Friday 30th March

Apparently the lights got switched on ay 6:30 am, however being on my high bed I had some protection! As the train was late we got in at 10:30 am not 9 am. We got off the train and went to the taxi rank; Leon gave us cards with the hotel name written on in Chinese to give to the driver!

We arrived at the hotel and jumped in the shower, the hotel room was really nice actually! I was impressed. There was a hilarious bad translation, it was supposed to say 'careful, slippery' or something along those lines. The translation that actual came out was 'carefully slid', which led to the puns I carefully slid into the shower this morning!

The weather today was pretty crap, it was chucking it down. I was not impressed! But then again it was the second day we have experienced rain, the first being in London! We got pretty wet! We had traditional Shanghai dumplings, which are better than the Russian and Mongolian! Pretty damn tasty they were!

Leon gave us an orientation walk, not that we could see a lot as the clouds were blocking the view, we did go to the Bund where you should see the financial district, however you could see murky outlines and that was it!

We headed back towards the hotel, we were down the road and realised we were missing the Germans, Alex and Matthias. We finally saw them running towards us with a newly acquired umbrella which was a hilarious sight to see!

We got back to the hotel and slept for a couple of hours not intentionally though! We did start watching a Jackie Chan movie but we had no idea what was going on seeing as it was all in Chinese! We woke up and went to find the internet café as this was the first hotel that didn't have any Wi-Fi! Which seems odd seeing as this is Shanghai! The internet café was literally across the street, it was cheap though 10 Yuan I think we should of paid more but the girl didn't have a clue what we were trying to say! So we left without paying the extra money for the internet! They also had an arcade which we spent an hour in playing all the random games there!

We went back to the room and went to bed seeing as it was late now but the rain had subsided, for now!

Saturday 31st March

We woke up for 9 am and Leon took us on another walk around the city, today was lovely and sunny unlike yesterday, thank god! We walked through the centre of Shanghai, down the shopping street and through a couple of lovely parks. The parks were lovely, with a lovely bright green colour! I have missed the green colour! It's good to see the trees coming into bloom!

We walked through the busy alleyways with locals trying to sell us all manner of things! We arrived at the old town where it was heaving full of people! The buildings were all in the old Chinese style and looked authentic! We found a buffet style restaurant and had some food before going into the nearby garden. We first crossed the nine cross bridge, which had nine corners which stretched across the water. There were a lot of fish lurking in the water, with a few dead ones floating on the top!

We went into the garden, which surprisingly was empty and very peaceful! We sat down and enjoyed the peacefulness before re-entering the mayhem! We managed to weave our way out of the tiny streets and we headed over to the Bund. The Bund is the river that runs through Shanghai, on the Eastside is where the locals never wanted to move to as it was hard to cross the river, but now business started moving in and building huge skyscrapers! Now it is a popular place to live. We located the tourist tunnel to reach the other side, it was a rip off price at 60 Yuan for a return trip. We jumped on the train car to go through the tunnel, it was possibly the weirdest experience, and it had flashing lights and random commentary like 'welcome to hell'. Which I thought was odd having this on the tourist tunnel!!

We arrived on the other side after 5 minutes of the bizarre tourist tunnel. We had planned to go up the tallest observatory in the world, the financial district building. It looks like a giant bottle opener! It was a long 20 minute walk through the middle of financial district. We arrived at the giant bottle opener and brought our tickets and headed in. There was a short video showing how quickly Shanghai was built compared to New York and Tokyo. Shanghai started off late but took a grand total of 10 years to build all the buildings it currently had including the bottle opener! It was very impressive!

There was a short queue for the lifts up but soon we were zooming at high speed to the top, my ears were popping most of the way! We reached floor 94, were we had to get off and queue for another lift up. By the time we got to the next lift around 10 minutes the queue had tripled in size, we clearer got here at the right time! We got on the lift for the last 6 floor to floor 100. We got off and started peering out of the windows. They had two rows of glass floor which to me seemed a bit pointless as all you could see was the top of the roof of the rest of the building, seeing as we were on the top of the bottle opener. The glass floor on the edges were good and you managed to get a good view of the ground below. After 1 minutes of looking and taking pictures, we queued to go back down before the crowd of people below caught up with us. Before we left I quickly popped to the loo there is a point to this story! One of the loos was by the window, but it wasn't frosted over like you get back at home, you could sit and look at the view below while sitting down. Luckily there wasn't any bigger buildings, but I'm sure the surrounding offices could see what you were doing if they looked hard enough! The second story was the loo had several different buttons, after inspection it was a 'fancy' loo where you could get your bum washed! I didn't try it out but I did take a picture to show Stu and Ida when I got out!

We had to rush back as we needed to get washed and dressed and get to the internet café to Skype Stu's parents and his Nan was over. After our skyping we had to meet Leon as he was taking us to the acrobatics show.

It was amazing! I am still wondering how the hell they managed to do some of the tricks! They showed us hoop jumping, hula hooping, bending women and a group of young girls balancing giant drums and barrels on their feet while kicking and rolling them in ways I didn't know you could! It was all very impressive. Leon met us afterward and took us back to the hotel, on the way back I somehow managed to bend a car number plate as it caught my jeans! I ran away from the car and pretended it wasn't me!

We got back to the hotel and got ready, again, as we were going to the Vue bar in the Hyatt hotel to get a good view of the Bund. At a 100 Yuan for entry and a free drink was slightly expensive the view was amazing. We managed to find a giant bed like sofa outside and sat around talking and looking out over the river. All the buildings had their lights going on and it was beautiful. It was pretty chilly though! We stayed for a couple of hours and left to go back home.

Sunday 1st April

We had a couple of hours to kill before meeting at 2 pm to go to the train station for another overnight train! WOO!!!

We walked to the shopping street and found somewhere for lunch. I had no idea what I ate as it was all in Chinese but the usual pointing and nodding got us our food. I had some beef rice combination! It was good! We found a bakery and brought ourselves some cake and pizza slices/buns for our train! We decided to go to the arcade as we still had to wait around for two hours which seemed to fly by messing around on the different games. I managed to beat Stu on a Wii style tennis game which he was not impressed by!

We went back to the hotel after spending all our tokens and waited for the others to arrive. We picked up all our bags and flagged down some taxis and went back to the station. We arrived at the station which seems to be busy all the time. What I have noticed about China is the facilities are pretty big but there are so many people in China that the facilities aren't big enough for the population and you end up having to push past people. I have become very rude now and have realised the only way to get around in the cities is by pushing you way through, just following suit like the Chinese!

Our train to Xi'an, this time it was an open carriage, so there was no walls separating the corridor to the rooms. There was still six beds to each compartment! It was very peculiar, but I enjoyed it better as you could have conversation with more people as they could sit in the corridor. I managed to bag myself a bottom bunk this time! We shared our compartment with Jeremy the American and Marta the Polish. We sat and chatted and ate dinner for a few hours before bed, when the lights get switched off at 10 pm sharp.

Overall view on Shanghai:

Shanghai had it modern buildings mixed along with local communities and beautiful gardens. I really enjoyed Shanghai and was quite modern and fully built despite it only being built in 10 years. Shanghai felt more spacious with the gardens dotted randomly throughout the city and gave the city a different side compared to Beijing.

Total miles travelled from UK: 8948

Transport taken:

Trains = 16

Hours ahead of UK:

+8

Our Photos:

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