Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Upon arrival in Shanghai, we grabbed our bags, ready to head out to our private transfer. The Chinese had shut down our tube station because of the public holiday so we were unable to get public transport - which is not necessarily a bad thing.
The journey took quite a while with all the traffic on the roads and just before we hit a serious looking traffic jam, the drivers decided to make a different turn.
Eventually we arrived at the hotel around the 9.30 - 10pm mark.
After a bit of a freshen up, we headed out on a orientation walk, along Nanjing Road, down to the Bund.
The view was spectacular. Across the river was the CBD and all the high rises were lit up in all their glory. The old state buildings were also alight.
Once the boys had finished their photo shoots with all the locals that wanted pictures with the foreigners, it was time for a beer so we headed around to one of the pubs.
A couple of popped to a Chinese fast food place for a quick bite, by which time it was nearly midnight.
The beer was good, real beer - well Carlsberg, but it was a million times better than the 3% beer that the Chinese were offering.
Early next morning Ma, Pa, Chano & I headed out to pack as much in as possible.
First stop was breakfast at the bakery. I was hanging for a nice cold orange juice, but apparently they only had hot orange juice, which is a strange concept so I said no. However miscommunication was rife and I ended up paying for it, so I might as well have it. Two minutes later Dad sits down t the table with an iced orange juice - unbelievable. He said he just answered yes to everything the lady asked and that's what he got, oh well never mind.
Whilst sitting there, Mum noticed a curious thing, that some of the people had pyjamas on - this was no jumper over your pyjamas to disguise them. This was full blown, yes I'm wearing pyjamas pyjamas. It wasn't just a couple of people either, there were stacks. So I guess it's the done thing to get your morning shopping in your pj's!
With breakfast finished, we wandered down to the People's park on the other end of Nanjing Road. Considering it was not even 9am yet, there was dozens of people around - apparently Shanghai never sleeps, they stay up late and get up early.
After walking around the park for a bit, we went in search of the Shanghai Museum.
The queue was reasonably long, but fairly steady and we were in after about a half hour. Shanghai Museum is free, so I'm actually surprised that we didn't have to wait longer.
It had an interesting collection of coins, paintings and jade and also a collection on Catherine the Great from the Hermitage, so I am looking forward to going there when I get to st Petersburg..
Nearly three hours later, we were all museumed out and it was time to head out to the airport to go for a ride on the world's fastest train.
I timed the journey to the airport, from the point were the train comes into Shanghai. It was around 47 minutes long.
We purchased the 50 Yuan tickets (5 pounds, 12 NZD) and waited a few minutes for the next train.
The Maglev (Magnetic Levitation train) didn't appear to be that much different from an other train, but once it got going, it was quite unbelievable.
The whole journey took 8 minutes. The train went from 0 to 431km in about 3 & ½ minutes flat. If only other public transport was as fast!
Dad, Chano and I wanted to go to one of the observatories in the CBD, so we took the back street towards the Bund, so as to avoid the maddening crowds, unfortunately under my direction we turned a street too early and came into the mass that was the people of China.
Each side of the street was lined by Army people standing with two metre gaps, directing the people like sheep.
God save you if you were on the wrong side of the road like we were. We were going against the flow and it was just horrific. Eventually we made a run for the other side and managed to get there safely.
The Army folk scowled at you if you even considered stepping around them onto the road so you could overtake the other pedestrians.
On arrival at the waterfront, we decided that since we couldn't even see the top of the observatory, going up would be a fruitless exercise, so we returned to the hotel.
That night, it was off to an Acrobats show. There was lots of drum spinning, swinging from ropes and poles, jumping through hoops, contortionism, bike tricks. To top the evening off, they had the globe of death, with the motorcyclists cycling around the cage. This was fairly spectacular since they managed to get five motorbikes in such a little space. Also considering how many errors the other acts had made, I wasn't holding high hopes out for an accident free cage ride, but luckily they were professionals and all ended well.
Sunday was our "departure" day from the trip and we were to get a new tour leader and lose a few of the people that were on the trip as they went off in another direction.
Essentially it was a free day for us, although we were supposed to go to a meeting that evening, but we had big plans for the day and had no intention of breaking them just to hear a repeat of what Bing had told us two weeks earlier.
Everyone was up and ready to go at 7am. We were off to Expo, this was an unknown entity - if we were going to get tickets, if we were going to have to queue for a million hours to get into any of the pavilions - who knew!!??!!
It wasn't a long trip to the Expo and the purchasing of tickets seemed fairly effortless, expect for Mum telling us we were in the wrong queue, which we weren't. eventually all of us acquired tickets (three kiwis, a Dane and two brits).
Time to queue up!! We were directed into large pens, and waited there for over an hour for the gates to open at 9am. It was a sea of black hair and five foreigners - it really seemed that all of Shanghai had chosen today to come to the Expo. We later heard that there had been 4 or so million people at Expo in the first three days of the National Holiday (we went on the third day).
Once the gates opened and we went through security, we headed for the furtherest corner to go to the British pavilion. We'd decided that we'd do our three nationalities pavilions before looking at any of the others.
There was next to no one on the raised walk way towards the pavilion and it was a nice change from the previous couple of days. However when we arrived at the pavilion, there was a reasonably sized queue and it took us a good 40 mins to get in.
It was an interesting pavilion, made out of fibre glass tubing, that from the outside looked like it was a large hedgehog's bottom. Inside the pavilion at the end of each tube was a different set of seeds. Not what anyone expected, but still interesting.
The Danish Pavilion was next and there was luckily no queue for this one. It was designed with a ramp going up the middle of it and it was more like what I thought the expo would be about - a promotion of the country. The Danes had also shipped the Little Mermaid all the way from Copenhagen, which means I'd saved myself a trip to see it in Denmark J. You also had the option to cycle up the ramp as the Danes promoted their local transport options.
It was time to take a look at home sweet home. Although there wasn't much of a queue to the NZ pavilion, we found the VIP section, showed our passports and got shown a short cut in. It was all about everyday life and then there was an outside area with some local flora. It was all very pretty.
We met a kiwi girl that was working at the pavilion and she suggested we try and get in the Oz pavilion with our passports. So we tripped over to our mates across the pond.
There was a little Chinese girl on duty and we mentioned that none of us had our passports, but she was a bit unsure of this. My mother then decided to break into a rendition of Waltzing Matilda and whilst everyone else joined in, I was hiding my head in shame. It seemed to work though and the lady let us jump the queue.
Other pavilions we visited were the Global Urbanisation pavilion, the Oman and also the UAE pavilion which we had to queue for nearly three hours (or it felt like it). Although we wanted to go to the Indian pavilion it was late and the queue was huge, so we just made a quick visit to the Nepalese pavilion. On the way, we saw the Saudi pavilion and queue - I don't jest there must have been a three hundred metre queue that was about six rows wide with about five or six people wide in each row. There were police monitoring the queues and people must have been queuing for at least five hours, if not more.
After a quick bite to eat Lesley and Stuart went home and we got the bus back towards the African pavilion. This pavilion was made up of dozens of the smaller African nations that couldn't afford their own pavilions.
Unsurprisingly the Zimbabwe section had two enormous photos of their illustrious leader and talked of how wonderful the agricultural life was with the new farmers on the their lands - no mention of the old farmers and what had happened to them!
It was eventually home time and we got back to the room around 10pm - a nice 15 hour long day - all fun though.
Monday was the first activity day for the new group. We had an NZ girl and an English guy joining us, whilst we lost Chano and Michael & Dee, from the States. We drove out to a water town, just outside of Shanghai.
We sat around for over an hour while our new guide went off and tried to get some tickets for a ride down the river.
This was a fruitless exercise as he came back empty-handed. We headed into the old town to see the sights instead and try and get a boat ride from inside.
It was a lovely little town with lots of old style buildings hugging the river, however once again due to National holiday week, it was completely rammed with Chinese tourists.
We wandered around a bit, went inside an old building where "teachers that had been teaching for 30 years and the deformed man" were entitled to a discount - you have to love the world of PC-ness in China.
After that we really got amongst the people and the only way to get anywhere was to just shove like hell.
We finally made it down to where the boats were. The decision was made to have two boats as they only took ten people and this would mean that one person would miss out.
The ride was fairly gently down the river with a man at the back doing the steering/rowing. It was as gentle as it could be with the loud sound of hocking in the background - definitely not a sound I'm going to miss when I leave China.
After a failed attempt to organise everyone for lunch, we went our separate ways for a while - I was feeling slightly claustrophobic and was hungry so wanted to go back to the new town - the directions I was given was go up towards the flag and then turn left and you will come to the exit. Well I came to an exit, just not the one we'd entered by, so I went rambling in the countryside for 15 minutes or so and realised that I just wasn't getting any closer to where I thought I needed to be, so I did an about face. This was definitely locals country because the blonde chick was getting stared at quite a bit by all and sundry that passed by.
I saw a couple and thought they looked like they knew their way - I was wrong, but fortunately for me they spoke very good English and were heading in my general direction. They got some directions from a man who had offered to take me back into town for a price, but then reneged on the offer when I changed my mind and decided to take him up.
Anyways, I followed the young couple through some little internal alleys between some houses until we came out in the old part of town again. They then took me over the bridge and from there I recognised the way and managed to get myself back to the meeting point for the van.
They were a lovely couple who worked in finance and civil engineering in one of the largest cities, just outside of Beijing. They also thought I was completely mad travelling round China during National week.
After we were driven back into town, we wanted to go up to one of the observatories so our guide led the way and organised for us to go into the Finance Centre building. This was a 100 storey building that loomed over the rest of the city.
By the time we got up it was nearly dusk, so we thought we'd wait for the lights of the Pearl Tower (the Telecommunications tower of Shanghai) to come on.
The City was truly beautiful with all the lights and you could see some much of it - it was a wise decision having not gone up it two days earlier.
We called into a bar/grill for two for one burgers and two for one beers - not just any beer, but Tiger beer - yummy!
When dinner was finished we headed out and Dad was accosted by one of the many salesmen trying to sell laser lights, that not only pointed to the top of the 100 storey building, but also made pretty patterns on the ground.
After much bargaining, dad and Damien got a guy on a motorbike down from 180 a piece to 2 for 140. He then wanted to sell a third laser, so I proffered 30 yuan (3 quid). Some bargaining later and I got it for my asking price. This may have been a little hasty and slightly alcohol-induced, but I handed over the a 100 yuan note and was carefully watching him count out my change and making sure that I wasn't getting false bills in return. Half way through this process, I realised I hadn't actually checked to see if the pen worked.
After the first few failed attempts, it managed to send it's bright laser to the top of the building, but before I could think about it, the dude had bolted. I double checked my money and he'd only given me fifty change and the laser pen actually only pointed and didn't have the pretty swirly lights that dad did. That was okay, I got ripped, learnt my lesson and only lost a couple of quid.
It was time to leave Shanghai and head to Xi'an - City of the Terracotta Warriors - yippee!!!.
Chano and I dragged ourselves to kfc for an early lunch and then it was time for the farewells, before we got into taxis to head to the train station.
This time round I had bottom bunk status. I was getting used to the train rides and this one was fairly uneventful.
- comments
Chris You're only about 3 countries behind now....
deb I'm getting there..........
Chris Easton I had forgotten that story about your Mum singing Waltzing Matilda. What a crack up ;) I loved Shanghai, what an experience!
mum I want to go on holiday again' Love Mum