Shanghai

I took the overnight train from Beijing to Shanghai and arrived at about 7am in the morning. Travel by train in China is quite typical, much more so than in the US, and they have fairly comfortable overnight compartments. In fact, there usually are 4 classes - hard seater, soft seater, hard sleeper, and soft sleeper. While cheap, it must be unnecessarily difficult to go overnight via hard/soft seaters, as the sleepers are much preferred for the 13 hour journey. However, they were out of hard sleepers (which cost a little less than 200 RMB), and so I had to settle for a soft sleeper. It was about 500 RMB ($70), which is a bit on the expensive side, but as I had never ridden soft sleeper before, I didn't mind paying a bit extra for the experience.

It turned out that the train I was on only had soft sleeper compartments, and each compartment could house 4 people. It also turned out that while there was a lot of extra room on the train, my ticket was for a bed in a full compartment. Not that I'm against having neighbors, but it ended up there wasn't a lot of room with all the luggage I had on hand.




Anyhow, I decided to go to the dining car to get dinner. I ended up getting Lion's Head (not literally, it's a Chinese meatball dish) and some vegetables, which were surprisingly good:

Afterwards, I slept pretty well in the soft sleeper and woke up about an hour before we arrived. At Shanghai station, someone was offering to give me a ride, and kept asking me where I was trying to go. I ignored him, and tried to find the official taxi stand. When he saw I finally figured it out, heading for the underground passage where all the taxis were lined up, he tried to dissuade me by telling me it's the wrong way - only the subway was underground. It didn't quite work, but it's interesting what desperate lies people tell to try to win business.

I took the taxi to my aunt and uncle's house way out in Pudong. It is in quite a nice development, but unfortunately the seclusion meant that the taxi fair was quite high. I was quite unaccustomed to have to pay 75 RMB for a taxi ride when rides usually were around 20+ RMB in Beijing. Even the crosstown rides were only about 50 RMB...