Hong Kong - Shanghai - Hangzhou - Anji - Hong Kong

Wednesday 27th of September, 2pm: Claudia leaves student hall to go to shenzhen airport (just across the border to the mainland)... taking train to the Lo Wu border 3:30 pm, crossing border by walking (yeahh.. new china stamp in my passport) 4pm, finding and taking bus from border to airport - hoping that this bus would actually really go to the right airport and ever arriving there, 5:30pm due to traffic, flying from shenzhen to Hangzhou 7:30- 9 pm with crying and seat kicking kiddo behind me, taking bus from airport to train station 10 to 11pm, waiting in overcrowded small town crappy train waiting hall from 11pm til 3am, trying to sleep on one of the rows of uncomfy plastic chairs, switching into crappy train with smelly people who wont take their feet off the chair for a "laowai" (foreigner) like me, arriving in Shanghai at 5:30am, taking subway to Renmin Gongyuan (people square) and checking in at the hostel in a "authentic" chinese back street at 7am. wow, that was a quick and easy journey!!!!!!!!

Thursday, 28th: so I slept half of the first day there,then went "online" in the hostel --> welcome to China, I-net is shit here, no Hotmail, Messenger or whatsoever... everything blocked by communist policy arrhghhhhgggghhhh. The hostel is really nice by the way and very central! Then went out at 3pm finally to Nanjing Donglu. Consumerism hits me . Tourists everywhere: HELP??!! try some weird sesame snack - yummy! get tired of looking around and all the tourist stuff, take the subway back and decide to treat myself to a haircut! Why not in a country where nobody understands hello and goodbye?! After a new experience in a rather dry way of shampooing (using water out of spray thingy and no sink under my head) I get a wonderful head and neck massage. then me and about 5 employees of this "hair dresser" challenge each other for a mutual understanding of what I want with my hair. Drawing pictures helps a bit and they seem to understand what I mean with cutting the hair-ends (german: spitzen schneiden) .... well, it turns out ok but they didnt seem to quite understand it totally so actually it did get a little short. they seemed to especially miss the part of me explaining them that I want to be able to tuck my hair behind my ears - which is IMPOSSIBLE now.... and the more I think about it later I am devasted and depressed aobut how short my hair is! To make myself happy again I buy some cute earrings and try a Starbucks grean tea frappucino - yummy. Spend the evening in the hostel bar with Zhu Hui, the Chinese girl who also stays in my room and find out that the Formula1 race is actually in Shanghai this weekend, and she is just here to support Shuumaakkaaa!! hahahaah

Friday 29th: got up early to do all the tourist attractions of Shanghai today. subway to South Shanxi Rd. in the biddleof the French Condcession part of town. Walked around there for ages. how beautiful! a mixture o faded 1930s architecture, from old art-deco villas with the cutest quaint balconies and doorways in little backstreets and narrow alleyways with hundreds of small art galleries and shops. Felt almost like a French small town (not that I've ever been to one and my roommate would probably hate me for saying such a disdainful thing!)
Then I visited the old town of Shanghai, newly renovated in the 1980s and equipped with zillions of antique and souvenier shops. I wander around there for a while and then find some backstreet shops beyond all the tourist attractions, and I buy some Christmas gifts to send home... (early planning again).
Now after that I finally made it to THE sight of Shanghai - the bund! this is what you are supposed to see when looking at the Shanghai skyline - an assortment of neoclassical buildings in downtown New York style and across the river the Pudong area with all the high rise skyscrapers amongst which the oriental pearl tower sticks out most. Well,... it was ok nice there... this city is so filled with smok that I could barely see Pudong and the air smelled extremely of hte typical mix of chinese street cuisine and fumes of all the taxis and boats on the Huangpu River. YUCK!
met up with Zhe Hui again at night for some Shanghai nightlife and real shanghaian dinner. Turns out that the dinner place is at Yuyuan garden where I'd already been over the day, but nevertheless it was great, real good food, called Tong yuan, a Shanghaian kind of rice balls with poppy seeds (German: Mohn, Dutch: Klaproos/korenroos) in it. weird but yummy. Oh and then of course we also went to the bund again. Muuuuch nicer at night, cuz you cant see the smok! The skyline does look great with all the lights and of course I took hundreds of pictures. Anyways, I know a skyline that is so much nicer: Hong Kong!

Saturday was travel day again: got up early though so that I could still do something before, and I went - yippieeee... to the Shanghai Museum of Arts. Welll... out of all the museums I've been to, this must have been one of the worst ever. Seriously there was no piece of art in the whole place that was older than 2 or 3 years maybe, no traditional chinese art, no impressionist or what ever... only modern art, photographs that you and I can take, installations of wire or wood into weird forms or strokes of paint that make no sense whatsoever. nevertheless, I enjoyed the atmosphere and there were some quite good pieces!
Then I made my way to the train station again, got a train ticket and hat to wait of 2 hours.. kind of stressed I just wanted to sit in the supermodern waiting hall. I just sat down when this guy just sits next to me, introducing himself as Andrew and its his job to help foreigh coostomah at tha stationg and he like to make new frrien with "beauty girl from Noawahy" (told him I was from Norway) ... god how annoying. asks me for my contact info... write down Christina, and a fake email addy... and he keeps on talking and talking.. damn it- just get lost man!! the only good thing is that he can actually tell me where I gotta go for my train. He keeps talking for a while and then tells me that he has to return to his work (I thought this was his work) but probably he just spotted another poor foreigner around the next corner... I am SO not gonna email this guy! Well, the train ride was nice. Sat to a middle aged chinese guy who tried to make some converstaion in the beginning until he found out that I dont understand shit of what he was saying...
arriving in Hangzhou I met up with Megan, and we checked into a really nice hostel (IKEA shower curtains ;) ), enjoyed a good Chinese dinner nearby the Maya bar, then met up with a ton of Americans, two isreali guys we'd picked up in the hostel and some other folks and we spent the rest of the night in the maya bar drinking tiger beer and tequila. altogether, it was a lively group. much fun!

Sunday morning, megan and I walked on Hangzhous beautiful west lake for a while (though I dont see why Marco Polo should have said "in heaven there is paradise, on earth there is Hangzhou") I mean, it was nice but there are nicer places I guess....
Then we went in search of the elong (yeah again!) office to pick up our plane tickets to go back to Hong Kong on Tuesday. The address provided by elong was Fengqi road, number 6, first floor. Should be easy right? Well, It would not be china and not be Elong if they wouldnt do it according to their business philosophe, so it turned into 2 hour hike around fengqi road, as the taxi driver dropped us off near some hospital (number 8) which was nowhere near where we needed to be. we wandered to the 3rd floor of some building and into a cyts tourist office that was under construction. finally, we found the office at number 96 and got our tickets! Afterwards, we wandered through the silk market - a long pedestrian market street filled with silk shops. you can see scarf shops and old 1980s mannequins boasting VERY strange faces, colored hair, and frumpy ladies' silk shirts. we finally got the bus to Anji, the city where Megan lives and works, but not before sitting in the bus station for about 3 hours. it being national holiday, all travel centers are beyond busy, so the first non-sold out bus we could find was a 4:30 departure (it was 1:30 when we bought the tickets). we walked across the large, busy motorway and stumbled through a small goods market. we wandered down a small lane with dirty, two table restaurants and bought fried pumpkin rounds from a vendor. later, we sat on a ledge and looked through the lonely planet until it was *finally* time for our departure.

Anji is like a really small town, and quite typical chinese I guess. People constantly looked at us loudly whispering "laowai", and it was totally good to be in a small place for once, no more huge cities, no more tourists around!

we met up with Ivy, megans colleague and cathy and Heaven (ivy's boyfriend), megans friends to celebrate Cathy's birthday. To honour this event, Cathy had decided to change her name from Cathy into Shadow. Yeah well, why not right?
After the dinner party with a yummy cake, we went to a karaoke place!!! oh my god that was fun! I actually can sing a little bit (Antoinette, stop laughing already!) Well it was fun anyways, the chinese are such "GOOOD" singers.... it is not only impossible for them to sing in anything close to a rhythm but they are also totally off-key... wow was that bad! BUT fun!

Monday, the 2nd of October, was basically the last day of my trip. We went to see Megans friend Meshells workplace, a chair factory! then we went for lunch and I had my first dish of real bamboo, tastes good, I can only recommend it!! And then in the afternoon the three of us went to da zhu hai (big bamboo sea). There is no sea anywhere near by, but the hilly area is FULL of bamboo trees and cuz of their kind of treetop they wave in the wind just like waves on the ocean (very poetic, right?!)
at night we went to another restaurant and enjoyed a whole lot of dishes, eggplant, potatoes, rice, more eggplant and beef and FROG!!! whole frogs that is!! and they are so yummy, a bit like chicken, and they are quite muscular. Must have been quite some sunny-boy frogs... yummy ;) And on account of the 1Yuan beer (0,10€) bottles we had loads of fun also.
When we left, I drove Meshells scooter outside for a minute or so... and I didnt even fall over, as I had expected. this is so easy!!
on the way home, we passed a chinese style town fair and took a detour around it. interessting stuff they sell... got some new socks!!
now this was basically it... the next day we got up early to go back to Hong Kong... Taxi from Megans place to the bus, bus to Hanghzhou, another bus to the city centre, other bus to the airport, flight to Shenzhen, bus to the border, walk across the border and the KCR to Hung Hom. Finally back "home" in an area I know and english speaking people around! now since then also a lot happened, but I will keep that for the next blog which I'll try to write tomorrow or so.. cuz now I will go to tha beaaach!!


*I have to add here that I actually took a few phrases of htis blog from megans blog, cuz I am too busy to write and too lazy as well! so this keeps it a Plagiarism free site!! ;)