our first blog! Shanghai Times........

Well...where do we start??

Arrived in Shanghai after a 10 hour flight and no sleep! Saw an amazing sunrise over China from our plane.

We got on the Maglev train from the airport to the city centre - it travelled at 450 km/h - pretty cool! We arrived in the city centre with very heavy backpacks and spent ages looking for somewhere to stay. We actually ended up asking a french guy and he showed us a place and got us a discount - result! We looked out over a school from our room and the kids were doing some kind of gym class on the roof-synchronised dancing to strange announcements - not sure what was going on there.....

Headed into town later without sleeping (didn't want too much jetlag) and we had some dumplings from a stall and later some noodles from a street seller - the noodles were made from fresh and were sooo cheap (about 40p each). Then we went looking for an internet cafe in a department store and ended up walking into the staff canteen - whoops!

The roads and drivers in Shanghai are crazy - full of bicycles, mopeds, cars, buses and people all fighting for the same bit of road and sometimes pavement! Crossing the road is like russian roulette - the cars and bikes don't take any notice of the red lights or the traffic assistants with their whistles - to get across the road you just have to close your eyes and run!

Day 1 = very hectic!

Booked our train tickets for Beijing on Day 2 (to leave on Tuesday) and almost ended up buying a bus ticket by mistake! It actually seemed as though the whole of Shanghai had gathered outside the station - lots of people trying to sell you stuff and lots of food stalls. We also saw a chinese boot sale - they were selling their old wares on the road - yes actually ON the road! Later we saw Shanghai by night with a boat cruise on the river.

The next day we got up and had breakfast in a new hostel we had moved to - savoury and sweet things, dumplings, rice etc - not really what we are used to but it was cool. Went to Shanghai Market and the old town - Mikey had octopus skewers and we had melon sticks - about 10p each!

We did lots more sightseeing on day 3 including a trip up the Oriental Pearl TV Tower (350m high) - saw an amazing view of Shanghai. As we looked through the binoculars, we could see a man working on a skyscraper opposite even higher up than us and he had his washing out on the line to dry! Everybody in China seems to hang their washing out to dry in very strange places - the strangest we saw was between a lampost and a traffic light! We also visited the highest bar in the world - Cloud 9 Bar in the Jinmao Tower - on the 87th floor - had a few cocktails!

Today we managed to buy 2 bus fares, 2 tube fares and a bottle of water for under one pound! It's very cheap here.

Since we have been in Shanghai we have been stopped by so many chinese students - they are practicing their English on us!

We are looking forward to our sleeper train to Beijing. It leaves at 7:30pm our time and arrives in Beijing at 7am the next day - should be interesting.

Bye for now.

Mikey and Kaz.

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