News - by John

Shanghai is definitely a city of severe contrasts. While modest and homely in some places, buildings are literally being thrown up from the bowels of the streets. This creates a fascinating horizon line of tradition and new ideas when traveling along the endless expanse of turning roads.

View of TV Tower - by Jim

One street by the water best reflected these spectacular contrasts. On the right-hand side of the bus one could see the TV Tower across the water looming over several other geometrically sound buildings. On the left, a wide array of Eastern-influenced buildings made their brown, green, and yellow statements in front of a light gray sky. It was as if by turning your head from side-to-side your head was transformed in to a biological remote control clicking between the History channel and the Sci-Fi network on the television of life.

Dining at the dumpling place - by Lindsay

While in Shanghai we visited museums, gardens, shopped, danced, ate, walked through the marketplace, and were able to have our hand at surviving in a foreign country with virtually no verbal communication between us and the rest of the world.

Dining at the dumpling place - by Lindsay

Young boy hanging out with Luke

Shanghai, being the last city we’d visit in China, was a place where we all ’seized the day’ by blowing the rest of our Yuan during a day of shopping and relishing our last chances with communicating to people who don’t really understand you (which had become a favorite passtime for some).

There was a bowling alley on the fifth floor of the hotel. We’d go there at night and mop up our ‘free time’ before bed in playing one or two games of bowling. In the bowling alley there were such treats as a massage chair and a jukebox. When it wasn’t our turn to bowl we’d either go stick a few jiao in the jukebox or in the chair and let them do their magic. The music that came from the jukebox included Spice Girls, Mariah Carey, and Backstreet Boys…obviously they have as bad a taste in music in China as they do in America.

Saying goodbye to Yang and Bin, our tour guides - by Stephanie

Leaving Shanghai was where we had to say goodbye to our tour guides, Yang and Bin before lugging our suitcases to the checking counter. We boarded the plane and left the steamy climate of the humidity-plagued country to enter in to the cooled, wet feel of Japan. And then we flew home.