Day 213: Breakfast Food Tour — Scavenger Hunt — Acrobatics Show
We had a big day planned for today. The original schedule: 3 hour breakfast food tour; 3 hour “scavenger hunt” tour; acrobat show. Yikes.
I was a little worried given the relatively late night last night celebrating M’s 40th, our history with multiple “touring” activities in one day and the hot humid weather.
Also Margaret and I were somehow a little hungover. Shows what lightweights we’ve become in our 40s (I can actually say that now). We’ve actually had consistent drinks on this trip — but rarely more than one or two on any one evening. Last night we each had a martini at the start of dinner then split a bottle of white wine. That typically wouldn’t make us hungover… maybe the heat and humidity contributed, who knows.
But despite these long odds, the day turned out to be a huge success.
Our first activity was a walking breakfast food tour. We’ve had fun on our two previous food tours — one in Rio and one in Hong Kong.
But those were not for breakfast.
Margaret and had recently noted that while we’re willing to experiment with local food for lunch and dinner, we always stick to our western favorites for breakfast: cereal, eggs, yogurt, pancakes, etc. All breakfast buffets will have local items and we never touch them. So we laughed when we realized we had schedule a breakfast tour — in China.
We often use the breakfast buffet as a motivator to get the kids out of bed on an early morning… no such luck today. They weren’t happy, and Margaret and I were admittedly a bit skeptical.
But everyone’s opinions changed at our first stop when we dug into a Shanghai doughnut (like a big churro) with warm sugary soy milk for dipping. Really good.
Our Shanghai guide Joyce handed us off to a new guide, Chelsea, for the food tour. She’s originally from The Netherlands, has started a business doing VR modeling for real estate but works for Untours in her spare time. We liked her a lot.
The tour highlights were the doughnuts, jaigbing (sp) pancakes and various soup dumplings.
According to Chelsea there is some food that is specifically eaten for breakfast in China but unlike the US, many people have dumplings or noodles for any of the three meals. Historically you ate what you had for any meal if you were lucky enough to have food to eat.
One memorable stop was at Egg, a very western coffee shop run by a New Yorker that was right out of Williamsburg. But they actually had super interesting drinks like Coconut Iced Coffee, Vietnamese Cold Brew and fruit sodas with clever fruit pairings. We stopped here for a drink, some banana bread, a bit of AC and a bathroom break. The second floor was lofted and had memorable artwork on the walls: paired paintings, both framed, one by a sick child in a hospital and one by a professional artist “interpreting” the kid’s piece. It was an initiative put together by the DreamCoLab. Very cool.
The tour had about 10 food stops. Chelsea also took us through the alleys to see how the local people live — they are like the hutongs of Beijing.
We were stuffed and exhausted by the time it was done.
On the way back to the hotel we told Joyce that we weren’t going to be able to turn it around for another 3 hour tour in the middle of the day. So asked her to shorten the scavenger hunt tour to 90 min and push it to later in the afternoon / early evening, right before the acrobat show.
It was the right call and the kids had a blast.
But first we took some time to rest back at the hotel. Margaret and I even dozed for a bit while the kids played on my iPad. We then took the kids to the pool and gave them a bath before gearing back up for the scavenger hunt.
The tour was in and around the French Concession area of the city. We had yet another guide for this one — Charlie, an energetic and immediately likable guide who works for Culture Shock, another local agency. She had actually spent a year in Orlando working for Disney at the China experience in Epcot Center and also spent a few years at Iowa State getting a masters in hospitality.
We huddled up with our guides before starting the tour and a little smiling granny walked up, joined our group and just smiled and stared at the kids. So cute.
Charlie had kid-focused missions printed out with pictures and sealed in envelopes with cash.
Willa and James would open it up, get the mission, then follow Charlie to a new part of the neighborhood to accomplish the mission and get a code which would help them open up a treasure chest back at the tour companies office. Right up their alley.
Missions included:
* Go to the cricket market and buy a cricket cage. Once there we saw bugs, fish, rabbits, kittens, birds, etc., etc. With Charlie’s help Willa and James negotiated to buy *two* little wooden cricket cages (crickets not included, thankfully). Margaret decided they would make fun Christmas tree ornaments.
* Go to the wet market, take a picture of a frog, a crab, an eel and a Chinese person. Blog readers know we love markets. This was our second of the day — we hit one this morning during the food tour. Getting to use mommy and daddy’s phones was an added bonus.
* Go to an antique shop to buy old coins, an old doorbell and a lock. Margaret was in heaven — she loves a shop filled with junk. She bought two antique jade snuff bottles. Such a Margaret purchase.
* Paint Chinese calligraphy using a big water sponge on a stick. We had actually seen a guy doing this in the park in Xi’an. We tried to make it happen in the driveway behind the tour company’s office but this was the only mission that didn’t really work because it was so hot and the cement just evaporated the water too fast to actually write anything.
They used their codes to open up the treasure chest in the office and got all kinds of little gifts and treats.
A risky second tour of the day was a huge success. The reason: kid-focused activities and a fun, engaging guide who wasn’t afraid to lower herself to their level (literally crouching and addressing only them the whole time)..
Off to the acrobat show!
The ERA acrobat show was in a big air-conditioned circus tent on the northern outskirts of town with seats around about 70% of the circular stage. We had great seats in the third row right near the center. We bought beers, popcorn and peanut M&Ms and were blown away by the daring feats of these incredible performers.
Needless to say, words won’t do justice to what these people were doing. One act included women riding in circular bicycles standing on the seats, riding upside down, jumping from one bike to another, etc. In another, a guy did a whole routine with heavy ceramic vases, flipping them up in the air and catching them on head… on the edge of the vase. In one, multiple heavy guys were jumping off of 10 – 15 foot platforms down onto a lever / see-saw thing and flinging another smaller human up in the air to do flips, or land on a raised up chair — which we thought was crazy until a guy hopped out on a pogo-stick like contraption strapped to his body (but with no spring… just the stick). Then the same guys would fling that guy up in the air and he would flip around and land on that stick. Inside. The final act included 8 motor cycles zooming around inside a hallow metal sphere and somehow not crashing into each other.
At one point Willa turned to Margaret and goes, “Why do you keep yelling ‘No!'”?
The show started at 7:30 and went until 9:15 or so. The best review of the show is that Willa and James, even after a late night last night and the huge day they had today, were wide awake, fully engaged the whole time. They loved it. Bravo!
James was asleep 2 minutes into our drive home. Thankfully we can sleep in tomorrow. We have a free day in Shanghai, our last full day in China.
Fashion Humor
Over the last three weeks we’ve noticed that Chinese men, in order to cool off on hot days, will scrunch up their t-shirts over their stomachs. It’s more common in Beijing than in “more fashionable” Shanghai but we still caught a pic of one this morning on our food tour!
We learned today that this has a name: The Beijing Bikini.
Holy crap Margaret and I were loving this.
“A” for Effort at the Portman Ritz in Shanghai
We’ve seen all levels of service on this trip and nothing quite compares to what we experienced here at the Ritz.
There are so many employees on duty at any one time and they are all super, super nice. They get an A for effort, for sure.
But.
In our opinion the “personal attention” is a bit…much. From the moment we arrived they are so overly attentive that they literally chase us around as soon as we set foot in the lobby, offering things like bottles of water, asking if we need help with anything, how we’re enjoying our stay, etc.
They had unsolicited activities planned for us and every time we entered the lobby they hounded us for answers to find out when we wanted to do them — and then seemed devastated when we ultimately — though very politely — declined.
It’s a huge place (largest Ritz in the world) and there are 6 elevators, three on each side of the lobby. Clearly there is an issue with customers hitting one “up” button and then not seeing which elevator is opening. They solve that with two employees in the elevator area at all times making small talk and then pointing you towards the door of the one that will open, then holding it open for you.
They gave us customer feedback forms, once for the pool and once for the breakfast buffet and then kept following up to see if we had filled them out.
I started walking through the hotel like I was super busy and had somewhere to be so that I didn’t have to tell another person that YES! We *were* in fact enjoying our stay!!
They are so, so sweet, but it’s ironic: A “luxury” place made less enjoyable because of a constant parade of small-talkers, helpers and question-askers among staff. Amans don’t do this at all, but Western chains like Four Seasons and Ritz seem to do it so much. The Breakers in FL was previously the all-time record-breaker but the Portman Ritz in Shanghai takes the cake.
Bottom line: we are still loving our stay here. It’s a super comfortable place and they are bending over backwards to give us a good experience. Must give them credit.
Do professional drivers in Asian countries share the same taste in fruit?
Bet there is no Google auto-complete on that question.
DWe discovered a funny coincidence today. So, the kids love playing the “top three game” (h/t to Meg and Luke from SA), asking new friends, guides, whoever will listen what their Top Three Favorite is in any category. The usually start with fruits. Today they insisted that Joyce ask our driver for his top three fruits. She translated (he spoke zero English) and we learned that his favorites were apple, banana and grapes. Amazingly the same three as our driver in Mongolia!
