Surfing Shanghai

We only caught a glimpse of Shanghai during our two-day stopover. The vistas at night strolling down ‚the Bund‘ are fantastic, it’s a huge, modern and very clean city. The shiny scyscrapers are impressive, and if you are into glitzy shopping malls and fancy restaurants, Shanghai offers all that and more. Yet for us, it just seemed to miss a bit its very own character, and didn’t quite have the charme and liveliness of other big cities we visited on our trip.

The best thing for us about Shanghai (besides meeting up with Pierre again, who we met a few weeks earlier on the hike in the Tiger Leaping Gorge) was the discovery of couchsurfing. In case you don’t know what it is (like me a few weeks ago), let me introduce you to this amazing website and concept. It’s a community of people that are volunteering to host travellers in their homes, and people looking for a place to stay (surfers). You can decide who you would like to meet with, contact them, and if they agree you can „couchsurf“ in their house – all for free. Besides saving money on accommodation, it allows you to stay with interesting people who know the city, expats or locals.

We decided to try out couchsurfing for the first time in Shanghai, and found a nice young couple, Mark & Camille, who hosted us in their apartment. We got a luxurious room, and felt like staying with friends, even though we just met. It was a really great experience. Best of all, they turned out to be experts on the Philippines (Camille is Filipino). What a handy coincidence, as we have lined up the Philippines as our next destination after South Korea. Anyway, the existence of a worldwide network of friendly, open-minded people willing to open their homes to travellers like us, continues to amaze me. We definitely did not couchsurf for the last time.