Category: Shanghai

I had the morning to continue snooping a bit around beautiful Shanghai. We went on a walk to a nearby neighbourhood with several open houses that were once residences to famous poets and playwrights. They were very fashionable neighbourhoods for the wealthy Shanghai set. We visited the homes of several of these Chinese authors to see how they lived. There was a steady stream of visitors to these open house museums filtering in to see these places.

It finally came time for me to head to the airport. Everything seemed to go smoothly until the last half hour before my flight was due to take off. Suddenly, an announcement was made in Mandarin that led to huge gasps from my fellow waiting passengers. That can’t be good, I thought. Sure enough, a four-hour delay was finally announced in English. The delay was due to a mechanical issue that required a replacement plane be used.

Knowing this would screw up my connection in Singapore and knowing there were few alternative options for other ways of getting to Perth, I immediately started working on resolving the issue. There was an 18-hour gap between flights to Perth out of Singapore, so I tried contacting various parties to see what could be done to ensure I was back in time for work on Monday. In essence, Qantas disowned any responsibility for the problem and claimed it was China Eastern’s problem and China Eastern claimed it was Qantas’ problem to get me to Perth. I could only get as far as a consensus that I would have to get the issue resolved after landing in Singapore.

Before I left Shanghai, China Eastern handed everyone wads of 600 yuan as compensation. They only announced the handout in Mandarin, so I only found out about this when a very nice bilingual woman went around and told all the Westerners what they were entitled to. We had to approach a desk to ask for the payment.

We decided to hit the gardens today – which turned out to be a bit hard to find the entrance for behind its walls. The experience dragged us through a very touristy shopping area with beautiful traditional architecture. There were cool back alleys to get there – but the gardens themselves were packed. Beautiful, nevertheless.

From there did a bit of shopping and then tried looking for a cab. An unofficial taxi pulled up and offered to take us all to the Shanghai Museum for 30 yuan. We accepted his offer and got in the museum just before the lines started to form outside. Perfect timing and nice to get out of the heat. It was a great museum full of interesting art exhibitions on various topics: currency, paintings, calligraphy, furniture, jade, clothing/culture, ceramics, etc. Being my last night in Shanghai, I headed to The Bund on my own to see the spectacle and get some obligatory Shanghai skyline pictures.

Today was a travel day to our final destination: Shanghai. This was my first foray into 2nd class seats (because the 1st class seats were sold out). They were not as nice at 1st class, but they were certainly tolerable. We made it up to the end of the train line in about three hours but then had to wait another 2 1/2 hours for the driver to find us in the massive train station / international airport and get us to our hotel. Suddenly we found ourselves amongst many fellow Westerners again – so not quite like the fun of before.

The neighbourhood where our hotel was located was the old French quarter of Shanghai. It had beautiful tree-lined streets, shady sidewalks, and great parks to stroll around. The hotel itself was a former luxurious apartment building – which still retained old-school fixtures throughout. An old-school hotel with great views as well.

We attempted to venture out to The Bund in the evening but didn’t have much luck getting there.