After breakfast at good old Macdonald's, we had a little free and easy time to buy some souvenir before meeting up at the hotel lobby. It's Saturday, so there's a group of aunties doing some dancing exercises, led by a very faggotty old uncle, who can really twist and shake his butt! Jolie was mesmerized by their dancing. :)
Doing a little camwhoring at the hotel lobby. My hat cute? :)
Today we're leaving the hustle and bustle of the big city and heading to old Shanghai! We don't want to join those tour group, so we booked a mini van to drive us to Zhou Zhuang, also known as the ancient water town of Shanghai.
Almost everybody fell asleep as we sped off on the highway, but I woke up only after 5 minutes and just watched the scenery change from urban city landscape to beautiful flat farmlands and trees with gorgeous yellow autumn leaves. The ride was about an hour plus, which was pretty quick. I love it as it's so different from the dusty, noisy and grey city. So quiet and beautiful! And since it's further inland, it's not as cold too! Well, it's already pass lunch time, so we settled down for lunch before going into the village.
Zhou Zhuang was famous for their braised pork trotters, so that was definitely on the menu. Glad that Jolie's food scissors came in handy...
The trotter was delicious! Full of flavour, and the meat was so tender! Bro 不客气了. Use hand ah!
Father and daughter at the entrance. Jolie didn't even need her coat anymore.
This is the inside of the village. Quite alot of tourists. We decided to hire a tour guide so that we know what we were looking at. But once in awhile you get some other free loader tourists who would hang around and follow us so that they can hear what our tour guide was saying and enjoy a free tour. Ggggrrrr.. felt like asking them to BEAT IT and get their own tour guide! Or if they wanted to listen, PAY UP or something. Oh well, the place was so squeezy, nothing you can do. They'll usually leave after awhile.
But I must admit, this place was so beautiful...
An ancient tree that was struck by lightning so bad, the top part wouldn't grow leaves anymore. But isn't it beautiful? I love the colour of the leaves.
This is some famous dude who likes to make thoughtful poems with your name. Apparently, he did it for the Chinese President Jiang ZeMin and our dear MM Lee Kwan Yew when he visited the place many years ago. So now his "office" is in Zhou Zhuang where it's always peaceful and quiet. And for a fee, visitors pay him to make poems from their names too. We thought it would be a great gift for Jolie when she grows up!
Our little tour guide...
Check out the number of koi fishes in the temple pond!
By the time we were finished with the poem, it was already late afternoon. Isn't the view great?
After a little unpleasant encounter with some money-faced monks in the temple, (shame!) We ended our tour with a boat ride around the village. You can even pay a little extra and the nice boat lady would sing while she row the boat along the narrow canals. Chinese version of Venice. Nice.
We walked a little more by ourselves in the village looking for a place to have our dinner. Along the way, parents stopped by at one of the shops to look at some toys, not knowing that we had went ahead into one of the restaurants for dinner. Sis and I thought that Bro went back to inform them, but it turned out that he just went to another stall to buy something for himself.
So there was a moment of panic where we lost track of my parents in the narrow maze of shops in the village. They didn't bring their mobile phones, so I was so worried that we've lost them as it was getting darker by the minute in that place where they have no street lights. Thankfully Bro found them further down the street and we were reunited again for yet another not so fantastic dinner.
The light was so disorienting! It was only 7pm plus, but it was so dark, you would think that it's already 10pm or something. So we stopped by a convenience store to buy some snacks, water and some milk powder before heading back to the hotel.
Jolie was already asleep when we got back, but we wanted to go buy some stuff before we leave tomorrow, so Mom helped me watch over an already snoozing Jolie while my siblings, Cobby and I went out. There's this store that sells all sorts of 招财猫, so we bought loads of it as souvenirs. If the sales girls worked on commission, it would have been a great night for them. :)
With that our Shanghai trip has ended. Tomorrow we'll be going back to Hong Kong!
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