Macau

Last week was the Dragon Boat Festival and we got a few days off from school so 14 of us planned a trip to MACAU and HONG KONG! woo! We left for the Hong Kong Airport early Monday morning and then took an hour long ferry to Macau. The first thing we noticed when we got the Macau was the 98% humidity! After that, we noticed that there were quite a few signs in Portuguese. This was because Macau used to be a colony of Portugal. We took a shuttle from the airport to our hotel and after settling in headed to a Portuguese restaurant for dinner. It was really good. We didn't order any unusual dishes. We ordered normal meats that were cooked with different flavors and different kinds of gravy.

Us at dinner (Vince, Copp and Winters missing from picture)

Following dinner, we went on a tour and walked by the Grand Lisboa casino, Hard Rock Cafe and some others. We entered one of the casinos and and some of the boys tried their luck at the slot machines and virtual roulette for an hour before we head back to the hotel to rest.

Macau at night (very different from Macau during the day)

The next day, we made our way to Chris's house. Chris is one of the kids on this trip and Macau is his hometown. He is the most gracious host and really did a great job in showing us around Macau, making reservations at his favorite restaurants and helping us out in general. We hung out there for sometime and then took to the bus to a restaurant that is famous for its egg tarts! We all got a few and they were delicious. The store owners had a pet turtle that kept coming into the restaurant. It was really cute.

Our amazing host- Chris

Delicious egg tarts

After brunch, we made our way to the Venetian! It was a mall/casino/hotel. They had all the top name brands and the mall went on forever! They had a fake river with a gondola. We shopped for hours! All the girls bought shoes and the boys bought clothes and shoes and other things.

The Venetian - this is indoors

The Venetian

The Venetian

Gondola at the Venetian

Peek of the casino from up above

After the Venetian, we headed over to a shopping district which was outdoors. It had many food stalls and stores for clothes and food. One store sold Macau sweets and meats and the best part about it was they had free samples of EVERYTHING from butter cookies to almond cookies to savory snacks! We all had a good evening snack there and shamelessly walked out without buying anything.

One of the stalls with the yummy snacks

Shopping place in Macau

Famous Landmark in Macau

Something we were looking forward to all day were the reservations Chris had made for us for a huge buffet at the Grand Lisboa. Our reservation was for 8.30 PM. We lined up at 8 and were first in line! The food looked so good. We were told that the best strategy was to run to our tables and then run and attack the sea food which was the most popular so that wouldn't have to wait for the chefs to prepare second rounds in case the dishes finished. That's exactly what we did! I have never run for my food before but I did this time. The buffet went on forever! They had everything including salad, meat, fruit, dumplings, noodle bowls, sushi, seafood, bbq stuff, dessert etc. It was very filling!

Grand Lisboa

After the very filling dinner, we headed back to the hotel so we could glam up for the casinos. We all planned to go out gambling that night. All the boys wore suits and all the girls wore dresses and we headed back to the Venetian. We took tons of pictures outside the casino since cameras weren't allowed inside and then headed inside to try our luck! We couldn't find any open Blackjack tables that had a minimum of 100 HKD so we headed to the Hard Rock Café where they especially opened up 2 tables for our group. I observed for a while and then went in with 200 HKD. I left when I had 500 HKD in my hand. Yes, I did make a profit of 300 HKD woot! That more than covered the cost of my buffet! One of my friends, Bill, won 1800 HKD.. what!?

That was a great day and we finally turned in at 3.30 am, some of us with heavier pockets and some of us with much lighter.

Next morning some people decided to go jump off of the highest bungee jumping tower in the world! (Mummy, don't worry, I didn't do it.. Skydiving once last summer was enough). Those of us who didn't jump, hung out and watched the jumpers and cheered them on. They all looked soo happy coming down. Some of them paid for their jump with their winnings from the night before. That's impressive. Soon after we headed back to catch our ferry to Hong Kong! I was in charge of planning whatever we were going to do in Hong Kong and will include details of what we did in my next post. For now, wish me luck for my final on Monday!

World's highest Bungee Jump

PS - I am going to add new pictures to Amazing Race post

Amazing Race: Team Win!

On Saturday June 5th, we woke up early to catch the 6.40 am campus bus to get to the other campus (Xuhui). That was the starting point of the Amazing Race that the IPO staff had planned for us. Throughout the day, we had to follow clues that would be given to us and that would take us to different parts of Shanghai. There were 5 teams. One of the rules of the game was to not have more than 2 Chinese speakers in each team. So we had exactly two and boy we had no idea what gems they were.

Contestants

At 8 am, the rules were read to us and the clues were handed out. Each team immediately ran to a corner, took out a map, and began mapping out the stops. It wasn't very easy since we were given clues about the place and not exactly where the place was. Immediately the 2 Chinese speakers, one of whom lived in Shanghai, whipped out their phones, made phone calls and got us the names and addresses of all the places we had to go to. Honestly, the only thing I contributed to the mapping of places besides my terrible sense of direction was the calculation of an integral that was required to figure out one of the clues. We were very thorough with our mapping and soon were the only team that hadn't left the campus yet. However, we were confident with our plans and set out for the metro station. Luckily, the staff had arranged for all of us to have unlimited one day passes so we could use the metro as much as we wanted. Realizing that we were the last ones to leave campus, we started sprinting whenever we could i.e. from campus to the metro station, in the metro station, up and down stairs etc. Soon we were exhausted and decided not to run for a while.

We got to our first stop, finished the tasks of taking pictures/videos and then went on to the second. This one had a time limit, as in we had to get there between 10 - 11 am. We made it in time and the task there was to make 3 consecutive basketball shots within 35 minutes. While one team member was trying to make the shots, another had to run laps around the stadium we were in. It took the girl making the shots all of 5 minutes to make the shots! That was amazing. All the other teams had to struggle quite a bit. After that we learnt a dance that we had to teach pedestrians on the street and video them! We weren't too optimistic about that one.

Next, we headed to the other stops. Some tasks required amazing bargaining powers for which we thankfully had an expert on our team who thankfully also spoke Chinese. She bought us a kite for 10 rmb and a chess set for 30 rmb ( all these were parts of tasks at the stops. Yes, one of the tasks was to fly a kite 20 m in the air for 7 minutes). After some time, it was time for lunch which also had a time limit of 1pm - 2 pm. We met another team on the metro on the way to lunch. They took the wrong exit out of the metro for lunch and thanks to our other Chinese master navigator, Peter, we went out the right exit and were a little ahead of them. We decided to keep our advantage so we sprinted yet again. In our attempt to completely outrun them, we missed our destination and ran an extra 2 blocks! No wonder they say slow and steady wins the race. We stopped running and walked to the lunch location. We were so ready for food after the exhausting morning full of running, walking, kite flying, haggling etc. Unfortunately, there was a challenge first. We had to eat a bunch of things out of which one was stinky tofu. Stinky tofu is the worst smelling thing ever! I had stayed away from it my whole stay here because the smell was so obnoxious. Now, we HAD to eat it to get points. I stopped breathing and gulped it down. The Chinese people on our team actually enjoyed eating Stinky Tofu so it wasn't a problem for them. One of our team mates almost threw up. But finally we were done with it and they served us actual real lunch!

This a famous pose that we had to imitate in front of the temple. We had to convince pedestrians to participate in the picture with us for bonus points

Task - Find this set of footprints.

Finding this was very difficult.

Task - Use super bargaining powers to

buy chess set for as low as possible

After lunch we set out on our mission again. We went to a place that was a former slaughter house but was now a shopping mall. It looked very very cool!

Task - Find this glass ceiling/floor in the slaughter house

Task - Locate this sign in the slaughter house

Task - Make the flower and pot that's in my hand

Task - Convince store owner to let Alex

try on Traditional Chinese Dress

The last thing on our agenda was to teach people to dance. We got bonus points if we could get 8 to dance at the same time however, we didn't want to waste too much time so we just got 3. It took a lot of convincing to make those 3 agree. Once we got our video, we sprinted to the final destination which was Carl's Jr. We were half an hour ahead of schedule and wanted to be the first to be done so we could get the extra bonus points. Unfortunately, a team had already reached there before we did.

Teaching dance steps to pedestrians on Nanjing Road

We all got dinner while the organizers watched videos and awarded us points. At the end of the amazing dinner they announced the winners. Guess who won... WE DID! WOOT! The people who came second were our close friends so both teams were really happy! First place got free tickets for lasertag and second place got free tickets for go karting. We are going to go to both together.

Winners - Joe, Peter, me, Alex, Andrew and Mindy

I absolutely loved this day! We got to see sights in Shanghai that we had never seen before and probably would never have seen if it weren't for this race. The sites we saw were not tourist areas and I'm soo glad that we got to see a different side and a different aspect of the personality of Shanghai. This city is beautiful both the touristy and non touristy parts! We took the metro back home, took long showers and went to bed to rest up after the long and adventurous day that we had had.

Nayana

Beijing: Day 3 and Day 4

We woke up and met in the lobby of the hotel at 9 am. Some of us got breakfast at McDonald's while some us at BreadTalk. It wasn't a bad breakfast! After that, we headed to a store which had fake branded purses, shoes, belts, tshirts etc. on one floor, cheap pearls on the next and real expensive pearls on the next 2 floors. You, had to use super bargaining powers here and I was ready. I saw a pearl bracelet I liked and worked the priced won from 50 RMB to 10 RMB. I also got them to make it smaller so that it would fit me! After that, I decided to go help out a friend who was buying a couple of necklaces and earrings from a person named Sally. Oh, we bargained real hard with her and made her give us an amazing discount by basically convincing her that we'd send 25,000 students from the University of Michigan to her. To support our case a little, we kept bringing over one by one different members of our group who wanted to buy pearls. It was a fun bargain.

The sellers on the floor below where they sold purses were vicious. I had a huge red purse with me and this woman just grabs my arm asking me if I want to buy a purse while looking at the purse that I was holding. I didn't know how to make it more obvious that I didn't want a purse!

Following the Pearl Market, we went to a famous toy market which had stalls that sold each and every type of toy. They had many game consoles and accessories for them. I bought a Wii game for my brother from there.

After this, we made our way to the Temple of Heaven where one of our friends, Andrew Copp, decides to go daredevil on us and tries to jump with both legs onto a really high ledge. He bangs his shin onto the ledge and ends up with a giant gaping bruise. He was okay, but he and 3 others went to the hospital where he got 2 stitches and a tetanus shot. It was a relief that he was smiling through all that.

The last tourist activity of the evening was visiting this really old street that had been preserved and that had many little shops on it. The perfect word to describe the street is "quaint". The shops and the foods available were really really interesting. Too bad my stomach wasn't feeling too well otherwise I would have tried something. After that, 6 of us tried to get taxis back to the hotel so we could get ready for dinner. The first 3 easily got a taxi but when it was our turn we got turned down by 6 - 7 taxi drivers. Did I mention that it was a really really hot day?Only one of the 3 people spoke some limited Chinese so we tried finding a metro stop by asking directions but that didn't work. I think we tried for around an hour after which we found this very kind girl who walked quite a distance with us to lead us to the metro station. We were so grateful to her. We finally got back and got ready for dinner. Btw, this dinner was one of the best dinners of my life!

We reached this really nice area with expensive stores and went into the Hibachi restaurant where we had made reservations for 12 people. They mixed up our reservations and told us there was only room for 4. Fortunately, we had a Mandarin speaker with us who gave them a piece of his mind which fixed all the problems and also got the staff to give us "Sorry" drinks! We were so happy!

HIBACHI GRILL

This part of the day was SO great that it requires it's own section. This was an All you can eat- All you can drink for 200 RMB ( ~$30) restaurant! You could get whatever you wanted off the menu and the Chef would make it right there in front of you. The food was AMAZING! There was a bit of EVERYTHING and everything tasted marvellous! Some of us got hot Sake which was an interesting drink. Even without the drinks, everyone's mood instantly got much better ! I think we ate continuously for 2 hours. YUM! Some members of my family would have LOVED this place (right Papa, Bhaiya and Gaurav?)

Now to burn off a small fraction of the calories that we had consumed, we went out dancing! It was a very very fun night!

The Chef

Hibachi Grill

The next day we went to an art district which was very interesting. There were many buildings in which different artists displayed their work. We walked around there for a couple of hours and then headed back to the old street where we were the previous day.

One of the art exhibitions

For dinner, we had the famous Beijing duck and then packed up and left for the airport for our flight back to Shanghai. The airport wasn't crowded at all and security check took 5 minutes. The boarding process was very smooth and the plane took off on time. They served a good snack and drinks on this 1.5 hour flight! I was super impressed with the whole process. We got back to campus around 1.30am, woke up our ayees and went straight to bed!

This weekend was one of the most satisfying and exhilarating weekends I've ever had! I'm glad I went and I had a great time with all the people who came to Beijing!

Nayana