Ni hao! Wow, well we are still in Shanghai and still enjoying it! The city is really modern and clean - completely different from Beijing. At night it was amazing driving through the city with all the lights lit up on the skyscrapers. The sky was a purple colour, partly we think because of the lights and partly because of the smog which is pretty bad here, like Beijing, Last night we went to see the Shanghai Acrobats which we really enjoyed. We took a taxi with ...

(Written by Holly) Hello from Shanghai! Gosh we're moving around so much it's hard to keep on track of this blog! So the last blog we wrote finished up in Xi'an but we didn't mention the train journey from HELL! We met the rest of our group after a pretty boring last day in Xi'an at 6pm and got all our luggage together ready for our train which was to leave at 8. After making sure we had everything and buying food supplies for the 17 hour journey we went to Xi...

(Written by Matt) We woke up on our last day in Xian at around 10am after having the best nights sleep so far. (Nothing to do with the alcohol we had been drinking the previous night to prepare ourselves for our group karaoke session!) Our last night in Xian was very fun. Lilian, our tour guide, had organised a karaoke night for everyone. When we first heard about it we were a bit dubious and as we dont really have the best singing voices (Holly), we weren't sur...

So today we went to see the Terracotta Warriors! We met our group in the lobby of our plush hotel at 9am all feeling very rested and smug after having a lovely hot shower! We took a local bus to the Terracotta Warrior site which cost us 70p each - bargain! It took about an hour and we got to see some of the Xi'an countryside. When we arrived at the site the bus dropped us off and we felt a bit stranded as you have to walk quite far to actually get there! But we e...

Well... the overnight sleeper train was an experience! We all gathered at Beijing Train Station in the evening and boarded the train about 8pm. Our guide did a 'lucky dip' with the tickets to try and mix the group up, but we all swapped to be with the people that we were travelling with! The train was really long and full of sleeper carriages. We passed the 'deluxe' carriages hoping that they might be where we were going, but sadly it wasn't to be! It was a bit l...