Shanghai to Atlanta (Sat)

I had most of a morning to kill before heading to the Pudong airport for my flight back to Atlanta (hooray for Delta's direct flight!). So I just wandered around the neighborhood near SJTU.

Dude selling fresh steamed buns.

This bun was *so* good. ^_^ (and only costs 1RMB = 14 cents)

More street-side food stalls/shops.

I couldn't entirely figure this one out. I think you just point at whatever you want, they boil it in some soup, possibly with some noodles, and there you go.

Fresh yo/ tiao. I was running out of small bills at this point, and didn't want to force one of these street stall guys to have to break a 100RMB bill, so I didn't get any.

Fresh made cong yo/ bing~ (scallion pancakes). It took a good 10-15 minutes of waiting for them to make them. I watched it go from raw dough to finished product, and there was a long line by the time it was ready.

Finished product. Also amazingly good. Also 14 cents. Totally worth the wait.

I found a little market. Incredibly crowded.

Vegetable lady.

Meat aisle.

I got one more bun. This one was similar to the original one, but instead of steamed bread on the outside, it was made out of rice. Also very tasty.

Funny shop name in the Shanghai/Pudong airport. Someone needs to file an anti-trust suit against them.

Shanghai (Fri)

We finally got to the Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU) "Faculty Club", which is their hotel for visitors, at about 2am. Suck.

Cool/weird bronze piece in the lobby. It's a urn with eight dragons, and eight little frogs with their mouths wide open ready to accept something from the dragons (like feeding baby birds?).

Neat model of the Minhang campus of SJTU. This place is *huge*.

Fancy room where they showed us a brief video on the history of SJTU.

Offices where the GT/SJTU ECE MS program are run out of.

After a good visit to SJTU, we were dropped back off at the hotel. And it was pouring. We hiked to some mall nearby to meet up with my cousin Lester, but we just got straight-out soaked (even with umbrellas).

We went to an all-you-can-eat sushi/hot-pot place.

Lester and I ate them out of uni... or at least they claimed to be out of it as we ate enough of this to more or less cover the cost of dinner.

Tuna and salmon.

"Kobe" beef and kimchi.

The hotpot... convenient for hiding unwanted food; since this is an all-you-can-eat place, you have to pay extra for any food that you order that you don't finish (that they don't find before handing you the bill...). Lester is a pro.

More sashimi, shrimp and uni. Oh yeah, it's also an all-you-can-drink place as well, so we went through plenty of beer and sake.

Some sort of grilled fish.

And then of course, it was off for foot massages.

The pre-foot-massage massage.

Nate enjoying himself. They gave us these pajama-type pants to wear, which were more comfortable than our still sort-of damp clothes.

Continuation of above picture.

Beijing to Shanghai (Thu)

Conference over. Nate and I have a morning to kill before heading over to Tsinghua University, and then later to the airport.

Not really that pretty.

But in the basement, we find a hot-pot counter. Sweet.

And we ordered too much food, and it cost next to nothing anyway.

Coffee break. I just thought it was interesting that they used coffee grinds in the ash tray.

Weird sculpture on the Tsinghua campus.

This building is supposed to have some significance, but I forgot what it is. I think it's just one of the old buildings on campus, but there were a lot of people taking pictures of/with it.

Off to the Beijing airport, where some thunderstorms end up canceling our flight. We had to go through multiple rebookings before we got it all settled. Didn't depart until well after 11pm (we were supposed to get to Shanghai by about 10pm).

Noodles in the Beijing airport while killing time.

Fried chicken bits. (Same place.)

Shanghai to Hong Kong

Early in the morning, we took the subway to the mag-lev train station. There we got a quick bite to eat.

Soy milk, a really thin congee (rice porridge), and some pickled veggies. We also got some steamed vegetable buns (not shown).

Airplane food. Noodles, croissant, fruit, apple juice.

After we got into HK, we took the train from the airport into the city, checked into our hotel, and then wandered around a little bit in the surrounding area. We ended up just picking a restaurant more or less at random.

Shrimp wonton noodle soup for me.

Malay beef curry for Sue.

Next door to the restaurant, we found a HK-style dessert shop. It turned out to be a chain that we found all over the place (and visited many of them).

Sue got a crazy fresh juice combo: watermelon, lemon and tomato juice! I got grass jelly with sea coconut.

That evening, we met up with Uncle Paul (not a blood uncle, but in Chinese we refer to almost all men of your parents generation as "uncle") who's a very good friend of the family. He ended up being out tour guide for a significant amount of time in HK. Always great to get shown around by a local.

Anyway, before dinner, we first went up to Victoria Peak to catch the city view at sunset. Up there, we also stopped at this gelato place:

mmm. They had lots of interesting flavors, of which I'm sure you'd have a hard time finding in Italy.

I think this is Sue's dish, which has coconut+pandanus+sugar cane (left) and strawberry and basil (right).

Mine was strawberry+basil (left) and tamarind+lime. It was all very good!

For dinner, we had Cantonese food at one of the restaurants in the HK Jockey Club, of which Uncle Paul was a member (otherwise we wouldn't have been able to go there).

Roasted suckling pig (crunchy brown stuff in the center) and char siu pork (a.k.a. Chinese BBQ pork). Perhaps the best I've ever had. Awesome.

Cantonese mixed vegetables with glass noodles.

Eggplant with pork and mustard greens.

There was also a traditional Cantonese soup that was made from a bone broth with assorted other ingredients, some herbal such as ginseng. To make this right, it apparently needs to be cooked for a long, long, long time. It was quite rich and tasty.

After dinner, we ended up grabbing some dessert as well.

durian, pamelo and sago for me.

mango and cream for Sue.

Fresh mango wrapped in mochi with coconut on the outside, shared by all three of us.

Shanghai

We met Lester for lunch. We went to a local xiao~ long/ bao (XLB) place that was very popular. We got there a little after 11:30am, and the line was already out the door. We eventually got seated and then proceeded to consume six basket of dumplings. Half were pork, and the other half were pork with crab.

XLB.

A light soup with duck's blood. Kind of funky texture. Not as heavy as I thought it would be.

We then spent the rest of the afternoon just walking around town, mostly in the old city.

Bacteria-infested fresh fruit!

Passion fruit popsicle.

Eels, and some guy doing a not-so-great job of watching over the eels.

Chicken skewers. Pretty good... had a light hint of curry or maybe just cumin.

(May need to click to zoom and read) "Here we have Chinese cakes preparing for foreigners"

Egg tarts!

More popsicles. Sue's is obviously pretending to be watermelon. Mine was gross. It had three layers of different textures, and the flavor was just odd.

In our wanderings, we went through quite a few markets. Very cool.

Fruits/produce.

Some of the largest winter melon I've ever seen. The knife on the side is machete-sized, just to give me a sense of proportion.

Meats.

More veggies.

More meats. Duck mostly.

Craw-dads.

Fishies.

View of the market. Very old-skool feeling.

Chickens and ducks.

Bag o' frogs.

These guys were gutting eels. Man, they must have been doing it for years on end, because they were really efficient.



The aftermath...

We got back to Ela and Arrin's apartment and decided to just relax with some drinks. This brand is called Reeb, which I found really funny since the first thing I thought of was Klim: a brand of powdered milk that my grandfather used to drink. Don't get the names? They just spell the products backwards.

"Bai/ jio~" (literally white liquor). Nasty.

For dinner, we met up with Lester again (he had to go back to work after lunch) and went to a Szechuan restaurant.

Starting top left going clockwise: some kind of lettuce with a peanut-like sauce, oil-fried meat (see below), don't remember what kind of meat, and spicy chicken.


Close-up of the lettuce w/ peanut sauce. Some kind of lightly pickled/vinegared cucumbers on the right.

The ma/ la\ catfish. ma/ literally means numb. The catfish is soaked in this oil, which is full of peppers and they weird peppercorns. The peppercorns aren't really hot in the normal painful way, but they make your lips and tongue tingle and eventually go numb if you eat enough (it doesn't last too long though).

Close-up of the catfish after they've scooped out most of the peppers.

I think this was called "toffee taro" or something like that in the menu. It's basically pieces of taro (or some other root/tuber) that's dipped in a warm caramel-like sauce. You then dunk it in ice water which makes the sugar crystalize. It took us forever to order this because Lester didn't remember the name of the dish, and then when we were trying to describe the dish to the waitress, neither of us could remember how to say potato or taro. Eventually, it turned out that there was a photo of the dish in the menu all along that we could have just pointed to.

After dinner walking around in the streets. Just a funny sign for a restaurant. I'm guessing they serve some kind of spicy chicken, although the pepper doesn't seem to be too keen about the idea.