leg #2: travel China, Shanghai

After traveling Thailand for ten days with my boyfriend, I flew to Shanghai to meet a good friend from the States. She was my first visitor to China that came solely for me, so exciting!

She had some vague requirements of things she needed to do (see a big city, see a small city, see the Wall, see a temple) but that's about as much planning as we did. She kind of left it all in my hands as the Chinese "host" and I've been playing everything by ear, not planning much at all throughout my travels over the past seven months out here, so I planned to do the same with this trip. Basically, I dropped the ball a bit.

Coming off traveling with the bf in Thailand backpacker style, I had a really rough time switching into China travel mode. I had forgotten how much harder it is to travel in China than in Thailand, Laos or Cambodia. Everything in China is a struggle, just trying to eat can be an exhausting challenge (especially since my friend has some stomach issues).

I was really proud of myself, I ordered for us off this menu, using only Chinese, and got exactly what I wanted and expected. Win.

Combine that with the fact that I was having some problems in my personal life, and then one health problem, which turned into many health problems, and our first week was just kind of rough. We made a couple of hospital visits, luckily we found one for foreigners in Shanghai, but it was still difficult. Their English was not good enough to discuss health problems in depth and it's still Chinese healthcare, so treatment is never the easiest route. Almost a month later, I am still on meds.

Nothing instills confidence in a hospital like a Family Guy sign, lol.

I went into that leg of my trip thinking, "Oh, I live here, I'll be a great tour guide, it'll be really easy," and I felt really bad when it became blatantly obvious that nothing about it was going to be easy. Life in China can be, but when it's in a place you know really well, doing things you know really well and eating things you know really well. Even Lonely Planet can (and did, for us) steer you wrong.

We did a couple of cool things around Shanghai at first. I took her to the Bund, the French Concession Area, the pearl market and foreign food street (things I knew). The Lonely Planet fail came in on an afternoon trip to Songjiang, which basically had nothing to do or see.

After that, we made plans to head down south to Hainan, for the beach and the hot springs, up north to Beijing, for the Wall, and then back to Shanghai for a day before we both flew out.