Today we met with Kat’s cousin Iris, who has been in China for the last 11 months as part of her position in a hotel management training program. We had arranged to meet her at a metro stop, which proved to be challenging because we (a) slept in and (b) had not used the Shanghai metro before.

We arrived about 15 minutes late, but managed to find Iris despite our tardiness. She took us through a stroll in the park, where we saw a roller-coaster ride and an art museum celebrating the 25th anniversary of Pixar.

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This morning we began with failure. We slept in and missed breakfast, and were thus quite hungry by the time we headed out to search for the public bus to Zhūjiājiǎo, an ancient canal town about an hour away.

We had some trouble finding the bus depot. Due to the language barrier, we had to rely on hand gestures when asking passers-by for directions to the station (we had its name in written Chinese). It turns out that hand gestures are also different here, which should not have been a surprise. For instance, the numbers 1 through 9 can all be signed with one hand (10 requires that you cross the index fingers of each hand). The sign for “left” consists of slapping your left arm while outstretched. And the sign for “go straight” is some bizarre action that looked more like a lethal attack than an attempt at providing directions.

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