Days 9 & 10 - Shanghai & Heading Home!

We arrived in Shanghai after our 12 hour train ride from Beijing, exhausted. We took a cab to our hotel which was an experience. A shady guy in a tan jacket tried to get us to go with him for 80 RMB to an unmarked car...we followed for a little while and didn't see a taxi meter so we declined. He insisted .. we argued a bit and finally he relented. We found a metered cab and got to our hotel for 6 RMB. The hotel was an oasis in a foggy, smoggy, rainy city.

Exhausted, we ordered room service, showered, watched Patch Adams (hehe) and took a nap. We had planned on going to an acrobat show in the evening but ended up spending a good bit of time at the Shanghai Harbor & the Bund taking photos and just enjoying the scenery.

We took a cab back to the hotel and enjoyed an overpriced, but tasty dinner.

Day 10 began with room service breakfast and a cab ride to the Yuan Gardens. We never made it to the gardens (probably because of some language issue) but did make it to a pretty sweet street market. We had lunch at Pizza Hut because I am not sure our stomachs could take anymore noodles or Chinese food. Walked the streets for a while, developed nausea from the food being cooked on the street (again there were pig ears, odd sea horse/lizard looking things on a stick and cooked pig snouts) and cabbed it back to the hotel.

We are pretty much really, really ready to come home at this point so we rented a few DVDs from the hotel and watched an awful M. Night Shamalayn movie and the latest Mummy.

Called it a pretty early night as we had to get up at 5 am to get to the airport.

At Shanghai airport now heading to Tokyo, on to Detroit then finally to Atlanta. It's 8:30 AM local time in Shanghai on Friday and we'll get to Atlanta at 5:30 PM Friday. Bizarre how we gain an entire day given that our flight time is ~24 hours.

Overall, we had an incredible time. Saw things we'll probably never see again - Great Wall, Beijing Olympic sites, Hong Kong Harbor, pig snouts on the street, and Shanghai. It was an awesome trip and a once in a lifetime oppty.

Looking forward to getting home! Thanks for following our adventure!!

(we'll add photos when we get to Atlanta)