Day 6: Remembrance

Today, I went to visit both my dad and grandmother. The cemetary provides it's own transport and usually it's very hard to get a seat on the bus. However, because of the National Day celebrations, there was not the usual number of people riding so getting seats was relatively easy. The trip there winds through many of the outlying areas of Shanghai so I got to really see what life in a rural (Xiang(1) Xia(4)) setting was like. The houses were small, mostly rundown, and there was trash just lying everywhere in sharp contrast to the image Beijing tried to paint of China as a super modern nation.

After paying my respects, I started walking back to the bus, but noticed on the way that for some reason, this cemetary has live peacocks. Upon closer inspection, they had almost 20 peacocks in this small enclosure, mostly adults, but one mommy peacock had 4 little chicks.


None of us was really wearing anything vibrant or colorful so none of the male peacocks fanned out his feathers.


Getting back, my cousin and I went to purchase some random stuff just to stretch out our legs. Shopping in China is definitely another experience. There are just massive hoards of people in the streets and most stores are jam packed with people. I saw an IKEA, Best Buy, and even a Dairy Queen! The first order of business was to upgrade my cousin's computer. Her computer only has 256 MB of RAM. As such, trying to blog everyday took quite a long time. We upgraded her computer to 2 Gigs of memory which sped up the performance considerably. We also needed to buy a couple of 2 gig USB drives. I ended up getting a 8 gig one for myself.

We had lunch at this Korean restaurant. While seated at the table, you see these nicely wrapped wet towels sitting on the table. You would think that these are complimentary, but no, they actually cost about 5 RMB each which is a ludicrously high price as 5 RMB can easily get about 5 of the same towels at a store. The most under-handed thing is they wait until you USE the towel to let you know there is an extra charge for it! Overall though, things are comparatively a lot cheaper in China. The entire meal probably would have been at least $40 or so, but only cost about 110 RMB (17 bucks or so).

After the shopping, we headed back and basically spent the rest of the night watching the televised Shanghai Snooker Championships. Snooker is wildly popular in China and televised snooker events often gain exceptionally high ratings. I was never really a snooker watcher, but I gotta admit, those people have some amazing skills.