More in Shanghai

Greetings Shanghai readers! The last I left off was going to recap our dining experience from Wednesday evening. As we've spent our entire time here in Shanghai, we've had our share of local cuisine as well as many Westernized options. Wednesday evening we dined at Pasta Fresca De Salvatore; an Italian restaurant. http://www.pastafresca.com/ The restaurant was founded in 1988 by Mr. Carecci Salvatore in Singapore and started out with just three tables. He's since grown his restaurant and has locations in China and India. We had a great bottle of Chianti and good food.

On Thursday we spent the day at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre attending the International Exhibition for Bakery and Confectionery Trade. The Expo was in four barns of exhibit halls; I personally thought was a pretty big show. Our host Jia from PrimeSource said it was average; not very large and that there are much bigger shows in China. Bakery China; the name of the conference is the largest trade fair of its kind in the Asian region. It's a yearly exhibition. The entire range of products and services offered by the baking and confectionery industry was represented at this fair. We saw numerous vendors showcasing their wares including baked goods, boxes and equipment. It was pretty interesting. We lost count of the number of "moon cake" vendors. Moon cake is the food for Moon Festival; which the Chinese celebrate in which they eat the moon cake at night with a full moon in the sky. They can taste pretty darned funky and I don't mean funky in a good sense if you know what I mean!

Chinese Moon Cakes

After the trade show we returned to old Shanghai to get in some more shopping. Yu Yuan is the area near Yu Gardens which has a large shopping bazaar. After more haggling and buying, we returned to our hotel. We finished the night up with snacks & drinks at the Executive Lounge (we're on the 36th floor with club level privileges) and then returned to Beni Bar for more dice. Around 10pm or so we decided to take in a Chinese massage. For 180 rmb ($25 US dollars) we had an hour massage. While it was nice to take in a massage it was funny how they do it. As there were four of us (three men and myself) we had our massages together in one room. It isn't like the US spas where it's soft music, glowing candlelight and smells of eucalyptus and more...it's group massage by men and women who don't speak a lot of English and it gets kind of loud and rowdy in there! We each asked for full body; oil massages. Basically it was our front and backs; no feet, head or chest. When we were finished they asked if we wanted a foot massage. We assumed it was part of the massage package but it wasn't. We dressed and went to another room and for another 68 rmb ($10 US dollars) Dave and I did foot massages. You can beat $35 with a stick! We got back to our room after midnight but it was worth the late night!

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