Halfway through Shanghai!

Rise 'n shine! Bus pulls out at 7 am sharp (well, we never leave anywhere quite on time...)

I had breakfast at 6:30 with John and Paul (I managed to get my omelet first!) and we piled on to the bus to prepare for our 2.5-hour journey (false advertising, it was 3.5). I listened to my iPod for the journey (we did make one-stop at a reststop, which was an adventure in and of itself... not the mention the smell!) and we finally arrived around 10:30. Our first order of business was visitign Alibaba, a hugely popular internet company in China (think Ebay, Paypal, Yahoo, and SAS). We had a brief lecture and a tour through the office (which was mostly just cubicles... but well decorated ones (my favorite were the large stuff animals people were using as back cushions). My favorite part was the "Monitoring Room" where you could see all the site activity, like what people were searching for around the world at that very moment, there were two people (one in the U.S. and one in Sweden) searching for "Box"... interesting, creepy that you could see that.

After our tour at Alibaba, we headed to lunch at another traditional Chinese restaurant, this one inside the Lily Hotel. I wasn't quite as stuffed after this meal, because there wasn't as much I was willing to venture to eat, especially after one of my tablemates was posing with the chicken's head. The hotel did have a nice bathroom, so I was able to stock up on a few pieces of toilet paper for reserves (which is hard to come by in this country).

When we were finished lunch, we went to the West Lake park to prepare for our boat ride on the West Lake (which was previously a lagoon, now a man-made lake). The boat ride was lovely, as it was nice to be on the water (for my first boat ride of the season!). Our next stop was a Tea Plantation, where we toured some of the tea fields, learned how to make tea, and sampled some fresh Green Tea (not a big fan).

We were exhausted and gross (thanks to the humidity) at this point, so we abandoned the plan to see the Ling Yin temple and instead headed back to Shanghai, arriving at the hotel at about 8:30. I finished up some of my yogurt from the night before, read for a bit, and went to bed without dinner once again.

This morning I woke up at about 5:15, so decided to venture online to catch up with the rest of the world. Today's agenda includes a trip to the World Trade Center, Urban Planning Center, a visit to the Silk Market (aka, Knock-Off market) and a performance of Chinese Acrobats this evening! Will write about those adventures when I get to Tokyo on Saturday.