Tuesday July 10 - Shanghai
We slept in until 8 am, which felt luxurious after a couple of long days. After getting ready and packing up, we had breakfast at the Sunnyside Market again. One of the other tables was occupied. This morning's breakfast consisted of muffins for the kids, a pork moon cake for me, and an egg tart and sausage roll for Chad.
We were due to meet our Mr. Orange driver in the hotel lobby, and he was there a few minutes before 10 am. He did not speak English, but we communicated pretty well using a translation app on his phone that all of our Mr. Orange drivers used. He would speak into his phone and the words would pop up in English on the screen. Not grammatically correct, but clear enough that we could discern the meaning.
We loaded our bags into his minivan, and set out for downtown Shanghai. There was some traffic, and the trip took nearly an hour. The first stop we had requested was The Bund, and the
driver dropped us off at the Peninsula Hotel since he could not stop right on the road. As we pulled into the hotel driveway, we were met by an employee asking if we needed assistance with checkin. We told him no, we were only being dropped off to do some sightseeing. That did not deter him in the least, and he went on to interpret with our driver regarding our pickup location, allow us into the hotel to use the bathroom, and then offered us cold water before we set out for our walk. Lovely service for people who weren't even hotel guests!
We were literally steps from The Bund, so we crossed the street and climbed up the steps to get a good view across the river into Pudong.
We took many photos of the iconic skyline, and then walked the length of The Bund. The kids were approached here again for a photo and obliged.
We then took a detour inland to find Old Shanghai and Yu Garden. It took a couple of tries, but eventually we found our way.
Old Shanghai was chaotic and crowded with tourists and a bit overwhelming. We made our way across the zigzag bridge amidst throngs of people, and passed the famous steamed bun restaurant (we'd hoped to eat there, but knew it would be closed for renovations).
Instead, we picked up soup dumplings and drinks at a nearby takeout window...
...and took them to the entrance to Yu Garden where we purchased tickets and went inside looking for someplace shady and cool to eat. The dumplings were ok, but not great. We then toured the garden with the rest of our available time, and poked our heads into a couple of souvenir stalls back in the bazaar area before our driver met us in Old Shanghai at 2 pm.
I was a bit surprised by Yu Garden. It had less garden, and more buildings and hardscape, than I expected. It was still lovely, just not quite what I expected.
Right before we got picked up, I noticed Chad's backpack was hanging half open, and we figured out that we had been the target of an attempted pickpocketing. Luckily nothing went missing. This part of town is packed with people and has a high concentration of tourists, so I'm sure it's a haven for this sort of thing - beware and be aware.
From Yu Garden, we were driven to our last destination of the day, Tianzifang. This is a maze of alleyways in the French Concession that have been converted into shops and art galleries and restaurants.
It was touristy but beautiful, and still populated by way more Chinese than foreigners. Our first stop here was at Tono's Palace, a cat cafe we had found online. Mallory is a major cat lover, so this was a real treat for her.
The majority of the cats hang out on the first floor, so we waited until we could get a table there. The cats were mostly friendly and quite lazy. They all wear sports jerseys, and the one we spent the most time with was also wearing a pearl necklace.
The cleanliness of the cafe left a bit to be desired, as it probably does for most cat cafes. It was also expensive, as cat cafes are, because you're paying to support the cats, as well as for the food. We split one plate of waffles that came with fruit and ice cream, and each of us had a fresh fruit juice or smoothie, and our bill was about 280 yuan or close to $60 CDN.
We had an hour or so left to do some shopping. There are lots of interesting little shops to browse and the prices, while likely higher than elsewhere in China, were still very reasonable by the standard set at home.
I wanted a ceramic birdhouse and a large beautifully painted flask, but questioned how I would carry both of those around China for another two weeks, and so I left them both behind.
Interestingly, Tianzifang was the place where I saw someone (a child) peeing in the street for the first time.
Our driver met us again promptly at 4:30 pm, and we set off for the Shanghai Main Railway station. It took about 40 minutes with traffic. Once there, he escorted us to the ticket window to help collect our tickets. However, he was more confused about the process than we were. DIYChina, our train ticket
travel agent, had given us excellent instructions (including links to a few YouTube videos to watch) that spelled the process out. First our driver tried pointing us to a self service kiosk, not knowing that foreigners can't use them and must go to a ticket window. Then he led us to the ticket window around the back of the station, rather than the one that was closer. But eventually we got there, and had our tickets printed - not just for our trip to Beijing, but for all four legs of our rail journey. This is supposed to cost 5 yuan per ticket for the trips not originating from the station where you have them printed, but they did not charge us the extra fee.
With tickets in hand, going through security to get into the station was very quick and easy, and we also quickly found our waiting room. We then had more than an hour to kill in a hot and stuffy standing room only environment (there are seats, but not nearly enough for the number of passengers being processed). We killed the time buying snacks to eat on the train, and using the bathroom, since we figured it would be a better, cleaner bathroom than the one on the train. The bathroom had one western toilet compared to about 19 squat toilets, no toilet tissue, and no soap to wash up. We were definitely outside of the Disney bubble now.
Our train boarding began 20 minutes before departure. You can tell when you're boarding because your train number on the electronic board turns green - and also because there's a noticeable stampede toward the platform.
Our compartment on the D class sleeper train was nice and new, small but comfortable, and with 4 berths in each compartment, we had one all to ourselves.
The bathroom situation on the train was decent, with one western toilet per car, toilet paper included. We each had storage space and an electrical outlet in our berth. We ate our snacks, played several rounds of Heads Up, and did a bit of web browsing and reading before bed.
The trip to Beijing would take about 11 hours.
(We rented a mifi unit from 3G Solutions for our trip. It came with 10GB of data and a VPN for about $78 US for the 12 days of our trip on mainland China. It was occasionally spotty, but overall it worked well. We used hotel wifi when it was available to cut down on our mifi usage. At the end of our trip, we'd used just over 5 GB.)
Next up: Beijing!