chapter 7 - we all scream for ice cream

It took us three hours to cross the Bund today, constantly answering questions and feeling more like we were being interviewed. Most of the questions centered around how much it costs to get into an American university, but we were also asked about our home countries. We attracted the inevitable curious crowd of onlookers as well as four police officers, probably ensuring we weren’t spreading evil capitalist doctrine.

In the afternoon we went to Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s residence, now a museum. I told Hamish it was a house. If I told him it was a museum he wouldn’t go. We had to place plastic bags over our shoes before we went in and every room had an old attendant nodding sleepily in a corner. The house was large and cool, full of old photos, rosewood furniture, books and prints. There were airy verandahs and bright sitting rooms and we both thought it looked very livable. We sat in the garden for awhile, but it was hot outside and so we went into one of the hundreds of Shanghai’s confectioneries. Ended up with coconut ice cream balls and a Sprite float eaten in the relative cool of the People’s Park. We sat there lazily watching locals and talking about the museum (which Hamish really enjoyed!), the good Doctor himself and conjecturing whether or not there was any country in the world that did not sell ice cream.