Shanghai Noon

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Our flight was delayed for an hour. The staff decided to dish out the food whilst we waited, so when we got runway clearance there was a bit of a mad rush to clean away the rubbish. We landed in Pudong Airport and were greeted with the familiar stares of curiously by the Chinese. Possibly thinking why are these stupid tourists carrying so much luggage? Wonder where they are going? Etc! Pudong airport is quite out of town and is the other airport in shanghai. We took a maglev (a very quick train which was doing speeds of over 301 kmph. We got into shanghai very quickly, it covered 32 km in around 8 mins.
This is where we hit out first brick wall. Note to all other travellers who are coming to china, get anything and everything written in Chinese. We spent a good 20 minutes trying to figure out a way to our hostel in the end we got a lovely lady in the information centre to translate our hostel address from English to mandarin and handed it over to the taxi guy.

We arrived to our hostel and we were told the room we booked was not available so we got upgraded to a “deluxe room” for free during our stay!! Instantly we liked this room, it had a cosy feel and it was the sort of room you could just sleep in forever. That’s exactly what happened that day. We were shattered from our airport antics, we went to sleep looking forward to Angelo’s birthday.

It rained the next morning and very hard. We stopped in till the rain went awa at around 12pm. We were starving and decided to go to the local KFC (Ang was permitted to make this choice as this was his day!!). We turned up and realised that the KFC was situated near shanghai old street where the shopping centres / stalls all mixed together with traditional Chinese buildings and was near Yuyuan gardens. We spent the rest of the afternoon browsing and making a few calculated purchases bearing in mind we already had massive luggage. That evening we went for a meal to celebrate Ang’s birthday at a Sichuan restaurant which all in all turned out not to be a great meal!

The following day we went to get some train tickets and we found out that like Shenzhen the train booking system really favoured the locals over the tourists. The locals were able to buy the tickets 10 days in advance while a tourist could only buy it 4 days in advance. Needless to say all the good tickets were sold out. Later we strolled over peoples square and got chatting to two Chinese tourists who were in shanghai. They said they were on their way to a tea festival, and as we were on our way to get a coffee anyway accepted their invitation to tag along. There we were chatting and following them until we came to a small tea shop. “here we are”. We entered a little confused and were put in a small room with the two other ‘tourists’, on came the music and out came the menu of overpriced tea. Around £5 - £10 per cup! They asked us which we would like to try and our internal alarms bell started ringing - we made a sharp exit. This was the first time throughout this trip where we truly were convinced by scammers… at least we didn’t pay for the tea! They were very good. We grabbed some lunch opposite the metro and noticed our two “Chinese” tourists again chatting to a foreigner. We crossed over to do a small wee wee on their bonfire, they ran off and left us with a very grateful German tourist who had been as convinced by them as we had.

The next day we got up early and took the bus to Zhujiajiao which is a village out of shanghai where there is a lot of old traditional Chinese architecture as well as canals. The village has been turned into a tourist trap but we still enjoyed the views and wondering around the little shop filled alleyways. We bought a ticket that gave us entry to all the sights and included a boat ride.

Since we arrived in Shanghai we had been feeling a little homesick and so stayed in again in our comfy, cosy room watching movies, popping out only for noodle soup down the road.

We finally made it to Nanjing road the next day – famous for shopping – but found it a little too upmarket for our liking and our budgets. Gucci, Cartier and Louis Vuitton are not really our thing. We returned to Yuyuan gardens, our favourite place in Shanghai for another stroll around the shops there. We actually made it out that night to The Bund for a walk along the river and dinner overlooking Shanghai’s dual personality, the new skyscrapers on the Pudong side facing the old buildings.

On our last full day in Shanghai (we definitely spent longer here than planned!) we did the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel which was weird. You get in a little capsule thing which takes you along a track under the river while the tunnel beams strange lights at you. Makes a change from taking a ferry across I suppose! We had a look around the Pudong area watching the crowds of Chinese tourists and locals. In the evening we wanted to go to a supermarket to stock up for our train ride tomorrow. The guy from the hostel, Wang Jian, and his girlfriend who was visiting walked us down to the nearest and largest supermarket and we picked up some train snacks.

We checked out and hung around the hostel until 1pm the next day, then took a taxi to the train station. We grabbed a quick McDonalds before sitting on the floor of the crowded waiting room for our train number to be called. Angelo’s chairman Mao bag he got in Singapore was drawing quite a bit of attention from the locals who seemed to think we could speak Chinese. We definitely can’t.

The train was on time and it was pretty easy to find our seats. Despite the 20 hours sitting in a chair we quite enjoyed the journey talking to the locals and practicing our Chinese phrases. We drew a crowd and they enjoyed watching us struggle over their simple words!

Deb & Ang

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Photos

Ringing the bell
Ang was going to be the luckiest person ever after doing this!!!

Every little helps
outdoor escalator

Ang with a local lady on the train
she taught us some words in mandarin.