Somewhere in ... Shanghai

So we are moving forward on our journey through this imense country. After our stay in Hangzhou, we took a bus (the tickets are bought in the china post office!) to Suzhou - town famous for its Unesco heritage gardens and beautiful women (as Pedro said, he could see the point about the women. For details please ask him:) We were welcomed into the house of Trevor, the English teacher, who is teaching at an international school and is getting ready for his next teaching mission in Quatar. He introduced us to the local teachers expat community and we had a fantastic evening cruising the canals of Suzhou and seeing the lights on the historical buildings (chinese folks like it, when everything is sparkling and full of lights). For three days we walked and walked and saw every single corner of each garden, which are really impressive with beautiful old chinese architecture. Of course we forgot that it was a weekend so the number of visitors at least tripled, but well, we are getting used to it and the crowds are almost nothing to us anymore (well, we might be really trying to persuade ourselves hard on this topic:)

But well, Suzhou itself was great and we really loved our time there, enjoying the delicious tea, chinese whiskey or great australian wine with Trevor.

The next task which was upon us was to buy train tickets for Shanghai. Even though the train departs almost every 20 minutes, the first available train was after 2 hours from our arrival to the train station. I guess, we don't have to repeat that there was at least one million people in the train station:) But well we have succeeded and got to Shanghai, the booming metropolis with almost 19 million people living here. Again we were welcomed to a lovely house of French expats couple Beatrice and Michel (yes, yes don't believe us, but we are practicing our French a bit and got to the decision - again - that there must have been something wrong with our stay in Strasbourg, as we find ourselves missing a word here and there in our french conversation). Shanghai is huge! Big skyscrapes, business and shopping centres, overcrowded underground and on the other side you see the old part, the poorer one with traditional architecture, small houses cramped beside each other, old chinese people practising their thaichi in a park and together with a french concession quarter it shows you completely different face of Shanghai. Again we were very lucky as Beatrice showed us around and almost as a local, speaking chinese in the markets getting better deals for us we saw the hidden corners and beautiful details which are not described in lonely planet. Michel introduced us to his German & Japanese colleagues and we have experienced the beauty of business dinners again. This is exactly what makes our journey so special. It is not just the visits of temples and seeing different landscapes, it is the people we meet, their views, philosophies and stories they share.

It will be difficult to leave Shanghai as we really enjoyed it here but it is time to take an overnight train (we will let you know how did it go) and make our way towards Beijing, stopping in a place called Qufu, hometown of Confucius.