And so our Shanghai adventure begins! 4.50am and our airport transfer picks us up -a different guy than all the other transfers, which is a shame as we wanted to tip the other one..but anyway. It's raining today in Beijing - not had the best of luck with the weather with all the smog but at least it has been dry the entire time.
The flight over went quickly, we were looking forward to some breakfast on the plane, but what we got looked like prison food!! Pink porridge that was basically watery boiled rice, some yellow cubes with edamame beans, a bread roll with some strange yellow thing inside, and a yoghurt!! So yes, we went hungry and stuck to the sweets we had in my bag - none of it was tasty, or edible for that matter...
We decided to make our own way to the hotel - we caught the Maglev train - a high speed train that only takes 8 minutes to the city centre and reaches speeds of over 500km! Luckily we met an English guy on the train who has lived here for 2 years, he told us which tube we then had to take to make the last part of the journey. Off the tube we got a little lost finding the hotel so jumped in a taxi and we were there in minutes! And at only 20¥ (about £2) you can't go wrong.
The hotel is very nice, we're on the 21st floor so have some good views of the city, you have to pay for wifi though which is a right pain.
This afternoon we've just been wandering around the city through People's Park, had some lunch at an American themed bar, and found the bus stop for the hop on hop off bus we have tickets for over the weekend.
While walking through the park we did come across an art exhibition on, we decided to go in as it seemed really busy and lots of people kept coming out with colourful sticker dots all over them! It was called 'A dream I dreamed'. It was a lot of polka dots - mine kind of art - and we actually really enjoyed it.
We then made our way back to the hotel and got ready to go out for some tea - a restaurant down the road from the hotel - great food again and dirt cheap!! I'm definitely going to miss having Chinese every day when we get back home.
Now we're just planning what we want to see tomorrow - we have the tickets for the hop on hop off bus for over the weekend which will help us to see the main places around the city. We might even look at seeing an acrobatic show tomorrow night! Good first day in Shanghai though, a city we could both see ourselves spending a lot more time in!
Xxxxx