Family in Town

I left Pennsylvania on February 11^th and haven’t seen any of my family since I parted with my aunt in Wuyishan on February 24^th. Up until this week, it had been about four months since I had seen my mother and sister, and three and a half months since I had seen my aunt.

This past Tuesday, my mom and sister arrived in Shanghai. They are in China for two weeks and leave on Tuesday, the 19^th. We spent Tuesday through Friday morning together in Shanghai. Then on Friday morning, we headed to Huangshan, where we met my aunt. My aunt and I then left to go home on Sunday afternoon, and my mom and sister are headed to Beijing on Monday. We will then all meet up again in Xi’an on the coming Friday and stay there until Monday, when we head back to Shanghai in the morning. On Tuesday, my mom and sister fly back to the states and I will begin to take my finals.

On Tuesday, I picked my mom and Maea up at the airport around 4 PM. We took the Magnetic levitation (Maglev) train from the airport to downtown. It goes 300 Km/H, or about 185 MPH. We then went to their Airbnb and dropped off bags. We had Indian food for dinner, explored the neighborhood, and then parted ways so that they could get some sleep.

On Wednesday, I had a meeting at the U.S. consulate to discuss my options for surrendering my U.S. passport to the Italian consulate in Mumbai while I was in India. It wasn’t a very productive meeting. Then I headed back to Fudan to go to class. During this time, my mom and sister checked out the Shanghai Municipal History Museum to learn about why Shanghai is the way that it is. After class, we met up and I showed them Fudan and my apartment. We then did a food tour on Daxue and Wudong road, getting hand grab cakes, roasted lamb wraps, margaritas at Togo Taco, and Xiao long bao and steamed pea buns at Hsu Xiao Lu.

Following our food pilgrimage, we took the metro to the fake market, where both Maea and I got new sneakers. We then headed to Jing’an to walk around. We saw the temple and several of the cool streets. We ended up grabbing drinks at the Shanghai Brewery before heading to Lost Heaven for dinner. Lost Heaven serves Yunnan food, from the Yunnan province in Southern China. This was probably the best Chinese food I have had. It is also close to the Bund which was super convenient and allowed us to go walk around after dinner.

On Thursday, we met each other in Pudong to walk over to the Park Hyatt for breakfast. We had breakfast in the restaurant off of the lobby, which is located on the 79^th floor of the World Financial Center, aka the bottle opener. Breakfast was decent, but the view was pretty incredible, and we were able to see for miles (we could see Guanghua towers at Fudan). After breakfast, I headed back to Fudan for class, and my mom and sister went to explore Yuyuan gardens. At 6, we all met up again, along with my girlfriend, Nadia, for drinks at Logan’s Punch. Afterwards, we headed next door to Tomatito, a Spanish restaurant, for tapas. The food was good, but the Sangria was much better. After dinner, we headed home to go to bed.

On Friday morning, my mom, sister, and I took a morning train from Shanghai to Huangshan. We arrived in Huangshan around ````````1 PM and met up with my aunt. We headed to our Airbnb, which turned out to simply be a hotel that we had rented every room of. It was kind of a weird situation. After checking out the property, we explored the town and grabbed lunch. We then went back to the Airbnb to relax, before going to hot pot for dinner, my mom and sister’s first time having the Chinese staple. After dinner, we returned to relax and sleep.

On Saturday, we left the house at 8:30, with the destination of Mount Huangshan in mind. Unfortunately, my aunt put the wrong address in and our Didi took us a few miles in the opposite direction of the mountain. Fortunately, we were able to quickly renavigate and make our way to the entrance of the national park. On arrival, they decided to go to the hot springs, instead of hiking, and so we took a bus to the hot springs. We spent the day lounging around, breaking up our time between the pools and the cover of the pagodas (it was raining). After a few hours, we headed back to our apartment to grab dinner and relax. We ended up with western food for dinner (kinda, sorta pizza), and then got cake at a small bakery. We ate the dessert at the house and then passed out.

On Sunday, we had breakfast in the apartment before grabbing a Didi to Tangmu, an ancient town that was near the train station. We spent about two hours walking around and exploring the old, historical houses and structures. They even had a “west lake” that claimed to be the sister lake to West Lake in Hangzhou. It was very pretty and was a nice way to end my time in Huangshan. After Tangmu, we grabbed a taxi to the train station, where I was dropped and caught my train back to Shanghai.

We will all meet up later this week to explore Xi’an, but for now we are parting ways to go and have three very different weeks.