We took a day trip to Suzhou which was worth the 2 1/2 hour drive each way. It’s a very pretty little town (only 6 million) with canals and old streets which we rickshawed around in. And we visited 2 ancient, private gardens which were magical and amazing and I adored them. The other magical aspect of that day was that it was 42 degrees. And a ‘street temperature’ of 50-51 degrees. I’m not sure what that means but any surface you touch will burn and it takes concentration to breathe. Any breeze feels like standing in front of a hair dryer. It becomes quite surreal. The kids managed it quite well – I kept pouring water over their heads.
And we ate gorgeous food. Fresh water fish. Jack ate the whole fish’s head which was a little unexpected. He just left a tiny pile of bones.

I could eat myself stupid here – and that’s without leaving an airconditioned mall. There’s fresh squeezed sugar cane juice next to gorgeous sashimi and shiny dumplings and bubble tea and cheesecake shops then barbeque duck and dim sum ……

Shanghai will now feature on my top ten cities list. It gorgeous and fascinating and characterful and cosmopolitan. Perfect blue skies*. I love it.
*We were here for the hottest days since the 1800’s. They closed subway stations because they were too crowded – by people looking for aircon. Instead, they opened the suburban underground air raid shelters for children and elderly. Creepy. Hot.

We went to the museum which was fantastic – we could have spent hours there. And a cheesey silk factory that the kids loved. They got to play with silk worms and cocoons and feel every step of the process. Yu Gardens – which is like ‘old-china-disneyland’. Exquisite architecture housing tourist utopia. I was tempted by tiny crispy birds on a stick, more xiang long bao, and weird Turkish icecream being pounded with a big wooden mallet which I hadn’t seen since I was in Turkey. Obscure.

We’ve been to the Bund, (Bund, James Bund – as Jack has now said 2000 times) taken photos of Pudong, wandered Nanjing Rd … but it’s insanely hot. People don’t come out until after 8.30pm and then there are (literally) millions of people out on the streets.

I tried not to cry on the drive from the airport to the hotel. What a Dickensian shit hole. Like a Victorian industrial revolution nightmare. 8 million people living in the most disgusting, depressing inhuman hell.
And it has terracotta warriors and they are very cool.
But you couldn’t pay me to go back there. There is a much more exciting site being excavated right now – the actual mausoleum of the Emperor. But I will just read a book about it one day.

I felt the 6.6 earthquake in Gansu while I was having breakfast. I freaked the f&*k out, but no one else blinked an eyelid. I guess it’s like the difference between Auckland and Wellington.

And the food was shit. Although the part where Jack got wasabi stuck in the back of his throat and ran around a restaurant screaming and waving his arms was retrospectively amusing. The staff all stood and looked at him – then brought him a glass of water later while he was sitting at the table crying. Boiling water.

Beijing –
We stayed in a very brown hotel and the city is very grey. The air is also very grey, and thick and choking. When it rains it stings. It must be so depressing to have to live in permanently. It’s very utilitarian and how I imagined it – but with more ‘generic’ touches, like Starbucks everywhere. I read ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’ while I was here which might have flavoured my overall experience.

There was a great food hall place across the road from the hotel we discovered so we ate most of meals there. Peking Duck, of course; hot pot; and a few other things.

The ‘tourist’ food we were fed on our excursions was uniformly disgusting. I don’t even want to think about it. And I believe anything we didn’t eat at lunch was recycled for the next batch of tourists for dinner. Foul, greasy and tasteless. I don’t know whether it because they were making something that they thought tourists might like, or whether they just didn’t give a shit. Maybe both.

The Forbidden City and Tianamen Square were really interesting. And the Great Wall was indeed great. But at 38 degrees I found it really hard going. It’s very steep in the part we went to. So steep in places that you have to climb up the steps on all fours, like a ladder. Extremely hard work. We saw the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube which were a tiny bit interesting. But it was about 41 degrees that day and the pollution was choking so I was pretty over anything at all by then that wasn’t a Tsing Tao.
We went to the Temple of Heaven which was lovely. And the Summer Palace which was fascinating. It was a Sunday afternoon, and whilst I am very prone to exaggeration for effect I can honestly tell you that there were half a million people there that day. That in itself made it a fascinating experience.

Went to a cheesy Kung-Fu show one night. It was like ‘Jackie Chan does Vegas’. Lots of dry ice and flashy lights. I think the story line of the performance was something like “if you love your Mother or have sexy girl thoughts you can cure that by breaking things with your head.” I think. The kids loved it. And spent the next two days kung-fuing everything/each other.

Overall Beijing was more orderly and unAsian than I had expected. They seem to have bulldozed anything of character and replaced it with something big and grey. If I had to live in that pollution everyday I would commit suicide.

The children have a Darwinian instinct that prevents them from eating on planes. So they hadn’t eaten for 24 hours by the time we got to Hong Kong. (That didn’t stop Mouse from throwing up on the flight, as per.)

This hotel has a nice breakfast buffet.

And there’s a lovely restaurant. It’s on the 28th floor and has a great view of the harbour and the light show. We ate roasted goose, barbeque pork and a very delicious crab, tofu and egg dish. The photos are pretty rubbish unfortunately.

The best thing we’ve eaten so far is the xiao long bao at Din Tai Fung – which is an international chain ‘dumbling’ restaurant. They are worth queuing for. Beautiful steamed dumplings, with a boiling hot liquid broth inside. Dangerous if you don’t know … You kind of pick them up, and put them in a spoon, pierce the skin and let the broth out. It’s like a self saucing dumpling. My favorite was the pork and crab roe. And we had garlic spinach which tasted succulently and perfectly like it had half a pound of butter on it. Which was fascinating since it had none. And there’s no photos because we forgot the camera. I’m blaming jet lag and we promise to be better next meal. Instead, here’s a photo of weird plastic food at the science museum.

Here’s a place to see all the cool things that Jack, Molly and I will be eating on our adventure. Delicious, strange and exciting. Hopefully nothing poisonous. Little golden deliciousness – Joel Robuchon.