Second day In Shanghai

Woke up early to Chris's alarm feeling a lot less sick and a lot more awake. After a shower and realising that small microfibre towels are great in summer but not so great in winter we headed out. A bit sunnier today and nowhere near as freezing, a lovely day really!

First we headed to shanghai railway station to buy a ticket to hangzhou, after coming out of the wrong exit of the subway and me thinking it was all wrong we decided to try a different station, a flash of idea from chris has us use another metro exit and end up in the square I was familiar with and quickly find the ticket office.
I have no idea why there is always a big queue of chinese at the English language counter but today was no exception, we were served quickly still by a guy with great english and bought tickets to hangzhou for monday at 10.00 for 164y for two, £8 each!
This done we headed to UBC coffee nearby for a swanky coffee and late breakfast, a really nice iced coffee later (despite chris being caffine intolerant) we headed towards old town.
Old town is a remade and totally fake version of old shanghai with narrow streets and people selling all sorts of junk but pretty i suppose. Chris was keen to see the temple to the city god so we headed deeper into the labyrinth and saw a lovely small replica temple which we keenly photographed.
Chris unfortunately saw some probably fake coins, a few chinese and a few Mexican and decided to buy them all at the crazy initial asking price of £5 each! But at least got a small one free...
I nearly escaped without spending anything until after spending the morning bemoaning the lack of a small notebook I saw a small silk covered notebook in bright green i quite fancied, she asked 7 but quickly dropped to 4, expensive but nice, and a place to keep useful phrases and chinese characters that I can't write!

After this we walked around the corner and found a lovely replica tea house on a small lake, but covered in tourists, after a few pictures we headed away from it for a cheaper pot of tea.
In the next park we saw a small film crew videoing a young celebrity and after watching for a few minutes we headed into the cafe for some tea.
We sat inside and started our pots of tea and were discussing the map when a young guy asked in broken english if we would move tables, we did and then the young star sat down and the carried on filming their show in this small teahouse. After a while we finished our tea and were thanked by the director as we left. It was crazy with all the entourage packed into the small tea house and it wasn't until we had walked quite a way we remembered we hadn't paid! despite being told goodbye by the owner as we left. We didn't head back and decided that the film crew must have paid since we had to move, and only had the cheapest tea! Ooops!

We walked back onto the bund and walked up to the top watching the massive ships motoring through central shanghai before heading out for some dinner.
For dinner I was keen to head to Simon's test kitchen, a restaurant I liked a lot last time and was very fairly priced.
We looked up directions and headed out changshu station. After wandering around for half an hour or so (and finding an expensive paulaner beer serving restaurant that we are saving for when we are rich) but no test kitchen we eventually gave in and checked the map for somewhere else to eat. It was then we noticed a changshu station and 3 stops up a changshou station, that O became all important and so we headed off towards this second station.
On arrival we found the kitchen in now time and found it to be empty on the saturday night and so ate there.

We ordered spicy noodles with peanut sauce, pork xiaolongbao (dumplings?), spinach and pork xiaolongbao, and some sweet sticky rice that chris fancied.
We both didn't like the rice so ordered carrot and spice xiaolongbao and some more pork ones, as they were so good!
Turns out they are their speciality....

After all that we headed back to the bund and walked back up to the hostel to rest our legs and relax with a well deserved beer.

I must learn how to make those tasty tasty xiaolongbao!

Last day in shanghai tomorrow! Not sure what we will do though, hopefully something cheap...!