Halloha,

We flew to Shanghai on Sunday morning... the plane food was interesting (so far plane food has been quite tasty) ... There was some sort of (very) overboiled rice in starchy slop, accompanied by pickled cucumber with a large black vegetable or fruit?! And an undercooked break roll with a slice of animal fat on it. Needless to say, we poked that food and gave it a miss - our little Western tummys couldn't cope with it at 6am!!

We had huge issues finding the Hotel (HOTEL - Mark, woo!) We could have done with an English map but they don't seem to sell them anywhere. After trekking miles - catching buses and subways and walking through the city lugging 25kg bags each in the midday heat, we found it - only to be told to walk up the road for about "2 minutes"... anyhow, about an hour later we got to our hotel. Accomodation is interesting - they're big fans of having windows connecting the bedroom to the bathroom, which as you can imagine, is a little awkward - even for a couple!

We spent the afternoon chilling out. We went for a walk along the Bund (to find it's mainly closed for construction work for "expo 2010" so we found a pretty little park and sat there for a while. Once groups of people started clustering around us with camera's we thought it best to move on...

On Monday we went on the Bund sightseeing tunnel, which was a big tunnel under the river with lots of flashy lights and shiney things - no real sights to be honest?! We were greeted the other side by some amazing buildings. Big, shiney corporate offices, really quite impressive. We wandered along the riverbank just soaking up the sights. We went to the Pearl Tower (BIG TV tower) and Pete was brave enough to venture up there - all 350 meters high! Holly wimped out and sat in Subway Restaurant for a bit :p Pete stood on a glass floor - the photo's are enough to make you feel wobbly.After that we went for a walk through the people's park, we kept getting stopped by friendly chinese people who wanted to practice their english with us! :-) Finally we walked along Nanjing road, its the main shopping street which goes nearly all the way back to our hotel.

The next entry will probably be from Xi'an, as we move there tomorrow!

Love from

Holly and Pete

xx