We left Japan completely spoilt and had a massive culture shock when we were dragged into Shanghai. We flew in via air china and despite the clear skies we had a lot of turbulance and a very bumpy landing.

We caught a bus into central Shanghai and were stunned by the mass of huge buildings and bright lights. Shanghai is certainly a busy place and is nothing like the slow, perfectly organised Japan.

Our 3 days here have been very different, mainly down to the weather. The first day was very humid and hazy. It took us the full day to find our feet and get used to where we were. We felt really obvious in all the crowds of Chinese people many of whom were not discrete as they stopped and stared at us. We were hassled quite a bit on our first day with people trying to sell us things or asking us for things or trying to take us off to "tea ceremonies".

The rain on the second day sent us back inside for an early start on the beers, which didn't end till 3am with much beer pong played! However, we lost no time on the 3rd day making up for this as the sun was out and the temperature had dramatically increased. We explored the main areas of Shanghai from "The Bund" to the "Yu Garden" and market streets. We some how ended up with more octopus to eat, this time fried on sticks....lovely . Also had juice squeezed from bamboo....interesting.

As the sun began to set we headed across the river to Padong and the skyscraper district which was amazing, a huge contrast to the scraggy streets we are staying on with upmarket shops like cartier and tree lined avenues, very posh and rich. We headed up to the sky walk observatory deck of the financial tower and at 492m we certainly felt we were high. The 8 meters per second lift made our ears pop and the glass floor of the deck felt weird to walk over. We stayed up on the observation deck until the sun had gone down and we got a birds eye view of the whole of shanghai lit up with great views of the surrounding skyscrapers coming to life.

Train tickets to Beijing are now booked, thanks to a little help from the receptionist at our hostel who wrote down the train and destination in chinese for us. Will be heading there tomorrow lunchtime (25th) so our next post will be from Beijing.