Travel Memories: Shanghai, Shanghai, China

China is one of those countries you hear so much about on the news, especially here in Australia. It is a global economic powerhouse, a heavyweight in manufacturing and trade with countries all over the world. And I must admit I had been intrigued by it for quite some time. So when an opportunity came up to head to Shanghai for 4 days in October 2013 using one of the staff tickets my Dad used to get through working for an airline, I jumped at the chance. And we loved it so much, we decided to return to China seven months later, revisiting Shanghai and also taking in Beijing (click here to read my blog post about Beijing). This post is a combination of those two visits to Shanghai.

There is no question that travelling to China, particularly from a Western country, is a significant culture shock. There is a reasonable, but not insurmountable, language barrier, and social media is blocked*.

*On my first visit to Shanghai in 2013, I was surprised to be able to access Facebook and Twitter from my hotel room. By the time I returned the following year, this had changed (apart from one day when I seemed to have slipped through a loophole and managed to get into Twitter for about 5 minutes!). When I asked the hotel staff what had changed during the seven months between my stays, they told me a guest had abused the access privilege and all social media had since been clamped down on. But I talk more about this censorship in my Beijing post. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).