Leaving Hong Kong we headed to mainland China, first stop Shanghai.

Shanghai was apparently little more than a fishing and weaving town before the British arrived around 1842 after the first Opium War, turning it into a huge, international trading port.

The Nanking Treaties (which were massively in favour of the British) meant the international community jointly ran the city with the Chinese, though, similar to Hong Kong, the Chinese have tried to take credit for the city becoming such a large and successful trading port, and all the museums and things we read praise 'far-sighted' China's hard work and ambition and talk negatively about the foreign invaders infecting the country.

The international influence is easy to see in Shanghai though, and is most visible on the Bund, the riverside mass of colonial and New York-style buildings left over as a reminder of it being in the foreign quarters of town.

Unfortunately it seems the Chinese have knocked down a few of the buildings lately. Nothing stands in the way of progress here, and if there's money to be made the Chinese will demolish it.

One of the buildings knocked down we think was the former British Consulate, but after only a short time in the country we've got the impression the Chinese are quite bitter about losing out to us in the Opium Wars, and are keen to destroy any memory of us and colonial China.

Hopefully the rest of the Bund will be spared though, as it is the prettiest part of the city, and no amount of skyscrapers thrown up on the opposite banks of the river will change that.

We arrived in Shanghai after a twenty hour train journey in hard-sleeper class.  We took the middle and top bunk (as the lower bunks were all sold out), not realising the climb involved to get up onto them, the seven foot drop from the top, and that the top bunk was right under the air conditioning unit, so Rich had to wear a thick jumper as well as a blanket all night.

Still, the journey went pretty quick despite our weird and annoying cabin buddies, a middle-aged woman who grassed us up for sitting on the same bed playing cards and didn't stop eating the whole journey (boiled eggs, not very sociable in a small cabin), and a young girl who liked to watch us sleep and woke up at 5.30am to start cooking and banging pots around!

Another thing we've noticed in our short time in China is the rules.  We were told to move when we both sat on the same bed, the Irish girl next door was told to turn around as she was sleeping in the wrong direction (!), and if you step off the pavement on a red man at a pedestrian crossing, a traffic controller blows a whistle in your face and waves you back.  We've started doing it at every crossing now just to stress them out.

Arriving in Shanghai we jumped on the metro (after fighting our way through all the shoving, staring and spitting) and searched for an hour before finding our hostel, the Mingtown.

Despite it's name this is probably the best hostel we've stayed in on our whole trip, with a Chinese garden complete with bridge over a pond full of fish, good and cheap food and beer, and a great room with cable TV (though unfortunately all the channels bar one are in Chinese, and this channel only seems to broadcast programmes about China's glorious past, it's glorious future and about it's great relations with neighbouring countries).

Although Shanghai's a really nice city, quite relaxed and not too polluted compared to Hong Kong and Hanoi (considering it's China's largest city with over 13m people), there's not really much to do.  The Bund is worth a night time stroll, there's a lot of good food, but not much else.

We spent our three days there learning about the 'father of the Republic', Sun Yat Sen, by visiting his former home, and learning about the Communist Party by visiting the location of the first national congress of the Communist Party meeting.

We also checked out the Shanghai History Museum, which is like a wax model museum and is full of more propaganda about the foreign invaders doing only bad and the Chinese making Shanghai what it is today, before watching the FA Cup final (don't know why we bothered) and leaving for our next destination, Nanjing.

Two more things we've noticed that have shocked us are the things the Chinese eat and the spitting!

A cookery programme had a recipe for a dolphin dish (at least we think thats what they said), the shops are full of snacks such as chicken feet, marinated duck's neck (minus the chest bone, as this pops the plastic wrapper we learnt), menus offer terrapin and turtle, and choice cuts of meat are tendon and cartilage!

The spitting is something else too!  Women in suits and pretty dresses noisily clear their throats before gobbing in bins or on the pavement.  A woman the other day even gobbed on the floor in a museum, though we're starting to think some of it is for our benefit, as the woman looked at us before gobbing and plenty of other people have done too!  Now we just join in to see their reaction.

It is constant though, and everywhere you go you are never far from the sound of someone grollying .  We think it is something to do with the Chinese wanting to get rid of bad stuff in their bodies, as we heard they eat water chestnuts to help them fart as they believe they will live longer if they expel bad gases (they don't mind doing that in public too!).

Oh, and finally, during dinner the other night a young lad of about six was sick all over the table next to us.  His dad just carried on talking and eating, while his mum scooped it up into the bowl he was eating from and carried on as if nothing happened.  Nice!  She didn't even tell the waitress to disinfect the table.

Hope they clean up their act for the Beijing Olympics next year.  We heard spitting is banned.  We can't wait to get there!!