Blog 3

Blog 3

Had a good night sleep last night. Got up at 7:30, dressed and went down for Breakfast at our hotel, The Royalton. Wonderful buffet breakfast serving both Western food and Chinese and Sushi. I breakfasted on the Chinese and sushi. Most of my group is Southern Californian or Midwesterners, with 3 widows from Boyton Beach, Fla. We tally 24. One group is a family of 4 from the twin cities, Ron and Nancy and their children Kyle 21, and Kyra a high school junior; 8 people who always travel together and originally from Indonesia; now living in Whittier and Simi Valley, Ca—one member of this group is Hans—who loves to tell off color jokes. There are two special ed teachers from Kansas City, Mo. Lorelei and Nancy; a couple from the mid west Jim and Nancy;
the 3 widows, Selma, Adele and ?, and a few others. It is a pleasant group, but not as friendly to each other as previous groups. They are cordial, but here it is day 3 or 4 and we really don’t know each other. I’m the only one here who can eat with chopsticks and they are very picky when it comes to food. I seem to be most friendly with Jim and Nancy.

At 9 AM, we departed for a visit at a Carpet Factory. Interesting watching them weave silk carpets and tapestries. No sale here from me.
Then we went to visit a Senior Center, where the seniors with dancing, a fashion show and singing entertained us. A Madame Ding who looks as if she is right out of the Cultural Revolution runs the program. Her body movements represent that time, although she was very friendly. After this program, we went to a home host lunch. We broke up into groups of 8 and dined at the apartment of three locals. Meals are served in small, but many dishes that are placed on a large lazy Susan. Most of the Chinese food I have eaten thus far is rather bland and similar. It is very different from my experience in Thailand where the variety and taste was great. The home host, spoke very little English, but was very lovely. She tried to teach me some Chinese, and said my pronunciation was good, but after I went over the numbers 1 to 10, I quickly forgot them. My retention ability for language is nil.

After lunch we got back on our bus and entered the world of traffic of Shanghai to go to the famous Bund. It is totally under construction. On one part of the river are buildings built early in the century and on the opposite side are huge skyscrapers of much different architectural design not more than 5 years old. The modern architecture is so varied with each skyscraper taking on a distinct character of its international architects.

We got back to the hotel at 3:30. I was not able to get on my blog site to write my blog, I think that blog sites are sometime blocked. However, I was able to send out two email to some of those who wanted to see the blog, (and probably to those who have no interest) I
don’t have my blog signup so just trying to send it to the people who requested it. Please forgive me if you didn’t want to receive these.

We went out to another Chinese dinner –similar food as we have been having and then after we went downtown to the Ritz Carlton hotel which has a theatre and saw a magnificent Acrobatic show. Got back to the hotel at 9:45 to write this, download my photos to my computer and now am ready to collapse. I have a 6:30 wake up call because we are taking a side trip via train to Suzhou City for the day.