Thursday 23rd July 2009 Shanghai

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Thursday 23rd July 2009 Shanghai
We dragged our hungover heads out of bed and were out in a taxi just after 11 and went down to the old town of Shanghai. It was jam packed tourist central down there, all the tea pot and chop stick shops were vying for business around the traditional style area which is actually very pretty once you look up a level above the starbucks signs. We just browsed through the tat they were trying to flog and made our way to the Yuyuan Gardens which are a kind of traditional park with lots of rockeries, carp ponds, bonsai trees and beautiful little alcoves and promenades. A beautiful place to wander around for an hour or sit and read a book, and it wasn’t as bust as you had to pay 30 Yuan to enter. After there we felt like a cuppa so went into a traditional tea house (well very touristy traditional) in a nearby temple and drank some green and Jasmine teas. Very nice to chill out and try and forget about all the booze we’d downed the night before. The table next to us had a crowd of Dutch weirdoes who were getting well into their tea ceremony. Lunch was the traditional world wide hangover food of McDonalds again before we headed back to our windowless home

Brian met us again for food and he continued our culinary introduction to China by bringing us to a Xinjiang style restaurant which once again was fantastic. Then we hit the streets for the next two hours on a bit of a walking tour down to the kind of commercial city centre and the famous historical Bund area where the British set up in the 1800s to organize all their drug dealings to the Chinese during the first opium war. It was so good just being able to follow somebody on a tour like this rather than having to check you lonely planet on every corner and squint under a street light at the 20 square mile map they have squeezed onto a paper back page that only names every 13th street.. And asking the locals isn’t gong to get you much further than an earful of Chinese screaming as even if they are having a gentle conversation of “I love you more, no I love you” it sounds as if they are screaming blue murder at each other. We then headed up to a rooftop bar to see the skyline of the Pudong area across the river. This is where they build all the impressive skyscrapers and the once thought space aged TV tower which is a symbol of the city. The strangest thing they have though is on 2 of the fronts of the buildings are 2 of probably the world biggest TV screens running advertisements, they must stretch for about 50 stories, cool in the beginning but I would say the most hated thing in Shanghai after a while. After that we headed back to Brian’s and used his washing machine and he installed a driver on our computer so we could use it in our hotel which was super handy.

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