Shanghai, China

Yesterday, a day that was both long and short left me in a fog. We arrived in Shanghai after a 15 plus hour plane trip, direct from Atlanta, at around 2 in the afternoon. After a quick trip through customs and a bus ride downtown I found my self on the rooftop patio for with a beer by 5pm. (Time wise I am 13 hours ahead of Memphis, or Central Standard Time) The flight went much better than I thought. I fell into a rotation of movie, stretching, and then an hour long nap.

We met in the lobby of our extremely nice hotel, HengSheng Peninsula International (four stars!) to head over to the Bund of Shanghai for dinner. Shanghai is a city of anywhere between 18 to 22 million people. The government really wants it to supplant Hong Kong as the financial capital of China. The sky line is more impressive than Manhattan. There are skyscrapers as far as the eye can see in any direction.

So far the people in my group seem great. Everyone is pretty excited about the itinerary and the stuff we will see and do. And after doing some research into the places that we are staying the trip seems to be pretty first rate. I crashed last night around 9:30pm and then woke up around 5ish this morning. Today we have a pretty full day on our plate. We will explore Shanghai in more detail. First we are going to the Bund, then head to the Yu Garden, and then finish with Xintiandi before we take an overnight sleeper train to Beijing.

Upon our arrival to Beijing we will go to Tiananmen Square, Imperial Palace (Forbidden City), the Summer Palace, and then after checking into our hotel, the Plaza Royal Hotel, we will attend the Legend of Kungfu Performance.

Here is a rough map of our group’s travels while in China. (Link)

Pete Panda Bear…., out.