All the tea in China!

China was definitely a different experience to Japan!! We arrived into Shanghai late at night and were greeted with very muggy and smoggy conditions. Amazingly we met a group of chinese girls who were studying English at university and after stopping and asking us where we were from, their next question was ''is it smoggy in London?'' (their view of London seemed to be like something out of Dickens!!)

The girls were absolutely lovely though and made our first full day in China memorable - they invited us to go to a tea tasting with them - which was very expensive but worth it (Aside from Steph: Mum you'd be amazed at all of the different types of tea I've been drinking!!!).

We decided to visit the Expo seeing as though we were in Shanghai - we were not sure what to expect and but we definitely didn't anticipate the amount of people we encountered!! Queues for some of the pavillions were more than 2 hours (Rich you would have hated it!!). The buildings themselves were impressive though.

A lasting memory from Shanghai will be the Nanxiang steamed buns - yummy!!

Apparently the proverb goes that 'in heaven there is paradise, on earth Suzhou and Hangzhou'- which were our next destinations in China. Suzhou is a lovely watertown with numerous beautiful gardens. Hangzhou is dominated by the West Lake, which was gorgeous and probably our favourite place in China proper (excluding Hong Kong!!). We met Lawrence, a nice chap from America, in our hostel and on our last night we all ended up in a bar listening to fantastic live music from a groups of expats.

Our last stop in China was Hong Kong which felt a bit more like the UK - unsurprisingly!! Managed to visit a few of the sites as well as have some down time which was good.

We left China behind and travelled on two overnight sleeper trains to Vietnam - an experience - particularly the border crossings - but Man in Seat 61 was an excellent resource!