The Orange Juice Index

Below: View on the Skyline of Shanghai from the Pudong district. Shanghai is huge- by far the biggest city I have ever been to (approximately 17 million inhabitants). After: Jack, our friend from HK (he studies at Shanghai Jiaotong University, is originally from Xi'an) with whom we were staying and his girlfriend. After a long night out singing karaoke and partying we had a great dumpling breakfast! Above: View on Tian'anmen square. We spent altogether 4 days in Beijing, which was enough, just because of the pollution (as you can see, it is pretty foggy in the picture). This was one the first day (Monday). We spent one day at the Temple of Heaven and walking around Qianmen, one day on the wall near Simatai (below). The weather was great and we walked 10km on the wall, which was partly crumbling so badly that we had to climb down. There were no tourists -we saw maybe 10 other people except for us- which was the good part, but since there were no tourists, walking was sometimes really difficult because of the condition of the wall. A good tradeoff however!

In Beijing we had to have the infamous Beijing duck. And we paid 30 yuan for an orange juice- from then onwe measure everything judging for whether it is a complete rip-off in terms of the "Orange juice Index". 30 yuan for one litre of juice....ok, food for 1 yuan? A bed for 20 yuan? Perfect...

Below: Terracotta warriorrs in Xi'an. Amazing, but a lot of tourists... much better was the arab quarter (2nd below): a chaos full of people (a lot of them in traditional clothing and head scarves), streetfood, bikes.... Xi'an has also big city wall and old towers (Drum and Bell Tower) and temples worth visiting.

Below: Tibetan monastery in Shangri-La. We came here yesterday with the night bus from Kunming (we flew from Xi'an to Kunming), which was a very interesting experience (unfortunately I cannot upload more pictures). Shangri-La : A place that does (should) not exist, lies 3220 above sea level -the nights are cold (around 8C), the days windy- is a town in north-western Yunnan province, close to the Tibetan border. Or well, in China, the border does not officially exist, so one might call it Tibet. Everything is inTibetan and Chinese, most people are mixed Naxi/Tibetan, there are some Han of course as well. Pretty remote. The monastery seemed like a little Lhasa.