Last Day in China- Shanghai-4/3/09

The last day in Shanghai I decided to go explore by myself as I hadn't done that yet and most people had field trips for class anyways.  I asked someone where the subway was and of course they told me the wrong direction from where I actually needed to go.  I hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch yet and I was really hungry and anxious to find a place but of course there was no food to be found.  I was in a neighborhood where clearly no one spoke any English.  I eventually found a KFC and figured I would settled for that only when I walked in I was the only one that spoke English and the menu was all in Chinese with no pictures.  It was really frustrating as I was really hungry and just wanted to eat but ordering clearly wasn't going to work out.  I decided my best bet was to just scrap finding the subway and just take a taxi to where I was trying to go which was on the other side of the river.  After about 10 minutes of zig zagging across the street and trying to find a taxi I finally found one, except I didn't know how to say the name of the Shanghai TV Tower in Chinese.  I tried pointing to it and making hand gestures and eventually I was pretty sure he understood where I was trying to go.  Several minutes later I actually arrived at the correct place and was still very hungry.  I went up to the ticket counter and of course they didn't take credit cards and I didn't have enough cash to get up the tower but they said there was an ATM in the mall across the street.  I headed over to the mall and ended up walking around and finding the food court.  The easiest/quickest thing in there was going to be McDonald's so I tried ordering a burger "only ketchup," and I get the burger and it has everything on it but ketchup.  I said something to the lady she said "no ketchup," I said "only ketchup," "yes, no ketchup."  I eventually gave up and just ate the burger cause I was very hungry.  After lunch I walked around the mall for a few minutes.  I found a Best Buy and decided I would go in to try and find an external hard drive to put my pictures on since I ran out of room on my computer.  A few days earlier I had bought a 400 GB flash drive in Beijing and figured it probably wasn't a good idea to risk all of my pictures on some cheap fake flash drive.  I found a 250 GB hard drive for like $80 and thought it would be a good idea to know all my pictures from my trip were on something from a legitimate store.  I went to the cashier to buy it and handed them my credit card and the little keypad was all in Chinese and I was like "umm can you tell me what to press here" and they kept saying "enter pin" but American Express doesn't have a PIN number.  Eventually after a few minutes they figured this out and handed me the hard drive and receipt with no bag.  I tried telling them I wanted a bag and they said "1 RMB" which is like one penny.  I couldn't believe that after I just spent $80 they were trying to make me buy a bag and I didn't even have any small change so they had to break my 1000 RMB bill.  Anyways I was finally on my way to the TV Tower to check out the view of Shanghai from there. 

I bought a ticket and headed up to the top of the tower and inside the elevator there was an elevator women explaining some stuff and said it in English as well but just saying it to me as everyone else was Chinese.  It was kind of awkward but nice of her I guess and they sure packed us into the elevator.  It was a pretty foggy day or smoggy so it was hard to see that much, but you could see the ship which was pretty cool. I saw some other SAS kids I knew; Alex, Kayla and Kelly.  Alex told me it was our friend Jackie's birthday and she asked if I wanted to come get a few drinks with them before we had to be back on the ship.  Kayla and Kelly headed back to the ship because they had a field trip to go on and Alex and I headed to go find Jackie.  She told us the street she was on and said she was in front of the Nike Store next to a pizza hut.  The taxi driver didn't understand where we were trying to go so I took off my shoe and pointed to the swoosh.  He understood and we figured we were probably going to end up at his cousins shop that sold fake Nike shoes but he actually took us to the legitimate Nike store.  We called Jackie to see where she was and said she was next to the Nike store, well so were we.  We kept walking around and apparently on that street there was 3 Nike stores and all of them were next to Pizza Hut's.  We finally found them and were on a search for a bar but no bar could be found.  We ended up doing some shopping in the stores that sell all the fake stuff where they remove part of the wall and then there is a huge room with all of the fake goods.  You name it they have it in these stores, its pretty crazy.  Each place was sketchier than the next, selling iPhones and digital cameras.  Like I'm sure anyone would buy a phone from that place.  We finally had to head back to the ship because it was getting late and we had to be back on in like a half hour.  We kept trying to find a taxi, except they were all occupied.  This went on for like 15 minutes and eventually we saw a taxi driver in front of a hotel and we asked him to take us and he said "no."  I guess he was on a break or he didn't want to face the traffic.  We ended up offering him like 10 times the amount the taxi ride should have been and of course he agreed.  We got back to the ship just in time and didn't get dock time.