Hawking for life

Shanghai was incredible!  Despite the fact that they're technically in the same country as Hong Kong, Shanghai was a completly different place. 

We spent the day with our friends Tim and Susie.  Our first stop was the Bund.  A short cab ride took us to the major riverwalk area of Shanhai.  It was beautiful but we were instantly overcome by the commerce.  Everywhere we walked someone wanted to sell us something.  They must all have the same supplier because they were all selling the same thing.  Quickly we figured out that you can bargain...hard and that you will be successful.  We were initially offered a set of skates for about $200 Yuan (the chinese currancy).  That's about $25 USD.  We ended up negotiating them down to 2 pair for 40 yuan.   I was stunned!  That's an 80% discount.

The shopping continued at that rate from there out.  Susie loved shopping and Kim wasn't disinterested so we did that for much of the day. After strolling down the Bund (if that's what you call swatting away every hawker in town) we made our way to the Yu Gardens. 

The Yu Gardens is a shopping mecca with a rock structure on the outskirts and a traditional tea house in the middle.  The tea house is located in the middle of a pond and you have to cross the Bridge of 9 Turns to get there.  The tea was great but the experience was better. 

From tea we moved to lunch at a restaurant in the gardens.  This was the same restaurant President Clinton at at when he visited.  Susie had never used chopsticks before so we had a lot of fun with that.  The food was great. 

We wandered around a bit but returned to the Gardens for some final shopping before we returned to the boat by 9pm.