Shanghai - Beijing

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Hi again,

Well lots to write about this time we have been very busy!

Shanghai

Well on our first day in Shanghai we decided to take it easy and just find our bearings arond town. We took a walk in Huangpu Park and then strolled along The Bund looking over at Pudong and the famous Jinmao tower (the one with big spheres on it). It was nice but it was nothing compared to Hong Kong.
We then walked up Nanjing road which is the main shopping/eating area and looked around that part of town.

The next day we decided to go to the Chinese History Museum in Renmin Square, it was really interesting and took us a few hours to look through all the exhibits. My favourite exhibition was the stone sculptures (who knew there could be so many Buddha carvings though!). It wasnt a very big museum but it was nice to see some of the chinese history.

On Valentines day we decided to take a 'short' walk to the Shanghai Zoo. We failed however to read the signs properly and mistook the 10km sign for 1km. After 2 hours walking we gave up and caught a taxi which was so cheap. the walk was nice but it made my feet hurt before i even got to the zoo! There were loads of animals but some of the cages were in horrible condition and needed a good clean so we felt a bit sorry for some of them. We got to see the pandas though and some little piglets, awww! could not manage to find the polar bear though after a while looking in all directions! i reckon they lied and there wasnt actually one there. Also went out for a nice meal in the evening and managed to find some proper meat!!!

On the 15th we spent the day packing up our stuff and chilling out playing pool before cathing the train (12 hours) to Beijing. Luckily this time we got the hostel staff to write down what we wanted so we managed to get ourselves beds for the night (although it was a lot more expensive)

Beijing

The train finally came to a stand still at twenty to 7am (although we didnt realise it was Beijing station as it was so small and scanky!) We caught the subway to Qianmen which was apparently near the hostel we had booked. We had trouble finding a road name so we just guessed and started wandering around with our backpacks on, unfortunately when we finally arrived after about 30mins walking they gave us a street map and it would have probably taken 5 minutes if we'd taken a different route. Still after dropping our bags we decided to spend the day at the Forbidden City. We walked up through Tiananmen Square and in through the big archways. It was 40yuan to get in which is about 2.75. It was absolutely beautiful, all the old buildings and massive stone steps and things. There were loads of exhibitions within the little outer buildings and we spent 5 hours walking around! We didnt manage to see everything which was a bit dissapointing but alot of the buildings were the same design so we couldnt have missed much.

Today we woke up at 6.30 and went on a trip to the secret wall organised by our hostel. We were driven out to a remote location past all the tourist sites of the wall and given a little old chinese lady as our guide. We walked up the mountain to the original wall. The views from the top were absolutely breathtaking and you could see the wall going off into the distance. Some parts were crumbling away and there were trees growing up through other parts but i was so glad we went to this part and not the restored bits. After spending an hour or so walking along the wall we made our way back down to the tour guides village for some traditional lunch of noodles/ rice (surprisingly!) and vegtables. It was really nice but now we are soooooooooooo tired!!!

Hopefully we're going to visit the summer palace before we leave but not sure what else yet. We leave on wednesday to fly to Bangkok so next time i write we will probably be sunning ourselves on an island somewhere! xx

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