14 days, 7 cities

It's been a crazy two weeks, traveling to so many cities in such a short period of time is actually pretty tiring. Especially when you end the trip with a 24 hour train ride. (I'll upload pictures later of the train, it didn't turn out as bad as I expected since you get some sort of a bed to sleep on when you're tired)
So a few things I've learned on this trip:

-Chinese tour guide groups try to suck all the money out of you, they bring you to tourist attractions and make you buy the tickets to enter, and try to sell you the "local specialties." And of course I fell for the trick and bought a silk blanket and some chrysanthemum tea :( But they weren't expensive, I guess I don't really regret buying them. A good thing that came out of this tour was meeting two college girls from Guangzhou that kept me sane (the rest of the tour members were 50+ in age, lol)

-Chinese people love to push and run to be the first ones. Even if there is nothing to gain by being first everyone rushes to the front, especially old men and old women!

-Though millions of people come to New York to see the lights of Times Square the lights of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong are just as amazing, especially when these cities have lights all over the city and along their riverside!

Visiting Hangzhou, Suzhou and Shanghai has shown me how developed and advanced some of these cities have become. The subways are amazingly clean (especially when compared to the old New York subways). Hangzhou even has a bike share program that allows anybody to conveniently use bikes (free for the first hour and then they charge a really low hourly price).

As for the Expo, it was packed! Some places took 3 or 4 hours to get in (I avoided those places). While some countries were pretty amazing (ie the high technology ones) I would say the content of most of the countries were kind of plain. But the outward structure, shape and overall style of each country was unique and made me ooooh and ahhh a lot.

Now that the traveling has ended, I have to start getting serious about getting a place to live and going back to school. I went to a real estate agent today and he said he'll call me when he finds a place that is 4000-5000 rmb a month for a two bedroom apartment and several other IUPers who are also looking for a place to live will be arriving in the next two days, so I'm not too worried.

Too lazy to upload pictures now, will do later!
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