Ticket Problems (China)

The Bund, Shanghai

I am writing from an internet cafe in Beijing, China. Some friends and I took a 12 hour train ride last night from Shanghai to Beijing and it was amazing. Things are going well right now, we are currently making our way through the city of Beijing towards the Forbidden City and Tian'naman Square and tomorrow we are going to the Great Wall. We are going to be taking the train back to Shanghai where we will take a plane on the 16th to Hong Kong. Right now we are about a day ahead of you, it is currently 10am on the 14th. Shanghai was incredible! I walked around Old Shanghai, around all the markets and saw a lot of poverty. Overall things are going well and I am very excited to be here. There is just so much to say, I don't know where to begin.

12 hour train ride

The flight from San Francisco was long but after seeing the city as we traveled through it to our hotel energized me to explore the city. At night, the entire city is lit up by its 2,000+ highrise buildings in the downtown area. It is very bright! The entire trip out to Beijing has been an eye opening experience since people here are not so friendly to Americans. we went up to a ticket window in Beijing to get our train tickets back to Shanghai and even though we had Chinese lettering telling them what we needed, they refused to help and left the window. We then went to an international hotel where an English speaking woman called the train station to find if there were any tickets available for us and she told us there weren't any for the day we wanted to leave so I asked if there were any leaving tonight that had any room and without hesitation she said no, so we figured that she wasn't trying to help at all. We continued to a travel agency and got our tickets with no problem.

Old Shanghai

So now I am sitting here in the internet cafe with five of my friends, all of us are at computers writing back home. We're with a good travel group, we're not too big but big enough to be able to split up if someone wants to go into a store and someone else wants to go into another. Things are going well, we have been trying to find phones that allow the use of international phone cards but all of them thus far take some sort of credit card type thing. Still haven't figured out how to use them.

We are going to try and get a hotel or a hostel near the Great Wall tonight so we can get up early tomorrow and have the entire day to see it. I have a lot of pictures already and so many will be taken in the next 24 hours and a lot of video footage too!

Alright, we're heading out. Just know that we are ok and are enjoying every minute in China. Hope things are going well back home. I'll try and call home or email again sometime.