This has been rusting in my list of drafts for almost a year now. Due to this the events may not be in a chronological order but that would not make a difference to you eh? So, a recap of what has happened so far,

1. RoboCup 2008 Day minus One
2. RoboCup 2008 Day One, Two
3. RoboCup 2008 Day Three, Four

• Skipped the breakfast on purpose, I could not take anymore of that pungent smell in the dining hall. Harith somehow managed to go and have some eggs, et cetera.
• Having missed out on the Great Wall of China trip, we decided to take a city tour (pronounced ‘Sheety Toor!!!’,  exclamation is a must – Watch Russel Peters’ episode in which he narrates his trip to China) being offered to participants for a ‘discounted’ rate. The tour included,
  • Chinese Gardens (summer houses) for the then Chinese administrative officers. Of the 3-4 gardens we visited, the one with Bonsai plants looked pretty cute. At almost every way point in the guided tour of any garden, there was a lady dressed in kimono playing very sweet soothing music using Chinese musical instruments like some-chinese-words-come-here.
  • Grand Canal, Suzhou is also known as the Venice of the East – thanks to the wonderful editing by Harith, the video tells you why.

• China is apparently very well known for its silk. We were taken to one of the silk industries where we were shown the entire process starting from feeding the silkworms to killing them and finally getting the world famous quilts, clothes and yes, scarves (for the ladies). Harith and I bought a quilt each and Harith bought a very nice silk shirt for his father. The guide by then picked up courage to ask me a question – “Is he (point to Harith) your son?” – and when I said we were not related she asked me another one – “Is he your student?” – to which I of course said a no and explained to her that we were ‘co-researchers’ and ‘just friends’. Do we really look like that?

• We asked the guide to drop us off in Downtown (pronounced ‘DaawnThaawn!!!’). It was a funny experience, once again thanks to Harith’s captures. After an exhaustive search, we finally located KFC – not one, but 5 KFCs at 4 corners of a big market. Real food after 4 days!
  • During the stay we never noticed any stray dogs, cows roaming aimlessly on the streets. We all know why!
  • However, the absence of birds sent chills down our spines. The reason for absence became clear to us almost immediately – barbeque joints displaying roasted birds and other animals (looked like rodents) on sticks.
• Went about looking for Olympics merchandise for ourselves and friends but could not find anything. Shopping in the downtown reminded me of Koti. 

It was my first trip to Koti with Kirthi and he stopped to ask a hawker the price of some item X (or maybe the hawker simply did not let go of him). The guy asked 200 to which Kirthi offered 20. The guy groaned and came down to 50! I think Kirthi then went down to 10-15. I do not remember what the final price was but I am pretty sure Kirthi did not buy that item X after all that haggling – ‘Just for the heck of it’ apparently.

• Harith and I had a similar experience in almost every shop (high class hawkers) while on the lookout for Olympics merchandise. 
• Unfortunately we could not find any official stuff and so we returned, having decided that we would come back to the same place the next day and finish shopping.
• Wrong move. We should have had something to eat instead of putting all our hopes on the banquet dinner. Let me recount what I had during that dinner – about 4 glasses of coke, 2 bread rolls and few spoons of chicken popcorn (they ran out of this in 5 minutes!). My first banquet turned out be my worst dinner experience till date.
• The next day we took our luggage to the Convention Center (flight scheduled early next day) and from there, hired a direct taxi to Daawnthaawn.
• We started asking everyone on the street for places selling the Olympics goods. Those people had a Chinese equivalent for Olympics too and could not understand the word ‘OLYMPICS’!  We found an Olympics banner, took a photo of it and starting showing it to people. Finally we got redirected to a mall. Phew!
• There were no T-shirts but we got our hands full with keychains and couple of bags. So much so that I overcharged my ICICI credit card – which took about 20 minutes to get verified.
• Had good lunch at McDonalds and KFC (preparation for the worst) and went back to the Convention Center.
• The awards ceremony was uninteresting probably because we did not win the prize. We were so close! And we lost it because of the stupid patriotic feelings.
• The 3 hour drive to Shanghai (pronouced ‘Shãwhãi!’) Airport cost us around 500 RMB and left us (including Prof. Kamal) penniless – seriously. I mean we did have USD and INR, but another foreign exchange was going to be a PITA.
• Prof. Kamal had to go to Singapore. He suggested we explore the Shanghai downtown in the evening and then we parted ways (yippieeeeee).
• We decided to try out the MagLev and stuffed our luggage in the lockers (damn the foreign exchange!). The MagLev experience was phenomenal, breathtaking, and all those words one uses to describe the state of ecstasy. One look at the video below shot by Harith is enough!