The most amazing month ever...Shanghai

We arrived in Shanghai in the evening and drove in a taxi into the city. I felt like I was in a movie driving through this big city with bright lights everywhere.

Our apartment was amazing!!! It had a view of the Bund, a view of the second tallest building in the world (the Shanghai Tower standing at 2,073 feet tall) and the apartment was so clean and modern. The apartments are for people living in the city and they are also for people on holiday. I would love to earn enough money to live in this apartment! It would be a dream to live there so long as I had friends in the city.

Shanghai is like a space bubble city. It’s so modern and western but still manages to have a Chinese feel to it! The pollution is not half as bad as Beijing and Zhengzhou! In the city we saw a Tesco shop, a Marks and Spencer store and even a TGI Friday’s restaurant! That’s how western the city is.

The city is very big though with a population of twenty two million people. We stayed in the centre so we only experienced life at the heart of the city.

When we arrived in the evening, the city was surrounded in a cloudy mist and most of the tallest buildings were out of sight in the clouds! The next morning we walked along the shopping street towards the famous Bund. It was raining a little and when we got there we realised the buildings could not be seen at all because of the mist! So we decided to go to the Shanghai museum to get out of the rain and hope for the best…that the mist would clear by the afternoon!

The museum was very interesting. Everything was about Chinese culture and history. The museum even had an exhibition on Chinese minorities which was very interesting! I visited Yangshuo and learnt a lot about Chinese minorities. I will talk more on this subject in my next blog post!

In the afternoon, the sky cleared a little luckily and we got some pictures with the famous skyline in the background! It’s a nice palace to walk although there can be far too many people as usual! People fight their way to have some pictures in the first spot they see after walking up the stairs. Walk away from the crowds and you can still get some good photos but with far less people!

My family were confused at the fact that Chinese people were asking for photos with us. They were even more confused at the fact that a Chinese man asked if his wife could take photos of me and him together! In the UK, if a man would ask his wife to take a picture of him with a young foreign girl, he would get a punch in the face from her! This wasn’t the first time a man had asked his wife/girlfriend to take a picture of him with me either! How odd!

There are many nightclubs in Shanghai but as I was with my family, we only went to some restaurants and bars. I saved the partying for when I went to Thailand! There’s a very cheap bar called Abbey Road. It’s clearly dedicated to the Beatles. It was my mum’s ideal bar! We also went to this all you can eat buffet. At the beginning we were unsure about eating there as it was expensive. But as soon as they mentioned that wine was included in the deal, we were sold! An all you can eat and all you can drink buffet would never go down well in the UK! People would definitely abuse the restaurant!!

We went to the Yuyuan Garden. It’s been in existence for 400 years and was built by a government officer of the Ming dynasty. The gardens are very beautiful and very Chinese! I recommend taking a look if you ever go to Shanghai! In Chinese gardens, there are always giant fish and turtles. The turtles are a symbol of longevity and fish are a symbol of wealth.

We went to the top of the sixth tallest building in the world, the Shanghai World Financial Center. The view from the top was very impressive! The weather luckily was good for us. I recommend going up there before sun set so that you can see the city by day and then by night after the sun set.

I also recommend seeing the Bund at night. The skyline is very impressive!! I thought the city would be in flashing lights all night long but surprisingly, they turn off many of the lights after a certain time! So the city isn’t as energy wasting as I assumed!

I feel like I should say that my favourite place that I visited in China should be some traditional and cultural Chinese town. However, I was very impressed by Shanghai. I do feel that making parts of China more Western destroys the originality of the country. At the same time, I’ve never felt so relaxed since being in China! It’s very Western but at the same time it has its traditional gardens and the taxi drivers don’t speak English, like in any other city in China! I always feel safe in China, even in Zhengzhou. In Shanghai, there are cameras and patrols everywhere, so I’m guessing Shanghai is probably one of the safest areas in China!

Next stop was…Yangshuo…

The most amazing month ever ... The Great Wall of China

So I may have forgotten to mention one teeny, tiny place that we went to while in Beijing…the Great Wall of China!

 If you don’t want to be stuck in the middle of millions of tourists, go to the Jinshanling section of the wall. It was amazing! It takes about 2 hours to get there from the city. It's so worth it!!!

 There was a very steep climb to the top and I did worry that my fitness was not up to scratch. Actually, I thought I was going to fall over and roll all the way back down. It was so hot and I’ve clearly been eating too much Chinese food. However, as soon as we reached the top, all was forgotten. The views were amazing of forests all around and we probably walked passed twenty other people at the most in our two and a half hour trek.

My parents kept asking me why I was always complaining about the amount of people in China. We were practically the only ones on that part of the wall.

Our guide was great. He didn’t seem to know whether his English name was Henry or Harry. So we called him Harry. When my family go on holiday, we hardly ever have pictures taken of all four of us together. He took so many of the four of us together without us asking and he knew all the perfect places to take pictures too! You think you can only take so many pictures of a wall. But there is a reason why this one is called the Great wall! We took sooooo many pictures!!!

We were hassled sometimes by the women selling things on the wall but a tourist gets hassled most places these days right??

There were constant ups and downs and these weren’t just little hills. They were really steep! There’s a Great Wall marathon…who the hell does that? 

I’m so happy to say that I have now climbed the Great Wall of China!!

The most amazing month ever ...first stop... Beijing

This past month has been simply incredible! I will write an individual blog post on each place that I went to!

Let’s begin with Beijing…

I took a fast train from Zhengzhou to Beijing. It only took two and a half hours. The train went at 308 kilometres an hour…that’s nearly 200 miles an hour!! The train station looked like an airport, it was immaculately clean, it was new and it had plenty of space. I was very impressed. It was so cheap too...especially compared with the train prices in the UK. It cost me the equivalent of around £30. Sadly, to most of the population of China, that's not affordable. Or maybe it's a good thing because these fast railway stations and trains are probably the least crowded places in Chinese cities!! 

As soon as I arrived in Beijing, I was approached by a man asking if I wanted a taxi. He was charging a ridiculous amount, 550RMB (which is like £50). I was sensible and went to the designated taxi rank. It ended up costing me 41RMB (like £4!) to arrive at the hotel where my family were staying. So when you’re on your travels, be aware that some people are seriously prepared to rip off foreigners!!

When I met my family for the first time in five months, I was nearly crying! I have lived away from home before, in university and in Italy. China has been different though. I have literally been counting down the days to see them again.

We had a little catch up and we were soon ready to begin exploring. We were only in each city for four days at the most so we had a lot to see and do in such little time!

Most of my friends here in Zhengzhou have been to Beijing before. Most didn’t think highly of it. Luckily, because my expectations were low, I was surprised to actually like Beijing a lot more than I expected to! The traffic everywhere was worse than Zhengzhou! Also, thank God I never have to catch a bus in Beijing. We walked passed a bus queue that seemed endless!

The first places we visited were the Lama temple and the Confucius temple. They were both very pretty temples. They were beautiful colours with old trees all around them. The shrines inside the temples were amazing too. I had no idea who Confucius was until I went there. I felt a bit naive not knowing who one of China's most famous historic figures was. 

Unfortunately, I don’t have many photos of inside the temples as it is considered bad luck and disrespectful to take photos there.

 Tiananmen Square was interesting. There were cameras EVERYWHERE! In front of the square was the entrance to the Forbidden City and a giant portrait of Mao (a Chinese communist revolutionary) on the wall. As we went inside the Forbidden City, Chinese tourists were having pictures taken touching the giant doors leading the way into the Forbidden City. They were doing this because the doors now symbolise the freedom of the public to enter a place that had always closed to the outside world. 

One night we decided to go to a peking opera. We tried to go to a famous restaurant that did an amazing duck meal (Peking duck), but we arrived too late and didn’t get a table. So we ate somewhere else then tried to find the opera. The taxi drove us to the wrong place and everyone we asked said it was around the corner but we just couldn’t find it!! Being in a situation like this made me realise it would have been so much easier if I could speak Mandarin, (not just the Mandarin for numbers, greetings and food)!! Amazingly, none of us lost our nerves and kept going. Turns out, my dad went to ask for directions in a hotel and realised it was actually in the hotel! It wasn't the best performance (maybe due to the fact I didn't understand any of it and the way of singing is very different to the Western style) but it was an experience.

One evening my dad and I decided to have a wonder outside our hotel. We walked past a wall that had a gap either side. We had never noticed it before. How astonished we were to peer around the corner and see China town. There was a long street filled with people, red lanterns and little restaurants. The place was buzzing! We walked down the street and came to a crossroads. In front of us were endless tourist stalls and to our left and right were endless food stalls. It was like a secret traditional world hidden from the outside modern city. They had scorpions, star fish and grasshoppers on sticks everywhere you looked. So many of them were still alive and moving on the sticks! My sister, who is a vegetarian, had to make a quick exit! I wasn't brave enough to try any of them!!!

The lack of Mandarin made life a little difficult for the John family! Even just phoning reception to ask for a bottle opener proved difficult. First they thought we wanted some robes, then coca cola then food. Eventually we got there. We were definitely needing some wine by then. Trying to communicate when you don't understand each other at all is so difficult!!! 

We didn’t have enough time to visit the Summer Palace or the Temple of Heaven. I was disappointed but I hope to return to the city again to see them! There’s only so much you can see in a few days.

So off we went to the next city, Shanghai…