Yesterday I went exploring Shanghai - I had a fairly quiet day with no set itinerary - just set off walking to see where I ended up.
My first visit was to the Peoples Square and the Shanghai Museum - the museum has loads of Chinese art, pottery and history in - it was well worth a visit (especially as I got in on student rates so it only cost about 30p!) but was a little boring.
I decided I'd be a bit more adventurous and try my luck at using the Shanghai underground - when I'd navigated the maze of tunnels and worked out what line I was supposed to be on I was fine - even the ticket machines were relatively simple to use. I went to
Pudong - the other side of the river where the Oriental Pearl tower is that you can see from the
Bund.
I was going to go up the tower but it was a bit cloudy and you could do with a clear day/night when you go up so hopefully I may get chance sometime this week. I did a little shopping and then caught the underground to the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum - which for some odd reason was closed!
Catching the underground back to the Peoples Square I went back to the hostel for a bit and found out where
Xin Tian Di was on my map with an aim to find it last night.
Xin Tian Di is a
pedestrian area with buildings in the old Chinese
Shikumen style - yet the shops, bars and restaurants are very international and modern. There was a fantastic atmosphere and buzz about the place with people from all over the world eating, drinking and meeting there - there was just one slight snag - it was quite expensive. I don't suppose it was expensive by western standards - but after being in
Nanshan it was a bit of a shock. I went into a German style restaurant and had Sausage and Mash and a beer - it was 140 yuan - just less than 10
British pounds - when you consider this to the food market in
Nanshan though I could have had tea 70 times over for the same price!!!
I have a tour booked for tomorrow to go to Suzhou and
Zhouzhuang - both are water villages just outside of Shanghai.
Anyway, I should really work out what to do with myself today.
See you all later!
I didn't realise quite how many photos I took whilst I was in Shanghai - there's loads!
I'll start off telling you all what I did yesterday before explaining the title of my post. ;-)
I was even braver today and attempted the bus - the hardest thing is that all the timetables are written in Chinese so not only do you not know which stop to wait at, you don't know what time the bus is coming, or whether or not it is even heading in the right direction! Luckily one of the members of staff here at the youth hostel was really helpful - she marked on my map which bus stop I needed to go to, which bus I needed at catch and from there it was pretty easy (I only got on one wrong bus - theres not much difference between 925 and 925b!) :-).
I set off early this morning hen my guide came to pick me up - luckily the tour group was pretty small - only 7 including me - all American except one German guy. We drove the one and a half hours to Suzhou and had a look around some of the gardens there - we had a quick trip around a silk factory, found out how silk is harvested and then made into garments, quilts, ties etc and then we had lunch.
I got taxi this morning to Yuyuan Garden - a famous classical garden right in the centre of Shanghai just off the Bund. It has lots of pavilions, rockeries, halls etc and would have been a nice peaceful place it it wasn't on the top 10 list of places to go for tour groups - it was packed with people and tour guides waving flags and shouting down microphones. Just outside of the garden a lot of the streets were traditional chinese temple architecture - quite possibly reconstructed to make it into a tourist attraction - and you could see where east meets west in that it was traditional alleyways and chinese style buildings yet there was even a Starbucks and a McDonalds nestling inside.
