Reality sets in!

It's crazy hot here! Two or more showers per day kind of hot. It's so humid that an envelope which I am using to save receipts sealed itself, and the receipts inside it are damp. My hair has gotten big - very big.

On Sunday, five of us decided to take a Hop On Hop Off tour to see some of the city. Stop 1 was a block from our hotel - convenient. Stops 2-4 appeared to be different sides of the same park so we planned to Hop Off at the Bund - Stop 5.

The guide recommended walking along the Bund to Stop 6 so we set off on foot, humidity sucking us further and further into sweaty delirium with every step. We walked and walked and walked and Stop 6 was nowhere to be found! This was a fine moment to realize that the map we had only had *some* street names marked while others were just mystery roads.

So we bravely decided to just walk on over to Old Shanghai behind Yu Garden. There was a dumpling place that the hotel concierge recommended for lunch and we were starving! Old Shangai was super confusing - there turned out to be 4 dumpling places so we just picked one. I don't handle that kind of humidity too well and it totally zapped my appetite so my lunch was a TsingTao and a spring roll!

Stop 7 was supposed to be just across from Old Shanghai we thought we'd reconnect with our tour and carry on to a couple of temples. We asked the waiter which way the main entrance to the area was since we had come in from what we think was the side. Confident that we had good directions and re-energized after an air conditioned break, we were off.

When we reached what we thought was the bus stop, there was no Point 7 to be seen anywhere. We asked 3 people including a cop. All 3 looked puzzled, stopped someone else to confer with them, debated something back and forth with the person and then gave us directions confidently. They were wrong. They were ALL wrong. Each person had sent us off in 3 different directions. When none of those worked we tried the 4th direction and arrived in front of the landmark that the map showed as the Point 7 pickup. But...no point 7. It was getting late and we missed the window for going to the temple. Hot and frustrated, we gave up and took a cab back to the hotel. The tour ended up being nothing more than a $44/person transport from our hotel to the Bund. :(

On the plus side, that evening we found what we are calling Santana Row. It's an area full of upscale, nice restaurants and bars. It's familiar and comfortable and we all breathed a sigh of familiar relief when we saw it. We've now been there for dinner 2 nights in a row and I'm sure we'll be back there tonight!

Oh and we had lunch with our local team here yesterday and I got cornered into trying some foods that I would rather not have even seen, let alone tasted.

It's sensory overload here - hot, humid, polluted, maniacal taxi drivers!, and crowded. "Santana Row" and our hotel are nice sanctuaries though.

Let's see how the rest of the week goes but I haven't started loving Shanghai yet.