Madame Tussauds Shanghai

While in Shanghai, we also dropped by at Madame Tussauds of Shanghai, located at 10th Floor, New World Building, Nanjing Xi Road. The place was not very big, just a small fraction from London i guess. And it was very hot inside the museum. Here some of the pictures, we have a lot more but not for your eyes to see...

My girl with Tom Cruise.

Me with the late Princess of Wales. The wax looked so real.

Michael Jackson.

My girl with the genuis Eistein

Angelina Jolie and Brat Pitt.

My girl with The Terminator!

Us with The Beatles

China One Child Policy

We learnt this from our tour guides.

Both tour guides are the only child in the family. This is the norm in China who has one child policy. We found out that there are pros and and cons of having this policy and according to them it is not really working well. The government is very strict if the Chinese have more than 2 children for whatever reason they will be fined certain amount. But this rule can only be practiced in the city and most people who live in the city has only one child. But for the rural people they still have more than one child, usually hidden from government, quite obviously so considering how big in population China is.

Philip told us because of this policy, they become very stubborn, hard headed and always get what they want. It can be difficult to handle in a relationship whereby both partners have to compromise with each other. And this one child is not used to compromising since he/she is the only child in the family. Because of this, the divorce rate in China is quite high in recent years. Philip is already experiencing this, he and his girlfriend are always bickering. They don’t know how to handle each other and both always want to get their own way. So I guess he is in a big trouble when it comes to relationship.

No pregnant women could be seen roaming the street also. The women were mostly slim and slender. We were in China for 8 days in total we only saw 2 pregnant women compared to Brunei where pregnant women are everywhere!

More experience to share...

The tour guide

Our tour guide in Beijing was Philip, he was 26 years old, single and had a girlfriend who lived far away from him and they only met in the weekend. We didn’t know how far we didn’t want to sound so nosy. Philip was helpful, friendly and spoke good English. He also had a good knowledge of Beijing and tried to explain about his city history as much as he could. He also spent so much time on his handphone while we were on the road either talking or texting someone, so we reckoned that must be his girlfriend he was talking to. We didn’t know what to expect of him the first time we met at the airport, he looked soft spoken and a bit feminine. But after a while he was ok, he was flexible and easy to get along with. He took us places and spent as much time as possible with us. He helped us a lot during our train trip, took us to nice restaurants and answered our questions as much as we could. He was rather impressed with our country and it was apparent that he had a good knowledge of the world as well. With him on our holiday in Beijing was the driver, a lady named Mrs Huang. Mrs Huang didn’t speak English at all so there was no communication between us and her. When we wanted to know something about her Philip became our translator. It was rather difficult to communicate and it was a pity that she didn’t know any English otherwise we might be able to get to know each other better. I guess it’s a good idea if these drivers know a bit of English at least.

We had a different tour guide in Shanghai. She is a young lady, also 26 years old named Estrella. She is rather beautiful with pretty smile. She was also very friendly and helpful. She was waiting for us at the train station early on Wednesday morning 26th March 2008. She was very pleasant and she had a good communication skills. She told us everything about Shanghai and she really could talk and I couldn’t keep up. Two days in Shanghai we knew so much about her.

The Train

We didn’t know what to expect. Before the trip to Beijing we tried to do some research in the internet on how the train will look like and we were impressed with what we saw in the internet. The trains look new, clean and modern. The tickets were brought by the tour agent so we didn’t know what type of cabin was given but they assured us we wont be disappointed, its first class with 4 bed cabin. We arrived at the train station early after we had our early dinner, the journey didn’t start until 7.40pm. The train station was very busy with so many people but we already knew that through the internet and Philip also told us before hand.

The train station is one big place, we were overwhelmed with the area but I think it still looked small with so many people running or waiting around for their trains. We waited for almost 2 hours until its time to go into the train. Its rather difficult to maneuver the area with our 4 luggages, luckily Philip was there to give us a helping hand. We found our cabin based on the number on the ticket, it was a long walk and very tiring. We settled into the cabin and we shared the cabin with one Chinese guy who occupied the upper deck since it’s a 4 bed cabin. I found the cabin was rather small, imagine we had 4 luggages two of them were quite large so we had to make do with the small space that we had. We had a hard time to keep all of them in the cabin. And I shared my bed with a luggage at the end of the bed. So it’s a good idea if you don’t have too many luggages with you because the train didn’t have a separate compartment to store your bulky luggage. But the cabin was clean, the bed is comfy with 2 pillows for each bed, a blanket and a hanger to hang our coats. There was also a small table between the bed near the train window with a stainless steel hot water thermos. And a fresh flower in a small pot made the cabin much nicer.

Our cabin was near a toilet which was very convenient, we were lucky there were two toilets and one was with normal toilet bowl we used to. I was earlier warned from my research on the internet that the toilet can get quiet dirty and smelly at the end of the journey so I was a bit nervous about that. The toilet was small and very similar to the toilets in the airplane with a vacuum flush. It was ok during the night we went to use it a few times but towards morning its getting too dirty. I must warn the readers that the Chinese are people who don’t like to flush their toilets, they just left it there after doing their business which was very gross! So be ware of that issue…

The weather

China is 4 seasons country. Beijing is on the northern side of China meaning it can get more extreme weather than the rest of China. Shanghai can be less severe but still very cold. We went with full expectation and anticipation, basically we know what to expect. Our luggage was much heavier than our previous holidays since we were bringing warm cloths with us. We even bought some leggings and thermal clothing. We went in March so the weather was a bit cold. In fact it was very cold since we were not used to the cold weather since we came from the tropic. On our first day, it was hazy and the weather was around 10 degrees celcius. We also enjoyed the winter scenery where there were still no leaves on the trees and people still walked around in winter cloths. Not so bad although its still very cold for our standard. But we enjoyed it and embraced the cold weather with open arms. We really wanted to experience this kind of weather that is why we went in March, December not a good idea it might be too cold so March was good enough. The next few days were as cold as the first day but the days were much clearer with no haze. We could see miles and miles of the Great Wall and we were lucky to have such a nice weather and clear sky.

Some experience to share..

The food and Restaurant

In Beijing, I am not kidding you but you really need a tour guide to help you select the food from the menu! There was no English on the menu and you gonna have a really rough time to select what food you want to eat. Its even more difficult when none of the waiters or the waitresses knew any English, not even simple english. We have been to a number muslim restaurants and the plus signs of experiencing these restaurants were the food was out of this world. They were simply delicious amid too oily for some people. They used lots of oil to cook but the food was stunning.

Good idea also to try to use chopsticks for the sake of experience. Its not easy to eat rice with chopsticks though but what we can observed from our tour guide you have to put your mouth closer to the bowl in order for the rice to reach your mouth hehehe. Eating noodles, vegetables or slices of chicken or beef was a bit easier as long as you were being patient and willing to take longer to finish your food. You will notice also most chicken are boneless I guess this is the norm so that it will be easier to pick up using the chopsticks.

Another thing I noticed also is while having your meal you wont be served with water only a pot of hot tea with tiny weeny cups. There was variety of tea to taste from. But if you are used to eating your meals with water or drink by the side, better to bring your own water!. And I am not sure if drinks were in the menu also since all our food was ordered by our tour guides and we didn’t know whats in the menu.

We also noticed most restaurants in Beijing served egg soup. We never failed to have this in our menu. I think this is the main soup in Beijing, but it was rather nice though.

Shanghai has less number of muslim restaurants but the restaurants we did go to was very nice and the food was splendid. The best one was in Nanjing road where it was situated on the 10th floor. The service was a bit slow but the tour guide asked us to select our own food, the menu was in Chinese with some English. It was a big restaurant I think it occupied the whole of 10th floor so its rather impressive. The surrounding was nice but as usual there were a lot of people.

The Hotel

You really need a hired a reliable transportation to reach your hotel, especially if you reached Beijing late at night like we did. Our trip was much easier to reach destination when the van with the driver and tour guide were already waiting for us at the airport to take us to the hotel. We didn’t have to go through the horror of talking to a taxi driver and explained to him where our hotel was. I heard it can be nightmare since most of the taxi drivers do not know how to speak English. But as a word of warning and caution, if you have to take your own transport, it must be a must to have the name of your hotel written in Chinese characters so all you have to do is to show the paper to your taxi drivers and pray that he will bring you to the correct destination.

Our hotel is a 3 star hotel, very simple, basic but met out satisfaction. Afterall we didn’t spend much time in the hotel anyway, we left the hotel at 8.30am in the morning for breakfast and sight seeing and didn’t come back to hotel until about 8.00pm in the evening. So basically we were in the hotel for our slumber, shower and changed our clothings only. The hotel was ok, its clean but a bit small for 3 people. The room was a bit dark due to not enough lighting but it had all the necessity you would ever need, it has hot water, tea/coffee making facilities, slippers, fridge, tv and most importantly a normal toilet bowl and not the squatting one. We didn’t complain about the hotel in fact we enjoyed what we saw. We were not offending the Chinese people but the English they used were rather hilarious but we salute them for trying to come up with a good English with anything. It meant they really looked after their tourists!

Our hotel in Shanghai was spacious and airy. It had 3 beds but still there was enough space for the 3 of us. The toilet and washroom was ok, clean and it has a beautiful wash basin. It was situated in a residential area so there were a lot of apartments around us. We came to know most Chinese living in the city lived in apartment buildings like people in Singapore. Again the hotel met our expectation.