Shanghai

We arrived in Shanghai late morning on Saturday 21st after a 15 hour train journey from Xi'an.As soon aswe left the station you could tell that the city was more metropolitan than those that we had visited in Northern China, I'm not sure if it was the change in fashion or the fact that the locals weren't constantly staring at you, but it was definitely different.

The hotel, was quite nice, about a 10 minute walk from the centre of town and not a bad view of the city skyline.However it was on the edge of a street that Terry had warned uswas a bit dodgy, out of intrigue I had to have look!It was a strange mix of 'massage' parlors, very expensive restaurantsand street food stalls, not so bad I thought,until the guy selling rat on stick tried to sell tried to sell me hash to go with my meal, I obviously declined - good rat though!

We caught the metro to the financial district, to see the skyline, the buildings were impressively high and even more impressively lit. It was pretty expensive to go to the top of the Pearl TV Tower and too cold to just wander, so we took the tacky tour bus.The best idea of the evening, we got to see most of the buildings and we got a free cup of coffee!Coffee is quite rare in China and good coffee even more so, so I did contemplate staying on the bus for the rest of the night.

Once I had been coaxed off of the bus by the promise of beer, we had a wander looking for a bar that wasn't going to charge us an arm and a leg for local larger.In the end one of the boys spotted Hooter's was having a happy hour.Cheap (er) beer and hot women, it didn't take long to decide this was a good idea.It actually turned out to be one of our worst decisions,they tried to stitch us up on the two for one beers claiming that each person got a free beer for the one they bought as apposed to us buying sixteen and paying for eight? Anyway after a heated discussion with the manager we managed to pay the cheaper price!After all that excitement it was an early night for me.

The next day Ditte, Jonas and I took a walk in the rain to the Sunday market, which was fairly interesting.From there we found a local food market, the fresh fruit and veg looked amazing, the live fish, frogs, turtles, dogs etc. etc. were pretty interesting too.

By the time we had finished at the food market the rain was becoming quite relentless, so Ditte headed back to the hotel.As we were only in Shanghai for two days Jonas and I decided we wouldkeep walking and find the French Concession.We walked for about an hour, stumbled across the famousantiques market where I bought my genuine reproduction Terracotta Warrior! The walk was hard work in the rain, but we saw some interesting sights, it is safe to say that the French Concession wasn't worth the effort!

That night the whole group met up for dinner before going to see the Shanghai Acrobats.The production was pretty amateurish, but the acts… WOW! They were fantastic, and so young, some of them could only have been seven or eight,

Wade missed the show as he was still feeling pretty poorly, Terry insisted it went to the hospital as he had fever and wasn't eating. Reluctantly he went and came back with an arm full of drugs etc.

We have the longest train journey to come 25 hours from Shanghai to Yangshuo plus about 3 hours of transfers! Who'd want to fly anyway?