Advertisement
Published: November 30th -0001
Edit Blog Post
In the mist
The famous Shanghai Skyline, lost in the smog Our train journey from Wuhan to Shanghai was very different to the ones we experienced before. We got ourselves on an airconditioned express train (only 9 hours instead of 24). And what a difference it was!!! Curtains on the windows, quiet and cold inside, carpet on the floors, clean bathrooms, no coal furnace?!? - and shock, horror - nobody is eating instant noodles?!?!? Although we had a quite restful night we would not want to miss our experience on the simpler and slower trains. One of a kind 😊
Arriving in Shanghai felt a bit like leaving what we knew of China behind. This is a very modern City, with good metro connection, flashy supermarkets and departement stores. We guess most people come exactly for that, shopping. Well, not us. At first we found it strange that we could not find many hostels in the centre of town, so we booked ourselves into the Koala International Youth Hostel which is easily accessible on metro line 3 and 4. The "Hostel" turned out to be much more like a hotel, many of them do in China for some reason. However, we soon found out why this was just the right place
for us. When we got off the metro loads of breakfast stalls greated us scattered around the station. Friendly people helped us to find the hostel and we found more stalls just in front of our door. Brilliant! In fact, for the first time in China, while looking lost we have been approached by a number of people asking "May I help you?". The breakfast was a delight, egg pancake and fresh bread with toasted sesame. What more would you want?!
The mission for the day turned out to be the dreaded walk to the train station to buy tickets to Hong Kong. Apparently, our hostel could not buy tickets for us this time as all mainland Chinese need a visa to visit Hong Kong. That 10 years after it has been returned to China! Never mind. We followed the lonely planet and hoped for an easy way out - it suggested that there is a ticket office at the Longmen Hotel, near Shanghai station. Well, it turned out that those guys got a bit annoyed with the backpackers and closed that service. So dan dan dan, we had finally to go to the train station. A pice of
cake, no queues no nothing. Josie asked the woman at the Longmen Hotel to write down that she needed 2 tickets to Hong Kong for Saturday and that helped. We were done in about 10 minutes. However, we still think that this might have been a different experience in Beijing or Xi'an. We had our tickets and we were hot, our mission was done for that day and we returned to our room to cool down.
We discovered that the little stalls around our place change for different food in the afternoon so we went again to explore. And we found the bomb - chicken nuggets! Finally, finally!!! no gristle, no bone, just chicken filet, battered, deep fried and tossed in some yummy spices. HALLLELUJAH!!! We found a dodgy electronics and DVD market and there it was, looking at us - the third series of LOST. We felt a bit nostalgic and remembered the evenings when we used to watch the series simultaneously with our friends Pete and Max. We knew what we had to do - we had to catch up! Andy tried hard on his bargaining skills to get a cheap DVD player, but the price was
still to high. Now Andy was on a mission! This thought didn't let him go until the next evening when he surprised Josie with his new prey. We also found a whole street of food and vege whith no tourists in sight. We started to like our remote location a lot! On our way back to the hostel, 2 of the staff were on the way to a famous food street - of course we were up for it. It was great, as this time we had someone to translate to us what all the things were. And we tried pork balls, some sort of kebabs, and our favourite - fried dumplings!
As far as we were concerned we have seen Shanghai 😊 and Josie declared the next day a "stay-in-bed-day". Andy was so kind and jumped out few times to hunt down some food. And that was pretty much our day. Ahhhhh.... isn't life great?!
Ok, we had a bit of a bad conscience and went propper sight seeing the next day - we saw the famous for it's shopping Nanjing road, walked the way down to the Bund and walked the way back to the Shanghai
Lost
Lost, a bottle of wine, and some yummy chinese style chicken nuggets.... priceless museum. All of the sights mentioned have not impressed us too much. It is just a big city in the end and certainly around those places you get more hasseled and attacted by students pretending to "practice their english" while really wanting to drag you into an art exibition or something. We decided we preferred the neighbourhood of our hostel, where nobody would shout after us and nobody would rip us off. That night we went to a "hot pot" restaurant. It is a bit like "fondue" just with soup. You order various vegetables and very thinly cut meet and dip it into the spicy broth. Delicious!
The best thing when you stay in a place for a bit longer is that people start to recognise you. They start to smile and talk to you and give you the bigger pieces of whatever you just ordered. This was much more our world and what made us happy.
Now that we had the DVD player we decided to take a break, switch off, and relax. We went to a big supermarket, bought food and wine, and locked ourselves in watching all the films we found in the dodgy DVD market. We did have a pause for some chicken nuggest though 😉 Excellent!
And so our time in Shnaghai came and went, we more and more feel the need to stay in a place for a bit longer than just a few days and do some "normal" stuff. Who can sight see every single day of a whole year? Not us 😊
Advertisement
Tot: 0.714s; Tpl: 0.017s; cc: 30; qc: 140; dbt: 0.6118s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.5mb
Neil
non-member comment
Training
All those years of training as a student finally came in handy . Like the signs on the side of the Three Gorges , I am measuring the passage of time by the length of your hair .