Shanghai

When I first suggested a cruise around China and Japan, I wasn't entirely convinced myself. What changed my mind was a perspective that this an intro for the kids to Asia without flying around cities. If this works, I would probably build 2 separate trips to Japan and China in the following years. 

The idea of this trip was simple enough: spend a couple of days in Shanghai, board a ship, wake up every morning in a different city without having to repack, drag suitcases through train stations or argue with airline check-in desks. Add Royal Caribbean's Spectrum of the Seas to the equation, throw in two excited kids, and suddenly the whole thing started making a lot more sense.

The itinerary looked almost too good to be true. Three days exploring Shanghai, followed by stops in Nagasaki and Fukuoka before sailing back across the East China Sea. In between, a couple of "sea days" which, in reality, meant attempting to sample every activity the ship had to offer.

The kids were mostly interested in the pools, bumper cars and robot bartenders. I was more interested in comparing the buffet to the one in Marina Bay Sands... purely for scientific purposes, of course.

This was also our first proper cruise as a family, so everything was new. How big could a cruise ship really feel? Would we get bored during the days at sea? Would the kids disappear into the endless activities and only come back when they were hungry?

As it turns out, that last one was surprisingly accurate.

Over the next week, we managed to combine futuristic Shanghai, historic Japan, spectacular food, surprisingly efficient planning, and enough walking to almost justify the number of desserts consumed onboard.

Almost.

The holiday officially began the moment we landed in Shanghai. There are two ways to get from the airport to the city: the normal way, or the Chinese way. Naturally, we picked the Maglev, which reaches 430 km/h and turns the airport transfer into the first attraction of the trip. If only every airport train was this much fun.

After dropping our bags at the hotel, we headed straight back out. We only had a couple of days before boarding our cruise, so wasting an evening recovering from jet lag wasn't an option. That's future Alex's problem.

Our first destination was The Bund, Shanghai's famous waterfront where old colonial buildings stand face to face with the futuristic skyscrapers of Pudong. It's one of those rare places where you can literally see the past and the future in the same photograph. As the sun disappeared, the skyline slowly lit up until the whole city looked more like a science-fiction film than a real place.

The obvious next step was to see it from the water. We boarded a Huangpu River night cruise, which turned out to be the perfect introduction to Shanghai. Looking one way you have historic Europe; looking the other, twenty-first-century China trying to touch the clouds. If you're only in Shanghai for one evening, this is probably the experience not to miss.

Dinner was supposed to be at a restaurant overlooking the city, but as with most family trips, plans evolve. The important thing is that everyone was fed, nobody complained too much about the walking, and the kids were still somehow full of energy despite a fourteen-hour flight.

By the time we got back to the hotel (best hotel ever!!!), jet lag was finally catching up with us. The sensible thing would have been to get an early night.

Instead, I spent another hour looking out of the hotel window, wondering how a city of twenty-five million people can make London feel like a small market town.

Tomorrow, we swap futuristic Shanghai for robots, traditional gardens and, hopefully, some proper dumplings.