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Another late start, I guess the downside of having a really nice hotel is how hard it is to leave.
We walked over to the French Concession area, once again looking for the cool shit our concierge recommended. This time, we found it. It does have some neat shops and restaurants and bars, though in no where near the density we were expecting. When someone says “this area has alot of bars” im thinking of a street where every other storefront is a bar, not each block has 1 or 2 bars on it. This is probably why we didnt find it last time, we did find it we just didnt know it.
We did stumble on a little museum. It was the house of Zhang Leping ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Leping ), who was a comic artist of China, who was used by the Chinese government to produce anti-Japanese propaganda, and later Communist propaganda. This was a free musuem, tucked away in a back street of this neighborhood, we found it purely by accident. It had a walk through of his life, and the works of his life. Upstairs in the house left as it was when he was alive.
After walking around a bit we settled on a beef noodles place.
This was one of the places where they hand pull the noodles, right in front of us. We could see the guy pulling the noodles from the dough before tossing it in the boiling water that would eventually be our meal. I had a noodle dish with a sort of tapenade of finely diced olives, beef, onions and other unidentifiable vegetables. Laura had a noodle soup with beef bits in it. In both dishes Chinese fivespice was prevelant. It was very tasty, proving once again that the hole in the wall places are good choices when over here. And all told our bill ammounted to less than 5USD.
After this we made our way to the Nanjing Shopping street looking for new shoes.
This requires some preface; In the Army i wore my issue boots all day every day, most evenings and weekends i never left the house, and thusly never needed shoes. The civilian shoes i had were some old beat up skate shoes that would not work for two months in Asia, nor look nice enough to sneak into nicer restaurants. So before leaving I hit up a few stores and settled on Saucony running shoes. It had good reviews on Amazon, and various other sites, and i figured running shoes should last for 2 months of heavy walking right? Runners will easily put on 10-12 miles a week, and they dont expect to be replacing shoes every other month. Apparently the same “runners” that reviewed these shoes as tough and durable are the people that wear yoga pants to the grovery store thinking they are "active".
Would these shoes stand up to the rigors of being a nurse walking around marbled floors all day? Or the lifestyle of an carpet bound office worker? yes
An actual runner? not at all.
Within the first 2 weeks, i had worn the primary grip from the soles away, and the memory foam in-sole part was pil-ing pretty bad, after 3 weeks the pil-ing turned into complete wear, the pad of my foot had pulled up most of the memory foam. Essentially at this point the pad of my foot was less than half an inch from the pavement.
The only thing good about these shoes i would like to point out, is they make acceptable climbing shoes, the lack of traction and significant insole meant i was able to boulder/climb the frozen Great Wall of China pretty well. So if you need some climbing shoes that arent climbing shoes, these work.
for 65USD I am very disappointed in these shoes.
Fortunately I am in the land of knockoffs and cheap shit, i found some “outdoor athletic shoes” from a Chinese brand ANTA that will survive at least the last 4 weeks of this trip.
After switching shoes we went to the Bund ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bund ) to see the city all lit up. The Bund is full of western style buildings, this is where all the western countries that “opened up” china set up their trading houses. accross the river from here is the new Shanghai, the part with all the super high ultra modern buildings. these buildings and 1800 put on a sort of light show that is pretty neat. after seeing the light show we intended to catch a river tour. The ticket agents werent very helpful, and observing the boats, it looked like a very limited tour, we decided to walk around.
after feeling confident we saw all there was to see on this side of the river, we hopped a subway to go to the new Shanghai and try to see the city from a high vantage point.
Our concierge recommended the Park Hyatt Bar, as it is the highest bar in the city, providing great views. Unfortunately this is a VERY swanky place, and two people wearing multi-purpose wind breakers, with scarves, wearing clothes packed in a backpack for a 9 week trip, are not the normal clientele. While waiting for the elevator we had some unreasonably snooty people throw shade at us.
getting to the top we realized we were underdressed for the venue, though in all honesty, that lady was being unnecessarily cunt-y, for all she knew we could be Silicon Valley CEOs that just put up an IPO for 5mil and were bout to buy rounds for the bar. We got out of there most ricky-tick and wandered around a park, and various above ground walkways taking in the view before heading home to go to bed.
