Shanghai

*sorry for spelling mistakes, its cold!*

Hello

It's a tad warmer today so I'm free to write up about our last few days in Beijing...

We got up at 6 for our Great Wall trek, it was a big group, about 16 or so. It took about three hours in a bus to drive a herd of groggy travellers to the great wall in the freezing cold - no snow, but cold enough to make everything pretty much totally numb. The initial walk up was murder, but once we got onto the wall itself we saw a pattern emerging; up, then down, then up further, then down, then up etc. etc. The wall itself was amazing and the views were spectacular, we've got lots of photos of it so don't worry. And an aside about photos, we've had some messages from people clamouring for us to put them up, we have taken lots, it's just we haven't really figured out how to put them up on this thing yet. We sort of wanted to do albums by country anyway, so once we get to HK I promised we'll get on it and give you what you want. In the meantime you'll have to put up with my sparkling descriptions...

The trek was quite hard, and the cold made it more difficult because it didn't really feel like oxygen we were breathing in, only cold. Once we got into the swing of things it got easier, and the route was quite good because it took us over some of the unrestored bits of the wall which not a lot of tourists get to see. At the end there was a suspension bridge over a lake (which the photos don't do justice to) and there was also an optional zip line which looked unsafe at best and no one took advantage of.

Achy and tired, we managed to propel ourselves towards the Dongcheng street food market once back in Beijing for some dinner. They had all the usual, squid, scorpion, millipede, sea urchin etc. etc. but we went for some chili noodles and a baked alaska. It was interesting to see but the stalls mostly had the same sort of stuff on them, so full of food we pushed on for our night out on the town.

After visitng The Bookworm, a cosy sort of cafe-cum-library, we headed tothe main bar strip to a bar called Cheers and took in some local Chinese band whose genre I'm finding difficult to place. The singer had a beard longer than his ponytail, though. We initially wanted to try Bar Blu as recommened in the Lonely Planet, but it was scary as it had English bouncers on the door, and that was more disorientating than the whole of Beijing itself up until that point. It was full of business men dancing to YMCA with small Chinese girls - something t avoid. We headed out abnd were going to get a taxi home (achy, tired) but someone suggested a bar down the road and we decided to put our heads in and then head home. About three hours later we stumbled out of there and headed to Bar Blu until it closed (make your own mental pictures) and got a taxi home for sure this time. Heading back to the hostel, we spied the French bar Salud where we'd had hot wine before, which was full of French people singing and dancing to old French songs. This looked like a good idea, so we headed here until 6am, and thus ended our 24 hour day.

Sunday we took it easy for various reasons, and decided to centre it around food. We went to a Tibetan cafe for some 'meat momo' (suggestable and unidentifiable meat in a sort of dumpling) and boiled lamb which was delicious. I had some butter tea which was lovely but Amy didnt seem to care for. For dinner we went to the Quanjude Roast Duck for the best duck pancakes in town. They ere obviously used to tourists and rushed us in quickly, threw our duck at us and stood menacingly beside us until we left... the duck as good though, quite fatty, and we got some 'duck soup' with it, which is really hot duck fat. Neither of us really fancied eating the duck heart curdled unappetisingly on the plate. The district as pretty nice, quite new and busy, Wufangjing I think it was. It was our first sight of inner Beijing.

We'd booked an overnight soft sleeper train to take us to Shangai at 8pm on Monday, so we spent the rest of our time in Beijing ticking off the tourist sights, Tianamen Square (sp? sorry, its too cold to get out the guidebook) and the Forbidden City. Parts of the city were closed due to resortation (slack season rears its ugly head again) but it was beautiful nonetheless. We tried to go to the Starbucks there, just for the novelty, but it seems to have been shut down. In the Square the Mao mausoleum was shut, so we didn't get to see the pickled man himself which I found disappointing, but have consoled myself by the fact that I can see Ho Chi Min in HCHM when we get to Vietnam. We saw the big Olympics countdown clock, they're nuts about the Olympics I tells ya. They bloody love it. Its on all the TV stations (it's 7 months away!). Did get the feeling Beijing was preparing itself for the tourist influx, lots of Chinese were trying out their English on us on the subways etc where we were the only white people. Dont know why more tourists don't take it, it costs 2yuan (15 yuan is a pound) to go anywhere in the city - bargain. Taxis are cheap, but not as cheap as 2. Beijing is pretty but a cheap city, and we were sad to leave it and our lovely hostel, which was small and homely. But, we had to move on

Beijing central rain station was like nothing I've seen before. There are 1.6billion Chinese in China, and apparently they all want to take a train on Monday nights. The queues were unbelievable - we've later learned this is because big snows have snowed off the major highways, and what with Chinese new year it's all a bit mental. We got on our train with no problems, bunk beds, Chinese music playing, and settled down for a night of on-off sleep.

We arrived here in Shanghai at about 7am only to find in my sleepy state I'd booked the wrong nights for the hsotel which meant we had to take a more expensive double room for one night, but now have changed to a 6 bed dorm. Shanghai is more expensive and cosmopolitan than Beijing. We went to the museum yesterday and saw some nice stuff, then ate in a veggie restaurant in the evenign which was so so, which had horrible tea. Amy's come down with the dreaded lurgie unfortunately, so today we're taking it very easy, reading up and arranging transport/hostels for our remaining time in China. We've booked flights (as all the train tickets are taken) to go to Guilin on Friday at about 6pm. We stay a night there and then take a bus to Yangshuo, a backpakcer haven apparently, to take in some countryside air and relax a bit.

That's about it, we'll hopefully see more of Shanghai and get a bit more used to it in the coming days. In our hostel there are cats, and they have kittens which are just beautiful, and they sleep by the internet area, so I think I might just go and have a look at them now.

by the way, I know people have been having problems with this site. I think it's just got so much user traffic it crashes every so often. We can't be bothered at the moment to scope out another site to use, to bear with it - if you want to message us its prob best to use our email addys instead of the site. It's so nice to hear from you all who have messaged us so far - missing home, and can't believe the news about Heath Ledger - sad. Keep messages coming, and hope youre all ok

xxx

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