New Year’s Eve at XinTianDi and Nanjing Rd

We met up with Ron’s INSEAD classmate Harry, who is from Shanghai, and Harry’s friend Chris. We had lunch at a restaurant called Butterfly Garden to introduce us to some Shanghainese food. Please see our album for more photos but my favorite dish was a sweet and warm dish of red dates stuffed with sweet rice cake:

After lunch we visited Chris’ store called Yogo Juice. The store was right near the restaurant and she treated us to some drinks. The serve fresh fruit yogurt smoothies similar to Jamba Juice in the US. I tried a hot drink made of a fruit called “acai“, pronounced “a-sah-ee”, made into a latte. It’s hard to describe the flavor because I think the soy milk kind of took over the flavor but it was a bit nutty. It is supposed to have tons of antioxidants.

Afterwards, Ron and I went walking around XinTianDi. There was a bit NYE concert featuring the Taiwanese girl group “S.H.E.” but unfortunately tickets couldn’t be purchased. Tickets could only be earned by spending over $500 in the mall and that ended a few weeks back. So unfortunately we missed out.

We did manage to book tours to Suzhou and Hangzhou for the next two days. The tourist information centers are actually pretty useful. We were a bit shocked though that the English speaking tours were THREE times more expensive than the Chinese speaking tours. Since we’re on a budget, we chose the Chinese speaking tours and Ron promised to translate for me.

We tried to find somewhere to go to watch fireworks or something so we tried Nanjing Rd but there were no fireworks, just another concert. Since it was getting close to midnight and we were pretty pooped out, we ended up taking a taxi home and watching fireworks inside the taxi cab! When we got back to the apartment, we watched the rest of the fireworks on TV.

We did have a midnight snack at McDonald’s where they have a taro pie (instead of an apple pie). It was yummy!

We have to meet the bus at 7am for our tour so I leave you with the slideshow of our photos for the day:


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