Why did I have the seafood aeroplane food?

Is the groan I hear from Nikala as we arrive at our hotel in Shanghai. Probably because we haven't eaten anything of substance during our 40+ hour Beijing airport ordeal I reply.  If I'm honest, my insides are feeling far from good at this point too, even though I avoided the nondescript fishy stuff we were served on the plane. But enough of that, we expected a little bit of tummy trouble at some point during this trip and I don't want to paint too graphic a picture, I'm sure you get the idea.

Still recovering from the aforementioned Beijing saga we were too tired to do any exploring that night, so we went to bed early to prepare for our first experience of Shanghai with our tour in the morning. Neither Nikala nor I have ever been part of a tour before and we had mixed feelings about it. Normally we prefer to go and explore independently and the idea of being tied to a group with a schedule might be a bit restricting. On the flip side however, we were looking forward to someone else having to worry about the itinerary and getting from A to B, even more so after the (never to be mentioned again I promise) Beijing drama.

It turns out that our tour group consisted of just 2 people, Nikala and I, which might be a good thing. We started by heading off to the Jade Buddha Temple which despite being a huge tourist draw is still an active temple with resident monks and visiting worshippers. We were surprised to learn however that the majority of Chinese people are actually Christian and not Buddhist. There were a number of pretty spectacular statues of various Buddha's and our guide did her best to explain it all to us, sadly though, her English is not the best and we found that we were concentrating so hard on deciphering what she was saying that it was hard to take in anything else. In one of the central temple buildings were the Jade Buddhas and they were lovely and it is quite amazing to think that they were carved from a single piece of jade; the largest of the two is approximately 2 meters tall. Sadly we couldn't take any pictures of the Jade Buddhas themselves as it wasn't allowed. Within the temple is a koi carp pond and we were told that the fish could live to over 200 years old. Given the size of them I could well believe it, they were huge!

Next we visited old town Shanghai and went to Yu Garden, which was a private garden created by one of the Emperor's officials for his parents. It is about 400 years old.

After Old town we headed to an area called the Bund. This is the old British quarter and you can tell. The buildings all share similarities with those found in the City of London; it was quite odd. This area is on one bank of the river that runs through Shanghai, and looking across to the other side we could see the new ultra modern area, with loads of skyscrapers and the famous Shanghai TV tower.

We finished our day in Shanghai with a visit to the New Shanghai Circus. This isn't a circus in the usual sense but is an amazing display of acrobatic, balancing and strength skills, culminating in a mad motorbike display, with up to 5 riders whizzing around and criss crossing each other in a tiny spherical cage. Again sadly we were not allowed to take any pictures, primarily because they wanted to sell a video of the performance afterwards. But it was fantastic and if you ever get the chance to see it I highly recommend it.

Tomorrow at 6:30am we are leaving for Guilin and I am not sure what our internet access will be like out in the sticks, so it may be a few days before we can update this again. But we are looking forward to returning to Shanghai in 5 days time, when we will have a day to ourselves to explore independently.