Tuk Tuk's and Chinese Noodles ......

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01 - 10 - 08

Landed, collected my luggage and left the airport with Will after having my passport and visa looked at like I was a terrorist. I must have just got the new guy; Will's passport and visa got looked at for 2 seconds whilst mine, well lets say took a lot longer! We ventured inside the departures hall to purchase a flight to Beijing, after trying various airlines desk we went to the China Eastern desk; we told the girl that we needed a single ticket each to Beijing on Thursday, which was in 2 days times. Due to language constraints or something she thought that we wanted tickets for today, we were like Thursday, tomorrow she asked, we were like no ... Thursday! Eventually we managed to get flights booked for Thursday. We got on the Maglev; the high speed train. The journey took 7 minutes and the train reached a top speed of 268 mph or 431 km/h. We got off and still had to jump into a taxi to take us to our hotel. Now the problem with taxi's in China is that the drivers, as a rule of thumb don’t speak English, we had kind of foreseen this problem so on the flight coming over we asked a Chinese gentleman seated next to us if he wouldn’t mind translating the address into Chinese in a bid not to have any troubles; it didn’t work. We got taken to the wrong hotel, where he got directions from the bellboy and guess what, in the end we had to phone up the hotel and pass the phone over to the driver to get directions off the hotel we were staying at directly! We tipped the poor driver a little bit of extra money for what seemed like driving across Shanghai in big circles and checked into our room.

When, eventually we ventured outside there was what seemed like millions of Chinese people crowding the streets; it was the start of a Chinese national holiday. It was the kind of thing where if you didn’t walk you would get swallowed up by the crowds. We fought our way though the crowds along the road; dodging being trampled on, dogging the various people selling stuff on the streets, I stopped to buy 2 skewers of undeterminable meat; to this day I still have no knowledge of what it was. From there we got a tuk tuk to the People's Park, where we just sat on the banks watching the natives pass by, a couple of students sat down next to me whilst Will went to get a coffee, we started to talk about China, the UK and then all of a sudden they wanted me to come to this tea bar so I could try some traditional tea, suddenly I remembered what this guy told me when we were queuing up to get our visas in London; he warned us that this may happen and that it was actually a big con.

From there we took a walk down into the metro system which was completely packed. We had to fight to get onto the metro to take us over the financial district, we wondered around looking up at all the skyscrapers trying not to get squashed like ants by the crowds. There was some kind of concert on, probably to celebrate the public holiday. We crossed the river by going under the Bund, the tunnel was full of stalls selling various tourist tat and every time we enquired about how much something was the price doubled for us; the joys of a being a tourist ..

We went back to the hotel and I fell asleep until Will decided we were going out to get something to eat. We went to Auisen Noodle; a noodle bar located by the People's Park. Will picked 4 dishes and I picked 2 ... made all the more difficult by the fact that everything was in Chinese!! I ended up ordering squid and I hate squid. Add that to the fact that we got so many dirty looks and people laughing at us when I struggled to use the chopsticks.

The rest of the night was just spent wondering up and down street sent alight by tons of neon signs, we spent a couple of hours in an arcade filled with Chinese youth. The noise and heat inside was unbearable! Games ranging from driving games to rock band simulators; everything you could have every wanted under one roof! We ended the night by being harassed by the "You want watch" people, so much so that we ended up going to the same shop twice!

02 - 10 - 08

Me and Will decided that today's main activity was going to be going to copy shops and pick up some counterfit items. This did take most of the day; going from one shop to another; from one bout of intense haggling to another. The end result was that I got my sister a Chanel handbag and a couple of DVD's. Feeling physically knackered we decided to have a wonder though the old streets of Shanghai. This is what I was expecting; funny smells, little market stalls and seeing animals stuffed into cages! It was just a day of wondering about, exploring.

We ended up wondering round this temple that is still used by the locals as a place of worship with statues which I assume represents Chinese gods or something; we slipped out by the back exits again into the millions. Our wondering took us back to the river, where we jumped onto a boat tour; we watched the sunset and drunk beer, lots of it! We went out that evening for something to eat and ended up trying to find a bar. We met up with these Swedish kids and sat on the street and watched the celebrations; there was a parade of some description as the police and the army was out, lining the pavement, stopping us from going into the road; I suffered an arm in my stomach as they stopped us crossing the road. We were drinking some rank alcohol, honestly I couldn’t even tell you if it was vodka, whiskey; all I know was it was strong, not very nice and Chinese!

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Photos

Shanghai At Night
Lots of Neon Signs