When you hear that people are visiting China, one of the first destinations you think of is always Shanghai! Whether you are interning in China like myself, or simply being a tourist, I would strongly recommend Shanghai to anybody who is prepared for the hustle and bustle of this monolithic city.
So I travelled with 2 fellow interns, Mehmet and Christopher, making it 3 guys on internships in Zhuhai heading to Shanghai for the first ever time. We left on Tuesday – taking the train and metro to Guangzhou airport. It was typical that when we got there, we were hit by a flight delay of 4 hours and ended up arriving in Shanghai at the Dockbund hostel at 5am… needless to say we didn’t do alot that night.
The Dockbund hostel was in the popular tourist area known as ‘The Bund’ – a very scenic location adjacent to a lovely pier where you can see the Shanghai Pudong skyline. There are also several great clubs in The Bund, Muse and Bar Rouge to name a couple.

Day 1
On our first day we decided that we wanted to try Mr X on Jumen Road– like a game from a TV show where you are locked in a room and have to solve puzzles in order to complete the challenge – cost is 100RMB. We didn’t do amazingly at this game; in fact we sucked at it, completing just half of task 1! But it is definitely something I want to try again… mainly so that I can recover some pride. [Tips: you can only book Mr X in person or online as it is a ticket event where you will be given a set time. It is also helpful to have a Chinese speaker with you as not all staff members can speak English]

Afterwards, we explored the neighbouring area to Mr X, it was a fairly average Chinese area so nothing special. We did however find a ‘game centre’ (an arcade) and spent a couple hours there. One of the best things about this game centre was how cheap it was! Each game needs 1 token and 1RMB got you 2 tokens, after applying some maths that meant that you could play any arcade game for 0.5RMB, so we played racing games and hoops until our arms ached!

Come sundown, we decided to head to one of the main attractions of Shanghai – East Nanjing Road. This is essentially the main shopping area where the most upmarket and modern malls and shops are. When we got there I couldn’t help but draw numerous comparisons to another great city I’d visited, New York due to the huge architecture, bright lights and the general atmosphere.

By night time, we were exhausted. Although we had planned Shanghai with the intention to party hard, we were actually satisfied to stay within the vicinity of The Bund and just walk along the pier with everyone else there and enjoy the skyline. [Tips: The lights of the main buildings making up the skyline come on from around 7-11pm]

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