Final farewells, ticket confusion and an excursion to the hairdressers

On Friday (12th) when we arrived in Shanghai, we had the day free so Matt and I set off to try and buy us some train tickets for our onward journey. We have to travel from here to Nanning (in the south), then from Nanning to a small town called Pingxiang at the Chinese border. We leave China and cross the Vietnamese border then it'll be roughly a 6 hour train / bus journey from there. So, we wanted to buy tickets to Nanning (a 27 hour journey from here) and possibly tickets to Pingxiang to save us some time. We found the station and thanks to a kind lady who wrote down in Chinese what we wanted earlier that day on the train to Shanghai, we successfully purchased 2 hard sleeper tickets. We also managed to purchase tickets to Pingxiang even though and rather alarmingly the ticket officer had never heard of the place and also they were pretty expensive at 130 RMB each for such a short journey. However, as the ticket office was a fairly sweaty and chaotic affair, we left just pleased that we had something to show for the past 2 hours.

In the evening we met up with the group and went on a boat ride with excellent views of the Shanghai skyline at night.

On Saturday we had another free day; so as it was our last night with the group I decided that my mission was to find a nice top to wear as the other girls in the group have all brought lovely clothes and here I am feeling rather inferior with my wash one, dry one, wear one assortment of 3 tops. We headed out to find H&M (H&M!!!) and I had about an hour to find something suitable with my modest budget of around 300 RMB. Matt left me, rather reluctantly with the credit card as well, with the strict instruction not to 'panic buy' which is something I do rather too often and rather too well when desperate for a new item of clothing in a short space of time. Anyway as is usually the case I started out on my mission full of hope and energy. I soon realised the autumn collections had arrived and so jumpers and long sleeved things took up most of the hanging space. Slightly deflated, I finally plumped for a shirt, but unfortunately didn't find any trousers. So, undeterred, I folded and pinned my regular trousers to make cropped ones, wore all my hair bands as bracelets and watered down my eyeliner to make eyeshadow. A commendable effort even though the other girls were in their skinny jeans, beads from Tiffany's, vest tops and wraps.

Anyway, for our last night together we headed to a theatre to see the Shangai Acrobats. There are no photos as none were allowed, but it was pretty impressive is all I can say. Following this we went to dinner and Susan had organised a cake as it was one of the girl's, Gemma's, birthday. Then we went to a Mexican bar where we drank and danced the night away.

We awoke on Sunday with the first hangover of the trip (a mild one I hasten to add - I'd only had 4 drinks!). We checked out of the hotel and took a taxi to our hostel. This was near the Nanjing Road which is the touristy street of the city; however the hostel is in the back streets a little. Anyway, I, being the old lady I'm turning into, needed a nap after the previous night's exertions. Meanwhile Matt, very fortuitously for us, started to ponder the train tickets we had recently purchased. After some research he discovered there are 2 Pingxiangs; the tickets we had purchased would take us to the middle of the country (en route back to Shanghai from Nanning) bearing in mind that in China's Lonely Planet there isn't even anything written about the Pingxiang in the middle of the country just a very short entry about the Pingxiang border crossing. TFFT! (It's a little saying me and Matt have, which you can probably work out). To get on the train would not have been good.

Yesterday the first thing we did was go to the hairdressers. It looked promising as they had a price list in English. However, it soon emerged that none of the staff actually spoke English. Our phrasebook fortunately covered the basics; 'a trim', 'not too short' and 'easy tiger' (seriously). For some bizarre reason we were shampooed in our seats (?) after our hair was cut. The guy who shampooed my hair had really long nails; I felt like I was being scalped. He took me to have my hair rinsed and whispered 'you want massage?' I very politely but very firmly declined, then, in a very British way pretended I hadn't heard anything, although I'm sure this was a totally innocent query. Surely. (What's 'easy tiger' again…?). Anyway, another guy took over and my hair ended lovely and straight which made a refreshing change; albeit short-lived as soon as we stepped into the humidity of the subway.

Following this we headed for the station again to change our tickets. Without going into much detail we managed to get our money back minus a 20% 'service charge'. We did try to argue about this but having had to 'queue' (the word, I'm sure, doesn't exist in China) with a couple of dozen other sweaty, irate people wanting refunds then try to explain ourselves with a combination of frantic pointing at phrases in our book (due to the tonal nature of Chinese we gave up trying to speak it long ago) and charades we left needing to find a happy place. (Which we did soon after in the shape of Burger King!!).

In the evening we headed to Jinmao Tower, and travelled up the 88 floors for the cool view. A nice end to our time in Shanghai.