It’s the last week here and I remember counting down with my friends everyday to the end of the trip. Basically everybody was either flying home or travelling so I scheduled my time to spend as much time as with them as possible. So from Saturday to Sunday, this was what I did
Saturday – spend time with khaisheen playing badminton
Sunday – spend time with frank because he leaves for XiAn
Monday – zile and josh leaves for XiAn and we went for lunch
Tuesday – eat dinner with my theme seniors
Wednesday – Shanghai trip!
Thursday – Shanghai trip (yes solo)
Friday – settle some admin stuff with sheen
Saturday – spend time with sheen and friends
Sunday – fly home
It’s actually very sad one ok I remember it as if there was some virus taking away all my friends and I was the last one standing. Even my room felt so lonely as everybody left. So this blog post isn’t all that boring la let me describe my solo trip to Shanghai 🙂
Shanghai
Since Zile, Josh and Dan left for Xi An, I would spend time with sheen and his classmates because I don’t want to be forever alone. So when sheen and gang decided to go to Nanjing on Wednesday, I decided to go on a solo trip too. It’s damn weird saying this, but it was the first time booking train tickets for myself because other people have always been doing it for me.
So you must know that I spend money quite frivolously and at that point in time I had to resort to borrowing money from people and so I was on quite a tight budget. And imagine my horror when I reached the train station and tried to collect tickets and the person at the counter said “oh you cannot collect because you put your chinese name which is not reflected in your passport” I was so devastated and had to cancel my ticket and re-book which caused me to spend extra money and taking the train to Shanghai without a seat.
Rocky start but it’s fine. I went to shanghai and the queue to buy metro tickets were soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong and I was like “am I going to be stuck here fml” and luckily the metro station (like Hangzhou) has an app to it and you can use your phone to get in and yay I was on my way to visit nice places and eat good food.
First place I visited was Confucius temple at Shanghai. Don’t ask me why I am visiting another one ok I just find these temples fascinating. And the ticketing booth didn’t accept Alipay like what the which generation are you from bro??? luckily I had cash with me but yeah all jokes aside I went in and I was greeted with an amazing view because NO TOURISTS!!! besides myself and it was great because I could take nice pictures at my own sweet pace and without any annoying umbrellas/heads getting into the photo
After this I went to the Yuyuan area which is a mad contrast to this place because it’s super packed like I was so scared of bumping into other people physically because the weather was so warm and everybody was very sticky ew I didn’t manage to get into 城隍庙 and 豫园 because it was getting late and so I just at some 小笼包 and left to meet my NS friend for dinner. So this friend of mine offered to house me at his hostel and that saved me a considerable amount of money.
One bad thing about going on a solo trip – cabbing and accommodation is so expensive!!!!!!
so the next day after I woke up I only had a while to travel so I went back to to 豫园 and 城隍庙 to visit again
So yes that was the end of my Shanghai trip which coincided with sheen’s Nanjing trip and so I was back with spending time with friends.
Leaving China
It’s been like a surreal 13 weeks here and nearing the end I was always counting down with my friends. This trip helped me make new friends, learn new things and had an amazing time here. Hopefully the blog posts have been interesting to you guys (whoever is reading this thanks for the support) and I can’t wait to be back here in 1.5 years time.
Signing off,
Kenji Ling 🙂
