I haven’t been to vegas so I can’t compare but the Shanghainese love their neon. More so than Beijing and well pretty much every other country and city I’ve been to. It’s most apparent when sitting on Cloud 9 - the bar on the 87th floor of Grand Hyatt. The whole city, especially the bund, is on neon rampage.

Strobe lights run across bridges and roads, buildings form wave shapes with lights, a tall slender building shoots out green laser beams every minute, a twister-lookalike structure sprouts mushroom-looking lights, and a building with a roof like a lotus flower opening up sends spotlights to the sky… This is just to name a few.

So there we were, spending our last evening in style, over a bottle of NZ sauv blanc which costs more than 4 times than normal, but what the heck, this has been an amazing trip.

We spent the earlier part of the day doing touristy things - cruise on the bund, lunch and spending money at some fab shops in Xin Tien Di, then walking around aimlessly, sampling tea, Ko Bu having fun reconnecting with his knowledge of Han Chinese (our map didn’t have any English oops)….

We found Shanghai to be flashier, Shanghainese to be less friendly and the amount of people everywhere simply overwhelming. We both prefer Beijing but we enjoyed the day out even if at the end we were out of breath from running to be at the airport on time.

As the blog name implies, our half-baked plans extended to the end. A conversation about life and death and everything in between made our stay at Cloud 9 longer than anticipated, and we found ourselves racing towards the train to get the Maglev, a 431km/hr bullet train to the airport that we have to connect from a different line.

It would’ve taken us 8 min on the Maglev to cover the 32km to the airport. As luck would have it, despite us spending an hour at the internet cafe first thing in the morning, neither of us thought to check the train timings and we got to the Maglev station to find out the last train had left almost half hour ago.

We spent our last notes of Yuan on a taxi to the airport, where my bottle of Chinggis vodka and the stupid lock whose combination changed between this morning and night got us into the customs officers’ area. Finally, we had our dinner at the airport, catching our breath at the same branch of restaurant we visited our one first day of this China - Mongolia trip.

Did I say half-baked?