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Published: February 20th 2007
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Well I got back yesterday from a really nice 3 day long holiday in Shanghai with Sam and Nicole, Steve and Paul. I was intending to stay a little longer and then head straight off to Nanjing, but I felt satisfied with the time I'd had in Shanghai and decided to come back to Zhangjiagang and offload some of my stuff and sort out somethings and I will head off to Nanjing tomorrow.
I still love Shanghai, it's a beautiful city. I stayed in a hostel called the Captains Hostel on Fuzhou Lu right near the bund. It was 70RMB a night for a bed and it was a really good place. The so called English breakfast really wasn't worth the 25RMB I paid for it though. There's a really nice bar on the top of it with a great view of the bund, we spent a few nights sitting out on there watching the amazing lights of Pudong.
I spent most of my time wandering around the nearby area checking out the huge shopping areas and the massive buildings. I walked to Yuyuan garden on my first day but decided it wasn't worth checking out, I've done the
pretty garden in Suzhou and here in Shanghai the area surrounding Yuyuan was a tourist death trap and I couldn't be bothered with all of it. I ate a lot of junk food in Shanghai and that was sooooooo good! It really is nice to have a change in diet every so often. It was very nice that I over budgeted for my trip in Shanghai as I've come back with more money than I was expecting and I still had enough to have a really good time there.
The second night I was there it was Chinese new year and my god. People were setting off fire crackers and fireworks anywhere on the street they could as I was walking past. You really didn't know where they were going to go off. As the night progressed they got louder and louder and more frequent. It was quite a foggy night so all the lights from the firecrackers/works were kinda smeared in the fog which looked quite interesting. We decided to go off to some bars in Shanghai, we ended up in one quite sleazy bar which was great fun! The girls were all over us asking us to
buy them drinks and saying the most inappropriate things to us! I was being a stubborn cheapskate and didn't buy them anything and I still got some attention, haha! A little while before we left that bar we noticed firecrackers and fireworks being set off just outside, the bangs got very loud and frequent, all you could see outside was smoke and flashing lights from all the explosives being set off. We went to the door and saw people letting off fireworks and firecrackers and realised it was coming close to midnight. We walked out the door slightly and literally the whole street was full of explosives being set off, firecrackers exploding on the pavements and the road, fireworks being sent by hand into a nearby hotel parking area. Taxis were still driving past at this time with explosions happening sometimes underneath the taxis. Steve tried firing off a firework at one point and paniced slightly and ended up sending the firework in Sam's direction. Luckily no one got hurt. When we decided to leave this bar we went by taxi to another bar strip and literally on every road we went over there were explosives being set off. When
we got to the next bar the explosions were happening all around our taxi, we opened the door and an explosion went off a meter and a half away from us instantly, I think one went off slightly under our taxi aswell. There were so many explosives being set off we had to cover our ears and look down at the ground, and there was so much smoke it hurt to breath too hardly. This was one of the most extreme things I've ever seen. It really was a complete contrast to Britain, there was absolutely no regard for health and safety. People weren't too concerned about the directions they fired off fireworks, even if they came incredibly close to taxis and people. There were so many firecrackers going off on the street that you didn't have a clue where they were going to go off. People were just not being the slightest bit careful, some were being absolute idiots and kicking things that had been set alight onto firecrackers that hadn't already exploded. Amazingly I didn't see anyone get hurt, but I'm pretty sure people did. It was quite an amazing experience!
The following day we decided to
trek over to pudong. We were going to go by ferry across the river but couldn't work out which one to take, so we decided to take the tourist tunnel. Now this was bizarre and utterly pointless. It's a tunnel under the river, in little cart things that go along a rail, and in this tunnel there are strange flashy lights and laser shows and there's the most cheesy sci fi music. We all concluded that the 40 RMB we paid for these tickets was both worth it and not worth it. It was utterly crap, but it was so crap it was actually entertaining. Then we emerged onto Pudong and could see the huge buildings in all their glory. My god, these buildings are huge, and to think most of them are unoccupied! We concluded that the Pearl Tower's only reason for existence was just to show off. It's a huge tower and the only purpose it seems to hold is as a tourist attraction, there's no offices or anything in there. We walked around past the Super Grand Shopping Mall which is just plain massive when you actually get close to it. We were going to have a
Burger King in there, but we decided not to as there were far too many people. So we made our way to the Jinmao tower and decided to go up to the top of this. It cost 80RMB for a ticket to go up the fast elevator and my god it was fast. You could feel your ears popping as you got higher. Within 2 minutes we'd reached the 88th floor of the 4th tallest building in the world and it was a magnificant view. All the massive buildings I'd stared at in awe from down on the ground I was now staring at from very high above. We were so high up we were looking down on helipads on the top of buildings. It was soooo coool! And the middle of this building was hollowed out so you could look down from the very top floor right down to the bottom floor which was quite interesting.
I spent many, many hours just wandering around Shanghai. There were other touristy things I'd planned on doing but I just plain couldn't be bothered, I'd had a nice enough time just wandering around. I feel very refreshed from that trip and
I'm looking forward to Nanjing tomorrow!
Oh and I've finally transferred all of my old blog entries from the old blog onto this blog now, it took me a while! Enjoy and I'll update again soon!
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dawei
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more!
c'mon, more entries! D