John Carrino

I fly out tomorrow and it was a great trip but I am ready to be back in the good ol’ USofA. We kept pretty busy for most of the trip except for the last day or so; which was a good for winding down.

It was pretty hot and humid every day I was here so it will be nice to be back in Cali where there is no humidity and nights are cool and refreshing. If you have had the luxury of living or camping in Illinois without AC, you know why night in Cali are awesome.

The play-by-play of the trip is below the fold.

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Wednesday we got into Beijing and went shopping for some cheap stuff. We followed that up with a big family dinner. Later that night we hit up the bar scene and partied late.

On Thursday, we woke up and went to the Forbidden city. Check out pictures here. Yisong and I followed that up with some awesome basketball games. I will send those pictures later, because there are over 400 of them to sort through. China won it’s match with Angola, which was fun to watch. The game of Russia against Lithuania was really close the whole way and was very exciting.

Shanghai is an awesome city. It’s too bad we didn’t get much time to enjoy it or the nightlife. I got in around 9pm and after a bus ride and cab ride, we were at the hotel just after 10. We had some food and got some sleep.

I had tried to fight the jet lag, but I was up at 6am the next morning and went around looking for a coffee shop, but nothing was open yet. We took a cab down to the Bund but the river trips didn’t start till 10am. We got some breakfast and hung out in the restaurant for a while because they had air conditioning and it was hot and really humid out. After the boat trip we hung out at the Jade Garden area and bought some souvenirs and a lot of food. We caught the night train to Beijing at 7pm and that was a 12 hour ride that got us into Beijing at 7:15am.

We took the subway then a taxi to Yisong’s grandparents’ house. We had breakfast, showered up and found an open wireless connection. Now we are about to head out and buy more cheap stuff and hang out in Beijing.

Check out the pictures of Shanghai here