Back In China

side from the bloke underneath James snoring ALL night long, loudly, and James nearly knocking the woman on the bottom bunk unconscious by allowing his small rucksack to slip off the top bunk and fall fully 7 feet onto the floor, nothing much really happened of any note. It wasn’t the greatest nights sleep in the world, but they never really are on the trains.

"Mornin!"

We arrived in Shanghai before noon and I somehow managed to pass for a Chinese resident as I ambled through the wrong immigration desk, but there were no problems, I’m a good blagger. And then we left the station, to be met by……rain. AND cold. Oh so cold. This wasn’t good, and brought back memories of cold early mornings in the campervan in New Zealand. After we had “layered up” we found the English-speaking ticket office and tried to book our train tickets from Shanghai to Beijing. Apparently you can only book them two days before travel so we would have to return on Sunday. Oh well, it looked like we would have something to do on Sunday at least.

A drizzly Shanghai morn

Next up, finding the Metro and then the hotel. No problem navigating the Metro system and we even had an offer of help from a passer-by, to which we kindly refused as we had worked it out already. The hotel was not far from the local Metro station, but it didn’t look great from the outside. Thankfully, the room was OK once inside, and we even had a sun terrace outside, if it would ever get warm and dry enough to use! But it was a heck of a lot bigger and cosier than the one in Chungking Mansions, so that was just fine by us. We needed to catch up on a bit of R & R so we had an easy afternoon while doing some research on what to do in the most populous city in China.

Without a map we would have trouble finding the things we wanted to do so we set out to find the Tourist Information place nearby. It was still raining and still quite cold so we had to gear up in our wet weather attire and brave it for the short hike. James had drawn out a map from the internet and it wasn’t too far away apparently.

Shanghai...still in the rain

We never found it. But we did get a vague idea of what the surrounding area was like and we were sure that we would come to like it, when the bad weather cleared. So, sans map, but with wet shoes and trousers we headed back to the hotel to dry out and try to find somewhere to eat, as there seemed absolutely nowhere nearby that we could go. Thanks to Tripadvisor I managed to find a place that looked like it would fit the bill so we jumped on the tube and got out two stops down. It was only two stops, yes, but then again it was only 30p. So we thought we’d live a little. It was still raining, but slightly less than before, so we fast-paced it down the road to find the restaurant as quickly as possible.

We never found it. We walked the entire length of the street that it was supposedly on but we never came across it. We didn’t really see many other alternatives either, as it seemed to be that there were plenty of “local” places and plenty of expensive places, but nothing in the “James and Tim” category in the middle. We found a Pizza Express and thought that our prayers had been answered. Although a little pricey we breathed a sigh of relief when the manager said that there was a 50% off offer on. But then we left when he said it was only applicable to wine. So with sodden feet and legs we carried on our journey and managed to find a place that seemed economically viable. Simply Thai was quite classy inside, but I didn’t rate them too highly (or leave them a 
tip) as when our main courses arrived it took a full 10 minutes to get the message across the 4 or 5 waiters that I was missing my jasmine rice. It arrived just as my pork was getting tepid and it was very tasty, but it was eaten almost out of spite.

Harrrumph!

It was time to get back to the safety (dryness) of the hotel after dinner as it had got reasonably late with the elongated search for food, but thankfully the rain had abated. When we got back to the hotel our next job was to try and work out how to get around Chinas block on Facebook. It was blocking both Facebook and the blogs, so it was important that we got access to keep the viewing figures up, and so that our mam and dad didn’t worry that we hadn’t made it to Shanghai…