Well, here we are in the Rennaisance Hotel in .Shanghai. We have free unlimited Wi-Fi. I can access my footy tipping, my emails, and this blog site. I can share this onto Facebook. But I can't access Facebook. Banned by chinese government.
Anyway. Yesterday we decided to kill two birds with one stone - we decided to do a ship excursion which dropped us off at the hotel. First stop on the bus was the Bund area, or harbour. Very pretty, lots of high rise buildings including the 2nd tallest (at the time of writing) in rhe world. There are 25 million people in Shanghai alone. I'm tempted to suggest that they were all in the Yu Gardens, which was our second stop. Beautiful gardens but hard to appreciate when there were ship tours and many others with tourists desperately trying to keep up with their tour guide waving his/her special flag and all talking through their microphones in different languages. To and from the gardens we walked at top speed through the oldest and most crowded part of town - mostly along the road with bicycles, scooters and cars weaving around us. Then off to lunch - lovely chinese banquet in a posh hotel. Our tour guide Bei, ("call me E-Bay") was a gòod businesswoman. She then took us to the shops where she obviously had contacts, and in between sold items (us or aus dollars), made by other contacts. She also organized "private tours" for the next day. Last stop was the Shanghai Museum. There I saw some beautiful Chinese sculpture. Too much to see in an hour!
Tomorrow Helen flies home and I fly to London. I still have my cough. Do you think if I cough on the plane they'll put me in business class for my own protection? Not worth trying, you think?
Sorry that some of the photos have gone in sidewards. They are right way up on my tablet. I'll fix them up when I get home.
