From Shanghai to Xitang

Okay, so I got TO the Expo. Unfortunately, I did little more than that. I went to the ticket stands to try and buy an evening ticket so I could walk around for an hour or two and see some of the exhibits. Unfortunately, the whole entry was a little too complicated and in Chinese for me to take advantage of the Expo. There were several lines for several types of tickets and I never did figure out for sure which line I was supposed to be in. I walked around the facilities and never found an entrance. These things, coupled with the negative reviews that I had heard about the Expo, influenced me to walk around, take some pictures and then return to the hostel. At the hostel was another night of drinking Tsingtao and Tiger until closing time at 2:00 am.

That ended my only full-day in Shanghai. The next morning, we boarded a two-hour bus to Xitang. Xitang is a city on a river delta with lots of canals and, thus, a lot of bridges. It appears to be very much the tourist town, though a tourist town with a difference. In the day/night that we were there, we didn’t see another non-Asian person, so it appeared that the majority of the tourists were Chinese.

There were a lot of little stands in the Old City portion of Xitang, which is also where the canals are located. The stands sold local candy and artsy-craftsy type stuff that is very common in little stands in tourist areas. Close to the entrance of the Old City were also a long string of bars, night clubs, cafes and the like. The tourist stands closed fairly early as I watched many of them shutting down before 8:00pm. The bars, of course, stayed open later.

After arriving in Xitang, we took a walking tour around the Old City and then went to dinner. Nothing out of the ordinary here: duck, chicken and beef in a variety of sauces with rice. Afterwards, a few of us took a cruise along the canals. Not quite a Venetian gondola, but it was a pleasant way to spend around 25-minutes to see the tourist spots from a different perspective.

The next morning, I walked around the Old City and looked around to see what it looked like in the daylight. For the record, it looks better at night with all of the red candle lamps glowing, but it was attractive enough for a group of Chinese art students to come by and paint the surrounding scenes. A class of about forty students lined the walkways in the early-morning hours.

I also walked around the new city to forage for food and other items for the upcoming 28-hour trek to Yangshuo. Shortly after noon, we boarded a two-hour bus from Xitang back to Shanghai. From there, it was a 24-hour train from Shanghai to Gullin. Lest we get tired of travelling, upon arriving at Gullin, we promptly hopped a bus from Gullin to Yangshuo. The trip, although long, was fairly uneventful. There was a late-night charge to the food car after we ran out of the rice liquor that we were drinking, but we were turned away. On the bus to Yangshuo, the most interesting part of the trip was watching the driver’s assistant break out some little blue stools for people to sit on once all of the seats in the bus were occupied.

At the moment, I am in my hotel room in Yangshuo, where I arrived yesterday evening. It’s Thursday, October 14, 2010 when I write this. At the moment, I have no idea when it will be posted, but I will start posting things when I get to Hong Kong, and have access to the blog once I reach Vietnam, so hopefully we’ll get up-to-date someday.