外 国 人

21st September

This morning frankie persuaded me to skip class, and we went to have a cultural day. We cycled to south shanghai metro station, got on the metro to the train station and then took the bus from there thinking that the bus would take us to Jiading. The bus ride was quite exciting because we went quite far out of the centre and saw loads of shanghai that I havent seen before, and we drove past B&Q which was most exciting. The guidebook was quite vague about where this bus took us to, and when the bus turned around to go back the way it came we decided to get off. However, it was in a really random part of shanghai which wasnt really that nice, and they obviously didnt have many foreigners there because everyone was staring at us, and some people who drove past were shouting hello and beeping the car horns at us. Also, there were quite a lot of people walking around in their pyjamas, strange behaviour.
We saw a security guard and frankie went to ask him where we should go to get to the gardens, so he pointed us in the right direction and said that it wasnt far. So we set off and after a while we thought we should ask someone else so I went to ask a guy and he didnt understand but his friend did and he told us to carry on going and that it wasnt far so we carried on walking. But it didnt seem like the kind of place that the guidebook had described and we saw a hotel so we thought we would go in there and ask. But they didnt know where the place was, and after several phone calls they told us that we could take a taxi or a bus, so obviously we went for the taxi. They told us to sit and wait and that they would call one so we waited and waited . . . . and then eventually a woman came over to us and said that they couldnt get us a taxi and she pointed at a man and said he would drive us for 30yuan so we got in his car. At one point he turned down a little track and i was slightly concerned that he was taking us to the middle of nowhere to kill us but then we eventually got to a main road and we arrived at the Guyi yuan garden.
the garden was so pretty, and it was so nice to be somewhere that wasnt polluted and really noisy, but then loads of school children arrived and they ruined the peacefulness. But they were so funny. I was just sat on a bench by the lake and a group of girls came and stood behind me and I heard them whisper 外 国 人 (foreigner) and then they stood there for a while whispering and eventually one of them said hello, and i replied in chinese and then one of the shouted 外 国 人 侻 中 丈 (the foreginer speaks chinese) and the screamed and ran away, it was funny. And then loads of younger school children started walking past me with their teachers and they were all pointing at me and shouting 外 国 人! 外 国 人! it was really funny. Frankie and I hired a boat and went around the little lake for a while which was really cool but there were school children all around the garden and we kept shouting 外 国 人 or "hello" whenever they saw us.
We left the garden and walked to the yunxiang temple. We followed the directions in the guidebook, and on the way there we stopped for KFC which was good. We carried on walking to the temple but we got really lost somehow even though it was supposed to be really close to the gardens. So i went to ask a lady and she told us to follow her and she took us to the temple. The directions in the guidebook were wrong, sooooooo annoying!!
But the temple was amazing. When we got there there were some people burning something in a courtyard and when they set fire to it, the monks came out and were chanting and had various little musical instruments, it was amazing (and such good timing to arrive then). After that the monks went back into one of the temples. The temples were all so amazing, and they had massive gold budha statues in them. It was an amazing place.