Shanghais and Lows

Shanghai 1st impressions: Smoggy, big buildings, crowded, baaaad food.

Shanghai lasting impressions: Smoggy, big buildings, crowded, decent food.

As you can see our 1st and lasting impressions of Shanghai remain largely the same, but for one thing - the food. This may have something to do with our first meal in China, that left a bad taste in our mouths - literally.

A combination of wanting to sample the local cuisine and our complete inability to speak, read or understand a word of Chinese, led us to a small soup/dumpling restaurant near our hostel. The fact that we saw a man selling headless snakes in the shop next door should have, perhaps, made us rethink eating in this part of town... but it didn't and oh how we wish it did. From what we can gather, the restaurant had 3 dishes- soup, dumplings and some kind of animal leg. We opted for soup and dumplings, but what we were served can only be described as bit of some unidentified beast floating in water. We're fairly sure we recognised the chewy texture of liver and kidney, but the rest of the 'meat' remains a mystery. Not wanting to be defeated by food on our first day in China, we attempted to eat it... we ended up eating ice-cream for lunch instead.

Food:1. Amy and Claire: 0

Later that night over a few drinks, the guys we met on the boat (Luke, Rich and Niall) informed us that we would be having a 'tour-off' of Shanghai over the following days. This 'tour-off' would be Boys Vs Girls and involved each 'team' creating a sightseeing tour for the day and leading the others around... basically the guys couldn't be bothered trying to figure out what to do, so elected us girls to go first.

The following morning, 'Amy and Claire's Shanghai Sightseeing Tour' kicked off... however, a substantial lack of planning on our part, due to short notice and hangovers, left the tour as somewhat of a disaster that saw us get lost several times and unable to find the vast majority of sights (such as the propaganda poster museum) on our hastily put together tour list (also known as the Lonely Planet Shanghai Walking Tour). In our defence, there were many factors at play that were out of our control - for example, The Bund, one of Shanghai's biggest tourist draw cards, was completely under construction and there is basically nothing else of interest to see in Shanghai. Furthermore, we were wrongly led to believe that 'The Bund Sightseeing Tunnel' would actually be good and involve a few sights... but given that it is an underwater tunnel, it's not really a surprise that 'sights' weren't involved! Regardless, we felt cheated out of out $8 when instead of a tunnel of sightseeing, we got flashing lights and crackly audio that said something about passing through 'hot magma'... perhaps you might care to look at this link for a better idea... http://www.chinasnippets.com/shanghai-cultural/bund-sightseeing-tunnel/

An entry ticket for The Bund... possibly the most exciting part of the whole experience.

Over the next few days the competition continued and we saw all the sights of Shanghai (that we could find) including a backstreet full of pet stores complete with dead fish and rats lying on the road for cars and unsuspecting pedestrians to squash. Let's just say the competition was a draw (sorry boys, it's our blog and there ain't nothing you can say about it!).

While Shanghai isn't exactly a tourist paradise, it does have a unique 'cultural offering' of it's own... cheap drink nights!! Needless to say, we spent a fair amount of our time there exploring this 'cultural' aspect. We seriously could not believe our luck when we stumbled across bar after bar serving FREE (or near free) drinks every night of the week. We also couldn't believe our luck when in one such bar, we bumped into our friend, Alex, who we knew from Korea who is now working in Shanghai! Crazy small world!

So to Shanghai we say this; Although you were not the best place we have been to, you were fun in your own way. Thank you for the hangovers and thank you, sincerely, for your amazing sightseeing tunnel that robbed us of 15 minutes and $8 that could have been spent on other things... such as fighting locusts.