Honestly all I wanted to do was to go shopping.
It was Mum’s morning off from work and she wanted to take me to the fabric market, which apparently is a really cool place where you can pick your fabric and make your own outfit all tailor made for something like twenty dollars australian.
Anyway it was a pretty miserable day, though just thinking about it now it didn’t happen on a tuesday which is odd, anyway, it was raining when we got up and we decided to brave it anyway.
Cue two hour wait for a taxi or walk down a mile for a bus. Stupidly we took the option of the bus.
But thankfully that didn’t happen.
Because Mum is living on campus and she is a redhead and white the guards that stand at the front know her and by association me, and we looked like drowned rats by the time we got there.
So the guards really sweet ones took us inside and explained they would get us a taxi from the ones coming in and dropping students in.
Now this is a lesson in why it doesn’t matter what language you speak sometime it doesn’t matter.
Because it didn’t matter that we didn’t know a word of Chinese we knew what was going on.
A taxi was let in to drop in a student and the guards agreed to ask it when it got back, however during that time another taxi came dropped someone off and left.
When the second taxi came Guard One said that they should ask that taxi to take us. Guard Two was very much against that idea and told Guard One who was obviously lower than Guard Two that they would wait for Taxi One (confused yet). So they listened to Guard Two and waited for Taxi One to come back.
But wouldn’t you know Taxi One didn’t know where that was. You should have heard the yelling and desipte the language barrier you could tell Guard One was abusing the hell out of Guard Two as they waited for another taxi to come and get us.
We should have just taken that as they sign and went back to the dorm.
But we didn’t.
We successfully got to the Fabric Market, still pouring down and we did our shopping and mum decided to take the ferry over from the Shanghai side back to the PuDong side.
Ferry cancelled.
I saw the blaring sign to just take a taxi back but mum in her hopeless optimisum that it wasn’t Tuesday thought that we could walk to the place where the Tacky Tunnel is and take it back across the river.
First of all the Tacky Tunnel is just what me and mum call I think is The Bund or Bunt Sightseeing Tunnel for the life of me I can’t remember what it’s really called it’s basically a tunnel for the tourists that has more flashing lights and sound effects on the actual walls of the tunnel than Vegas.
Very tacky, very fun.
Anyway the rain had started up and we began to walk in the rain me almost soaked becuase I had given up by broken umberalla.
We walked and walked and walked. The road got narrower and before we knew it we were walking on a gutter in the poring rain running then through huge puddles as our sidewalk disappeared on the edge of an eight lane highway, with construction on our left and a hufe barrier in the middle of the road so we couldn’t even cross over.
And to top all of this off it happened on a MONDAY. I shuddred to think about what would happen tommorrow.
I think the moment thought that completely summed up our day though was us clinging to this tiny off crop of an old fences just out of the way of the traffic and watching a Chinese construction man come up to us and look at us weirdly.
