Eateries, Temples, and more Shanghai fun

It seems like it is cheap enough to eat out here every day and a meal can range anywhere from $1 to $5. Being the cheap ass I am, pushing that limit is always more fun and this calls for some more adventurous eating if I am trying to hit that dollar mark.
It's really nothing my iron stomach couldn't take, tbh, I'm more worried about my shoes getting dirty than food poisoning. The most fun part though is definitely just eating out with my fellow white friends....

I've been taking pictures of most of the "interesting" munchies I've ate and you may find them in the Food-o-mania section of the blog. I'll let y'all figure out the detail until I get to the food entry :)

Here's a typical store entrance inside a food joint, very homey

when laowai ask me about table manners....

To get a grasp on this huge variation of food prices, allow me to show you what we did:

For lunch over the weekend, we went in the tourist heavy area around the Yuyuan Garden, one of the traditional gardens you see in movies. Food around there was almost 30 yuan per person, or $6. Although we all had a great time eating and the presentation was good along with great variety, it is in no way sustainable for our wallet, plus there was no napins to even wipe our mouth (tissue is a luxury in most eateries since a lot of people would just grab the whole box).

So for dinner, we found this hole in the wall place and had some great home made food for 90 yuan, between 9 people.
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yeah, that's right. in Taiwanese, we call this 俗又大碗 (shio go dua wua), trasnlates to "cheap and big bowl". We got a few bowls of rice instead of plates and there's even napkins  provided at this restaurant but the experience was great, no pictures on menu for the white people, no chicken because they ran out, we were accompanied by bags of take-out boxes and we had a mostly vegetarian meal (yay to Carmen, our dear vegetarian friend)

snapshot of where we ate, literally a hole in the wall

 

plenty of color, I did find out that no one likes tofu though...still searching

"delicious, but never again!" my wallet says

In retrospec, 5$ is not so bad. lul

Okay, now back to travels, this weekend's theme was temples, we visited Chenghuang Miao or City God Temple and Longhua Temple. Taoist and Buddhist temple respectively. It was kind of a shame to see the City God Temple has been transformed into a toursit site (hence why we were there, meh) because it really has lost that peaceful feeling of being a temple, but it was still quite a trip being greeted by all the incense smell, prayer sounds and the hymn from the priests especially since I have not been in a temple in so long.

busy busy busy

These are Taoist priests, they wear hats and don't shave their heads practice the art of Tao or "the way"

mandatory group shot, if you look carefully, you may see a blind man with a leather jacket

 Next up is the Buddhist temple, a lot less crowded and actually more elaborate too, the giant idols inside is really something else to see, unfortunately I did not take photos inside the great hall. For future visitors, you can use your entrance ticket to exchange for some incenses and you may use them to worship and pay your respect right after the entrance.

On the way out of the temple, we walked by a memorial park and decided to check it out, turned out it was a Cemetery for the unnamed soldiers who fought during the crack down of Kuomintang during the late 20s. This was particularly interesting given my "side" of the story, I will leave the related info here. But all history aside, it was a very nicely built memorial. Twas a cloudy day so there were barely anyone around and it was majestic.

panorama of the cemetery

 Inside the pyramid building is a brief exhibit of some of the famous activists in the Communist side that led movements and I thought it was very interesting that the English translation was very brief and somewhat overlooked the detail the Chinese text provided. Just check out the picture, and you may see the difference in length of the different scripts. This really gave me a first hand experience with "history is written by the winners". but hey, maybe I am biased too.

Shanghai's heavy French influence is always around the corner

Okay, now some fun stuff. Thanks to the less frequent law suits in China (I am guessing here), we can enjoy the luxury of hanging out at a go-kart bar. Yeah, a go-kart place where you actually buy your tickets at the bar and get some drinks while you waited.

after a couple rounds of dice, taxi talks over the phone, we all managed to meet up safely

Waited for about 40 minutes until our turn so we can discover maybe we aren't all that good of a driver after a couple of drinks

somehow this picture was shot... but we all made it out there alive, so all is good

That's about it for now, I am actually getting more matierlas now then I care to write, and these entries do take longer than I had imagined to write, so here's a little sneak peak for next entry. I can tell you now the topic involves a scavenger hunt and your typical santics. Coming up too, there is also a series of photo we took at a Chinese food workshop.

Stay tuned and you'll find out what's next!

main area of our travel for the next entry, can you find it on the map?