As soon as I hit publish on the last post and went to look at ideas for this post, I realized that we had another weekend in Shanghai as Alex participated in a TEDx talk organized by his school. Alex, along with his good friends Johnny and Dylan, did a group talk on the benefits and drawbacks of AI. Other than a few hiccups ( they had a picture of a different Alex from his school, and the boys were told that they had 5 minutes when they only really had 3) it was a great time. The boys did a fantastic job and were really proud of themselves.
I can’t believe I forgot this trip to Shanghai!
After the TEDx talk, Alex got to go with Johnny to the Gundam store in Shanghai, he was so thrilled. Johnny really got Alex invested in Gundam, which if you haven’t seen is kind of like Voltron from when we were kids, except it’s one giant robot per person instead of the lions. Or maybe it’s more like Transformers but the robots aren’t sentient? I clearly don’t know even after all this time.
There are a few places in Shanghai that were new to us on this trip, and this was us queued outside a famous crab noodle/crab xiao long bao place. I think we waited over an hour in the heat, but it was absolutely worth it.
The decor inside was kitschy and cool, I loved the Tiffany parrot lamps, and the old school
Believe it or not, this picture below is the best picture I got of Mark, the other one he is almost actively glaring at me.
Alex on the other hand is always willing to pose for me and take nice pictures!
Here are the beautiful noodles, so there is a sauce under the noodles, but just to the right in the smaller scalloped bowl is the crab sauce, you pour that on and then mix it all together. Heaven in a bowl!
Mark of course was in charge of mixing, we only got one to share amongst the three of us, with other things coming along too.
Then came the crab xiaolong bao. I think I’ve described xiaolong bao on the blog before, but if you’re new or don’t remember, it is a dumpling that has a filling (in the case crab and crab roe) and a soup, so there is a technic to eating it to prevent burning your mouth. I don’t think I do the official technic, but I bite a hole, then pour the soup onto my spoon to cool down while I eat the dumpling and then finish with the soup. Absolutely delicious!
I took this one at the train station waiting for our train back to Haining, I just thought it was a nice example of “like Father, like son”.
Traveling Expat Family 