While in China a year ago, I wrote a journal of what I’d been up to each day just before I went to bed. I’ll post edited extracts from that journal, supplementing it with pictures and additional memories as I go along.
From my journal:
Sunday 25th February 2007
Here I am, in China, in Shanghai! I can scarcely believe it. I’ve been so busy in the run up to the trip – CU mission, preparing for my election campaign, interviewing Russell T Davies, getting work done – I’ve had little time for eagerly anticipating that I’m actually going out to China with my Chinese class. And now here we are! We’ve just had our first meal in this vast country and walked on the famous Shanghai Bund.
Our hotel it just off the Bund, it’s amazingly well places. The sense of size and space as you walk along beside the Pudong river, old Western-style colonial buildings on one side, the space-age new distict on the other, is almost overwhelming.
Driving into Shanghai from the airport was a long drive, eventually entering the city on flyovers suspended high between soaring towers and blocks of flats, before coming off the freeway and round and round and down in vast looping circles to ground level. With the glittering lights of high-rise buildings extending off in all directions, Shanghai looks like what a metropolis should be. But once you get down into the depths, it’s more rough, ragged and varied than the first glittering impressions may suggest. Old Chinese buildings and tumbledown areas nestle between the skyscrapers.
It’s odd having lost eight hours of the day, and the flight was long and tiring, though fortunately I was able to sleep for quite a long time on the plane. Despite the length, the journey was exciting, especially when the map on the plane’s tv screens began to match that of the Shanghai area in the biography of Hudson Taylor I was reading!
Our hotel, Broadway Mansions, is pretty amazing – right next to the Bund, and far grander than anywhere I’ve stayed in my life before. It’s two to each room, and I’m sharing with Jay, who’s a nice guy. But I’d better stop writing and sleep, to be ready to enjoy our adventures…
