The Shang'

The 12 hour train ride, as I mentioned, put us arriving in Shanghai before 8 in the morning! Fortunately we were able to check into our hotel right away, drop our bags off and recuperate slightly before heading off to find some breakfast.

That was an interesting experience. After walking around for a time, we landed at a neat little joint near the water. We ordered our food, anticipating its arrival with a hearty appetite. However, the portions were not up to par with what we had been hoping for. They even tried to give some of us half of the already small portion of fruit. And it took them about 17 tries to realize that we each wanted "individual" servings of jam and peanut butter. For some reason they thought we wanted to share a single size serving of each of them, or something like that. And we even had Yichieh with us, whom they could clearly understand. We had quite a time of it at 8:30 in the morning.

The rest of the day seemed kind of slow. It was a dreary, gloomy day and pretty polluted, but, having just come from Beijing, the air seemed moderately clean! Overall, I was disappointed with Shanghai. We actually wound up going to some kind of amusement park type place outside the city which was kinda random. At one point, we were feeling that we shoul've stayed in Beijing for two more days. Luckily, the night fulfilled all our hopes and dreams and turned out to be amazing.

After enjoying an awesome BBQ buffet at the top of our hotel, we headed towards downtown in hopes of locating the tower that Tom Cruise swings off of in Mission: Impossible: III. That was our mission and we chose to accept it. That turned out to be the highlight of the Shanghai portion of our trip.

First we went up to the 88th floor observatory of the Grand Hyatt-Shanghai and from that vantage point we spotted the now infamous group of towers. There was the taller, "football" shaped one next to the two slanted towers. It was so cool. Andrew and I actually bought copies of M:I:III in Shanghai and watched them when we got back to HK! It was great.

When we got down from the Grand Hyatt, we walked a few blocks down to the Grand Oriental Pearl TV & Broadcasting tower, the "sky needle" looking building that you always see in the Shanghai skyline. The bummer was that it closed right about when we got there. We didn't lose heart, though. We were determined to make the most of Shanghai so we went back to the M:I:III towers and attempted to go up inside them to the top. We made it to the 55th floor of the football tower but couldn't figure out how to proceed from there, plus, we probably weren't supposed to be in there anyway. The slanted tower he swings to was closed, but hey, we tried.

After walking around for a bit more, we caught a cab back to the hotel and relaxed in front of the TV before calling it a night by about 12.

The next day was a wash because Andrew caught an earlier flight back, which took up most of the morning and then we just hung out in a cafe until heading to the airport around 3. Got back to HKBU campus at precisely midnight, talked on Skype, and went to bed.

Overall, Shanghai was much more impressive during the night than it was in the daytime. the M:I:III towers were by far the highlight of that city.

View some photographs of our escapades here