Video Upload + Alcoholic Tea

Today was tough to get rolling. René and I overslept due to the jet-lag and missed the sightseeing bus. More precisely we overslept with six and a half hours... We finally managed to hook up with the rest of the team at the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. This is pretty impressive, due to the fact that Shanghai houses more than 17 million people and we didn't know where to search.

I found a way of uploading my pictures without tripping over blogspots digital obstacles. From now on I will upload the as a small video file, whenever I have the time to do so. I hope you enjoy it... (Depending on you connection, it might take a short while to load).

While exploring the city, we met some really nice Chinese students who offered to take us to a traditional chinese tea ceremony. We declined, due to our search party, but shared emails and got a rain-check on the ceremony. Later we found our own tea bar. After downing a cup of Chinas finest, we noticed how our legs felt tingly and our head started to buzz. Definitely buying a six-pack of that tea tomorrow...

After finding the rest of our team, we visited the museum. This was quite an experience. This was a six stories tall building, with a main focus on showing the vision of Shanghai as it may look in 2010 for the World EXPO. Every level of the building exceeded the previous in displaying beautiful models of Shanghai (see video above). The models do depict a more cleaner and greener Shanghai than what is real though.

I had dinner at KFC (very cultural, I know) to avoid choking on bone pieces and eyeballs. This, however, made me wanna try traditional food again tomorrow. Nothing like grease and french fries... After eating, I went to the dvd shop. Here I did my first magic "show" in Shanghai. After five minutes of trying explain the inner secrets of the word "magic" to the shop owner (he kept bringing me Michael Jackson albums), I produced a deck of cards. I did, Probably, my worst performance of 2009. After that he brought me a copy of "Cirque de Soleil". I guess this was a nice way of calling me a bozo...

Tomorrow we'll visit our Homebase for the next three months. Looking forward...