An Airport Is Still Around Me

Church, Pearl Tower, and a Water Town

 

July 19, 2015

By Rachel

           

Quick note about Christian’s post. He talked about how he loved the banana flavored popsicle. We were just informed that it wasn’t banana. It was raisin and rum. Wonderful. This is what happens when you can’t read the label on your ice cream. I have resolved not to eat ice cream without knowing the flavor. That may be a challenge in China.

 

Since it’s Sunday, we started by going to church. Now in China, everything is interesting – including church. The meeting was held in the conference room of a huge building. When we got there, we were informed that there would only be two hours of church instead of three like we normally have. They also told us that they would only have one speaker and for the other talk we would listen to a recording of a talk from a long time ago. There weren’t enough people in the congregation to have two speakers. We were also warned that there wouldn’t be many kids or women at the church because they all went back to the U.S. for the summer. (The congregation is mostly made up of people from the U.S. who are living in China for a while – and exclusively made up of foreigners.) As people began walking in, I realized that they weren’t joking about having almost no kids in the summer. My family tripled the number of kids in attendance and doubled the number of females. There was less than 30 people there counting everyone running the meetings and us. There wasn’t a primary class for the kids, so my mom and the other mother there put together a lesson on the fly for Christian, Sarah Ann, and another boy who was there. Because there were no youth classes either, Taylor and I went to the adult meeting with the other teenage girl there.

 

Church at the Yangdu Conference Center

 

After an interesting church experience, we headed back to Shanghai. The plan was to go up the Pearl Tower. The tower looks like it is out of a science fiction movie with huge cylinders stacked on top of each other reaching toward the sky. The whole Shanghai skyline could fit a futuristic movie and the Pearl Tower stood out as the most spectacular. It was built in 1994 and at the time, it was the third tallest building in the world. Needless to say, I was very excited to go up it. Well, I was at least until I saw the line. I think if we had realized what a long line it was we wouldn’t have agreed to stand in it. I mean is three hours in line really worth a couple minutes at the top of the tower? Also, it wasn’t exactly an orderly single-file line. More like a giant mob of people in some sort of formation that resembled a line. And the people behind us were determined to cut us in line. I think the elevator we rode up should win an award for how many people were jammed on. Also. the air conditioning didn’t work all that well. By the time we got to the top, I was more interested in getting away from all the people and noise than I was in enjoying the view. The view was lovely and there was a part where the floor was see-through. It was neat to see the enormous city sprawled beneath me. I felt on top of the world. It was cool, just not worth the hours of standing in line. My mom said it was a good cultural experience.

 

Here I am on the glass bottom floor at the top of Oriental Pearl Tower

 

Next, we got into our twenty person van and drove to a water city named Zhouzhuang. I fell in love instantly. I think it may be my favorite place in China so far. Instead of streets there were small water ways. Old-fashioned boats paddled by a single giant oar glided down the waterways. It was getting dark, so lights reflected in the looking water. Cute white buildings lined the waterway and music was playing out of some restaurants. Small, arched stone bridges allowed tourists to cross the river. Though there were a good number of people, it felt quiet and relaxing after Shanghai. And our hotel was adorable.

 

One of the streets in Zhouzhuang

 

The view out my parents’ hotel window. See the water between the houses?

 

We walked down the streets some before we found a restaurant for dinner. The town was so cute that I wanted to sit out by the waterway instead of indoors with air-conditioning. The family from my dad’s work that we have been hanging out with showed us a menu before ordering and asked if there was anything we absolutely couldn’t eat. My mom told them that we wouldn’t eat tortoise or eel and that the vegetables looked really good. She wasn’t saying that about the vegetables to be mean to us either. The vegetables seemed to be the least scary thing on the menu. But when the food came, it wasn’t as strange as I thought it would be and there was rice and eggs and bread that was good. Christian loved the beef. There was also a giant pig leg, lotus roots, and a chicken soup with the whole chicken in it – feet and all. Luckily, though, the family didn’t order eels for us.