Shanghai

We have accidentally booked into one of the poshest hotels in Shanghai and, apparently, the first hotel to have been built here. It is a very nice building, is very expensive and is run by very average staff. Its nice to have aircon and a luxury bathroom but we'd rather be in a more traditional place. It is in a fantastic location, though; the photo to the right was taken about 5 minutes walk away. The white fog surrounding the buildings seems to be a mixture of dust, mist and pollution.

Shortly after arriving on Thursday we tried to book train tickets to our next stop (we leave on Monday morning). This request was met first with a look of disbelief and then howls of laughter from the travel agent in the hotel. Monday is the start of 'National Day', a misnamed week long holiday during which most of China will be on the move so we spent the whole morning planning and booking most of the rest of our trip.

Shanghai has given us our best meals yet with steamed dumplings two days ago being the highlight. Today's lunch was wonderful (a spicy flatfish for Cathy and beef with chilli, garlic and green peppers for me) although ordering was far from easy as it was the first menu we'd seen with no English translations. Our limited knowledge of Japanese helped a bit with reading one or two Chinese characters and we managed to get across that Cathy doesn't eat meat.



After a few days of trudging around cities we spent today visiting a slightly more rural village called Qibao. At least, it used to be rural, it is now part of suburban Shanghai but made a pleasant change nonetheless. Lots of interesting places to look at (the photo was taken in small Buddhist temple) and I was most keen to see the Cricket House. Knowing a bit about Shanghai's colonial past, I assumed that this was to do with the sport. It turned out to be a place where crickets (the insects) were kept and then made to fight for entertainment. Paraphernalia included devices for catching, breeding, transporting and even weighing crickets. Quite how one conducts a weigh-in involving leaping invertebrates wasn't made clear. On the way to the Cricket house we had walked down a street where everything edible (and a few things I'd consider to be inedible) were on sale including pigs snouts on sticks, the penises of some unidentifiable animal and finally deep-fried duck heads, with beaks intact. We have decided on pizza tonight.