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Published: October 25th 2007
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....there's no such thing - why whisper when you can shout! Mobile phones in particular seem to require shouting.
I think I left you in Taishan from where we took an overnight train to Shanghai. They obviously see few westerners in the town and the waiting room (which is huge) went quiet as we walked in. The train itself was fine. I was opposite a guy who spoke pretty good English and wanted to know about the differences between China and the UK - where do you start?! The hardest thing I find is the smoking and spitting although it is noticeable that in general it is only the men that smoke - different from in Russia where it's everyone (but both sexes spit in China - very attractive! H.).
We arrived into Shanghai very early in the morning and were pleasantly surprised at the smooth journey into the city. We had booked a hotel online fairly last minute and were stunned at our good luck. The Astor House was once called Richards and was the first Western hotel in China, built in the 1920s. While obviously now outranked by tower blocks of plush hotels, the rooms are large
with polished wooden floors, high ceilings but updated with great bathrooms & even bathrobes.....and all this for just over 30 quid!
After luxuriating for a while we headed out straight onto the Bund, the original commercial district of Shanghai lined with 1920s buildings that are banks and financial institutions. The view across the river is to Pudong, the new business centre with soaring office blocks.
Back in the hotel I was very pleased to discover on the TV that the Star Sports Channel would be showing the Rugby World Cup final between England and South Africa. Kick off would be 3am and we had a train to catch at 10, but as England had managed to get to the final, I could manage to get up for that.
Sadly we had overestimated our luck and discovered we couldn't stay another night so had to move to a slightly less impressive place in a different part of town. It was a bit of a mad panic trying to find another room as it seems Shanghai gets very busy at weekends, but we did manage to check that the new hotel had cable TV.
The biggest disaster though
was that it was just chinese cable TV and they didn't have the channel showing the rugby. Fortunately I had a plan B. This involved getting up at 2am on Saturday night/Sunday morning, catching a cab to the other side of town and squeezing into a bar with lots of other mad Brits - Sarah slept soundly through it all! (I'm still convinced it was a try!)
The highlight of the first couple of days there was an acrobatics show which was stunning, including a large metal globe in which up to 6 motorcyclists rode around in amazing formations somehow never hitting each other - it was truly breathtaking! Which is a bit like the roads really - they're manic with cars, motorbikes, cycles and pedestrians and nobody is going to stop for anyone else but somehow it works. This is also different from Russia where we saw many prangs!
The city is obviously much more used to westerners and there is quite a bit of hassle to buy which is tiring (they make 'watch bag' sound like an instruction, but it's actually their initial sales pitch). So we were pleased to get away for a couple
of days to Suzhou, known as a Water Town or Garden city. It still has over 5m people but at the centre the old town is quite easy to walk around and there are some beautiful traditional gardens. We also had some great food.
Eating has been interesting andt mostly successful. Some places you have to use pictures to choose, just hoping that there's nothing suspicious in there, sometimes there's menus in English, sometimes menus in Chinglish. (there's also a few things to catch you out, e.g. green pepper can mean exactly that or it can mean green chillis - Sarah only managed about 3 'green peppers' this evening). So here's my (S.) next challenge, what do you think these dishes seen on a menu might consist of:
The joss stick fries many spring fishs
Smoke meat bowel book
France many privates
Black cow fries idea powder
Come on, unleash those creative talents!
So, now we're back in Shanghai and back in the nice hotel which makes it quite hard to go out onto the noisy, dirty streets. We fly off to Tokyo tomorrow but sadly our flight is too early to use
the Maglev train - the fastest train in the world - to get to the airport. This would have made a great contrast to some of the slowest trains that we have been on.
Thanks to those of you keeping in touch - we look forward to hearing from more of you. We're a little short of news in China as the BBC seems to essentially be banned, you certainly can't get the news web page (and CNN on the TV only seems interested in California forest fires).
Hope all well....
S + H xx
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jonathan
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Hello
I think "come on unleash those creative talents" is probably beans on toast. Am I right? Do I win a prize? Is it a T shirt? J x