More on Shanghai...and a taste of Hong Kong nightlife!

Hello readers!

I find out every day more and more people who have been keeping up with our travels on our blog – so thanks!

We safely arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday afternoon, after the train ride from hell. It was a 20 hour train from Shanghai and I won’t get into details, but it was awful. Also, I ate something bad on the train – and ended up with a stomach bug for 24 hours. Luckily, we are staying with my friend Rachel “Patch” Adams in HK, so I had a comfortable place to be very, very ill. And, I am now recovered! Phew.

The rest of our trip in Shanghai was much better than that first day. If you take a trip there, I would recommend staying away from the touristy areas like the walk from People’s Square to The Bund. That is where we experienced all the craziness and people trying to scam us…everywhere else we went was just fine. We really loved the French Concession area and Taikang Lu area (which is a cute little maze of artsy shops and streets and restaurants where we bought cool communist propaganda stuff.) Also, on that Monday night, we at an amazing restaurant! “Lost Heaven” is the name of the place. It was in the French Concession and was probably our best meal yet on the entire trip so far! The food was from the Yunnan province and was very fresh- and the spices they used were so different than what we are used to. Although I stuck to TsingDao - the Chinese beer – this was the night Matt got patriotic and switched to Bud.

In any case, I would highly recommend Lost Heaven to anyone going to Shanghai.

One night in Shanghai, we went out with some of our friends from the ferry (see picture above). Kevin lives in Shanghai and took us to some really cool clubs which, even on a Tues. night, were pretty bumpin'. Yes, I said bumpin.

Since we have been in Hong Kong, we haven’t done too much (since I was really sick), but Patch and her friend Andy did show us around the bars in Central and took us to a great Peking Duck restaurant. Hong Kong is off the hook as far as nightlife goes. I have never seen so many cool bars all in a row! It was crazier than New Orleans – I’m telling you. It’s strange though, because the area they mainly hang out in is all ex-pats so you see very few Chinese people. That is definitely a change from everywhere else we have visited in Asia. Granted, we probably need to get out of the “Central” area and see a bit more of this city. Hopefully, we will do that today.

Of what I have seen so far, Hong Kong is a very, very cool city – a very clean city – and most people speak English. It is quite different from our other China experiences. We did expect the difference – but not this great of a difference!

Tomorrow, Patch has rented a junk boat for her birthday. About 15 of her friends will all be onboard and it will be a little food and booze cruise going around to 3 different beaches! The weather here has been great…so I’m really looking forward to it!

After that, we are off to Vietnam… we haven’t planned that leg of our trip AT ALL so we have a lot of work to do today.

- Miss you all -

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