Shanghai complete post Part I

Shanghai impressions

The old centre of Shanghai



Yuyuan Garden's in Shanghai from 1577 Ming Dynasty (re-done several times afterwards)



Foodcourt in the basement of the Jing Mao Tower and a view on the Oriental Pearl Tower from the promenade


View from 88th floor of the Jing Mao Tower


Centre of Shanghia where people always want to sell you shoes and/or watches.The use of umbrella's against the blazing sun.


Maglev fast magnetic train that can reach speeds up to 420km/h but with us it got stuck at 300km/h

China 2008 trip

Good day to you all,

As you have noticed before keeping my blog going during the China trip didn't really work out due to either a lack of internet or an abundance of errors in Chinese Characters so both prevented me from updating my blog. However now that I just came back yesterday night and I have decided to make a nice summary of every location that we visited illustrated by photo's as they always say so much more than words.

Below you find a list of locations that we've visited in the past 20 days:
- Shanghai,
- Suzhou,
- Huang Shan,
- Wuhan,
- Xi'An,
- Pingyao,
- Taiyuan,
- Beijing.

The coming days I will sort pics etc. and you will see the updates appear along the week.

Shanghai days

Shanghai Report

As you might have noticed, my blog didn't really take off as I wanted. Internet has been a hassle in the hostels, always busy and when it was free the blog gave a chinese error which I could not read and my posts were lost....I'll try to post a few things here and there but forgive me if it doesn't work out....otherwise I will make up for it once I'm back home.

Please enjoy a few of the Shanghai pictures.

Kindest regards,
Jody

- Food
- Foggy view on Pudong
- Circus act that we sort of got into by accident (will explain more later)
- Pudong
- Garden with Pudong on the background

Upcoming China Trip

The Excuse
There has been a silence.....a looooooong silence, but we are back again!! It is not that I have not been active or anything, on the contrary, but I just never really sat down to actually post things. There are still things that 'need' to be reported, such as the follow up of our Chile visit (already a year ago, but I cannot keep those beautiful landscapes unused on my harddisc), more cooking stories (where I've taken pictures of nearly every dish that I prepared over the past year), but first we are going to China!!

The Promise
Coming weekend we will travel to China to enjoy 3 weeks of beautiful food, landscapes, people, etc. Really looking forward to that and I have to be thankful to an old promise me and a friend made already like 6 years ago. When we visited China for the first time with a studytrip we were in Beijing that at that time was an official Candidate City. While they were painting the grass in town green (it was summer and we had a heatwave so not much green happening to impress the committee) we promised to return to Beijing if they were elected to organise the 2008 Olympics. Well now you all know the story and there we go, to Beijing again!!

The Trip
We plan to fly to Shanghai and spend a few days in that cosmopolitan city to enjoy its splendor. After that we more or less want to travel to Xi'An making a few stops along the way such as in Suzhou (many many historic gardens (UNESCO)), Huang Shan (Holy mountain and UNESCO landscape), Xi'An (Terracotta Army again UNESCO monument and some nice things in town), Pingyao (Preserved Ming time walled city where the first bank in the world was stood, guess what? it is an UNESCO site), another stop that is still open, and finally ending in Beijing where we will see what has changed over the past few years and visit some of the olympic events such as athletics, diving, synchronised swimming and BMX bikes.

The Issue
I cannot say how much I am looking forward to returning to one of my favourite Asian countries!! Of course people always remember me that it is the same country that supresses Tibet, etc. but I am not going there for the government or anything, I am going there to enjoy the people, the food, the landscape, etc. And in China, just like in the rest of the world unfortunatly, the government and the people are not the same thing. I also visited San Francisco and not because I agreed with the war in Iraq.

Well I will keep you posted and hopefully will be able to post some pics every once in a while from China.