Shanghai'd in Shanghai

Ok guys,
I've FINALLY found a place with the internet. Seriously, for a country priding itself for growing technology, I'm stuck on a dial up LAN connection in my hotel room (because I don't have a laptop to plug into the wireless in my room).
Anyways, alot has happened since I last blogged that I was in Thailand.
So here goes...

Well, we left China for Shenzhen, and when we got there, we couldn't find a taxi that would take us to where we were staying. Mostly because they couldn't understand alphanumerics - which really sucked coz when we hailed a taxi and showed him, he just waved his hand and moved up to let someone else in. After that, at the whole taxi bay, no one would take us on. After that incident, we trudged back to the inside of the airport, and asked one of the security guard people type with white shirts and a red arm scarf to write it out in Chinese so that we could go home. We were absolutely buggered due to lack of sleep. It took a while for soemone to fill out the blanks for us, and when we FINALLY found soemone to take us to our hotel, we were pretty shitty with China.
We arrived at our hotel at probably a bit past 1am (forgot the name), and just passed out. We caught up on a few precious hours of sleep and woke up and left the hotel again at 6ish to catch a flight to Xian.

In Xian, we learnt our lesson and got the place we were staying at translated into the Chinese characters and were sucked into a tour thing. The tour we took was actually pretty good. First we went to see the terracotta soldiers which was ABSOLUTELY AWESOME!! We had a tour guide with us, which was also a brilliant idea coz she gave us an indepth description of everything that happened, the surroundings, what the Chinese government is doing now, and what they're fixing/restoring. AWESOME. I love this part of Xian very much. The lady that drove us (named Rose) was a really scarey looking lady, but as it turns out, looks can be deceiving because she was actually a really nice person. She told us what we should look out for, how we shouldn't pay more than a certain amount for soemthing, and told us when we got ripped off. Man, those places rip tourists off like no tomorrow. So not fair. Although I did buy some rather nice black jade bracelets to give to family. We even saw a sphinx and an Egyptian pyramid whilst in China~! Anyways, after the great trip to the terracotta soldies, we went to see one of the emporers burial/memorial site and climbed up what felt like a billion stairs. When we got up top though, the view was absolutely magnificent. The scenes of country China was actually breathtaking behind the backdrop of the mountains. The third place we went to was ... (20 mins later) some bath house that an emporer built for one of his beloved concubines. It took so long to figure out the last one. I'm really tired. Well anyways, by that stage I was pretty exhausted so I didn't want to go with a tour guide. I just wanted to go abck to the hotel we were at, shower and crawl into bed. Which we did do when we got back.

After that night, we left again for Shanghai and by that stage, lack of sleeping was making us all edgey/moody. We got to Shanghai, and as we were looking at our maps, some dude calls out to us and we thought we'd ask for help. When we got there, he somehow managed to con us into staying at another hotel called Lakeside hotel or soemthing, which costs roughly the same amount as the one we had originally booked. When we got there, it was nothing like the brochure he showed us. The place was HORRIBLE. It stank, and worse, our toilet didn't flush!!

Ok ok.
round two of this will be posted tomorrow after my shopping spree. It's 1233am and I am absolutely buggered from today.
Signing off til further notice, Thao
.x0x.