Okay, visit from friends #2. Lets do this.

I think the last time I talked about this I was a little to verbose, and a lot of the places we went were repeats. So I'm going to use a bit of brevity here.

Last time, I had to run out to the Hangzhou airport twice in one day. This time, there was only one place everyone was coming from. Shanghai. In the airport on the far side of town.

Damnit.

I left in the morning to get there, and along the way stopped to have lunch with Lucy. I know I've mentioned Lucy, and now after a bunch of my friends have met her - they know how totally awesome she is. But everything was pretty straightforward. We rode the maglev back, made the trip to Hangzhou, and then finally the cab ride back to Xiaoshan. We were fortunate in that we found a driver crazy enough to be willing to take 5 people with him. I'm pretty sure Shannon was squished into an impossibly small space. I told the cab driver we were Obama's kids, which he accepted with a little too much enthusiasm.

The first night, Bob, Dave and I headed out to see the "town", with some Muslim noodles in tow. We grabbed breakfast for an early jaunt into Hangzhou. Wushan Market, West Lake, Leifeng Pagoda, you know the drill. The tea was nice as always, and the street food amazing. We decided to head back to have dinner at Kaiyuan Mingdu, the amazing 5 star Japanese restaurant. I again emphasized that it may be difficult to find a cab driver willing to take 5 people, but surprisingly a Hangzhou taxi was willing to do so.

Finally my warnings were vindicated, when the next morning in Xiaoshan we were NOT able to find 1 taxi to the train station. So all we go, off to the beautiful Shanghai. I enjoyed a beer at the bar, and had a nice long chat about Chinese culture and society. Yes, quite.

After ditching our bags, we went on a perilous journey to find a pedestrian shopping district called Taekonglu. My sense of misdirection was in full force, as I managed to get quite lost and gave a desperate call for help to Lucy. I asked a bunch of people where it was, before finally breaking down in tears and getting a taxi.

Lucy told us to seek out James, the man from New Zealand who knew everything. Glier bought a stylish ring from him, and he was nice enough to give us a million suggestions of things to do. Super awesome guy, James. Going to have to remember him. After spending all day wandering about the city, we went back towards the hotel to eat an amazing duck restaurant. If you ever wanted to cross Peking Duck off your bucket list, this is a great place to do it. Well, that and Beijing I suppose. But seriously. The duck is really good.

For day #2 Lucy met us in the morning, where we got to experience some amazing street fried egg thingies. The agenda consisted of going to old town, with some shopping along the way. My haul was a bunch of hilarious movies, a new belt, a square commie hat, and snap on rollerskates. If that's not a successful day I don't know what is. We also got to go to this awesome Confucian temple complete with tea ceremony. The tea ceremony was especially awesome, and it totally worked to sell us a bunch of tea.

That evening we did a rooftop bus tour around the city, which I had never done but is actually a lot of fun. Shannon and I discussed teaching little ones, and Korean pop music. Unfortunately at that time I had to run back to Xiaoshan for work the next day. The rest of the gang stuck around Shanghai before moving onto Beijing. You can check their Facebook pages for the photo montage. (montaaaaage!)

Classy folk, they are.