Sightseeing in Tianjin

I wanted to quickly write about some of the things I've been able to do in Tianjin since I've been here. This past Saturday my roommate and I went in to town to check out a couple of the places Tianjin is famous for. Our first stop was a really nice Beijing "jia jiang mian" restaurant. It was really nice and super cheap (a bowl of noodles cost less than $2).

After that we went to a famous shopping street called 和平路 "Heping Street." It is a incredibly long street that has hundreds of various shops and malls.
After exploring around a bit, we decided to go down a side street that led to a famous Catholic church (apparently a bunch of people got killed there some time ago). Along the way we made a quick stop in a big shopping mall. Close to the entrance there was a small stage set up and some girl was singing a Chinese hip hop song. After her song, and then some dude's song, these 3 guys came out and started break dancing. They were pretty cool guys so I filmed most of it (check out the video below).



After the show ended, we headed back towards the church. It was kind of strange seeing a Christian church in China (they aren't very common). The church was open for visitors to check out and take pictures.
That was about all I did that day. Tianjin is a pretty small city in comparison with Beijing. I think I've covered all of the main things to do in Tianjin. I think I'll be planning a trip to the portion of the Great Wall that is close to here (the part that ends at the coastline) sometime soon. We'll see.....

Life in Tianjin

So, it's been waaaayyy too long since I updated this thing. I've been meaning to for the last week or so, but I am usually too tired by the time I get home from work. Sorry this has taken so long to get out. I just wanted to take a bit to let everyone know what I'm up to in Tianjin.

The speed train from Beijing to Tianjin was really nice. It only took about 29 minutes to cover roughly 150 km. The train gets up to speeds as high as . I moved to Tianjin to start a 2 month internship with LG Electronics. I work in the R&D Center as a market researcher. So far it's been a pretty good experience! They keep me super busy and I'm learning a lot about marketing and market research. I am also living in a super nice apartment. I didn't think it could get any better than what I was at in Beijing, but I was wrong. We live on the 4th floor of the building, and we even have an elevator! The apartment has 4 rooms and 2 bathrooms. We have a really nice flat screen TV and DVD player (although we don't get to use them much since we are almost always working). So ya... it's a nice place.
Work starts at 8:00 am every day (although we usually arrive around 7:30). At 7:50 every morning everyone does morning exercises. It's kind of funny (there is this really cheesy music in the background and some Chinese guy counting in Chinese). Before the exercises start there is some sort of LG propaganda song that is played every morning. I wish I could find the mp3 somewhere. It's hilarious! Lunch is everyday at 12. All of the workers head to two cafeterias for a one hour lunch break. The food is usually pretty awful. It's particularly bad on Mondays and Tuesdays. It's even so bad that the locals can't stand it! But hey, at least I don't have to pay for it. We also have to teach English during the day to our coworkers (which luckily for me, all of my students have a pretty advanced level of English).

We usually don't get home in the evenings until around 8pm after grabbing dinner on the way home. I'm usually so exhausted by the time I get home that I usually just go to bed. So my life is pretty boring during the week, but during the weekends I try to get out and explore a bit. We live about a 15 minute walk away from a TGI Fridays, which offers a nice alternative to the crappy food we eat for lunch everyday. I don't have much else to talk about now. This weekend I'll be taking the Singaporean interns to Beijing (there are 5 of us interns in total) to show them around. If anything exciting happens I'll post about it.

Beijing.... Jason go bye bye D:

Well I've just finished my last day in Beijing. It's been an amazing 5 months!! The Hutong School has been a simply phenomenal experience! All the staff were so friendly and helpful, and the teachers were all great (and very patient with me)! I consider them all good friends. I also made a lot of great friends with my fellow students, and I'm really going to miss all of them! It has also been a pleasure working with Picpax. If it wasn't for them, I would not have had this opportunity to be in Beijing. This is a very bittersweet ending to a very important chapter in my life, but I'm looking forward to the next one in Tianjin. LG is going to be awesome!

Zhouzhuang, The Venice of China!

So I meant for this post to go up at the beginning of the week, but I have been pretty busy getting everything ready for my move to Tianjin. I finally have a little bit of time to blog about my trip to Zhouzhuang 周庄. This beautiful little city is located just an hour away (by bus) from Shanghai. It's almost halfway between Shanghai and Suzhou.

We got up that morning at just past 6, ate breakfast and headed to the bus station (conveniently located at the Shanghai Stadium). After we purchased the bus tickets (which set us back 150RMB each, including entrance tickets to the city), we boarded our bus. The weather was pretty crappy that day (foggy and rainy), which is a shame when compared with the day before, but we told ourselves we wouldn't let that stop us from having a good time.

The bus dropped us off at the entrance to what we thought was the main part of the city and told us we needed to be back by 3pm if we wanted to get back to Shanghai. The new part looks like it just got done being constructed. Most of the buildings were vacant, and the town seemed deserted. We decided to follow the crowd which made its way over to the mansion compound of Shen Wansen. Shen Wansen was pretty famous in this region. He started as a poor farmer, but then became one of China's wealthiest people after he became successful in China's silk trade. It was a pretty nice compound that had a lot of interesting information about Mr. Shen's life.

Our next stop was this really cool place called CS Area. I really wish the weather would have been better that day because there would have been more people and we could have actually played this game. It was this really fancy laser tag game that reminded me of Counter Strike. There were replicas of all sorts of famous guns (ak47, m4, mp5, etc), and they even had a sniper rifle. The worker there was really nice and let us take some pictures with the gear and guns. After that we made our way back into the newly constructed part of the city.

By this time we were all wondering why we had gotten up so early only to be rained on in some mostly deserted really tiny city. So we decided to make our way across the street and follow some of the crowd that we lost after visiting the CS Area. This was what we came to see! It was beautiful! There were so many narrow, cobblestone alleyways that would end up along the water roads that connected this little village. All of the buildings looked old and original. After wondering around for a bit we managed to make it to a ticket check-point (it's a good thing we didn't throw away our tickets) and came across the main commercial street. There were hundreds of tiny shops selling everything from souvenirs to food. We stopped at a little art shop and all of us got suckered into buying some nice framed paintings (at what we thought were unbelievably cheap prices compared to Beijing). Don't get me wrong, they're all beautiful works of art. Had we just waited a few hours we would have come across more art shops that were a little bit harder to find with much cheaper prices.

So we wondered around the village snapping hundreds of photos and visiting all of the sites that we could find that I read about online before leaving for Shanghai. I think my favorite place was the beautiful Buddhist Temple located on the north side of the village. The scenery there was absolutely stunning! There was this beautiful pavilion on the middle of the lake and the two main buildings of the temple were also in the middle of the lake connected by arched bridges. It was a really serene atmosphere.

On our way back to the bus we stopped at a little restaurant to eat some chao mian (or chow mein to all of you back home). If anyone visits this place (which I highly recommend) please do NOT eat in a restaurant here. They are all spectacularly dirty (they even made some of the dirtier restaurants in Beijing seem like 5 star establishments). I ordered some chao mian with fried eggs, and Julian and Ludwig split a couple of other dishes. This proved to be my downfall as I got food poisoning later that evening. So, I would have to say aside from the food poisoning I got from the chao mian, Zhouzhuang was a pretty amazing city to visit!

Shanghai Shenanigans

Now that I've finally finished moving all my old posts over to this new blog, I can finally get around to blogging about my latest trip to Shanghai.

Going to Shanghai has long been a dream of mine, so this was an awesome opportunity! I love visiting huge metropolis cities like Beijing, Shanghai, or NYC (still really want to visit Tokyo and Hong Kong). This time it was just Ludwig, Julian, and myself that went (it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment decision to go). This time we decided to fly instead of taking a night train to give us more time to spend in Shanghai. Ludwig and Julian arrived in Shanghai on Monday, and I joined them on Wednesday. I ended up getting a great deal on tickets over at ctrip.com and round trip from Beijing to Shanghai was less than 800 RMB (which is pretty good considering it was during Spring Festival). We ended up staying at the Blue Mountain Hostel (which we found on hostelworld.com). This was an amazing hostel! It was located in a great place (close to most of the attractions we wanted to see, and right across the street from a subway station), it was cheap (40RMB per night for an 8 person dorm-style room), and it is one of the nicer hostels I've stayed in. I highly recommend that hostel for anyone planning a trip to Shanghai.
After I checked into the hostel on Wednesday, we went and grabbed some lunch at a nearby restaurant and grabbed some donuts for dessert (They have donuts in Shanghai!!!). I was shocked to find a Dunkin Donuts in Shanghai (which I guess they just opened up)! I wish they'd open one up in Beijing! After lunch we took the subway to visit the Oriental Pearl TV tower to get a nice view of the city from up top (the building furthest to the left in the picture at the top of the post). We ended up going to the JinMao building instead because it looked like we might get a better view from the 88th floor observatory. After paying the entrance fee (88 RMB or 60RMB with a student ID) we made our way to the top. The view from up top was absolutely stunning! It was really cool to get a view of the city from one of the tallest buildings in the city!
After our trip to the top of the JinMao building we decided to pay "Old Shanghai"a visit. On the way we stopped in this really cool older neighborhood. It was like what I imagined china looking like in the 80's and early 90's. It was dirty, crowded, smelled like fish, and filled with narrow alleyways (see pic below).
We wondered around this place for a bit, people staring at us the entire time (I don't think they see too many white people in this area). We even found this really funny PSA board that had illustrations warning people of the danger of fireworks (see below pic).It was a really cool experience and I'm glad we did it because we were able to find this small Buddhist temple on the outskirts of this little neighborhood. We managed to get in just before closing time (entrance fee was 10RMB), which was cool because we were pretty much the only ones there.
After spending some time to enjoy the ambiance of the temple we made our way to "Old Shanghai" (just a short 5 minute walk away). This place was incredible! It is set up to look like Shanghai did in the 1930's (I believe the buildings are original, just restored). It is filled with markets, tiny shops, and restaurants. It even has another, bigger Buddhist temple (entrance fee is 20RMB), as well as a beautiful park (Yu yuan) located inside of it. I recommend setting aside several hours for this place. There is plenty of great places to shop and a lot of really cool places to see.
We spent quite some time here shopping and looking at the sights. We got some nice souvenirs (jade carvings, t-shirts, etc) and ended up eating dinner there. I'm glad we spent so much time there because we were also able to see what "Old Shanghai" looks like at night. It almost seems like an entirely different place.
If you wonder around the outskirts you can find some really small streets (a little bit dirtier than the main area) with small street-side restaurants and shops. This also has a very disctinctive Chinese feel to it. I highly recommend visiting it. After eating dinner in "Old Shanghai" we took a cab to the river on the opposite side of the Pudong to get a chance to see the famous view of the city at night (see top pic). This was such an incredible view!
I prefer visiting this place at night (if you only have time to visit this place once) because the city looks absolutely stunning at night! It's really cool to see the reflections of the buildings and many tourist boats in the river. If you have time there are plenty of tourist boats that you can take (ranging from 100-150RMB) to get a tour of the Huangpu river. Our last stop of the evening was the nearby Club Rouge. Club Rouge has a deck with an amazing view of the Shanghai skyline, making the high prices for the drinks worth it. Club Rouge has a wide variety of both non-alcoholic and alcoholic drinks, and you can even custom order pretty much any drink you can think of. That pretty much wraps up my day in Shanghai. Stay tuned for my next post about Zhouzhuang, the Venice of China!