Blogs from Huangpu, Shanghai, China, Asia

Hello Everyone, Welcome to our Glories of China tour of 2019. The trip started off with a cancelled flight on Saturday night, arriving back home at 3am Sunday morning, back to airport for 3pm flight Sunday arvo. Into Hong Kong at 10pm and Cathay Pacific had arranged a brilliant hotel room, within the airport for the night. On our connecting flight to Shanghai at 7.30am Monday, arriving at 10am. Our tour guide, Grace had arranged for us to be picked up and although we missed the first part of Day 1, we were taken straight to our lunch venue, a magnificent floating restaurant on the Huangpu River. Our tour group is made up of Aussie's from Melbourne, Perth, Newcastle and of course Brisbane. We have another local guide, whose name is also Grace, so we have ... read more

The week had honestly worn me out, but I wasn’t about to sleep in my last morning, so by 7 I was up and at the gym before breakfast and meeting coworkers in the lobby for a whirlwind 4 more hours. One of my colleagues from the Beijing office happened to be in Shanghai for the weekend and was staying at the same hotel, so he joined us at well. The plan was basically to see People’s Square and then do some shopping and eating, but I deferred to my hosts for a more solid game plan. I hadn’t taken the metro yet, so this was my final golden opportunity to check it out. It’s known to be clean, efficient, etc. so just like every other public transit system in the world it’s the antithesis to ... read more

And with a quick hop and a step (on the high speed rail again) and less than an hour later, I had arrived at my intended final destination of the China leg of my trip - at the iconic eastern coastal port city of Shanghai. Given it's impossibly high skyscrapers these days jostling for real estate with colonial era-like buildings along the Bund, thinking of Shanghai as being just like any other port city would be quite inaccurate. Shanghai today is the commercial heart of the world's second largest economy, and the eyes of its populace have been flashing renminbi signs ever since it was first forced open to foreign commercial trade at the end of the first Opium Wars. Despite the implicated national shame of being subjugated to hostile foreign will, these events could conceivably ... read more

Have returned to Shanghai for the third time in my first stop of my fifth trip to China. The Maglev train 8-minute ride to Pudong from the airport at 325 km/hr once seemed so fast. Now, with so many bullet trains crossing China that customarily go close to 300 km/hr, it doesn’t feel that way anymore. Next time, I'll just take the subway all the way into town and back to the airport. It's slower, but you save the trouble of the carting of your luggage from the Maglev station to the subway to continue on into town. Am based this stay on S. Yunnan Lu, just a short walk from People’s Park and the Shanghai museum. It is a wonderful food street with both a variety of restaurants and street food. A long walk on ... read more

We took a taxi back to the bus station in Tunxi to head to Hangzhou where we would take the train back to Shanghai. We were walking onto the bus to find our seats when I heard a familiar voice... I looked up to see that our Korean friends were sitting directly behind us on their way to Hangzhou. They were excited to see us and hands were shook all around. What are the chances! Once last time in Hangzhou, we said our good byes and headed for the train station. Luckily we were able to get a train within the next hour and were off to Shanghai. Trying to get a taxi from a couple streets away from a metro station proved impossible, extra impossible when the couple taxis that did pull over couldn't recognize ... read more