After travelling for 11 hours on the hard sleeper train and a short metro journey, I arrived at the Mingtown Etour International Youth hostel in Shanghai. The Metro system worked pretty much like the Beijing subway. It is however £0.30 per journey instead of the £0.20 subway. Rip off!!! At first glance, the hostel seems pretty clean and hotel like (apart from the face I'm sharing with 5 others. It doesn't seem like there's air conditioning which may become ...

On the night train! I'm currently lying on my hard sleeper bed while typing this. My destination; Shanghai. My ETA 11am tomorrow morning.  What an interesting experience this is! Waiting for them to let us board the train was chaos. I thought London Euston was bad, but I've never seen anything like this!  It was literally every man woman & child for themselves. No prisoners were taken, including and especially the elderly women. I was glad of my 6"3...

There are 27 million people in Beijing, and probably 9 million Bicycles. Yet somehow, randomly I bump into Randall (NYC) from the hostel. He was also taking a bike ride. What was supposed to be an hours bike ride, turned into a 4 hour full afternoon. Riding a bike is by far the best way to explore Beijing, and I'm sorry I didn't try it earlier. We visited jingshan park, which was very beautiful, probably the best I've visited in Beijing due to it's vantage poin...

Today is my last day in Beijing before I hit the night train for Shanghai. In the last couple of days I've visited the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, both very beautiful scenic places to visit. I haven't eaten anything crazy since my visit to the night market, I don't want to overdo it on the scorpion!! I have been to various restaurants seeing how cheap I can eat for. A lad from Cardiff called Alex introduced me to a place which does a full meal for 6...

Scorpion Delight!! Ok yesterday I had the most fantastic day visiting the Great Wall of China. When I got back to the hostel I wondered what to do next. I was so tired that I could have gone to bed straightaway, but my battle against jet lag told me I shouldn't be going to sleep at 7pm. I was chatting to a French Canadian bloke called Joselyn at the hostel and he said he was going to a night Market where you can try delights such as scorpion. This seemed to...