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Published: October 15th 2012
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Shanghai
After 7 months working and living in Melbourne we are finally on the last leg of our journey home. We really enjoyed working in Melbourne and both managed to get great jobs to do with our careers which will help when we return to England at Christmas.
So we said goodbye to our work colleagues, house mate and friends and made our way to Melbourne Airport. We just booked cheap flights to Shanghai with Eastern China Airlines, cost approx $450AUD each which is around £300. We were pleasantly surprised to find the first 8 hours of our journey was in fact with Quantas, as Eastern Airlines were selling seats on their behalf. We would be stopping over in Singapore for a couple of hours before heading onto Shanghai which would then be another 5 hours.
We were sat next to an Australian man who I struck up a conversation with. That was a big mistake as he would not shut up and after about 20 minutes listening to him rabbiting on I was starting to worry I was never going to watch the free movies as had my eye on the
Magic Mike film ;o) He even asked me how much I paid for our fights so I pretended I did not know, he said he had got a fantastic deal and that’s why he booked it, he said he had paid $700 which was way more then we had so that cheered me up!
Anyway we took off but I started to feel a little light headed. Soon as the seatbelt sign went off I was getting hotter and hotter and felt really strange. I knew this feeling as this happened to me in Canada when I had not eaten all day and not drank much water and nearly passed out so I started to panic as suddenly felt really sick. I got up to go the toilet but collapsed onto Terry as my legs gave way. I did not pass out completely but the next few moments were a blur. Terry said my whole body was shaking which I do not remember.
The flight attendant must of seen me as he brought me a ginger beer which really helped, I think he presumed I was a nervous flyer which I am not. However I must of freaked
the Aussie guy out next to me as he started saying to the fight attendant how he also felt unwell and thinks the air con smells really musty and he could see lots of yellow stains around the air con vent.
The Aussie was really starting to panic and was speaking louder and louder so now more people were staring at us; and what with me with my head between my legs and this guy panicking I thought we were going to get kicked off in a moment for causing mass panic! In fact the musty smell was the old smelly guy sat in front of us which Terry did try and explain quietly to the Aussie guy but he was having none of it and he shot out of his chair and asked to be moved!!!
A few minutes later I was feeling better and the Aussie came back to collect his belongings. He said that two people had died last week on an Quantas fight due to heart attacks but he thinks it was the air quality, I did try and say that it had nothing to do with my collapsing episode and I pretended it
was due to me being hung over, which I was a little bit, but he turned out to be very very odd and we were glad he moved, plus I had two seats to myself even if the musty old man smell was a bit off putting.
We finally made it to Shanghai at around 5am after a short stop in Singapore. We decided to hang around for the first train to the town centre. We caught the Maglev train which reaches speeds of up to 400kmph and only took 8 minutes to reach the centre – very cool. We were surprised at how modern Shanghai was. Full of Apple stores and shopping malls, and designer watch shops...we headed down the Nanjing road and made our way to the bund which has a lovely view of the river and many interesting buildings such as the Pearl tower and the Financial building which looks like a bottle opener.
We decided to go up the top of the financial building. It is the tallest observatory building in the world. The views from the top were stunning and we got there just before sunset so was lovely to see the City
light up.
The next day we took a walk around the old quarter which was probably my favourite part of the city. Nice traditional buildings, small laneways, market stalls to wonder round – was lovely. We sampled some Chinese dumplings which were delicious. We found that many people did not speak english but we are getting by in restaurants as most have pictures of their food and we just have to point and hope its pork or beef that we get!
Shanghai was so modern, the view from the bund towards its sky scrapers across the river is stunning especially at night. We were only here for two days but we saw most of the city sights as it really is not that big, next stop an over night sleeper train to Xian!
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Pat White
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KATE AND TERRY
Hope that you are feeling better now Kate. Hope that I do not have a smelly traveller sitting by me. Great photos and you both look great. See you hopefully Thursday/Friday. Momma xxx