My 3 days (06-March to 09-March) trip to Shanghai, China was tiring yet fun. We were only two in the trip since we were not able to look for other people who wanted to join us. Nevertheless, it was just okay.
We arrived Shanghai 11:45 in the evening, and as expected, it was super cold. Upon exiting the airplane, we immediately felt the coldness that we’ve been wanting to experience while we were still in Manila. We have already booked our hotels for the 3 nights of stay there, but unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned, but in the end became a favor for us.
Our first night hotel was booked at PuDong Avenue for 190 RMB, which we thought was the branch in the airport itself. We walked and looked for it, but was told that it was a different branch and their cheapest room is at 358 RMB. The original plan was to go to the city center the morning after because we know that taking a cab on the wee hours would be very expensive. But due to this unfortunate instance, we decided to just take a taxi (178 RMB) to go to the city center that night, which was about 45 minutes travel from the airport. Luckily, I saw a cheap hotel on the Internet and it was just very near to the hotel we booked for our 2nd and 3rd nights. We checked in there and found out that the rooms were only 170 RMB per night (and we’ll still split that into 2). Wow! What an inexpensive hotel! We decided to stay there for the rest of our stay. So I called the agency that booked our hotel and canceled our reservations for the next 2 nights.
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The morning after, we started walking and doing site seeing. It was very cold, thus we wore 2 layers of socks, warmers, and 3 layers of top garments. We went to the Yu Yuan Garden and Bazaar, Old City, “tiyangge”, Xintiandi, and The Bund for our first day. On the second day, we went to the awesome Shanghai Science and Technology Musem where we spent about 6 hours finishing the entire museum that costed us 60 RMB entrance fee - it was worth it! Afterwhich, we roamed around and went up to the 350-meter high Oriental Pearl Tower, where we saw the beauty of Shanghai up above the ground. Third day marked our departure night, but it didn’t stop us from cruising the Huangpu River and walking down the no. 1 shopping district of Shanghai - Nanjing Dong Lu. We also spent some time relaxing and doing people-watching at the People’s Square, where we watched thousands of people crossing the streets. Our last stop was to watch the Incredible! Acrobats of China. It was AMAZING and truly INCREDIBLE!!! Something nice happened to us there, but I refuse to tell the story. (“,)
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When the acrobatic show ended, we hurriedly took a cab back to our hotel to pick up our bags and soon enough took another scheduled pick-up taxi going to the airport. We were quite early for our check-in time, but it was there where I saw the Filipinos I’ve been searching all in our 3 days of stay there.
Shanghai isn’t a place for sight-seeing and shopping and neither a place to go to if you’re not fond of eating a no-rice meals. Their water stinks (even the drinking water) and some places tend to be dusty. Like any other country, they have a lot of nice people, as well as a number of scammers and moody locals. Make sure you bring a person who knows how to speak Mandarin when visiting Shanghai. But you know what, over-all, Shanghai is a nice place to visit to experience their culture and their place. We should all look forward to the opening of the Shanghai Expo and Disneyland in 2010.
P.S. For China tours and hotel reservations, I would like to recommend SINOHOTEL. They reply fast and they are very nice.
