Michelle’s Umbrella-25.00 RMB, Elizabeth’s Umbrella-10.00 RMB, Out bargaining your friend priceless! For everything else there’s Mastercard!
Well….we got up very early today and had plans to head to Shanghai to do some shopping and site seeing. However, the weather was pretty drury and we needed to catch the fast train alot earlier than we thought so we decided to go to Hangzhou and West Lake. In spite of the awful weather, West Lake was breathtakingly beautiful! The Chinese architecture was amazing and looks just like it would in old black and white movies and textbooks. The gardens looked very peaceful and serine! We are going to go back to take pictures and explore it more when the weather and Michelle’s schedule permits it. We did attempt to do some shopping in downtown Hangzhou but, it was extremely crowded and a little overwhelming due to the language barrier. 
We decided after each of us only purchased an umbrella to head back to town and get a massage! That experience alone was hilarious! Trying to get them to understand what we wanted and us trying to understand what they were trying to get us to do was CRAZY!! I will say though…if we had not had the English-Chinese dictionary(thanks Wilson!!) we probably would have just walked out! The massage was good and SUPER cheap! It cost us 100.00 RMBs for both of us. I’ll let you all do the math…. 1 USD=7.6666 RMB. So the massages cost around $6.02 for each of us to recieve a 45 minute massage. Anyone who has ever gotten a massage knows that it usually cost anywhere from 40-60 dollars for a 30 minute massage. Anyways, all in all we had a good day and are actually sitting in the media room here at the hospital with the majority of the patients and family members eating sweet dumplings ( a chinese tradition for the Chinese Lattern Festival) which according to Chinese culture bring you good luck for the next year. I did partake in the sweet dumplings however, Michelle wouldn’t even look at them…lol! Tomorrow is a BIG day for Michelle! She recieves her first stem cell treatment. She has to lay flat in bed for 6 hours after treatment which will be until 7:30-8:00 p.m. our time which is 5:30-6:00 a.m. New Orleans time. I’m sure she will be calling everyone letting them know how the treatment went and I will also be posting a blog tomorrow night and let everyone know how it went and how Michelle is feeling. Michelle would like to thank everyone who commented on our blogs and all of the encouragement she has been recieving. She really apppreciates it and would like you all to know how much it means to her! Will write more tomorrow night!
-Elizabeth
6 comments March 4th, 2007
