First Day of Tour

---

After a fairly good nights sleep I had a quick chat with the Chinese guy before we arrived in Shanghai, the train was quite fast so in 12hrs we had covered 1463km (taking my total to 11,954km). Shanghai was cold (well coldish) and raining, I was worried about finding the hotel as I only had an address in english (which is no good). Anyway I found a taxi and they rang up the hotel and got the address, got a little ripped off I think though but at least this time I bargained.

This hotel was where I am starting my backpacker tour, we start in Shanghai, then Suzhou, Xian and back to Beijing. The hotel is actually very nice, it's a bit of a walk from everything but again has free ethernet connection in the room, a huge bed and a really funky bathroom where all the walls are frosted glass, apart from the one in the shower which you can see from the bed. See photo.

I had to wait for 45 mins for my room and was accosted by oldish English couple who came from Hong Kong, they were winging about the fact that no-one speaks english and that they needed to find shops to buy some warm weather gear but the staff were no help. I dug out the trusty Lonely Planet and found a department store and got the staff to write in Chinese the name of the department store to give to a cab driver. Barely got a thankyou out of it though.

I also found that the lobby has wireless and guess what ? My laptops inbuilt wireless worked. At last.

After a quick nap I grabbed a shower and updated my blog before I had to meet up for the first meeting, the group looked OK. There was a good range of ages but is dominated by Aussies. There are 2 Columbians, 2 Kiwis, 2 who haven't turned up yet and the rest are Aussies, so 8 aussies in all. The best result is that I am the only single male so I get I room to myself. I will give you more details about them when I get to know them better.

After we met up we headed of to a restaurant which was a bit of a trek but we caught a local bus which was a first, they were very modern and even had little LCD screen at the front showing the news. The meal was very good, it was pretty much the same as we have in the UK and we had a few beers and a briefing, most of it was common sense but thre were a couple of interesting tidbits like how to spot fake notes. The funniest was that our tour guide (Jerry) had his girlfriend there and she had never had beer, after two glasses she was wasted.

After we had our breifing we headed off for a river cruise, it was nice but short and we a good view of the Shanghai skyline at night, there was alot more skyscrapers than I expected and have put some photos on the page.

No late beers tonight, it was straight to the hotel to have a chat with Kate and get some sleep.

---

Photos

My hotel room
With the show all shower