greetings from Shanghai

We are all well but very jet lagged, desperate to go to sleep but forcing ourselves to stay up until a reasonable time - we had a nap and now feel terrible so we thought we would come to the internet cafe to try to do something undemanding. We went and ate at a real Chinese cafe today, they couldn't understand us and we couldn't understand them but we managed to point, mime, point at things in the window and in our phrase book - we felt very brave but ended up with far too much food - it was lovely though and came to about 8 pounds. Shanghai is pretty amazing, very busy and surprisingly commercial, very western but very chinese too - how I imagine Hong Kong to be - its very clean and we haven't seen any birds, insects, dogs of any other creatures at all (I did see a squashed mossie on the wall of the youth hostel!) We are staying in a dorm with 6 other people, very adventurous, and it's costing us about 12 pounds a night for all of us, very cheap for Shanghai. Found a nice little market near us with lots of selling of pretend Guccis, CK, game boy games etc. The flight was ok but Rosa couldn't sleep much and kept me awake too leaning on me and fidgetting a lot, we saw a really funny chinese film on the flight about a stinky princess!! It has been hotter here than I thought but it poured with rain whilst we were taking our nap, quite overcast and close. I let the kids have coke to keep them awake and I even had a latte! (not that nice) Anyway hope you are all well and not missing us too much yet, - love Heather