangui, and twice in Beijing, once at a Mailedi, and once at some place whose name wasn't in a conspicuous enough spot (robin says it was Tongledi).

Ktv is Karaoke TV, as big a part of Chinese social life as going to bars is. I actually only realized that ktv is only supposed to be for adults (they had a sign in the room, "No minors without accompanying adults!" but no one really follows those rules anyways).

Anyways, the inside of a ktv building is well decorated, very modern. The reception desk takes you to your own private room, which is equipped with a comfortable black leather sofa, a coffee table for drinks and food, a computer for selecting songs, and a huge-screen tv. The lights are dimmed however you want, and strobe lights are available.

The most expensive place I went was Qiangui (a taiwanese chain), which was 288 yuan for a small room for 3 hours (about 40 bucks). It looked like a 5 star hotel, was multiple floors, and had a buffet in the lobby 24/7 (the midnight-snack buffet looked pretty good too). A lot of ktv's are open 24 hours a day...

My fav place was Mailedi though. They had the most songs, including many recent korean and japanese songs: big bang, ayumi hamasaki, dbsk, lots and lots. They were also the cheapest. It was basically free for 3 hours as long as we ordered 159 yuan worth of food...so 159 yuan for 3.5 hours + all this food that we didnt even finish.

Shanghai

So we left for Shanghai on 7/6/08 at noon. It was me, Robin, and Qiuqiu.

First Impressions: Shanghai's pretty awesome. Lots of tall buildings while having little pollution. Shopping paradise, and bubble tea stands everywhere. It was also pretty hot, but better than Nanjing.

That first afternoon, we checked in at our hotel (which by the way, was free because Qiuqiu's uncle had connections). Our hotel was right on Xizang Zhonglu (Tibet Middle Road), which is in the center of downtown Shanghai. Across from our hotel was the train station, a block north of us is the famous Nanjing Road. After checking in, we decided to go to Nanjing Road. It's a huge road (no cars allowed) surrounded by many malls with all your designer brands and whatnot. There are also a bunch of restaurants (not one, but two mcd's!), small shops, and food stands. From there we walked down Nanjing Road to the Bund, this road next to the Huangpu river (which splits downtown shanghai). it had a lot of western architecture...the palce where all those foreign countries settled when they came into shanghai. from the bund we took pics of Pudong (Huangpu East), which has all the business-y stuff and the famous skyline. around 10 we decided to get dinner at UBC Coffee....I got teppanyaki again xD

The next day Qiuqiu had to go to some university to register for english classes, so Robin and I went to Chenghuangmiao. Chenghuangmiao, or the Temple of City God, is this temple surrounded by all these shops and restaurants built with traditional chinese archtecture. So...its a fun place to just walk around and buy small trinkets or all kinds of food (sbux and kfc are available for the un-adventurous xD) Chenghuangmiao also includes the Yu gardens. Hmm I ate 2 boxes of takoyaki and also some popcorn chicken from kfc. Yisheng messaged me and asked us to go have dinner with her, so we went back to our hotel in the afternoon.

People: Yisheng Lin goes to Oakland Mills, going to UMD, met her at math team. Jenny Su is my mom's friend's daughter, also graduated this year, going to Emory. I met her when I was in Orlando, but we didn't know each other that well then. Liu Li is this guy from Nanjing, Qiuqiu's friend.

Yisheng took us to Wujiang Road, a "snack street" that also has a bunch of small restaurants. Qiuqiu loves chicken wing kabobs, so she bought some even though we were gonna eat in a restaurant. After eating we went to ktv (my first time ktving!) at Haoledi.

Ktv is karaoke, really popular in china. Different from the karaoke in the US i guess... you get a small room equipped with a huge tv, a computer for selecting songs, and a comfortable sofa. There are thousands of songs in the computer, virtually any chinese song you can think of, and many english, kroean, and japanese songs. ah it was so fun =) we went home around midnight. Good thing about living in a hotel with no parents is that you can go home whenever you want.

The next day we went to the Shanghai museum with Jenny. personally i don't really like museums; most of the exhibits were boring except the new one about the origins of the olympics. We had lunch at Papa John's (how creative) and decided to go to Qipu, this palce with quite a few malls all dedicated to [very cheap] clothes. Robin and I noticed that qipu "tseepu" sounds like "cheap" (concidence??). After that Jenny had to go home, and Qiuqiu told us to quickly go back to the hotel cuz her uncle (uh oh, the loaded uncle) invited to (a probably very expensive) dinner. So yeah, we arrive at some 5-star hotel, and the uncle takes us to his private room. For dinner there were things liek duck tongues, small lobsters, sea cucumber soup, etc. you get the idea. Qiuqiu's uncle had to talk to qiuqiu, so he got someone to drive robin and me back to the hotel first. We were bored, so decided to go to Nanjing Road again.

The next day we went to Qibao, one of the many Venice-looking places in Shanghai. Since the entire Shanghai/Suzhou region is like all rivers and canals, there are a lot of those river-straddling towns. Qibao was disappointing though...it was only one street. One end of the street sold trinkets and clothes. One end sold food. Around noon, Qiuqiu's friend Liu Li arrived from Nanjing. The four of us went back to Wujiang Road to eat some barbecue, and then we went ktving (on nanjing road, but also a haoledi) again. this time with beer (which makes everything mroe fun xD). around 11 we went back to the hotel and played cards...until like 3 am.

Next morning we had, guess what, TEPPANYAKI! except this time, it was made in front of us. yum. after getting train tickets back to beijing, and back to nanjing for liu li and qiuqiu, robin and i went to the art museum. meanwhile qiuqiu and liu li just played cards and watched tv in the hotel. on our way back from the museum to the hotel we saw this hilarious engrish in the park:
Qiuqiu and Liu Li are know each other a little too well xD Qiuqiu's always threatens him by saying "I'm going to tell everyone about what you did to that girl and how you're a pervert!" She also calls him "da bian (poop)" and "zhong ba (w/e that means)". They're always arguing with each other and chasing after each other hahaha. That afternoon we went to Qipu again, and Robin got more Hello Kitty stuff. Oh btw, Robin's goal in Nanjing and Shanghai was to get hello kitty stuff, as much as possible, to give to this girl that goes to school with him. He was planning on giving it to her in hong kong (where she was for the summer), but we ended up not going to hk, so now he'll have to awkwardly go to her house in the U.S. and give it to her there xD. After Qipu we met up with Yisheng and her boyfriend at Xiaofeiyang (Little chubby lamb), a hotpot restaurant. Mmmm twas delicious. They gave our sodas in these collectible glass bottles. After that we played some pool with them, and then went back to our hotel. I learned some Shanghainese that night, "alamapeh." it means something along the lines of "there are no more free tables" o_O. We didn't feel done for the night, so Robin, Liu Li, and I went to Nanjing Road again to get a yexiao (midnight snack). Since i lost the card game the night before, I had to treat everyone to McD's. Qiuqiu wasn't with us, so we just got her something to take back. Then we went to an internet bar. They checked ID, so only Liu Li could get a computer. Robin left after a while, and I sat there really really bored-ly watching Liu Li play wow. We left around 1:30, and on the way home we were approached by a man who was like "young girls, young girls, itnerested? very pretty, come take a look." i said, "no we have a train to catch in the morning. we don't have money anyways..." Then Liu Li started being perverted and wondered aloud how mcuh we couldve actually gotten with our money...."30 yuan for a girl, nothing more...50 yuan for a girl and a chair...70 yuan for a girl and a bed...100 yuan for multiple girls and a bed....200 for the girls, the bed, the midnight snacks, and the other accessories..." somethign along those lines.

Friday morning, we took the subway to the train station. All four of us were on the same train, a bullet train btw, but Qiuqiu and Liu Li were gonna get off in Nanjing. Around 8 pm or so, I arrived back in BEIJING.

Nanjing

So, train ride to Nanjing. Twas pretty good...it was a sleeper train, and I was on the middle bunk. Ugh there was no headroom and I basically had to jump off to get on the ground @___@. On the bus there was a mom and a daughter who carried a box, and eventually they showed me there was a duck inside xD So then Qiuqiu messaged my phone, telling me where I should meet her in the station.

People: Wu Bian is my mom's college buddy who lives in Nanjing. He owns some biotech company that's coincidentally going to work on something with my mom's lab. His wife is Xiao Rong, she and her older sister are famous in Nanjing because of their beauty salon chain. She ALSO happens to own a biotech company. Their daughter is Qiuqiu, an 18 year-old who graduated from high school but apparently didn't do too well on her gaokao (college entrance exams) and so is planning on going to college in the United States (UMD most likely).

First Impressions: Wow, Nanjing has clouds. Nanjing's much less polluted than Beijing (well, before the Olympics). Blue skies, clouds. It's also really really really really hot. Considered one of the "four big ovens" of China.

So we had trouble finding Qiuqiu (whom I have never met in my life) at the station, but eventually we realized it was a girl we had passed earlier. There was a man with her, and I was about to be like "Ni hao, Wu shushu (hello, uncle wu)" but then i realized it wasn't her dad. It was a chauffeur. @_____@ It ended up being Qiuqiu's aunt (xiao rong's older sister)'s chauffeur. wow. SOMEONE's loaded. He dropped us off at the Sun Yatsen Memorial Scenic Area, which is basically a mountain with lots of historically important things, including Sun Yatsen's tomb. We went to these gardens, which had a place called Bridge World, basically all kinds of bridges crossing this stream. And then we went to the Ming Tombs, which had a long road with stone animals on both sides. Overall, it was so boring. And hot. And sweaty.

Then we decided to leave, and got the chauffeur to take us back in the city. For our late lunch, we decided to eat teppanyaki, which was SO DELICIOUS. YUM. Then we went to Qiuqiu's aunt's house, and her aunt took us to dinner in an expensive looking place with expensive looking foods. The rest of the week we went to other places like the Confucius temple, Zhan gardens, the Zhonghua city gate, Song Meiling's villa, Sun Yatsen's tomb, the Presidential Palace, and the Nanjing Massacre museum. We also had a day to walk around Xinjiekou, some shopping place (I bought a Jay Chou piano book =]).

Our last night there, Wu shushu invited us to eat Nanjing local specialties. we ate things like duck blood, snails, stinky tofu, and chick embryo. Eww so you open the egg and there's this embryo staring at you, with eyes and beak and all. you pick it up with your chopsticks, dip it in some spiced salt, eat it (no bones or anything!). then you eat the yolk, which is bright yellow and covered with blood vessels. there's also some really hard protein cap or soemthing at the other end of the egg...

Qiuqiu's house was by far the best place I lived in China. My mom was like "Don't stay too long in Nanjing, you still have to go to other places." But I didn't want to...her house was just soo comfortable. Besides normal things like internet, tv, she also had a piano (ya i hammered away my jay chou quite a bit), a very comfortable bathroom (bathrooms can get pretty bad in china), great air conditioning, yummy snacks (stocked with things like chinese yogurt, bakery bread, Lipton Milk Tea Powder), and the world's most adorable puppy. Their house is a condo, the top 3 floors of an apartment building. Ahhhh it was so great living there. Unfortunately, we were going to leave for SHANGHAI the next day...

Beijing 2

So. lets see. so the week of 6/23 i was at my lao jiuma (mom's youngest brother's wife, my uncle's rarely home so i think of it as her house)'s house in pinggu district (part of beijing municipality, but an hour outside of beijing city), and she took me and her daughter to eat various things. monday was yangxiezi, lamb spine. they give you a big pot of broth with, you got it, lamb spine. you eat all the meat, and then you use the remaining broth for hotpot. ugh it was so salty and i was full and we had plates of extra hotpot materials =/. tuesday. hanguk yori, korean food. soooo good, my fav was the beef and the lamb. not a big fan of pork...or barbecued veggies....wednesday was food at home, which i didn't rly like that much ;P. thursday we went to a chuanba, a "kabob bar." all kinds of kabobs, including cuigu (cartilage). ugh i dont see what there is to eat abt cartilage. it tastes like normal meat, but its harder to chew. on our way home, it was abt to rain and ppl were still selling their vegetables on the streets. a woman had like 3 huge stalks of scallions left, and she said to my jiuma "2 yuan and i'll give you all of it!!" and my jiuma said "no, we only need one." i felt pretty bad for the lady, she probably only makes like 20 bucks a day....meanwhile i spend 20 bucks in like half an hour...

On friday, Song Boyu (lao jiuma's daughter) and I took the bus back to Beijing city to live with my da jiuma (the wife of the older of my mom's two younger brothers) for a day or two. she's really really young...maybe 30? and she's at least 10 years younger than my uncle (da jiu). she also lives near the bird's nest and her son Song Qizheng is 10 years old (but looks like he's 7 or 8 haha). The next day she took us to eat lunch at golden hans, its a buffet, but there's also barbecue, which the waiters take around to each table to carve meat off of. then we went to tiananmen to take some pics, and at night went to the birds nest to take pics. on sunday we went back to pinggu, and Boyu and I joined my da jiu for a "business lunch." it was hotpot, and it was really really good...but since it was a business lunch, there was a lot of beer and cigarettes...my uncle forced two 600ml yanjings on me xD...the business partners got pretty drunk. my other uncle (my dad's sister's husband, who works with my mom's brother) was also there. at night i went back to beijing city again and lived with Mao Panyong (parents friend's house)

on monday i went to go see robin, went to wangfujing in the morning, and then went to go eat peking duck with his grandparents for lunch. at night mao panyong took us to the train station for our journey to NANJING