Planning and Mulling Stage

I booked 4 air tickets to Beijing, with a stopover in Shanghai!

Woah! I went ahead and did it without months of research like I did for Taipei and Hong Kong.

The train and metro maps look like mazes to me, but I couldn't care too much.

Next on the list is to book hotels in Shanghai and Beijing.

I have done my sparse research on the hotels and am quite set on the hotels. However, for some reason, hotels.com seems to be having some technical issues at the moment and will only resume service a few hours later.

It gives me some time to deliberate over whether I should reduce the time I spend in Shanghai and spill it over to Beijing.

I have allocated 5 days to Shanghai while 3 to Beijing, because besides Shanghai itself, I intend to go Hangzhou and a water town, both of which require us to travel quite a fair bit.

However, a Chinese national colleague told me that Beijing is much more fun and I should give it more days rather than Shanghai, but I should bear in mind that the reason I am going Shanghai is because my mother yearns to go there, while Beijing is more for my traditional father who is passionate about Chinese history.

It is not without struggles that I made the decision to travel for the longest time, because I am going without Baby.

I know I will miss her, and I probably will feel guilty.

I struggled because:

1) if I bring her along, it will be almost impossible to do a Free and Easy. We would have to join a tour group. I can't think properly if I have a toddler with me.
2) tour group is not what we want because the places they want to go are mostly not the places we want to go
3) we won't be able to go to both Beijing and Shanghai since it will be a hassle to move from one place to another with a baby
4) with a baby, it means that there are 5 of us. It means an additional bedroom at the hotel, and difficulty in getting a cab since cab maximum passenger capacity is 4 in Shanghai. Just the air ticket and hotel rooms for an additional head will drive my budget up another thousand dollars, nevermind she is two-and-a-half!
5) if I don't bring her along, I will miss out on this opportunity of spending time with her since I work long hours. Today was another 11-hour day again! By the time I saw my baby, she was about to fall asleep!

My parents were the usual Chinese Asian parents,"No! We don't want to go! Why waste money?!!"

But I know they do want to go. And I don't want to wait. I don't know when their knees would give way. I don't know if they would be too tired to walk or travel by next year, or the year after next. I know I would be terribly guilty if I never take them to China at least once in their lives.

It sounds abit strange that I feel guilty about not taking my parents for a trip, especially when I have more siblings than an average person, but I guess I am trying to make amends for my rebellious teenage and early twenties years. I have hurt them too much when I was young. I would like to make it up to them, no matter how trivial it seems to others.

So China, here I come (without any substantial planning yet)!