We will be so blessed to have two wonderful guides for 99% of our trip.  They both grew up in China, and so, of course, speak fluent Mandarin.  There are 56 ethnic groups in China, each speaking their own dialect but the majority of the people all over the country speak Mandarin also.  While the guys are at the conference together, the ladies will be sightseeing and shopping all over Shanghai.   There are very few people in China who speak English, and so taking taxis, buses, and trains would be challenging without a native speaker.  In many of the larger restaurants you can get a menu in English but quite often, the prices are higher.  The streets signs are written two ways: Chinese characters and romanized letters called pinyan.  But it’s even hard to read pinyan because even though the letters are ones English-speakers recognize, they are not all pronounced the way we do in English.  So you may know the name of the road you are looking for, but you won’t recognize it in writing.

Our friends are staying an extra week so John and I will have to get from Beijing back to Shanghai by ourselves on the last day — over a thousand mile trip — to catch our plane back to Atlanta.  We are trying to decide if we will take the overnight sleeper train or if we will fly on one of the local airlines.

Taking the 12-hour train ride  has advantages: we’d save hotel expenses, it’s cheaper than flying, and there aren’t as many delays.  But in the “soft sleeper” compartments, there are 4 bunks, and there would be strangers sleeping in the other two.  On the other hand, flights are often delayed up to 4 hours and they are expensive but we’d fly right into the airport where we will be catching our international flight and so would not have to maneuver our way across the 25 million-peopled city.  Final decision to be announced.

Back to the dark ages, we go.  No personal cell phones.  It’s amazing that in just a very few short years, we’ve become so accustomed to having instant communication.  Well, we will have a laptop.  The “ultra-mobile PC”, the  Eee, a mini-laptop.  Lightweight, 10″ diagonal screen.  Just enough to check our email, use Skype to communicate with the boys, and download our photos and videos each evening.

The first five days we will be staying, courtesy of Gulfstream, at a 5-star hotel in Shanghai in the Pudong district of the city, right along the western bank of the Huangpu Jiang (River), which divides the city into east and west sections.  This is the historic and present day financial district and a popular tourist destination to see the spectacular steel and glass skyscrapers of The Bund. To visit the rest of the city, we will either take a ferry across the river or take a taxi which will drive over one of the bridges. We want to take a cruise one of the days up river toward the Yangtze River to see all the wharves.  Shanghai is a busy port that handles one-third of all China’s trade with the rest of the world.

After the conference is over, we will take a fast train (magnetic levitation train which goes up to 267 miles/hour) to Suzhou, the Venice of the East, east of Shanghai.  For two nights and three days, we will stay at a 4-star hotel as we explore, by boat, bicycle and foot, that city and also bus to Zhouzhuang, another one of the water townships.

Then we take a 12-hour overnight train trip to Beijing (hopefully getting enough rest in the sleeping berths). For the next five days we’ll be exploring Beijing and also taking a side trip to hike part of the Great Wall.  Our accommodations will be in a 3-star hotel in a part of the city where the locals live.  On our last day we’ll fly back to Shanghai on China Eastern Airlines to catch our international flight home.

To combat jet lag and DVT (deep vein thrombosis) on our two 18-hour non-stop flights, we have ear plugs, eyes masks, neck pillows, homeopathic medication from New Zealand,  compression socks, electrolyte powder to add to our water, and a list of leg exercises to do every hour. We’ll be so busy with all that we may not have much time for novel reading or pre-recorded videos.