04 February 2009

We didn't do much yesterday during our last day in Xi'an so we'll start from Wednesday! We were up at 6am today to check out and meet the group for our flight to Shanghai. The original plan was to get a second overnight train from Xi'an to Suzhou and then a bus to Shanghai. However Bruce was struggling to get us tickets due to it being the Chinese holiday, which meant lots of people were returning to the cities from Xi'an. So instead he booked us on the flight and we had 2 extra nights in Xi'an (none of the group minded - we thought one overnight train was experience enough!)

We arrived in Shanghai around lunchtime and checked into our new hotel. We've had 3 really nice hotels whilst being on the Intrepid trip - twin room with bathroom. We may have to start preparing for much worse accommodation as we continue our trip!

Once we had settled in to our hotel we had an orientation walk with Bruce to get our bearings. Our hotel is just off of Nanjing Road which is meant to be the busiest shopping street in the whole of China. From there he showed us the way to the Shanghai musuem which houses various artefacts from Chinese History. Basically lots of Calligraphy, China, Coins and furniture. It was all very pretty but didn't really mean much to us as most of the explanations were in Chinese. We walked around until we got bored and then headed back to the hotel for a bit if a resy after our early start.

Later on in the evening we had an organised trip to the Shanghai circus to see an Acrobat show. As we haven't really seen any shows or entertainment in China so far we weren't sure what to expect but the show was brilliant. There were several groups of girl and boy acrobats who performed a variety of acts including acrobatics on roller skates, acrobatics on bicycles and acrobatics whilst spinning plates. They somehow managed to stand on eachothers shoulders in pyramid formation whilst the one on the bottom was riding a bike! It was pretty amazing. The only one i didn't enjoy was a weird lady magician who just seemed to pass a pack of cards from one hand to the other the whole time with a weird smile on her face. Other than that it was all amazing, particularly the finale where 5 seperate guys on motorbikes rode around a sphere cage at the same time narrowly missing crashing into eachother at really high speeds. After the show we headed back to our nice hotel to enjoy the comfy mattresses and get some rest.

05 February 2009

We had a free day today and decided to visit the Yuyuan Gardens and bazaar. It took us quite a while to find it (and we also stopped for a cup of tea at costa!) but we got there in the end. The guidebook said that if you only visit one classical garden in China to visit this one! It was really lovely and tranquil, and amazing that it was located right in the middle of a really busy bazaar area filled with hundreds of people. After we had looked round the garden we walked around all the little gift shops and I bargained with a woman in a shop over a waving cat for George. Not sure if it will survive the rest of the trip though...!

In the evening we met the group to go on a river cruise. I was expecting a boat like you get when you go on cruises on rivers in Europe, but it was like a proper cruise boat! We had to go up some stairs to the top deck and then had views across the river which was really nice.

After our cruise we had our leaving dinner with the group. Bruce took us to a restaurant near our hotel and ordered a selection of dishes for us to share. We had a group photo in the restaurant and then a group huddle back at the hotel which someone suggested....! Everyone had different plans after the trip, some going home but most travelling onto other places. We will hopefully be meeting up with an australian called Pete when we get to Sydney as he said he will cook us dinner! We have both really enjoyed the intrepid trip and the sights we have seen during the last 9 days. We definately think it was worth doing in China where there is little English and it can be difficult getting around/being understood by yourself.

06 February 2009

Today we unfortunately had to leave our fancy hotel in the centre of shanghai and venture a bit further out to find our hostel where we are spending our final night in Shanghai. After a pretty scary taxi journey where our driver continually cut people up and spat out the window we arrived at the shanghai youth hostel. We were pleasantly suprised when we arrived at the hostel. It is quite basic but clean and very catered towards travellers as oppose to rich business men like the last hotel. They have a bar with english food and internet access downstairs so we were happy anyway.

We decided to go for a bit of an explore this afternoon and used the metro for the first time which was very straightforward. We think we have figured out how to get to the maglev station for our flight tomorrow which is a high speed train out of Shanghai to Pudong airport. The train can travel up to 300mph and a journey which would take about an hour by car takes 7 minutes!. Hopefully we will still be in one piece by the time we get to the airport.

Later in the afternoon we were seconded by a couple of chinese 'students' who at first seemed very nice. They asked us how we were enjoying shanghai and said they appreciated the opportunity to practice their english. Fortunately, we had been warned about this sort of thing by our tour guide and they really wanted to invite us to a chinese tea party somewhere out in the sticks! We politely refused.

In the evening we intended to visit the Jin Mao tower which is according to the chinese the 4th highest building in the world. However, once we got there and realised how much it was to get to the top we decided the view was fine from the bottom. Instead we headed back to the hostel and used our last few yuan for some dinner. A new currency and a new country tomorrow when we arrive in Hong Kong!