Shanghai

On to our next city Shanghai, we met a great Chinese couple on the train who suggested loads of amazing things for us to do; it was so helpful because we didn’t really have a clue and they sorted out our train tickets to Beijing for us, result.

Shanghai yet again has an amazing skyline, in the daytime though it is unfortunately hindered by an almighty cloud of smog (and you Londoners thought you had it bad)! You can see it better at night, Ben and I took a really nice long stroll down ‘the bund’ on our first evening.

 The day time smog is unbelievable!

We took a little excursion whilst in Shanghai to a smaller city called Suzhou to go and see the world famous gardens. They were traditional Chinese gardens and were really lovely but other than the gardens in Suzhou, there really wasn’t much else to do! We did take a tuk tuk ride of death though that was really fun – they don’t take any prisoners on the roads here!

We seemed to time our trip to Shanghai really well as we were there whilst the ‘World Expo 2010’ was on; it’s basically a world fair with loads of countries setting up expo stands to try and boost tourism. It was absolutely mad in there though it was so busy almost a million people were there the day we were. Ben and I felt like parts of the exposition at times, loads of Chinese people were taking our pictures – we felt like right celebrities! The UK pavilion was really good and we got a queue jump in there because we are British – wow! The whole expo was a really great sight though, the Chinese pavilion was outstanding, these expo stalls must cost millions to make, it’s really insane!

 China Pavilion

UK Pavilion

The rest of the time in Shanghai we were just sight seeing around the city, we went up the tallest building – supposedly the worlds highest observation deck??? Our train ride to Beijing was not quite so fortunate though we officially had the worlds worst snorer in our cabin, Benny got about an hours sleep – luckily I had my iPod!!!