Travel China

I was really excited to travel to Shanghai since we had heard nothing but good things from other travelers. Travel shanghai is much easier than travel in Beijing. We booked our train from Beijing and set off on the 11 hour overnight journey. This was my first overnight train and it was pretty pleasant. We were in rooms with four beds and obviously the three of us pretty much took it over (with respect of course for the other individual in the room) so it was pretty relaxing. You end up sleeping most of the time anyway. We arrived at the train station where we were met by a barrage of cabbies trying to get us to ride with them….of course for a ludicrously high fare. They figure since we are foreigners we are naive about the prices of things. We were aware however that it should only cost 15-20 rmb and when one of the cabbies said 180 rmb we decided we should take the bus, after a few obsentities of course. Our hostel, UCOOL, was suppose to have internet, a restaurant, a bar, etc….but literally just had a dorm room and a large bathroom. It was incredibly disappointing. The rooms were nice in our 20 person dorm but when you are expecting the world and it’s not delivered it sucks. It was in a good location though so that sort of made up for it.

We spent a good chunk of our time walking down Nanjing road which has a plethora of shops and restaurants. It was pretty cool but not all that exciting. Just a long street with neon lights and overpriced items. The most annoying part were the people trying to sell you stuff literally every five feet. They would come up to you and say “watch, dvd, bag” and that’s literally it. They didn’t know any other English so if you tried to talk to them they just said yes or hello. You kind of end up turning into a jerk and telling them no quite harshly. I know they are just trying to do their job but hell…….it gets old. Other than that we sat by the Bund which lies by this really dirty river and just people watched. It was pretty interesting. Again, like in Beijing, a bunch of people kept coming up to us and taking our pictures. It always makes me laugh.

Shanghai was kind of a let down for me because minus the shopping and bar life there really isn’t anything that cool to see at all. The architecture is really impressive and it seems like they are putting up more and more highrises every year but that’s basically it. Everything is a lot more expensive than in Beijing and probably everywhere else in China. We went out one night to this place called the House of Blues and Jazz that had live music because we wanted to have a few drinks. Unfortunately, the beers were 60 rmb….where at our hostel in Beijing they were 3 rmb. It was a little disheartening.

I’ll have to come back again in the future when I am richer and can afford it to enjoy deluxe shang hai tours offered by the local travel agents shanghai.