The weather in Shanghai has been beautiful lately and we took advantage of it this weekend by spending lots of time outside. We had to get back over to Puxi (across the river) so that I could go to the fabric market to see the dress that I ordered last weekend. Typically whenever we need to get to Puxi we either take a car or the subway. However, there are a number of ferries that cross the river and this is by the far the quickest and cheapest way to cross. Riding the ferries is a bit of an adventure though because the ferry terminals do not have any information in English. We had taken a ferry across once before but felt comfortable because Rich had taken that one with coworkers previously.
I researched the ferry locations on both the Pudong and Puxi sides and realized that there is a ferry that runs from a terminal very close to our house that would put us about two blocks away from the fabric market. The tricky part was that there are two ferries that leave from the same terminal on the Pudong side so we just needed to figure out which one would take us to where we wanted to be on the Puxi side. Of course, we took the wrong one and ended up at the Bund. Oops! At that point we decided that Ang wasn't really up for any more adventure so Rich got back on the ferry with her and headed home while I set off on foot to do some exploring. I made it back to the fabric market and found all sorts of interesting little shops in the area outside of Yu Yuan Garden (which is a big tourist spot). I managed to get back on the correct ferry going home and found that it only took about 15 minutes from the time I boarded the ferry to the time I was standing in the lobby of our building. And for only 0.5RMB ($0.07 USD). Not bad!!
We decided that crossing the river by ferry could be compared to a game of frogger. The river is used by very large boats to transport all sorts of materials around. The ferry must navigate through all of this traffic and oftentimes it seems that they are weaving in and out of the other boats. It isn't so bad on the weekend when river activity is minimal, but I can imagine it would be a bit nerve-wracking during the week when things are busier!
the 'nice' ferry that goes to the bund
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