I have been eating SO MUCH in Shanghai - everything from pot luck choices off a Chinese picture menu in a pokey place packed with locals, to fancy Western cuisine in an outdoor rooftop restaurant with a view of the city lit up at night - it has all been delicious. There are Haagen-Dazs outlets everywhere so I've also been eating lots of ice cream My tolerance for spicy food must not to be up to Chinese standards - one spicy chilli beef dish had me coughing, sniffling and crying, much to the amusement of the waiting staff!

I'm glad I'm not a veggie - I thought it would have been hard being vegetarian in Russia/Mongolia, where everything on the menu has meat in it, even the salads, but China is a whole different story - there is meat to be found in the most unlikely of dishes - one night I ordered noodles with beansprouts which had what I thought were carrots in it but on closer inspection I realised that it was some sort of meat, then another night I order fried eggplant with beans and it turned out to have lots of bacon in it! Strange but tasty. If you were in any way squeamish about food, the Chinese restaurants here would test you - by the time I've eliminated dishes with stomach/intestines/feet/head and suchlike from the menu, there's not much left to choose from... and you can bet that 'chicken' doesn't mean a nice breast of chicken but rather a random selection of meat, skin, fat, bones (neckbones and the lot) and, if you're lucky, chicken's feet. I've always prided myself on not being a picky eater but even I'm struggling - I just have to close my eyes and not think about what those crunchy bits are!

In addition to the stacks of good restaurants, Shanghai is great for shopping and has some interesting sights. However, the experience is marred by hawkers trying to sell crap absolutely everywhere - at the end of the day I was always exhausted and wound up from fending them off. Nanjing Road is a long stretch of shops that's always packed with people, I couldn't walk five paces without someone following me saying "Hallo Lady! Watches? Handbags? DVDs?", it got irritating very quickly... The Bund offers some of Shanghai's most spectacular views at night-time, with the lit-up skyscrapers reflected in the river. Unfortunately it is ruined by hawkers, I think dollar signs start flashing when they see a white face and they latch onto you like a leech - it's more of an endurance test than a pleasant stroll.

Another peculiarity of being an obvious foreigner here is that I am stared at quite a lot. Westerners are surprisingly few and far between, to the extent that I find myself staring at them as well! So I guess I can't blame people...

One thing I've noticed is that Mandarin is an aggressive language to listen to - people often sound like they're arguing and shouting at one another and then they'll burst into laughter - this makes it difficult to read situations. The 'Chinglish' translations can be amusing, except when it comes to filling out forms and I have no idea what information they are asking for! Some of Shanghai's metro trains have TV screens with an animated pig who explains how one should behave on the metro - he says "Safety comes from minding trivialities". The main central station, People's Square, has at least 20 exits so every time I think I've got my head around where I'm going, I seem to end up somewhere new! It is pretty easy to navigate though, most street signs are in English as well as Chinese and they helpfully indicate North/South or East/West.

The French district isn't much to look at but it includes Xintiandi, which seems to be quite a trendy area to hang out, with lots of expensive restaurants and shops, packed with foreigners. Also in the French district is the Chinese Propaganda Poster Art Museum - an interesting (at times amusing, at times frightening) collection of Maoist propaganda posters, with a couple of post-Mao items as well. Most of the posters had a pro-Communist and/or anti-US sentiment, with many encouraging a sense of unity with Africa, South America and the Middle East in the fight against the US and some of later ones criticising Russia's 'revisionism' and hailing Mao as the true embodiment of modern Marxism/Leninism. The curator is very passionate about showing these images so people don't forget China's recent history and says he wouldn't sell them at any price - he has collected at least 4,000 pieces though can only show a tiny fraction of them in this rented basement of an apartment block - he said he'd like to move to a bigger space when he can find financial support but he's not in any hurry. He was quite a sweet old man and spent a long time talking to me, asking me about my trip and telling me about places he thought I should see in Shanghai and in China generally. Before I left he took me to see another room of his collection that's not normally open to the public, with calligraphy posters, and then he gave me a 1968 Mao badge from the museum shop. It has been quite shocking to learn (from here and reading elsewhere) more about the events that took place in China over the last century.

I took a day trip to Wenzhu, a village about two hours away from Shanghai by bus. It is a picturesque old canal town with lots of little bridges and traditional wooden houses built beside the waterways, though it is quite 'touristified', with tour groups and guides with megaphones swarming all over the place and lots of little shops selling sweets and souvenirs. On the way back from Wenzhu we stopped at a 'special tea shop', as far as I could see the 'special tea' was just hot water with daisies in it. I expected the tea here to be great but so far it has all tasted like dishwater.

While I was there, the first Chinese tourists to visit the US were featured heavily on TV (previously China had only issued exit visas for citizens to travel to the US for business or education purposes, not for tourism). Every couple of days they would be in a different part of the US and everywhere they went they were treated like royalty. It's crazy to think that they hadn't been allowed to go before now!