A friend of Booin recommended us a gorgeous hotpot restaurant in Shanghai. Fitting it's fame for being the one of the most delicious hotpot restaurant, was crowded more than I've ever experienced. We got a waiting number ticket. A huge display showed us the numbers. They gave us a tiny snack package with cups of tea while waiting for the line. Though it was very hot and somebody expected a bottle of beer, it was cute and good. We had a philosophical chat. We ordered more than the table could contain. The clerk asked again and again you mean it or not familiar with Chinese. We answered again and again we mean it and familiar with hot pot. 2 kinds of meat, 3 kinds of mushrooms, and the other thing like dried tofu made me to order a Chinese whiskey. The red pot(mara) paralyzed my tongue. The whiskey burned it at the same time. Hot pot was hot.
After we had a great dinner, walked along the humid and warm Shanghai street. It was really romantic, booin was happy with mangosteens.
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We forced living apart right after getting married. So we decided to meet at Shanghai at the end of March, where my booin had something to do. After all the hardest parts, we finally got our precious private time at Shanghai. For us, we got plan to have a hot pot and Din tai pung.
For me, I had got a plan to pop a surprise question to my wife, with aurora machine. We drove through an unknown road to get to this horse farm - we didn't get to see the horses, but three dogs greeted us. Our friends were scared of the dogs though - so we had to lock our friends safely in the cottage and move the luggages. There was supposedly a lake around cottages, but it was so dark that the only thing we could see was three cottages and dogs. While my husband was cooking, I kept checking the aurora app because the chance of seeing the northern light was at 50% tonight. We've been seeing the northern light even at 12%, so 50% was a pretty high chance. In the middle of cooking rice, the horse farm owner knocked on our cottage door, and told us there was northern light out. We all ran outside, and it was the clearest northern light we saw - so far. We kept checking the sky even when we were drinking, and one of our friends spontaneously stepped outside to borrow a camera (because all ours were broken) from a neighbor, and that's when we saw the dancing aurora, like the ones you would see on a youtube video. It went right through the sky above us, and we had to tilt our heads all the way to see it clearly, moving as if there it was a curtain laying on a window of a summer cabin, and zephyr slowly moving the curtain. We were in awe, and forgot that we were standing in icy mud in flip flops to see this breath-taking natural phenomenon.
We went around two peninsulas to get to the second to the last airbnb (and where we saw the best northern light). But seriously, for a European country, I was surprised that the airbnb hosts had to give us GPS coordinates - and not just this one, numerous others that are NOT in Reykjavik kept giving us GPS coordinates, and sometimes to a road that doesn't even exist on maps. There was only one gas station within 30 mile radius, so we decided to stop for gas before going to the horse farm airbnb.
After Akureyri, we started the last leg of the trip - the western side of Iceland. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to visit Westfjord - we purposely left that part out because the reviews said the road might get too dangerous to drive (but looking at the weather at the time, I doubt that it would have been too dangerous for us to drive..). The scenery of Western Iceland was surreal. The weather was getting better - increasing the chance to see northern light more. We kept checking the mobile app for northern light to track when would be the best time to go out and see. We expected to see more grass but as we approached to our final airbnb (before Reykjavik), we saw more mountains with snow.
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