Welcome to my travel blog!!

你 好

I have decided to write a travel blog whilst im in shanghai so people can read about what i've been up to, and its quicker to write this than sending emails to everyone.
Dont write any comments on my blog because it wont let me read them!!
If anyone wants to write to me (or send me a birthday card/present for my 21st - 30th october) my address is:
Room 402
Foreign Guest House
Shanghai Normal University
100 Guilin Road
Shanghai
China

So heres what ive been up to since i arrived:

27/28th August
This was the start of the longest journey ever - well about 18 hours from leaving Manchester to arriving in Shanghai. It was very exciting flying on the emirates plane after going on small easyjet planes for the past few years, and there was nice food and soooooooooo many films to watch. We arrived in Dubai at midnight and had 3 hours until we got ur transfer plane. I was very excited when i discovered that there was a wireless network I could use in the airport so that helped to pass the time. The second plane journey wasnt very exciting because I slept most of the way.
When we were walking into the main bit of the airport there was someone holding a sign with my name on which was really cool. The university had arranged for Lily to come pick us up because she's going to Newcastle for her year abroad in a couple of weeks. Her parents came and they drove us to campus. It was a bit of an effort for them to lift Beki's suitcase into the car. It is actually the biggest suitcase I have ever seen and after she'd taken some stuff out at manchester airport it still weighed about 35kg!
We got to the uni campus which is in the xuhui district of shanghai which is south-west of the centre. We are staying in the foreign students guesthouse which is just like a hotel. Its so nice. Frankie and I managed to get our room sorted out ok, but the woman at reception couldnt find Beki and Gemma's names on the list of people staying there. But then it turned out that they were staying in another building on campus.
We went to our room and it was just like being in a 4* hotel and there was a massive tv and big arm chairs. But it was so crap because there were no desks and no storage space so I was having to live out of my suitcase. It was really nice if you were going on holiday for a couple of weeks, but really impractical for students to live there for a whole year.
After we'd got our rooms sorted and had a shower we met Beki and Gemma and went to get something to eat. There are quite a few places to eat on campus so we went to a little place that has dumplings and Gemma ordered one of everything on the menu. They were really nice and I successfully managed to use chopsticks. And the food was so cheap, we had so many dumplings and it cost less than £1.
We went to have a look around the little supermarket on campus to see what food they had. There was nothing too strange. Although there were packets of chicken feet which looked gross.

29th August
I slept for 16 hours last night, which didnt help with the jetlag. Frankie and I decided to go exploring the centre of shanghai so we walked to the nearest metro station which was about 15minutes away and got the metro to the people's square. On the way to the metro we got a bit lost so i attempted to ask a chinese woman (in chinese) where it was and she didnt undertand a word i said, great!
We walked down Nanjing road which is one of the main shopping streets and there were so many annoying people coming up to us and asking if we would like to buys watches, shoes and bags. One guy wouldnt leave us alone so we ran into the nearest shop to hide from him and he came and found us, soooooooo annoying. We saw a phone shop so we went to get a chinese simcard which was really easy to do, but when I put mine in my phone it wouldnt work so I had to buy a new phone. But I managed to get a phone for 355yuan which is only £26. We walked around for a while and walked to the bund and saw the pearl tower which was really cool.
We were getting hungry so we found a nice restaurant just near the river. On the menu they had interesting things like frog, and tortoise and chicken soup, but I was really exciting and had fried rice with chicken!!

30th August
Because we slept so long on the first night it was impossible to sleep last night and I only had about 3 hours sleep. We got up and decided to go find somewhere we can use the internet because we couldnt log onto the uni network. We got the metro to shanghai library which was really cool, such a huge building, and the internet was 30p for an hour, i cant get over how cheap everything is. Afterwards we went to go and find a huge outdoor market that was in frankie's guidebook and we got a bit lost and ended up in a really nice park which was full of crazy people, and people walking round in their pyjamas. But then we discovered that the park was next to a hospital. We tried to find the market again but we couldnt find it so we went to get something to eat. This restaurant also had some interesting things on the menu - the was porcupine, and fried cow's stomach. gross. I went for sweet and sour pork.
I decided to ask one of the waitress' where the market was and she didnt really understand what I was saying because my chinese is soooooo bad, but there was a guy there who spoke english and he told me that the market had been closed down and it was now a building site, sooooooooo annoying.
We went to Huaihai road which is a really good shopping street. We went into watsons which is the equivalent of boots to get some insect repellent. One of the women who worked there came up and me and started saying something and pointing at my nose. I thought she was just saying that I had a big nose, but she gave me this stuff and an english leaflet which explained that whatever she had given me would get rid of my freckles. HOW RUDE. She was very keen for me to buy it but I told her that I didnt want it. Also on Huaihai road we round H&M.
On the metro going back to uni it was so busy and full of people staring at us because we're not chinese - people stare all the time. There was this one man stood behind me and he kept blowing on my neck, it was so gross.

31st August
We set our alarm for 10am because we thought that if we got up early it would help with the jetlag but it was so much effort getting up early. We decided to go on the bus to xujiahui which is the next district from where we live and theres loads of shops there. It was a lot like the centre of shanghai with big shopping centres and huge buildings. We found an underground market which was really exciting. Lots of cheap clothes. We went into one of the shoe shops and there were some sandles I really liked but my feet were too big for a lot of the shoes and i'm only size 4. I managed to get some in another shop and a few clothes. We got on the metro into town and went to the bund. We were just sat by the river and this girl and her mum came up to us and started pointing at their camera and we thought that they wanted us to take their picture. But they wanted frankie to be in a picture with them. It was so funny, the woman made her husband take a picture of her and her daughter with frankie. Aparantly they like to have their photos taken with white people because they are a bit of a novelty!

1st September
They eat so early in China. The breakfast in our halls is 7 - 8.30, lunch is 11.30 till 1 and then in the evening its 6 - 7.30.
We got up at half 10 and by the time we were ready it was about half 11 so we decided to go and eat in our canteen cos we hadnt actually eaten there yet, and we thought we'd see if there were any other foreign students, and there werent any, there were just loads of chinese people which is quite wierd because its the foreign students guesthouse.
We went to see if Gemma and Beki were awake, and we met their crazy cleaner. We knocked on Gemma's door and she didnt answer so we assumed she was still asleep, but the cleaner came and used her key to unlock the door and we kept telling her not to open the door and then we'd come back later but the cleaner thought it was so funny. She opened the door and went in, and just started laughing at Gemma when she was asleep.wierd.
In the afternoon we met Sunny. She was my tandem partner in newcastle last year and shes doing her final year of uni this year. She showed us round the campus, and we discovered that the campus actually went onto the other side of the road and it was loads bigger than we thought. Sunny showed us her dorm room which was awful. Its so small. There are 3 bunk beds and 2 tables in between and there is no space. I dont know how 6 people can live in such a small place. They dont even have their own bathroom, they have to share with the other people that live on the same floor as them, and they have communal showers so there is no privacy.

2nd September
Frankie, Beki and I went to the airport to go and meet sarah and fran. We decided to get some lunch before we went so we went into a random restaurant where they had pictures of the food, and it was really hard to tell what it was. Frankie and Beki thought they'd ordered chicken but they got some strange yellow meat. And I got something so strange, don't have a clue what it was, and it wasnt very nice! We went on the maglev train to the airport which takes only takes 7 minutes and goes up to 431k/hr, sooooo fast. We met sarah and fran, and when we got back to halls and they we're in the same building as me and frankie, but on the floor below us. Their room was so nice and a lot cheaper than ours, and it had desks and storage space so we went to ask reception if there were any spare rooms down there and they said we had to wait 2 days and then they would know if they had any spare room.
We all went to a little restaurant just next to uni to get some tea and I had some chips, they were so nice. I miss english food.

3rd September
Today we had to register at uni which wasnt very exciting. We had to go to loads of different rooms to register, and get our photo taken, and do other stuff. In one of the rooms we got given a bag with a free university tshirt and some general information about the uni. We got to see the other foreign students who were mostly Japanese and Korean. The last stage of registering was a little oral test and I couldnt even understand the first question that the woman asked me, it was so bad. I was put in elementary level 2 class which is second from bottom. We are all in this class apart from gemma who got put in the one above us. After registering we met 2 guys from Turkey and went to get some lunch with them in our halls, but they wouldnt eat anything because they dont like chinese food - bit of an error coming to china then. Afterward lunch some of us went to the big shanghai library again to use the internet and then we went back to Huaihai road to do a bit of shopping. On the way to Huaihai road it started raining loads and we didnt have umberellas, not good. We saw a Mister Donut tho and went in there to get something to eat and try and dry off. They had a really good english magazine to read with a list of loads of bars and clubs in shanghai so we stole it because we thought it would be useful.

4th September
This morning we went on a mission to find the English supermarket. We got really lost and asked several people for directions but no one seemed to know where to go. We asked one lady who was so helpful. She took us to a bus stop and waited for the right bus to come, and then she told the bus driver to tell us when to get off. So thanks to her we managed to get there. It was in a really posh shopping centre. It was quite expensive but worth it, I bought a couple of boxes of rice krispies so i can have a normal english breakfast. They had an english book shop so I bought a radical book which should be useful. When we got back to our room we discovered that we had been locked out so we went down to reception and said that our key wasnt working and they said that they'd locked us out because we havent paid our rent. So we explained that we were waiting to see if we could change rooms and they said that there was a spare room and we could move straight away. So we moved down to the same floor as fran and sarah and the room is so much better. Im no longer living out of my suitcase!
Later on we got a call from Beki asking if we wanted to go to pizza hut. so we got on the bus to xujiahui and met them. This was the worst meal we've had since we've been here. The pizza wasnt very nice and so much more expensive than all the other food.
We got the bus back from xujiahui and when i stepped off the bus there was a little moped cutting round on the inside of the bus, and it hit me just as i stepped off the bus. It was so funny. The guy was really concerned that he'd hurt me but I couldnt stop laughing and he just looked really confused. Its so bad trying to cross roads or even walking down the pavement because there are cars and mopeds and bicycles everywhere.

5th September
Today we went to ikea which is just near uni and got a few things for our room. It was so exciting. We had lunch there which was exciting, it was just the same as what you'd get in england. After we left all our stuff in our room frankie and i went to the bicycle shop up the road and bought new bicycles. I have decided that cycling is safer than walking. It was so nice to cycle down the road, and we pointlessly cycled around campus because we love our bikes.
Sunny and Vanessa came to our halls for tea and they ordered some things off the menu that they thought we would like to try. There was some kind of fish that was really nice, but i tried to tofu for the first time and it wasnt very nice, and there was a strange kind of soup that wasnt very nice either. Tomorrow night we're going to karaoke with them for sunny's birthday, how exciting!