So, this was our first day without a set agenda and without our guide, Terry. We took his advice and headed off to Nanjing Road – the main, upmarket shopping st in Shanghai. We went by foot and started to melt by step 3! The humidity was incredible. The street was exactly what we expected – lots of western looking department stores and huge, Chinese neon signs. This was also where the trendier Chinese younger set hung out – i was beginning to think they didn’t exist. We headed out to the airport in the afternoon for our flight to Sydney.

Natasha mentioned that food came up and lot – and she is right. I had arrived in China concerned that i wouldn’t be able to get enough into the kids over the holiday – adam was fantastic, after a few days of just eating fried rice, he began tasting other things and is now a big fan of Chinese cooking – even the hot and spicey stuff. Cora was a different matter – she was only eating boiled rice …so, every second day we took her to what passes for western food here – bad, American fast food…..pizzahut, kfc and mcdonalds. She did lose weight on the Chinese leg – we all did actually. But in our case, it had more to do with sweating and fluid loss than anything else 🙂

The flight to sydney was a 10 hour job and was over night. Quantas have individual entertainnent systems and the kids acted like Santa had actually moved in to live with us! The psp’s were dumped and the systems put through their paces! The flight was beautifully uneventful and the kids slept for a good bit of it.

Hotel in sydney is lovely – and compared to the rooms in China, they are vast. Its right in Darling Harbour, which is a gorgeous Marina, shopping, restaurants and playground. The playground was immediately used by the kids – running off excess energy. We then headed for a couple of hours nap and slept straight through 14 hours, waking up on Tuesday morning!