Day 4 - Transfer to Shanghai Marriott City Center, and the Bund!

Day 0 - Depart Singapore to Hangzhou (Scoot Airlines), Arr. Hangzhou 2135hrs
Day 1 - Hangzhou, got a driver, tour the city, including West Lake and Ling Yin Temple
Day 2 - Depart from Hangzhou to Wu Zhen (water town), and then transfer to Shanghai Courtyard Marriot near Disneyland
Day 3 - Shanghai Disneyland! (One full day)
Day 4 - Transfer to Shanghai Marriott City Center, the Bund and Hai Di Lao Dinner!
Day 5 - Private day tour to SuZhou
Day 6 - Shanghai Free & Easy
Day 7 - Home sweet Home - Shanghai to Singapore on Singapore Airlines (Business Class)

Day 4 of our 2018 China trip. After a fun day at Disneyland, and a good stay at the Shanghai Courtyard International Tourism and Resorts Zone, it was time to head to central Shanghai for the last segment of our holiday.

We hailed a taxi using the Didi app, to take us from Courtyard Shanghai International Tourism and Resorts Zone to Marriott Shanghai City Center.  The distance was about 30km and it took us about 45 minutes to get there.  Fortunately, the highways were quite clear, though there was minor congestion closer to the City center.

Multiple Mobile Phone Array
A highlight of the journey was the taxi driver's array of mobile phones.  He had 4 facing him, plus an additional phone in this pocket!  He told me that in the past, he had 8.  Why so many?  To access all the various ride hailing apps, to snatch for business as fast as he could.   He also told me that the Apple iOS phones were a tad faster than the Android ones.  His apple phones got the notification about 1 second earlier than Andriod phones, so he used old Apple phones to snatch business.  Fascinating. In the video below, you will hear me trying to converse with the driver in my poor Mandarin.  At least he understood most of what I said, and could tell us long stories about Shanghai.

The video also shows you some of the scenes from our ride into Shanghai City Center.


Here is a picture of the driver looking at one of his phones.  This being China, the taxi drivers won't speak English.  You need know some Mandarin to be able to communicate with them.  We went by the metered fare, and the total fare came up to around 150RMB, or 23USD for a 30km ride.  Already, taxi fares in Shanghai are considered the most expensive in all of China.  For those of us who are used to taxi fares in Western countries, such a fare is still very reasonable for the distance travelled.

Shanghai Marriott Hotel City Center
We chose this hotel because of its location, near Nanjing Road.  Also, the reviews were excellent.  While not exactly the cheapest, the hotel offered a Family Suite, and we could add an additional pull-away bed so that all of us had proper bedding.   And we certainly had no regrets!  The Family Suite was awesome, as shown in the video below.  The suite had a separate living and bedroom area.  The living area could take 2 super singles, and still have room to walk around.


More pictures below of the lobby area.  It was a grand lobby.  It was also a bustling lobby.  Very busy at times, especially during the peak check-in hours.

They had 5-6 general counters opened. The line could get long, but things moved along fine.  Efficient service.

Internal water feature, next to the bar area, which served drinks and food.  Welcome to Marriott Shanghai City Center!

Walk to Huang He Road 黄河路 for Lunch
After putting our bags and washing up, we decided to take a short walk to Huang He Lu (黄河路), literal translation is Yellow River Road.  It was about a 5 minutes walk (500M) and there was plenty of local food on this street.  We headed to a famous chain called Yang’s Dumplings 小杨生煎
(http://www.xysjg.com/), as we had read a lot of about it.


Pan-fried pork buns (生煎包)
The patrons were largely local.  Most were eating the Pan-fried pork buns (生煎包) Tasty, moist pork wrapped with half-soft, half-crispy dough, Shanghai pan-fried pork buns, traditionally served as breakfast, make a great party food.

Some food pictures.

57 RMB for Our Lunch (4 pax)
Here was the bill.  The total was 57RMB (or 9 USD) for 2 servings of Pan-fried pork buns (生煎包), 2 bowls of soup noodles, one bowl of soup and one Pepsi Cola.  That's quite a lot of food for under USD 10.  Each serving of 生煎包 came with 4 pieces and only cost 8RMB.

Dessert at McDonald's

It was a good lunch.  After that, we took a walk back to the hotel, and beside the hotel there was a McDonald's!  Time for some dessert.  We had two Sundaes which came with Fried Dough Sticks, a layered cake, and some coffee.  The fried dough sticks looked like Churros.  Well, maybe they were!  Certainly they were fried, and made of dough.  Dip it into the ice-cream, and the dessert became very filling! 

Nanjing Road Shanghai 南京路
It was time to do some walking!  It turned out that Nanjing Road was just a stone's throw away, 3 minute walk max.  Wow.  This shows you how centrally located this hotel was.  We would try to walk all the way to the Bund.   It was a very pleasant walk, and the street wasn't very crowded during this time of the day.  Very nice.


Shanghai Bund
It didn't take us very long to get to the Bund.  The viewing area was awesome!  Check it out! There was a couple taking wedding photos.  Happy marriage!For a century, the Bund has been one of the most recognizable symbols and the pride of Shanghai. The architecture along the Bund is a living museum of the colonial history of the 1800s. You've never been to Shanghai if you haven’t seen the Bund.


We took the touristy tram back, on a one-way ride, along Nanjing Road.  The cost was 5RMB per person.  Saved us a lot of walking!  Let's go!


Later that evening, we had dinner at Hai Di Lao. I spotted the restaurant by chance as we were heading back to the hotel from the Bund.  This was my first time at Hai Di Lao.  This chain has also expanded to Singapore.  Thanks for following along!

Beijing Trip SQ Flight to Beijing and Renaissance Beijing Capital Hotel Day 1

Trip to BEIJING, CHINA

Day 1 - SQ Flight to Beijing & Renissance Beijing Capital Hotel
Day 2 - Mutianyu Great Wall Following Michelle Obama Tobbogan Ride and Ming Tombs
Day 3 - Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven & Summer Palace
Day 4 - Beijing Underground, Lama Temple (outside), Hutongs, WangFuJing, Din Tai Fung

China!  The most populous country in the world.  Beijing (formerly romanised as Peking), is the capital of the People's Republic of China, a megacity, with a population estimated at 21 million, or about 4 times the population of Singapore.

We did a short trip (4 nights) to Beijing, covering Mutianty Great Wall, Ming Tombs, Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City amongst others.  In this and the next few blog posts, I will detail our trip.  Meanwhile, the number one takeaway for me was nicely summarized in this quotation on a cup:

Genesis of Trip
Our trip to Beijing came about almost by accident.  My wife and I were deliberating upon a short holiday (without the kids) and our initial search only focussed on vacation spots in South East Asia. Then, my wife spotted this compelling offer by Singapore Airlines which made us sit up and book almost immediately!  I recall the offer was over the Christmas period 2016.

Return Flight on SQ at $394 per pax
Return flight on Singapore Airlines (outbound SQ806 and returning on SQ801) at a very attractive $394.  For a 6 hour flight, this sounded like a very good deal on a full service Singapore flag carrier!

Researching Hotels
Well, after settling the flight, we researched hotels.  Since it was just the two of us, let's look for something nice.  The good thing with Beijing is that they have many 5-star hotels by all the major chains (presumably built for the 2008 Olympics and then continue to be used because Beijing is after all the capital of China).  The revamped Marriott app (which I downloaded on my iPhone) is very good for searching.  After searching the various properties (Marriot group has many properties in Beijing too), we settled on the Renaissance Beijing Capital Hotel:

We found that the room rates for this hotel, which was located in the CBD area, to be slightly below the other equivalent Marriott properties.  Tripadvisor reviews were all rather glowing, especially the 24F Club Executive Lounge.  So we took the plunge and decided to go with a studio suite because they had a 'Suite Dreams' package and the deal applied to us as you had to stay 2 consecutive nights and the rates for the suite over the weekend was lower than weekdays.  Overall, for a 4 nights stay, we paid less than 5,500RMB (SGD$1,120) for our stay (including taxes), and including the late check-out.

Here We Go - Departure Day 
Thank God we could take leave and make suitable arrangements for in-laws to look after our kids when we were away.  Very grateful and blessed to have wonderful family support, without which my wife and I would not be able to take this trip.

Our SQ flight departs from Terminal 3.  We took a Grab Car from our place to the Airport.  Nice and easy.  Check-in was very quick and we parked ourselves at the Krisflyer Gold Lounge (thanks to my Star Alliance Gold status) to chill and get some food before our flight.  This was my first time in the Krisflyer Gold lounge.  While definitely not as upscale as the SilverKris Lounge, it was pretty much adequate for me.   The food selection wasn't very wide, but decent enough.  You will see in the video that I had enough to eat (including Pork Buns), and they even did a very nice made-to-order salad.


Made to Order Salad
Doesn't this look healthy?  It was.  Just plain Garden Salad with some dressing.  I liked it.

The live Orchid display in the lounge was a nice touch.  Very Singaporean.  The lounge wasn't crowded when we were there.  Plenty of seats.  We were early, so we had our lunch in the lounge, then went out for a walk around Terminal 3, before returning to the lounge again to get some coffee and snacks, and then we boarded the plane.

Singapore Airlines SQ 806 to Beijing (9V-SWR)
SQ has 21 weekly departures to Beijing, 3-flights daily.  By the time we got to the boarding gate, it was time to board.  The aircraft today was an older Boeing 777-312(ER) with a rather long rear portion?  Serial number 9V-SWR.

Boarding was quick and the flight was at most 2/3 full. Despite the lighter passenger load, the overhead compartments were completely full!  Wow.  Reason was that this profile of passengers (mainly PRC Chinese) loved to shop, and they also loved to stuff everything into the overhead compartment including their smaller backpacks and handbags. As a result, the cabin crew had a bit of difficulty re-arranging overhead cabin baggage.  I can't imagine, if the flight were full, we would have an even bigger challenge.

Fight review video of SQ 806, Singapore to Beijing
Service and food were good.  I had my usual Singapore sling for the post-take off drink, followed by the Asian-choice for the meal (dinner was served).  It was steamed rice with two large pork balls.  Ice-cream was served as a dessert, which provided for a sweet ending.


Speaking of Pork balls, here was what the main course looked like, with my disposable chopsticks stuck in. Of course, they provided fork and spoon too, in case you did not like to eat with chopsticks.

After dinner was cleared, there was almost 4 hours of the flight more to go.  So it was time for a nap (call it evening nap?).  We were scheduled to land in Beijing at 2300hrs local time.  There was no time zone change between Singapore and Beijing.  The IFE map display alternated between English and Mandarin.  Snapshot of the Mandarin version, with all the Chinese cities listed.  Beijing 北京  (PEK) was our destination.

Landing was smooth and we cleared immigration and customs relatively quickly.   I noticed that they x-rayed every bag as we left the Customs Control, but fortunately that didn't slow down the lines too much.  The taxi queue was rather long, but it moved.  Finally, we got onboard a metered taxi and were on our way to our hotel.   It was past midnight, but traffic was still very heavy, and even jammed at places . We took an hour, maybe more, to get to our hotel. Distance was about 30km, and the cost (by meter) was 110RMB.  We gave the lady driver a 10RMB tip, and she was very pleased. This was the route we took:

Hotel Check In
At the wee hours of the morning, the hotel reception was empty, and we could check in very quickly. The receptionist told us that they had received my message that we were here to celebrate my wife's birthday.  The Exec Lounge had prepared something special in our room - surprise!

Rose Petal Display on the bed.

A closer look - this was going to be an awesome stay! 

What was this?  A birthday cake made up of towels, rose petals and red ribbons.  Wow.  So sweet.

Time to Sleep
It was late (or very early to be exact).  By the time we washed up and slept, it was past 2am.  We had a hectic day tomorrow so it was time to sleep. Here is a video review I made of the studio suite.  Check it out and continue to my next page on Day 2 of our holiday! .


Continue to Page 2, we visit Mutianyu Great Wall and the Ming Tombs.

Thanks for reading.