Day 3: Pudong Exploration

So last night was not my best for sleeping….something about crossing that date line and being in a room only 3 stories above the honking street traffic made sleep really elusive.  In all I think I slept about 3-4 hours and spent the rest of the time unpacking and writing emails.  I figured I’d be ok for today and be fine, but boy was that a pipedream.  I just woke up from a 3 hour nap and would like to go right back to sleep, though, as my mom warned me, I don’t feel any closer to getting on a normal sleep schedule. 

This morning I went walking around the motel that I’m at to get the lay of the land.  It sort of worked, I think my stellar sense of direction was still asleep though.  I found a supermarket and a little bakery I got breakfast at then walked a little in a park on the Bund.  Oh and I saw the cutest little Chinese grandparents doing tai chi on the shore of the river! Maybe next week I will join them.

I proceeded to return to dear Motel 168 and felt totally sick at first so I tried to shake that (unsuccessful) and then decided to just ignore it.  I went back out to Pudong (the area we are in) with James to go find lunch and get to the more downtown part of Pudong where I hadn’t gone before.  Basically we just walked towards the big buildings and then around the buildings and on the water.  There are some really interesting looking towers here- there’s one that has a huge base of columns and then as it goes up there are stacks of smaller columns the entire way up.  It looked pretty out of place next to the HSBC building and other big shiny ones.  We also wandered into a more residential part of Pudong and saw the tons and tons of apartments with laundry hanging out the windows, an interesting juxtaposition to the enormous, modern buildings we had just seen.  We also explored our supermarket options near work and our motel- we found a few more American ones (woohoo!) and got a kick out of the packets of webbed duck feet with a rubber duck cartoon on the front.  Sooo appetizing.  And we found a Subway, which I’d say was pretty awesome, and I will probably end up eating a lot at.