The sound of lung-clearing and spitting woke me up, closely followed by one of the people in our cabin turning the television on at full volume at about 7am. I tried to ignore everyone but the spitting just got worse and worse, and the person below me was really going for it, trying to cough up something the size of a golf ball, by the sound of it, so I got up and joined Mikey on the seat below. When I went up to my bunk last night, the floor carpet had been reasonably well-swept but this morning it looked like a city street with lumps of stuff, nut shells, noodles and string, along with loads of shoes and dirty tissues. The table was full of the same things and the man opposite me was crunching sunflower seeds and spitting the shells in the vague direction of the table. His wife was covered in the duvet and was sniffing and coughing and spitting into tissues and leaving them on the table too. The whole place was filthy. Then the two guys reached over Mikey and pulled the guidebook from my hand to see what I was reading and to make the point that they were talking about us, which I had already guessed by the stares and the pointing. 11am couldn't come quickly enough for me!

I was generally fed up with everything this morning and didn't really feel like seeing much more of China. I'm expecting filthiness and incredibly unhygenic places when we go to India, but I wasn't prepared for it here. It just got to me. We left the train and the sun was shining, and it wasn't nearly as hazy or smoggy as anywhere else we've been. It was also even slightly warm, which was nice too. We found a taxi, he put the meter on without question and took us directly to the door of our hostel. Adding to my bad mood was that we had decided to stay in a YHA, something we've made a point of avoiding since Australia. This one, however, was rather nice, very backpacker-ish though,(there were more westerners in recpetion than we've seen in the whole of China so far, but the owners were friendly and saw us to a large room with our own bathroom and a huge amount of storage space. We put our bags down, had a bit of a wash and change of clothes, and then went out to see the world.

The bank refused my card again, which we were expecting, but it delivered 2000RMB to Mikey with a flourish that left us feeling rather proud of ourselves! His credit card repayment went through a few days ago, and more cash would be available to us for the rest of the stay in China. Hopefully. Then it took us about fifteen minutes to work out how the internet cafe worked.In the end, someone came to show us. The internet was so slow, though, that we didn't actually manage to check our mail anyway. Our next port of call was to verify a rumour Mikey had started that said there were Subway sandwich shops in Shanghai. Armed with a map, a vague location and a hunger, we braved the local bus and set out to find the sex museum that the shop was supposed to below.

We did a lot of walking, and went past some lovely colonial buildings, including one made of red brick that had tiny diamond-paned windows and hundreds of roofs and chimneys. We finally found the site of the museum, and read in the guidebook that the museum had moved locations so that although the museum was here, Subway wasn't. So we jumped onto the metro system and tracked down the next shop on our list. We were rewared with excellent sandwiches; just the thing to cheer me up!

While we were here, we checked the local cinema times but the only film with English was King Arthur, something we didn't really want to see. Shanghai is much warmer than the north of the country, and it felt much more like late summer this afternoon than the early winter of last week. It is also much more colourful and doesn't seem to have the smog and grey filter over it all that we've had recently. We walked back slowly through some wonderful side roads. Some of the lanes we found were huge Victorian-style brick terraces, but they led off at right angles from a central lane, and were four or more storeys tall. Many of them had stone balconies, almost all of them had washing hanging out of the windows and bikes leaning up against their walls. There was a tangle of wires overhead and a lot of old men around, which led to the inevitable sound of spitting, something we'd heard relatively little of all day! Another place we saw was very gothic-looking from half-way up, with tall peaked roofs and arched windows, and below it was pagoda-roofs and dragons and glazed tiles.

We walked along the road a bit, looking for a number 71 bus. A schoolboy accompanied us, walking in step and watching the two of us closely, and we walked together for about ten minutes. He even waved when he squeezed onto the crowded 71 and we waited for the next one. The bus took us to the hostel and we watched a bit of the US election coverage (which depressed Mikey as he's fanatically anti-Bush) and went to sleep.