China - Day 105, Tuesday - Week 15

Week 15!

I signed up for a class about picky eaters (anyone who knows Daniel will understand why I signed up for this class). The class is held in Puxi, which means about 45 minutes from us. Richard took me there. When I went up to the 19th floor a woman met me at the door and told me that I was the only one who had signed up so the class was canceled. Really! They couldn't email me and let me know!!

So instead, Richard took me on a tour of Puxi. The French Concession is a beautiful area. You can tell you are in the French Concession because of all the trees.

This is one of the streets in French Concession area. The trees are beautiful.
Can you see how old they are - look at those trunks!

Another street in French Concession

Every street in French Concession is lined with these type trees.

Richard took me to another, very local place to eat lunch. Most Westerners do not eat here because the menu is all in Chinese characters, whereas most other restaurants have English words or at least pictures. They basically only have 2 items at this restaurant. One is a soup and the other is a dumpling which has pork and soup inside. While we were eating, Richard told me that people were talking about the fact that I, a Westerner, was in the restaurant. This is when it is nice that I don't understand Chinese! The dumplings were very good. Richard was amazed that I could pick them up with chopsticks! The soup was good, but I made the mistake of asking what was in it. See the picture below.

This is a picture of the restaurant. It really isn't very big.

This is a picture of the dumplings. There is pork and soup inside. This container is the traditional container that they serve dumplings in. There are 2 layers . You take the top layer (wood) off and there are more dumplings. They were delicious.

OK, so here is the soup. Want to take a guess at what is in it?
It is a chicken broth base. You can see the parsley. The whitish/yellowish pieces are tofu. The whitish color things in the middle are some part of the chicken - they were tube shaped and very chewy. (Randy thinks it is the intestine). Not sure what the dark reddish with light red outer ring pieces were.  The red square (under the parsley lower right) is blood!  The blood was kind of jelled. You can't really see it, but there was a lot of this. Also there are a clear type spaghetti in the soup. I managed to eat the tofu, spaghetti, a couple of the unidentified parts and the broth. I gave Richard everything else! Richard told me that the Chinese believe that you eat the blood it will give you more blood. I'll take my chances!!

We stopped at the Diocese of Shanghai and St. Ignatius Catholic Church.

The sign out side the church!

St. Ignatius Church

Diocese of Shanghai

He showed me the Cultural Square, we went to Painter's Street, and just drove around.

This is the Cultural Square. The building behind the trees is for plays, operas, etc. Mama Mia is playing there now! The fountain lights up at night.

This is a street for all painters.

Lots of small galleries.

I haven't done too much of just looking around Shanghai. It was fun.