We arrived in Shanghai eventually, we had to wait for our friend from England who is already travelling in China with his Chinese friends in blazing hot sun and we made a mistake of sitting near to sewerage but the uncomfortable wait was worth it soon as we met Neil and his Chinese buddies.

Despite our cultural differences, we got on like a house on the fire, we discussed so many different things and thanks to Neil interpreting and our gestures we were able to understand each other fairly easily. They helped us to cut a good deal for a ticket to Shenzhen which is near to Hong Kong and they also insist on buying us drinks and a meal at Chinese restaurant where I had duck with rice and leeks which were delicious.

According to them, it is in Chinese culture for the host to pay for a group, even so more when a local is hosting a foreigner; they confessed they were so shocked to see Neil attempting to buy a bottle of water for himself at first. I must confess I am glad that in England we don't do the same otherwise no one can afford to have a night out for a month or something!

After bidding farewell to Neil and his friends, we headed to our hostel which is amazing compared to the one in Beijing; I can hear my stomach rumbling with approval when I saw that they have clear Western toilets!!

But on the journey, the taxi took us to the wrong hostel and we had to walk the rest of the way and we also made a naive mistake of assuming they can speak a basic English so I had to went back to station and get a staff to translate the hostel name in Chinese which ironically as you can read above, didn't helped us one bit, we later discovered it is because there is so many hostels that have "International" in their title.

We spent the evening relaxing and sampling local beer and to my delight agreed a lie in tomorrow to recover for other couple of days exploring!!