Adventures in Shanghai 2008 - Part 1

KL --> Hangzhou --> Shanghai

Day 1 started off with an early flight from KL to Hangzhou.

I woke up at 4am to get ready, as the gals and I had to meet each other at KL Sentral at 4:45am. We wanted to hop on the 5am bus to LCCT.

Gosh, it was super tiring.

The AirAsia X aircraft was huge and I was amazed with the amount of leg room and how comfortable the flight was. I actually had no idea that our flight would take 5 hrs, it's almost as far as Perth man.

The same nasi lemak was RM8 on the normal AirAsia flight. However, it costs RM25 here. I was glad I had my nasi lemak at the airport a while ago, and it cost me only RM9.90. :)

We Malaysians were actually the minority on the flight. It was actually filled with Mainland Chinese ppl.

I couldn't really sleep much as there were these 2 women who were speaking in very high-pitched Mandarin the entire time. Gosh, I was tempted to ask her to "cut it out".

As soon as we touched down, way before the captain make his announcement, you can see ppl releasing their seat belts, getting outta their seats and started unloading their handcarry from the overhead compartment. The air stewards were having a hard time - nope, a terrible time, trying to control these ppl to behave.

It got worst when we started hearing the sound of mobile phones being turned on. The annoying *beep* *beep* *beep* sound was everywhere. (see pix below).

Talk about having no respect for safety!

Gosh, you should have seen the how black the air stewardesses' faces were. They were totally cheesed off. All they could utter was an exasperated, "Can you please NOT turn on your handphones now!".

Hangzhou (HZ)

At 1:20pm, it was raining and the sky was gloomy. Cannot be right? How can such weather welcome our arrival?

We have decided to catch the airport shuttle from HZ to Shanghai(SH) that will depart at 2:15pm. It was estimated that the ride will take about 2-3 hrs.

Initially, we wanted to take a train to SH as that will only take about about 1hr15mins if we board the D train and 1hr45mins if we missed the D train. However, after taking into consideration the time it'll take us to take a cab to the train station (45 mins) and the "what if's" of missing the train, which would then stretch the waiting + travel time to more than 3 hrs, we decided to just take the shuttle bus.

We were famished when we arrived. And after checking with the attendants when the bus is leaving and where we should wait (gosh, I had so much trouble getting used to speaking virtually 100% Mandarin only..my tongue was literally twisted!), we went hunting for food.

Was so happy when we saw this..

Gosh, they have such cute bears for their Happy meal! I want one too!

Seriously everything was in Chinese, I had trouble ordering. All I could say was "Gimme me set no.7 to take away" (in Mandarin). When I asked for ketchup, no one could understand. Sigh, i almost didn't get my ketchup until a guy helped me to translate.

This gave me an idea of how things might be when we get to Shanghai. Better get used to speaking in Mandarin. Fast!

So, i turned on my Cantonese mode. From now on, i'll translate English --> Cantonese --> Mandarin.

That worked pretty well for me for the next few days. :)

Getting a glimpse of Hangzhou...
We'll be returning on the last day and will tour HZ the entire day. Bye for now HZ~

When we arrived at NanPu Bus Station at 6pm, the sight was pretty miserable. It was wet and very dirty. As the bus station was directly underneath a couple of flyovers, whenever cars drove past, water would splash downwards towards us. It was pretty gross.

We couldn't find cabs as there were none. They were all outside by the main road, and we were stranded cos we didn't have a brolly.

Then, some MPV drivers approached us and offered to take us to our hotel for 60 yuan - which we thought was pretty reasonable seeing that this Msian guy, Zul whom we've met on the bus said that it'll cost us around 60-80 yuan to get to our hotel.

Note: It's actually pretty normal for ppl to take MPVs instead of taxis. MPVs are called 'Mien Pao Che' (Min Pao Ceh in Cantonese - literally a Bread Van). Zul helped to hail one for us when he got one for himself. Later, he told us that they wanted to charge him 150 yuan to his place, but he managed to cut it down.

Christine getting into a Mien Pao che.

What we didn't know is that our hotel was just bloody down the road. Gosh, talk about getting con!!!!!!

It only took us 5 mins to arrive. Geez man!!

This was the most undeserving purchase we've made the entire trip man. Even our 45 mins cab ride to Hong Mei Lu (where Pearl Market is) only cost us about 48 yuan (we went to the Pearl Market on our 3rd day in Shanghai).

Didn't manage to reduce the price with the driver as he said we've agreed on the price when we entered the van. But but but, we didn't know it's so darn near!

*Promise to self: must not get con anymore!!!

It was a miserable Friday night, as everywhere we turned, we saw only umbrellas. And we were sharing 2 brollies among the 3 of us. We all got pretty drenched actually.

Food stalls under the bridge

We saw a couple of food stalls set up under the bridge. But we banned this particular stall as, it was located directly underneath the edge of the flyover and splashy of water would get into her food whenever a vehicle drives past.

This particular stall was safe from the water as it was situated right in the middle of the bridge. And the aromatic fragrance of the fried noodles were very tempting. We settled for 2 plates of fried noodles. 5 yuan for a plate.

We wanted to check out the Fabric Market (cos we wanted to tailor made some clothes) but were disappointed when we found out that the market was already closed.

With nowhere to go (we didn't wanna check out Xin Tian Di as planned as it was raining cats and dogs and it would have been a damper!), we decided to do some grocery shopping at Trust-mart.

Look what we found @ Trust-mart!

Bikes for sale! Lots and lots of them.

Then we found some socks with Simon Yam's face on the packaging.

And Twins too.
Are these for real or what??

Here comes my fave part.

I love checking out snacks, what they don't have and what they have that we don't.

Gosh, what an array of flavours for Pringle!

Pesto Italiano, Greek Mezes, Salt & Pepper, Aromatic Crispy Chicken, Salade de Parisienne, Hot & Spicy.

Have you ever heard of/seen fruity flavoured potato chips?

Well, Lays has introduced Lychee, Apple, Apricot, etc. flavoured chips.

These Potepo by Glico are super addictive.

We had dinner at Little Lamb at around 9pm as we were still stuffed from the fried noodles. No, it wasn't this bright at 9pm. I took this picture the next morning as I couldn't take a picture of the place as it was raining cats and dogs then.

As we were walking past Little Lamb to Trust-mart, we were so enticed by the smell that we decided we'd have dinner there.

What? No English?

'Zhao le' (oh no!)

I couldn't read Chinese well, so I had to ask the waitress in Chinese to order for us. Thank God I could still understand what she was saying, hence I was able to tell her what we wanted.

I was so grateful for this bottle of coke. I dunno why...
Maybe i needed the sugar rush.

We ordered half pot of herbal soup, and another half sichuan spicy (ma-lat) soup.

Dumped some turnips into the soup to make it sweeter.

Pork balls (with meat inside the balls), and sliced beefs. Notice we didn't order any lamb at all.

I could barely touch my food as i was still full from the noodles. Though we ordered very little, we still had some leftovers.

Don't get me wrong, the food was great. I especially love the herbal soup. But i just couldnt stomach anything savoury then.

Dinner came up to about 80+ yuan.

We were all glad to retire to our service apartment for an early nighter.

Though Day 1 didn't start out that interesting, however the rest of the trip made up for it.

Stay tuned. :)