Blogs from Shanghai, China, Asia - page 16

Geo: 31.23, 121.47After a very short night, we were down in the Lobby at 5:45am. Armed with our boxed breakfasts, we (along with five others from our group) headed off to the airport. This was our first and only bus ride that was not in heavy traffic.Luckily, our bags would be checked all the way to JFK. Jo stayed with us through check-in. The only hang-up was that Brennan's swagger (sword/dagger) caught Security's attention in his checked bag. We had to go to a back room and open the bag. Happily, the inspector gave us the green light and we were on our way.On our flight from Shanghai to Beijing, Sue and Brennan had the worst food imaginable. Brennan had the "Western" breakfast, an omelet that looked like yellow mashed potatoes and Sue an "Eastern" breakfast ... read more

Geo: 31.23, 121.47It may seem impossible, but the breakfasts seem to be getting bigger! Dave had reached overload and just had a bowl of cereal. The one constant, good coffee.After breakfast, we went through the tunnel to the east side for a tour of Shanghai's 3rd tallest building, the Jinmao Tower. We shot right up the elevator to the 88th floor in seconds. Unbelievably, there was no sense of motion.The views from the observation level on the 88th floor were breathtaking. The new #1 tallest building shot up 40 floors above us as we looked out one side. On the other, the rvier and the Bund were far below. Maybe the most spectacular view was looking down through the center of the Jinmao Tower to a hotel lobby 40 floors below -- the Grand Hyatt, the ... read more

We took a taxi back to the bus station in Tunxi to head to Hangzhou where we would take the train back to Shanghai. We were walking onto the bus to find our seats when I heard a familiar voice... I looked up to see that our Korean friends were sitting directly behind us on their way to Hangzhou. They were excited to see us and hands were shook all around. What are the chances! Once last time in Hangzhou, we said our good byes and headed for the train station. Luckily we were able to get a train within the next hour and were off to Shanghai. Trying to get a taxi from a couple streets away from a metro station proved impossible, extra impossible when the couple taxis that did pull over couldn't recognize ... read more

Hello Followers, So we had an early wake up for Shanghai arrival this morning, the Chinese way, is blearing music into your cabin an hour before arriving, nice!! But finally arrived in Shanghai. We took the metro from the station to the nearest stop to our hostel, it only took 20 minutes at about 33p ticket. We dropped our bags off at the hostel into storage as it was still only 8.30am. The hostel is Ming town International-looks ok so far. We headed straight to East Nanjing Road- all the super retail stores are here, and if you walk to the east end you can look out over the Huangpu River to the sky scrapers in the Bund. After this we went to the Shanghai Confucian Temple. This was small and didn't have detailed English translations ... read more

In the middle of the night in Shanghai and refusing to pay double the price for our cancelled hotel room booking meant we had to find somewhere nearby to sleep. We were close to East Nanjing Road which is the wide pedestrian mall which leads down to the Bund so I left Jerry with the bags and set off to find a room. Turned away from a couple that were full I eventually found a small room in a very Chinese budget hotel. It was clean, though we had to go through a maze of corridors to get to it, but it gave us a bed for the night. Next morning though we ended up finding a comfortable room in the Jinjiang Hotel in East Nanjing Road. We bought the Jinjiang hotel chain discount card to ... read more