Blogs from Shanghai, China, Asia - page 264

If the 12 hour train ride was not really fun, the 17 hour trip to Shanghai was even less fun. We finally rolled in there at 11:30 am on Friday and the next chore was finding a cab that would take us to the hostel that we didn't have reservations for but would hopefully have space. Luckily, we developed a newfound appreciation for traffic assistants when one saw our unsuccessful plight of pointing to the place on the map in the Lonely Planet and about six cab drivers just saying no for no apparent reason. (They didn't want to drive that far away? They didn't like the looks of two foreign girls? Who knows) This guy looked at our map, flagged a cab down, and from our best guess told the driver that he had to ... read more

1ère étape de nos vacances d'hiver...... read more

SOUTH AFRICA 3 ----------- austraila 2 Love it, love it. Let me see, Shanghai. 14 million people, big buildings and wide streets. It has it all, but to be honest it did not live up to its hype in my opinion. It still has a long way to go for it to be up there with New York, London, Milan, HK and the rest of them. It certainly is a fascinating combination of old and new with brand spanking new BMW's taking over dilapidated bicycles on the city streets. One of the coolest things is that at most bus stops they have TV's built into the timetable area where they usually are showing sport. I liked that. We stayed in the Captain Hostel, once again the LP map was off and we wondered around in utter ... read more

Yes! we are back!! After Tibet we had lots of visitors, my brother Jose visited for 3 weeks, we went together to Beijing and Hong Kong... We never really had time to travel together so I was really excited and enjoyed every single day, especially the last day when we had a bottle of champagne together. After Jose came my friend Laureen and her daugher Emilia. They stayed for 2 weeks and we also had a great time, part of the experience included a US$4 but an hour long foot massage, getting surrounded by dozens of Chinese in a park when they heard Laureen was American (this is something like having super powers here) and a visit to the local Walmart (not your neighborhood supermarket in the US, here Walmart features live eel, all kinds of ... read more

I'm not sure how to sum up my thoughts on Shanghai in a way that hasn't already been said by others. I just finished a history of Shanghai written by a woman named Stella Dong and in many ways, Shanghai has not really changed much since the days of it rule by foreign governments. It is still a commercial city at heart with people trying to make a living anyway they can. Until the communists took over (and maybe even after), Shanghai was a decadent city, filled with prostitutes, gambling, and any manner of vices for the foreigners just arriving off the boat and the Chinese arriving from the countryside to get sucked into. Today, it's the western tourists that are mobbed at every turn with sales pitches and mildly fleeced with the two or three-tiered ... read more