Relatively crowded

As part of our home-schooling experiment, J is doing a project called ‘My Life in Shanghai’. To look at some classical Chinese gardening architecture, today we went to Yuyuan Garden. Yuyuan Garden is in old Shanghai, and is very popular with tourists. It was an extremely warm day, unusual I think for May, not particularly sunny but very humid and sticky.

We had left the gardens and were walking through old Shanghai, when we passed McDonalds and decided to go and get a coke (yes, it may be old Shanghai, but if there’s a tourist, there is of course a McDonalds). While we were crowding round the counter (no such thing as a queue of course), I got talking to the American standing next to us. I asked him what he thought of Shanghai. “Well,” he said, wrinkling his nose slightly, “It’s a bit hectic, a bit crowded, and it’s a bit muggy.” I agreed that it was particularly muggy today, and that old Shanghai is very crowded, and asked him where in America he was from. “New York,” he replied.