shanghai nights

My thoughts are with the families and friends of those affected by the earthquakes in China.

Our last stop in China was Shanghai.

On arriving in Shanghai and reaching our hotel, Anna, Helena and Alex settled in to their room to watch a film and we wandered down to an Irish Pub that Ruth and Nick knew of in Hengshan Rd. Matt was really impressed with the Guinness that was served there, which is saying something as he lives in Dublin.

It was a holiday in China, both the day we arrived (Thursday) and the next day (Friday) so the amount of people in the city was unbelievable.

After breakfast on Friday we headed into People’s Square with the original thought of going to the Museum. Sadly this was the same idea as about half of the people in Shanghai and the queue was insane.

Anna, Helena and Alex all brought bubble guns - guns that shot bubbles - and had a great time shooting bubbles at the rest of us in the sunshine in People’s Square.

We opted instead to head to the Observation Tower (again too many people) and then lunch at a restaurant that Matt and I then fell in love with called Element Fresh.

From there we headed to a market located at the Science and Technology museum Metro station. It was there that Matt and I were really introduced to haggling - a totally difference experience than in Europe - and we managed to pick up a few cool things.

One of the best things was the 120Gb memory stick that Matt brought on the Friday and on Sunday before we left, we managed to get one for me for half the price. Needless to say Matt was very unimpressed.

Friday night the seven of us had dinner at a Turkish restaurant near our hotel called Doner and Kebab - already this restaurant intrigued us. We all appeared to be in a hyper mood - I think in part because this was the last night we had together and also it had been a long few days and we’d done a lot.

So from demonstrating who’s actually wearing a wig, to showing each other who can curl their tongue (Ruth decided to do this as a patron on another table looked directly at her - she was worried that he thought she was poking her tongue out at him), to me teasing Helena with the bill, waving it around and then realising as Matt and Nick were almost in fits of laughter because as well as teasing Helena, I was really confusing a member of staff by waving it around in the air as she was trying to collect it.

I have been known to take a while to consume a drink. We’d each - well, the adults had - gotten a beer with dinner and they were quite big beers. So after I stopped waving the bill around in the air and handed it to the waitress, I was slowly enjoying my beer while Matt was teaching Helena how to flip a coin.

“Don’t move your hand so much to begin with,” I suggested. “Flick the coin with just your thumb.”

Helena flicked her thumb when the coin was resting and it rose about 20 centimetres and she caught it to check what the outcome was.

“No, no, no, that’s not how you do it,” Matt waved his hands in the air. “You’ve got to flick it with your whole arm, get the strength as you flick it up.”

Helena looked at me, shrugged and then did this almighty flick with her entire arm and thumb and the coin went flying straight up in the air, about a metre and a half.

Now if I’d told Helena that if she could have gotten that coin into my beer, I’d give her 100RMB, what’s the odds that she could have actually gotten it in? Well, as we watched, that coin came shooting back down with a huge “CLANG” and a splash as it landed directly in my beer.

The look on Helena’s face was priceless and the rest of us just cracked up, very loudly. I think, as we walked out of the restaurant still laughing, that the rest of the patrons and staff there were very glad to see us go.

On Saturday morning, we said goodbye to the Bakogianis family as they headed back to Nanjing and we headed to some of the shopping centres we’d walked past the previous day. We also went on the underground cable car that was, as Anna described it, “Cheesy, but cool”. We hit the major tourist shopping strip, as well as the tourist market and went on a cruise (because we hadn’t had enough of boats on this trip) in the night time to see The Bund.

It was really pretty and the cruise was nice because it was a little late and there wasn’t that many people on the boat.

Sunday was our last day - we were flying out at 11.35pm. So we had a whole day, which was nice, but there’s always that slightly sad feeling on the last day of a holiday and also we knew we had the 15 hour flight to deal with before arriving back in London.

We left our bags with the concierge, who said that he would book us a taxi for 9.30pm.

It was a little drizzly on the Sunday and so we decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to go to the Science and Technology Museum.

The Museum was quite cool and there were English translations for most things - although we did sit through a whole presentation that was in Mandarin about the human body. Luckily there was a cartoon so we could almost follow what was going on.

In the true spirit of airport stories though, Matt and I got picked up at the hotel to be taken to the airport. As we were speeding along the motorway towards the airport (we recognised the signs with little plane images and arrows pointing forward), suddenly our driver started veering off the road. Matt and I glanced at each other a little concerned and even more concerned when we stopped in a slip lane where another guy was standing.

Our driver got out of the taxi and I had a brief “Uh oh” moment, but the other guy simple got into the taxi, pulled back onto the motorway and we were on our way.

“Shift change,” Matt explained and we both started laughing.

We had a great holiday and I hope to return in the future to see all the places that I missed this time around.

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