beautiful monotony: The Yu Garden and Traditional Shanghai Steamed Buns

Despite the Major Snafu Jenn had on Nanjing Road, she definitely lightened the mood by saying,”oh well, getting the picture of Asian Snookie at the gift shop on Nanjing road last night made losing my wallet worth it…” Jenn is a great travel partner- despite the stress of some of our travel situations, she always manages to lighten thing up with a funny comment or a dirty joke. She’s my kind of girl J

Shanghai Snookie

This morning we had a slow start since we were waiting to hear back from the Yu Xin Chuan Cai to see if there may have been a small chance that Jenn had left her wallet at our table, although we were definitely not feeling like that was the case since Jenn had gotten an automated phone call in the middle of the night to confirm whether or not she wanted to change her pin number for a cash advance. After Jenn cancelled her cards, we were then on our way to the Yu Garden for the morning before catching our flight to Hong Kong.

The Yu Garden is an old garden complex built by the Ming Dynasty in 1559. It’s mostly a complex filled with restaurants, tourist shops, and bazaars. It seemed like it would be a good place to relax in for our last day, except that it’s filled with an overwhelming amount of hawkers and tourists.

The bazaar outside the Yu Garden...with super aggressive shop keepers!

The ornate architecture is incredible, and it's everywhere

Yours truly taking a break from snapping pictures..

Eating a salty snack while waiting for our buns

Waited in line for a ½ hour to get our Anthony Bourdain approved and

locally famous Nangxiang steamed buns

Yummy!

The Yu Garden was really beautiful, but it was incredibly crowded with people Jenn gets approached by more Asian Justin Beibers for photos, which she declined with a firm “no”, mostly due to the fact that she was tired and a bit worn out from the wallet situation. I have to say, I didn’t blame her. So we ate our steamed buns, did some people watching, and took in the beautiful views.

These little kids were going crazy over bubbles

in front of us, I couldn't resist snapping a few pics

The last thing we wanted to do was go to the Huxington teahouse for tea before we left the garden, a famous tea house in Shanghai. Of course, we couldn’t just sit inside the restaurant and have a glass of tea, as soon as the tea servers realized that we were American tourists, we were whisked to the back room and given a menu for types of tea we could taste and a tea ceremony. As usual, we had a moment when we were looking at each other and saying, “what the hell is going on?” “I have no idea…” but in China, we have found, sometimes you just need to go with it and if you only end up getting ripped off for a cup of tea or something, you probably shouldn’t sweat it because you’re still having a great experience. It was definitely sweet revenge though when Jenn called the lady out on ripping a price tag off a tea pot and charging her 10 times more than the original price. With me being the one that hates confrontation, I preferred to withdraw to the bathroom to use the hole in the floor toilet instead of sitting and listening to the exchange!