Shanghai - our introduction to China!

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Jerry and I left Australia at midnight with heavy suitcases and a feeling of "have we done the right thing?" Arriving in Shanghai we were met at the airport by a an English speaking guide who drove us an hour to our hotel - the 'Yangtze' (can highly reccommend it). It was freezing cold and raining. The hotel was an original art deco hotel and was situated very close to the Shanghai museum and Nanjing Lu (St), which is a pedestrian shopping mall which stretches to The Bund, the famous waterfront concessional area which was Shanghai's Wall Street in the 1930's. We spent three nights wandering the streets around our hotel and dodging rain showers. On the eve of Chinese New Year all night you could hear fire crackers go off - it was totally crazy - people were letting them off in the middle of the mall and beside parked cars. The streets were not very busy and we found that at this time of the year it is tradition that families stay inside together eating and playing mahjong. We watched a great fireworks display in the rain one evening as a group of businessmen, one by one, came out and let enormous rockets off outside a restaurant. There was certainly no regard for the safety of passer bys and the many cars which were driving along the street. The cars drove past the men standing in the middle of the road as large rockets fizzed towards the sky.
We were a little disappointed in Shanghai, it was very commercial - streets lined with very large shops and dozens of KFC or Macca's stores. The neon lights along the mall were very spectacular in the evening though. The shops were full of consumer goods - Shanghai is supposed to have the best shopping in all of China - lots of department stores and teenage clothes shops. The department stores are funny - they are more like lots of little shops within a larger store, though all the staff wore matching uniforms.
We left Shanghai and flew to Wuhan, 2 hours west. Jerry enjoyed the airline meal of dried fish and squid - I passed! We were met again by a guide at Wuhan and we were driven to our hotel, again situated at the end of the main shopping mall. It was one of 13 buildings in Wuhan (the capital of Hubei province and a major port on the Yangtze River) which has been renovated and retained it's old arcitecture. Many famous people from all over the world have stayed there and Chairman Mao stayed there regularly. There were some very interesting photos around the walls. The staff were lovely and after settling us into our previously booked and cosy room decided that in honour of the New Year we were to treated as special guests and they came and moved us into the best room in the hotel. It was very nice, beautifully furnished with a very lush bathroom, but it was big and cold and overlooked the shopping mall which had an enormous television screen so it was also very noisy! Chinese people don't seem to mind noise - in fact they seem to thrive on it. However there was not much else we could do but put up with it though we thought longingly of our smaller room a few times.
It was much colder in Wuhan then in Shanghai and still raining. We were due to spend three nights there and decided very quickly that we really liked the city. Wuhan will be our break from Guangshui at least once a month, to stock up on groceries and enjoy the sights of the city. It has a population of 8 million people and is the 8th largest city in China. We actually found a supermarket which had a few familiar things though we have since found that there is a another supermarket there that stocks a really good range of western grocery lines. We will explore that next month when we return to the city.
On our second day in Wuhan the weather got even colder and it began to snow. Before long everything was carpeted in white. They told us at the hotel that it was the heaviest snow fall in 12 years. The end result was that our school rang and said that due to icy road conditions they could not collect us and we would have to spend another 2 nights in Wuhan. We checked into a cheaper room (used our budget as an excuse) and thankfully it was much quieter. By now we had wandered around a lot of Wuhan and down along the river bank. The back streets were very interesting and we saw turtles for sale in many of the restaurants. The food is very, very hot and the red flavouring they add to the sauces and soups makes your eyes burn as you walk past the food stalls. My eyes were quite sore anyway from the pollution - you could see it hanging over the city. We spent the last 24 hours in our hotel room - it seemed pointless walking around in the freezing wet conditions, particularly as we knew we would be coming back to the city in better weather. Our school collected us late in the afternoon of the fifth day and we drove two hours through the dusk to our new home for the next 12 months.

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