Shanghai to Suzhou, the best to the worst to the best

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So we finally got to leave Beijing.

On Tuesday we boarded the high speed bullet train to Shanghai, train was full yet spacious and with hot food and cold beers available on board.

Jina had been missing the kids a bit so to cheer her up i rebooked the hotel in Shanghai the night before in secret.

We ended up at the Grand Mecure in Hongqiao just 15 minutes in a taxi from the Hongqiao station which we had arrived at.

Fantastic room, fantastic service and even a great Indian Restaurant just round the corner, Jina was so pleased with the suite at the hotel she ate indian food with me for just the 2nd time in 6 1/2 years!!

Wednesday morning we got on the metro to see Nanjing Rd (Shanghais Oxford Street) and then went down to The Bund to get the touristy photos for the album.

Wednesday afternoon we took the 30 minute trip by train to Suzhou where we had a hotel booked for 3 nights.Or so we thought.......

We arrived at the hotel and took an instant dislike to it and the receptionist, as we arrived at 17.45 she kept us waiting until 18.05 then said the room was available only until 18.00, i flipped, in a big way, i had already guessed something was up as when we arrived she was on the phone and in my very very limited chinese i could make out "foreigner" "room" "price", .

She then informed us they no longer accepted bookings from the website we booked with,i flipped again , probably not the best thing to do in asia, as it usually leads to nothing......

Now i see that we had got the hotel at a low rate and Suzhou is packed with chinese visitors so they wanted to sell the room at a higher rate.

In the end i gave up, told her tomorrow i would single-handledly wreck her hotels reputation and be back to pee in her green tea.So GRAN QIAN HOLIDAY HOTEL IN SUZHOU i will sort you out later!!

We searched for a hotel for an hour,fed up we entered a very luxurious hotel , i was scared for the budget,but no rooms again........

We sat in the lobby bar then whipped out the laptop to use their wifi connection.All websites were full full full, for an hour we searched,then as i refreshed the page one cropped up!Phew

After being ripped off by a rickshaw driver (again) we arrived, checked in and showered.

Later we sat at a night stall at a traffic junction eating 15 cents noodles and drinking 20 cents "snow" beer, we were accosted by hawkers, guys with monkeys on leads, watched taxis crash into pedestrians and watched drunks crash into the street and thought hey, after all the s""t today, its still worth it to be here!!!

Now for Suzhou and Tongli then back to Shanghai for our flight to Guilin on Saturday afternoon.....oh and we will be back to The Grand Mercure in Shanghai on Friday night!!

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Comments

[A. Jen]

Oh dear !
What a shame - not the experience we had in Suzhou but Chinese holiday had finished then. We liked it and visited quite a few gardens. Liked Nanjing better but perhaps it would be lousy during the holiday as well.We did get soaked on the rickshaw ride but was good fun and had great driver but guide told us not to pay more than certain amount when we had rides- they did try to get more but we refused.Hotel in Shanghai sounds good- well worth a second visit. Hope you enjoy Guillin. Would like to have gone there but other things we wanted to do.