Shanghaied in Nanjing, or should that be Nanjinged?

If you are reading this without having read the first half tut tut! In a nut shell, Shanghai, great but I am now very curious about Nanjing, of which I have only heard good/interesting things.


Outside the hostel



One of many departure areas

Holiday Market

The bullet train was remarkably cheap at £8 each way, booked with a days notice. All I had to do was go and pick them up from office 18p in the train station. The high numbers should have been a clue as to the sheer size of this train station. I remember being amazing at Beijing West but Shanghai West makes it look a little pathetic in comparison! I have seem smaller airports (although I admit, Southampton airport was a long time ago). I spent quite a long time in awe, staring at the rows and rows of ticket windows, each of which seemed to have a hundred people waiting at it. I eventually found the one I was looking for and settled down for a lengthy wait. 20 minutes later and armed with tickets, I began my search for the right gate. It truly is an unbelievable size, there are 15 security scanners before you can even get into the departure waiting area, or rather one of the departure lounges/waiting areas, I think there are 6, each one containing 50+gates and platforms. Makes Bristol Temple Meads weep!



Small shopping area I found by accident

Anyway, the train was very exciting. I got lots of funny looks when I took a photo of the speed display, I was impressed and felt it had to be immortalised onto my camera's SD card (I much prefer says film but it doesn't really exist any more), and three hours flew by. I arrived into Nanjing, without having booked a hostel so I was a little nervous wit it still being Spring festival and all, I showed a taxi driver a small leaflet I had been given and he seemed to understand. First impressions of Nanjing were not great, on the outskirts of the city is the factory belt which the taxi driver raced through, however closer to the center of the city things changed completely. buildings are built in the more traditional style so are very pretty and well kept and the roads are lined with trees not painted (as they are in Kunming) and flowers. The hostel itself is right on the river by a huge holiday market selling all kinds of sparkly and flashing stuff. It's not really my thing but the Chinese go nuts for it. I managed to get a bed and set off on another mini adventure. I had no map, no Lonely Planet and no clue where I was going but that made it that little more interesting. I found that Nanjing has the remnants of an old city wall and in front of the wall is a street build to look like it is about 500+ years old. It failed slightly with the TV screens everywhere and the KTV (karaoke for those who are not familiar with this method of inflicting pain on foreigners) but the over effect was interesting. again lots of photo opportunities for the Chinese (who will take pictures of anything if it stays in the same place long enough) and some great people watching for me.


Massacre Memorial

On day 2, I set off to find the Massacre Memorial. It is the free museum/memorial for the Japanese Massacre of the People of Nanjing in 1945. 300,000 local people were killed in less than a week and the memorial really hammers that home. It is a creepy place that is packed with survivors memories and hundreds of grisly photos, the whole thing is built on tne site of one of the mass graves so at random intervals there would be a glass panel in the floor to a few uncovered bodies. Nanjing has held on to it's history better than Shanghai, the difference in the two places could not be more obvious. Huge sections of Nanjing are built in the traditional style with lots of very strong historical importance, on the other hand Shanghai regularly knocks down old buildings in favour of the next tallest skyscraper. Two very different cities and I loved both.


And China says it doesn't have a pollution problem?!



View from my bed, overlooking the square

A few days in Nanjing was enough, I loved it and I would quite happily go back but it felt like a small town after the previous 4 days in China's biggest city. On my last day I stocked up on yet more souvenirs and presents for various people back in Kunming and decided on a whim to go and see the view from the city wall/gate. Many cities in China still have city walls as almost all of them would have had them centuries ago, few however have been preserved and looked after in a way that doesn't make them look like they were built last year, Nanjing in no exception. I have been to the wall of every city I have been to that had one, Xi'an being the only one I can remember that was complete. Nanjing has only the southern part in tack and unfortunately due to the bad weather I was only able to go to one small section and have a look. On the top of the wall I could see nothing what so ever, the pollution on my last day was so bad that I could barely see the end of the wall a hundred meters away. It made for some atmospheric pictures I suppose.

Nanjing felt like a mini holiday inside of a holiday, and i thoroughly enjoyed my flying visit to this incredible city. Back to Shanghai for a  few more days of sightseeing and maybe a little more shopping?
Then it is back to Kunming and straight into work on Wednesday, I still haven't worked out when exactly it is OK to start planning my next adventure but I hope it is soon. 



Shanghaied for Spring Festival!

Busy Bund

A joke which no-one in Shanghai actually seemed to find funny, but I still used at every possible oppertunity.

However, the rainy season has started and I am awake horribly early so I figured I should probebly get round to updating this trip/holiday/living in China blog thing. I apologise it has taken so long but I have been busy, not necessarily true I have been busy enough to have forgotten all about Shanghai updates. Better late than never I suppose!
Spring festival (Chinese new year) seems like a really bloody long time ago now, loads and loads has happened since then and yet I woke up the other day and nearly had a heart attack when I realised it was May already.
 
 
 
 

Finance Center

My trip to Shanghai was a little welcome break from China and the craziness that is Chinese New Year. I have heard it is the biggest human migration on the planet with millions and millions of people desperately trying to get themselves, their grandparents and a box of fruit onto trains and planes. It is chaos! No other word comes close. I flew the day before New Year itself and I think the whole of Kunming was in the departures lounge with me! It is a 3-hour flight from Kunming to Shanghai (just to give you some scale, that covers about two thirds of the country. China is a just little bigger than England) and I landed a little after eight in the afternoon. I soon discovered Shanghai has one of the simplest underground metro systems I have encountered and before I knew it I was in my hostel. A beautiful new building hidden down a little alleyway in a busy part of town, a 5 minute walk to the subway and then 4 stops to the Bund. Fairly central and amazing!



Most people I met in the hostel were in a similar situation to mine, living in china and in desperate need of some home comforts and a break from the China norm. I met people who were living all over the country so we swapped noted on where was a good place to live and where was hell on earth. I also added several places to my “want to visit eventually” list, which is not getting any shorted the longer I live outside on England.

World's highest observation platform

The city itself is a huge modern metropolis where absolutely everything has a record for something; tallest building, tallest viewing platform, biggest indoor market, longest shopping street, longest underwater tunnel, fastest train and so on. I began forgetting them and getting them confused on about the second day in the city. It is amazing but unfortunately, the novelty of records wore off fairly quickly when standing in the fourth queue of the day. Regardless, the vast majority of Shanghai is spectacular!

In total I spent 6 days in Shanghai and 3 in Nanjing (which I will come back to), which was enough time for me to realise I really love the city. Maybe not as much as Beijing, which has a nice mix of new and old, but still I had a great holiday. Some of the highlights were the insane market from which all presents were bought at rock bottom prices and the Shanghai World Finance Center, which is not the tallest building in the world but is home to the highest observation deck in the world standing at a stomach churning 475 meters. To ensure you don’t eat from some time the designers put a glass panel (like the one in the spinnaker tower, Portsmouth) in the floor so you can look past your feet to the ground hundreds of meters below. The lift travels at a whopping 25 miles per hour to get you to the 100^th floor in a little under 20 seconds. My ears popped twice!

When not doing battle in the busy markets, I would just wander off and see what I could find. It was almost impossible to get lost as subway stations appear when you desperately need to get back or you think you are so lost it would be impossible to ever find your way home and it turns out you are two stops from where you are staying. An amazing city! The home comforts were everywhere, Marks and Spencers, bookshops, H & M, bread that does not taste like cake and a decent club sandwich in the hostel. I left with my batteries fully charged and ready to take on China for another year (6 months at least).

During my stay in Shanghai, I met many people who raved about nearby Nanjing so I did some research and discovered a bullet train (300 km/h) could get me there in three hours. So I booked and jumped on a train the next day.