After dinner, we got ready for the club, piled into a cab, and set out for M1nt. When you arrive, you enter into a foyer with suited employees, a red carpet, and a velvet rope. We were scolded by the woman at the rope for not making a reservation, but "because you are 6 girls, you can go in this time." Thank goodness for being a woman, I guess. We were then directed to an elevator, which took us up to the club on the 26th floor. It was beautiful, but also incredibly pricey and pretty pretentious. I'm not big on clubs to begin with, so a big stuffy one isn't really up my alley. However, we all got drinks and did some dancing. We also found the shark tank, which runs along an entire wall and had what looked like young black-tipped reef sharks swimming all around the tank. Definitely impressive. Doesn't do much to make them look less pretentious.
After awhile, we decided to search for another bar. We weren't actually very successful. I'm not sure where the happening nightlife is in the bund area of Shanghai, but other than M1nt, we certainly didn't find it that night.
The next morning, my roommate and I set out to explore the French Concession, an area surrounding our hotel. We stumbled on several wet markets, offering live chickens, eels and fish, and just generally had some issues with figuring out how to get where we wanted to go. After walking for awhile in the stifling heat, we realized we were a lot further from the area we were searching for than we'd anticipated, and opted to hop on the metro. Let me just say, Shanghai's metro is glorious. It's air conditioned, pristine, and extremely easy to navigate around. We took it out to Shaanxi road, planning to walk along there for a bit and then head to Tian Zi Fang, which is a little slice of old Shanghai, with narrow streets and shops.
Unsurprisingly, getting to Tian Zi Fang was not as easy as the map implied it would be. We walked around in circles for awhile, following signs that promised we'd end up at our destination but just kept us walking around corners. A kind woman in a convenience store finally helped to point us in the right direction. Thanks to her, we finally stumbled upon Tian Zi Fang, and it really was worth it.
The whole area is a labyrinth of little streets lined with shops and restaurants, with little surprised shoved in each corner. Our plan is to head back and have dinner there one night.
Exhausted from a full day walking out in the heavy air, we hopped the metro back to our part of town and promptly collapsed in our living room for a bit. After a brief respite, we joined a few other people for a trip to the grocery store. This proved to be a fairly overwhelming experience.
One of the girls had lived in Shanghai two years ago, and directed the cab driver to the grocery store. We ended up at the biggest shopping mall have ever seen. It apparently has 58 floors. We got to 3 of them.
The grocery store is in the basement, and just like the building it's housed in, was incredibly big and overwhelming. There were more colors, foods and drinks than I have ever seen. The collection of imported wines would put most liquor stores to shame. There was a whole aisle of chicken parts. There were 4 cases full of yogurts. I'd like to go back and explore sometime when I'm not exhausted.
Having bought a few groceries, a few of us decided to head back to the apartment and grab a bite to eat. We ended up at a "hot pot" restaurant right down the road from us that was recommended in our welcome guide.
A "hot pot" is a pot of broth set on a hot plate in the middle of the table where you cook the other ingredients that you order. We opted to go vegetarian, which resulted in the first of the many odd looks from staff that we got all night. We ordered garlic and chili sauce as flavorings, along with noodles, mushrooms, leafy greens and what we thought were dumplings filled with eggs. When the broth and spices came out, we all decided that we liked chili and garlic pretty equally, so we would just put the spices in the hot pot, rather then in our individual bowls. Well, we threw the garlic in, but one of the women who worked there (and who looked like she was probably the manager) came running over to our table and began admonishing us in mandarin. She then fished the garlic back out and mimed that we were to peel it, put it in our own bowls, and then eat it. We opted to dole out the chili individually.
When the "Chinese Soup Nazi," as we named her, wasn't looking, we dumped the mushrooms and noodles into the pot. We also decided to try a dumpling. They weren't filled with eggs. They were actually made of eggs and filled with mystery meat that we couldn't get to not be pink. Needless to say, the dumplings didn't get eaten.
Once the noodles and mushrooms were cooked, we started picking them out of the bowl. Technically, you are supposed to pick things out of the bowl with your chopsticks, but we found it easier to use the ladles to help us. Well, the soup nazi didn't like this, and came over to admonish us again and show us how to do it right. We smiled, nodded, and continued doing it our way. About a minute later, a waiter plonked a set of forks and knives on the table.
This was pretty embarrassing and insulting, so we decided to leave the forks and knives alone and continue going at it with our chopsticks. It may not have been the conventional way of doing things, but we managed to do ok.
At the end, when we asked for the check, the soup nazi judged us pretty harshly again... she walked by our table, looked at the dumplings, and then did a double take to look again before scowling at us for not eating them. She was clearly not pleased with either our hot pot skills or our eating habits.
More to come...
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