Museum and Free Beer

Sorry about the formatting of photos in this (and several preceding blogs) but the formatting seems to have been broken and I can't be bothered investing the hours it normally takes to make it look OK.

We had yet another morning of trying to organise transport, but we did have one small victory: the girl working at the hostel had managed to get us train tickets from Suzhou to Xi'an although she had been unable to book our transport onwards from there. Another dead end! Since hostels always seem able to book transport, we booked our accommodation in Suzhou and tried phoning ahead to them to ask them to book the train for us, but for the first time the hostel did not offer that service. Organising transport is very tricky in China; clearly you are meant to travel with a group

After Xi'an we intended to get the train to Lanzhou and onto Xiàhé by bus from there. We reckoned that it wouldn't be a very busy route so we'd be able to book that without any trouble when we arrived in Xi'an. That only left our return journey from Lanzhou to Hong Kong to consider. This leg of the journey was vital because we would miss our flight to New Zealand if anything went wrong. In the end we decided not to gamble on being able to get train tickets and decided to fly. We found quite a few cheap flights sites in English and filled in all our details on the cheapest one, only discovering that there was no actual online booking: we just filled a web form and someone would get back to us. Not quite the peace of mind we were looking for, but we felt we were edging towards being organised.

View from Renmin Gardens

That done we leapt into tourist mode again and took the metro to Renmin [People's] Park for the museum. Outside the museum we were approached by two Chinese girls who planned to attend some ethnic minority fair nearby and they were keen for us to join them so they could practice their English.

Renmin Gardens

These girls seemed totally genuine, but we were both now very suspicious of these approaches as it always seems to be con-artists, so we politely refused, saying we needed to get to the museum before it was too late. Outside the exit of the museum we were approached by another group, who again seemed like perfectly innocent young people, but this time I was sure it was a con, because they invited us to a tea ceremony and told us it was a very special one we could only see that day, just like the gallery people who insisted it was the last day of the exhibition.

More modern buildings

The tea ceremony is a well known con, where you are left for a massively inflated bill for just a couple of cups of tea. This time it was easy to get out of it, because they had thought we were leaving the museum since we had mistakenly gone to the exit instead of the entrance; that was another give-away: they were hanging around, poaching, outside the exit of a well-known tourist site.

Great lighting in the museum

The museum itself was great. We don't normally like museums much, but this one really appealed to us both. I think it was partly the way it was very atmospherically lit, and cameras were allowed which made it a bit more fun as well. It was mostly just objects, but somehow it didn't seem as dry and dull as that would suggest; perhaps it was the way they were arranged in chronological order, so seemed to take us through Chinese history as we walked around.

In the museum

The Bund from Pudong

Big tower in Pudong

After the museum, determined to cram in as much as possible, we took the metro across the river to Pudong. We had been going to walk across via the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel, but it was much cheaper just to get the metro. We took in the view of the Bund from Pudong, but it was raining quite heavily, so not much fun.

Pudong

Pushing on with the tourist agenda, we got back on the metro and took it out to the start of the maglev line to the airport. We had no reason to be in the airport, but the Shanghai maglev is the fastest operational train service in the world and I just wanted to ride it for fun. Inexplicably Joanne wasn't very excited about it, but maybe it's a boys toys kind of thing. When we arrived there I had a huge let-down. Apparently the full-speed service doesn't run all the time, and we had missed the last 430km/h train, leaving us only with the option of a pathetic 300km/h. The Nozomi in Japan goes at that speed, and our Shinkansen was almost that fast, so it would have been a waste of time. We would have to return the following day.

Free beer!

The Bund at night

To console me we returned to the bar at the microbrewery we had been in the day before and redeemed a few of our vouchers for free drinks. I'm sure the free ones tasted even better than the ones we paid for the previous day. We used the bar's wifi to check email and discovered that I'd filled in the flight form incorrectly and had reserved a flight on the wrong day, and it was more also more expensive than the web site had said. I replied explaining the date was wrong and we set off to look for a club we were planning to go to the next night. When we were out with Sia and Willemijn in Thailand they had told us about places in Shanghai where you can pay an entry fee then get free drinks all night. It sounded like the fee was set with Asian livers in mind, not Celtic ones, so it was our intention to go to one of these places the next night.

A boat trip going up the river

Pudong trying to be Hong Kong at night

View from the bar

After wandering around the Bund for ages, we came to the conclusion that the club we were looking for was at an address which had been demolished as part of the extensive building work all around the area. We ended up in an old building, an island among the building works, where they were trying to regain some of the massive losses to their business, caused by the great difficulty in getting there past the building sites and road works, by offering two-for-one Schofferhoffer.

Another boat trip going up the river

An additional bonus was that the building used to be a clock tower (or was it a lighthouse?), so there were levels well above the adverts hiding the building work, and we were finally able to get a proper view of the light of Pudong. It isn't as impressive as the Hong Kong lights, but there are more tour boats sailing up and down the river, also lit up. After a couple of rounds of two-for-one Schofferhoffer we were drunk enough to and cope with the awful food offered by our hostel when we got home.

Disgusting "omlette" from the hostel

written by

The Happy Couple on July 27, 2009 from Shanghai, China

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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