The Big Trip...

Hey everyone

So, I'm in China now..my final destination and last stamp in my passport.

I arrived into Shanghai on the morning of the 9th and my first impressions were good. The hotel i am staying in is lovely (a big step up from hostels!) and that is because I am doing an organised tour with Intrepid travel. My tour meeting was not until 5.30 pm so after pottering about teh hostel for a few hours i set out to see the city.

Shanghai is absolutely beautiful..probably one of my favourite cities I have ever seen. Our hotel is right in the center so I had a walk around, found some shopping malls and went to look at the impressive skyline at the Bund. The Bund is the financial district of Shanghai and has extremely impressive buildings along with the Pearl Tower which is kind of like teh CN tower but silver and pink..very bizarre.

Anyway, after eating my first lot of chinese food (very different to home by the way) i went to my group meeting where i met the other people in my group and got told how everything would be working. I am the youngest in teh group and teh age range is huge, but everyone is really lovely and sociable so its all good. We went out for dinner to a random chinese restaurant in a back street that our guide took us to, and he ordered a bunch of meals for us all to try...very interesting. All ic an say is that the 2 months in thailand have definitely paid off as i am now a master at the chopsticks whereas everyone else was struggling completey!

After dinner we went on a boat ride down by the Bund and there were fireworks going off everywhere because it was the 10th anniversary since HK became part of China.

The following day we were meeting at 9am..so i was up at 8 and went to get raekfast on teh mains treet, but couldnt because there were thousands of chinese people all dressed in Beijing 2008 teeshirts as part of a 'get fit for the olypics' program all doing their exercises. Great.

As a group, we all walked to the Museam of Shanghai which was not that interesting..mostly just artefacts and stuff. So i left quite quickly, and spent teh rest of teh day getting teh tourist tunnel to the Pearl and going up teh Pearl. The tourist tunnel is a bizzare way to cross teh river - you get into little pods that hold about 4 poeple and travel down a track as flashing lights and stuff come around you..i can;t describe it..its very very strange. After going up to teh top of the Pearl and taking teh obligatory photos i went to teh history museam at teh bottom which was really interesting and thn settled into Starbucks at the adjoining mall for the rest of the afternoon.

At night the group met up again and we went to see chinese acrobats! The show was absolutely amazing and i spent most of it with my hands covering my eyes because the stuff they were doing was so scary! The grand finally was 'the ball of death' where 5 men on motorbikes went into a huge ball on teh stage and rode around it...i was sure they would crash but they escaped without a scratch...obviously!

After the show we went and grabbed some noodles before heading to bed.

Today, we are going to Nanjing overnight before heading to Xi'an the following day. So i will update again as soon as possible.

Bye xxx