Editing

I spent 3 hectic days sightseeing here. Actually, that's not strictly true - I had 2 hectic days sightseeing then on my third day I went for a 2 hour massage and then ate in a sandwich bar! I found Shanghai very interesting. Probably a good place to start because, whilst it's undoubtedly China, it is also quite Westernised in many respects. I wa...

Fa caldo. Tanto caldo. Troppo caldo. Quaranta gradi come niente e un'umidita' ridicola. Dopo quindici ore di treno, sul quale ho anche incontrato due poliziotti cinesi con i quali ho avuto una conversazione a gesti che mi ha ricordato tremendamente i miei giorni in Russia (uno di questi poliziotti mi ha anche domandato se potevo andare a casa su...

...No, Alex hasn't been cavorting with any "ladies of the night", instead the title of this blog refers to (one of) Shanghai's nickname reminiscent of the city's past, when British and French (and pretty much everywhere else) took advantage of Shanghai's position on the coast and turned it into China's busiest international ports, as well as a d...

Entry 2 of a trip titled: Butler's world tour 2008.

Travels......

Watch this space

Watch this space.

We decided to try and score plane tickets to Xi'an, and set off on foot into town to try and find CITS. We were worried that our five phrases of Chinese might not be enough to get the tickets we wanted. We somehow managed to avoid following the maps we had, very carefully mind you, and as the afternoon wore on, we vowed to just head into the nex...

After landing in Shangai, we got on the magic levitation train (or maglev, for short) and were whisked off to Hogwarts.... no, I'm thinking of something else. We got on the magnetic levitation train - ah, so that's where the last sentence started to go wrong - and rode to the nearest metro station, Long Yang Rd, and hopped on the metro. In peak ...

So far the trip will have been just travel without much sightseeing. Given that we have some time, we may chill here for a day before heading west to catch our cruise. We arrived in Shanghai around 6am, not quite as early as we'd hoped but that didn't really matter since it meant a better chance of getting a place to stay. We were hounded before...