The Fall Moon Festival week

'Hey' to all our family and friends. We've had a great week off for the Fall Moon Festival. It was also the National Holiday this week. That's like our July 4th. Both holidays in one week meant that most people were also off. So the trains were packed and the big cities were full of people celebrating the holidays. We decided to take the time to travel to Shanghai. We had to take a train to Beijing first so we spent a day there. We stayed in a hostel for the first time. It was a great experience. We would do it again.

It was the Happy Dragon Courtyard Hostel. It was a fun place with very good food.

This was the door to our room. The accommodations were simple, but comfortable. The staff spoke English very well and they were very helpful.
 
We had a full day to touring around. We started at Tian'anmen Square and the Working People's Cultural Palace near the Forbidden City.

As you can see, the weather was perfect, and the air was very good. After spending a few hours here, we headed to the Beijing Art Museum. It is a very good museum specializing in mostly modern art. I think this piece was very well done.

I was getting hungry after a full day of being a tourist. So we headed back to the Happy Dragon for some pizza. It was very good. They had a great rooftop dining area in the cafe. It was neat. The sun was setting and the cool breeze was so comfortable. We were with Cuyler and Lauren. They are the young couple who's teaching with us in Baoding. They had been doing their own touring, so we shared stories of what we saw in Beijing.

The next morning it was time to go to Shanghai. We took 4+ hr ride to Shanghai on the bullet train.

The top speed was 191 mph. Nice ride.

Marianne here: Shanghai has the Wall Street of China and so it's very cosmopolitan with many large skyscrapers.Historically it was under European influence and so many of the older buildings are right out of London, France and the US.

After learning how to navigate the subways of Beijing, we got comfortable with the Shanghai metro system- us and millions of other visitors. Although we saw many more westerners here than we ever see in our own town of Baoding, there were also many folks in from the country for the break and many had never seen anyone who looked like me.Therefore many people wanted to take their picture with us or of us and once a few started, it was like an avalanche. Many times we just had to fight off the paparazzi and escape. Maybe we should have just started charging and recoup our travel expenses.

We certainly have more photos and stories to share but we'll end it here for now to concentrate on prep for our classes. We'll post again as soon as we can.