Day 9 - Shanghai

On the 20th of October the Pedare students were all eager to fulfill a day of endless shopping streets and finally eating some western food. With a decent lobby call of 10am, which some of us found difficult to understand (me), we were able to make our way to the bus and enjoyed an hour and a half bus ride filled with long naps as we got to our hotel at 1 am in the morning the night before

Once on the bus, we went to a shopping street made for tourists like us who were wanting some western shops rather

than being pressured into buying a 80 yuan bracelet from pushy Chinese men and women. The street consisted of shops such as Starbucks, Fila and the extremely popular H&M where fluorescent green puffer jackets and sparkly slip dresses were purchased. After meeting back after an hour of shopping, we all were excited to see a piece of home come out of Mr. Pearce’s backpack, a Haigh's chocolate frog. After dividing the frog into questionably even pieces and receiving some strange stares from Chinese ladies sitting next to us, it was time to move on to the next destination, lunch. 

For lunch we were all keen to get some western food into our system in the form of Burger King (It’s pretty much Hungry Jacks). Once sitting down and waiting to order, Huang Lao Shi realised that the kiosks to order on were not something she was familiar with but since I have experience with using the machines as I work at a fast food chain I was able to use the images and the machines format to take educated guesses on what we were ordering. Once receiving our orders everyone demolished their food and once again hopped on the bus.
 The next shopping street we went to was a French market street filled with fancy stores such as Tom Ford and Cartier that left everyone feeling poor. But this didn’t stop us from walking in and having a look around which was most likely a bad idea looking back as Lucy had an encounter with some expensive silk pyjamas that are now missing a button. Some of us also took some photos for Instagram in front of the impressive storefront of Tom Ford but were closely watched by the manager as we were told not to get too close to the sacred TF sign. Once capturing all the photos of us posing in front of storefronts and sneaking some pictures of Korean tour groups (Deniz was extremely excited to add this to her collection) we were able to move on to our final shopping street. 
The final street we explored was a Chinese shopping street with multiple food and souvenir vendors yelling
out what they had to offer. Some favourite experiences from the street was Molly and I buying way too many enamel pins, trying some White Rabbit ice creams that I would rate a 5 out of 10 as they tasted pretty much like vanilla ice cream, Lucy and Brianna walking through a posh store outside the market by mimicking the way “fancy people” walk and Deniz dancing to the music coming out of a bar.  Once completing the whole street (we think, it was pretty big) Molly and I needed the bathroom. We where pretty sure it was going to be a squat but we had seen them before and they weren’t too bad so we made our way to the toilet, but boy where we wrong. Once entering the room we were hit with the smell, I don’t think I could even describe it and then the cubicle opened and that’s when we saw the horror. It was so bad that the lady who was in their previously stumbled out of the toilet with her hand over her mouth and gagging. We ran out of there with speed and decided it would be best to hold it until we could find another bathroom. 

After a long day of shopping everyone was pretty hungry and tired, and with a special request from some of the group, we were able to have Pizza Hut for dinner where we had mass amounts of mozzarella and experienced Lucy wash her hands in her cup of water as we weren’t allowed to drink it anyways because it was from the tap. It was quite traumatising. Although the day was long and our feet are still aching everyone made some exciting purchases and loved the experience.

Paige Warrington