China | Beijing and Shanghai!

While planning for our next big trip. I realized I never shared photos from my trip to China!

I must say this was not a trip we were planning to take. I jokingly sent a Groupon link to my boyfriend, Colin, about how cheap it would be to travel to China for 2 weeks. Then, that weekend we couldn’t decide if we really wanted to or not, and we knew if we didn’t we might regret it later. So, we bought the tickets! We had about 2 months before we had to leave and we rushed to get our Visas back.

Visas are such a pain to deal with if you ever have to get one! We were over billed about $500 dollars and had to call several times to get it sorted out. Travel the World‘s blog helped a great deal with the Visa paperwork. Since we only had one chance to get it right.

Since we booked through a Groupon, we were with a group of people in China. We spent the time in Beijing with the group because they offered transportation, amazing daily breakfast, and lunch each day. We saw so much in Beijing we wouldn’t have been able to see on our own! Not having to worry about transportation was a big time saver and in Beijing we wouldn’t have been able to communicate with anyone there!

In Shanghai we broke off from the group each day and just explored the city on our own. It was much easier to communicate with the people here and the city was just amazing. Each day we discovered a different part of the city that was so interesting in itself. Our last day in China we booked a private tour that took us out of the city to a water village. We booked through Miki Tours and was even able to get a bit of a discount when we asked about deals, so make sure you ask! Lisa, our tour guide took us to places we would have never found on our own. I highly recommend them if ever in Shanghai. You can read my review here.

Also, the temperature was never above the teens when we were in Beijing. So, if it looks like I am freezing, I was! But totally worth it, plus it snowed the last night we were there!