Blogs from Shanghai, China, Asia - page 260

Hello dear friends & family..... today your loving Eggs took a stroll in the basting heat through some hairy mary bike congested streets filled with communist-esque medal shops, poky tat emporiums and newsagent stalls into the 'Old Town'. Cue atmospheric music...da da DAAAAA.... We must have got a bit lost on the way, because whilst we had romanticised the idea of visiting the 'old town' into an image of us swanning around in luxury, sipping fragrant tea from delicate porcelein cups, whilst donning satin slippers embroidered with apple blossom to wander ambient walkways flagged with statues of lions & dragons, this couldn't be further from what we ended up with. Heading out from our hotel, we took the Henan Zhonglu road all the way down for about 20 minutes towards this big Chinese Gateway. Some post ... read more

Hi again. What? An update so quickly after the last one? I know - it must be such a joy for you all - but really we are just taking advantage of the free internet access in our hotel room. Today it stopped raining and the sun came out ..... HURRAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We meant to tell you in the post train journey update bit of our blog yesterday, but when we got off at Shanghai station, and went to get a taxi, there was a little boy who was pointing and laughing at Shaz for reasons only known to himself. His mum was pulling him away chastising him, but then we all locked eyes and started laughing along with the wee lad. We thought it was dead funny at the time but now we've noticed quite a ... read more

I AM GOING TO MISS MY FRIENDS HERE SO MUCH, even though they make it absolutely impossible to even try to get any work done for my classes. I had plans to actually get motivated and do some studying tonight, but I decided that it had been another long day of bank+gym+classes+pedicure as part of my assignment for my communicative class, and before I started any work I needed some "down time." Then Shana comes in to return one of our pots, and before long we're watching Sex & the City and Katie comes to watch too and then Kelly skypes us in the middle of it and she comes down and I was only planning to watch 1 episode, but then we watched 2 and when those were done we were looking back on pictures ... read more

It feels like it's been forever since I've written. It's mainly my mom and dad who are responsible for this, as they got here 3 weeks ago and had almost 2 weeks with me in Shanghai, and the other week was May Holiday when I went to Tibet and they did Beijing, Xian and the Three Gorges by themselves. Pretty much all of my spare time when I wasn't in class was spending time with them, but Thursday they left to go back to the states and pick up Dan from college, and I went to Beijing for the weekend, and today feels like the first day in weeks that I can actually slow down and catch up. But that also won't last long - although we decided not to travel this weekend, which means I ... read more

10 May 2006 I am in Shanghai and just arrived this morning by sleeper train. I am in such a bad mood it's unbelievable!!!! China is testing my character in everyway, and the not so good side of me is surfacing more and more. There are some moments when I think to myself, "I hate China. I hate Chinese people...Get me outta here." I am in disbelief at myself, I'm Chinese for crying out loud!!!!!! Shame on me, but it's the truth. Right now my head is spinning and it hurts. The reason? 13 hrs on a sleeper train filled with smokers, the bad smell of MSG and no windows. My personal hell. At least it was not on a hard seat carriage filled with 100 spitters. It is so comfortable on the sleepers its a ... read more