Well oops. I fell rather behind on this.

I'll give a quick rundown on the hotels I stayed in during my days in Mainland China.

The thing about these five star hotel brands in China is that they never really have any special service that truly makes them feel five star. They all have comfortable but uninspired rooms, large but generic breakfast buffet spreads, friendly but impersonal service - in other words, all the trappings of a property like a JW Marriott that I hear people call names like "4.5 star" or similar. Still, the cash price on these hotels are all extremely reasonable, so as long as you go in with proper expectations, you'll enjoy your stay.

In Shanghai, after navigating a combination of my esim not having signal in the parking garage, the Alipay app needing me to get a verification code from my bank back in the US, and the veritable sea of people offering sketchy illegal cab rides right next to the Didi pickup area (one of them kept showing me an "official" badge that said both "Didi" and "Uber" which seems very legitimate, my good friend), I made it to the Portman Ritz Carlton.



This is the older and the cheaper of the two Ritz Carlton's in Shanghai, the other one being on the east side of the river.




Views outside were pretty good on a clear day, though I did get rained in for most of my time there.



Large breakfast buffet spread, including more stations to the right outside of this shot. Breakfast is not free for elites, as is normal at Ritz Carlton properties, but the rate I booked happened to include breakfast.



Be warned that if you figure out how to order food delivery to the hotel, the driver will put it into a food locker downstairs that can only be opened with the Wechat app. There are no buttons or touchscreens on the lockers, and the QR code pasted on the door only scans in Wechat, not Alipay. As foreigners, we cannot create a Wechat account without someone who already has an account inviting us and so I, having only set up Alipay, ended up needing to get someone else's help to scan the code and retrieve the food I paid for.

I don't really have much else to say about this hotel. It was a fine place to sleep. I certainly wouldn't come to Shanghai just for this Ritz though.



I ended up adding an unexpected night in nearby Changzhou last minute. I had intended to just do a daytrip over at some point, but the bad weather all weekend scuttled those plans and I ended up changing my itinerary to squeeze in one night there.



The High Speed Rail network in China is massive, punctual, and remarkably impressive, but I find myself disliking the experience of actually riding it. The biggest and best-connected stations are often not that close to the town center (Shanghai's Hongqiao station shown here is in fact right next to their airport - great multi-modal hub, but there's a reason Amsterdam's biggest train station is not at Schiphol). What's more, you have to show up early just like an airport because you have to check-in with your passport to get into the station, then you have to go through security. Then you have to wait in the waiting area until they call boarding for your specific train 15 minutes before departure, where you and the entire train's worth of people then line up in a huge line at the gate to get your ticket / passport scanned again before they finally let you onto the platform. It's not like Japan or Europe where you just walk freely between platforms and jump on the train when it arrives. It feels like all this faff in the experience defeats much of the benefit of a train versus a plane.



Still, the train is fast, comfortable, on time, and at least it actually, you know, exists.

Also there's no less than five QR codes on the back of the seat in front of you, and I spent way too much time trying to scan all of them before finally figuring out that if you want to order food on the train, the QR code for that is on your arm rest, and not any of the codes in front of you. You'll want to scan it with Alipay.

Next stop was the Changzhou Marriott for just one night, located in what it claims is the tallest building in the city.



Popping out from the subway station, I'm going to assume that tall thing in the distance is what they're talking about.



This hotel was dirt cheap ($90 USD after tax for me) and seemed almost uncomfortably empty. They gave me a free upgrade to quite a large suite.





Views were pretty good on a clear day.



Also maybe this is a sign that I've been travelling in the US for too long, but I completely forgot that as a Bonvoy Titanium, I'm not only supposed to have lounge access, but there's supposed to be free food in the lounge, generally around dinner time. I was prepared to go trek outside or figure out how to order takeout again before checking in the lounge and being genuinely surprised that there was actual, edible food there. It wasn't the best food I'd ever had (the chicken soup on the left was the best tasting thing here, followed by the french fries), but it was food and it was free and most importantly at the end of the tiring travel day, it didn't require any thought.



The view outside was significantly less nice in the foggy morning I woke up to.



Respectable breakfast spread again. This is kind of what I mean about 5 star brands in China - this hotel is technically just a normal Marriott, a "premium" (4 star) brand by their own ranking, instead of the Ritz Carlton's "luxury" (5 star) badge. Yet from the room to the breakfast to the service, they all kind of feel the same here in China. Again, for the bargain-bin prices I paid for these hotels, there's absolutely no complaints from me. But the Ritz Carlton's here certainly don't feel like the Ritz Carlton's in Japan, for example.



Admittedly, it was very cool seeing the tower disappear into the fog from ground level.



By the time I checked out, the fog had cleared up a bit. Next up, Beijing.



This train ride included a transfer at Nanjing, and with how many extra steps the rest of the train experience had, I was worried this was going to be difficult and annoying too, but luckily it was pretty easy. I followed the signs for "Transfer" after getting off the train, which took me to an elevator up to the waiting area. I had to scan my passport to get back into the waiting area after stepping off the elevator, but that was it. I was back inside the station again. Still more steps than elsewhere, but nowhere near as bad as I feared.



I tried ordering a bowl of beef noodle soup on the train via the QR code. It wasn't very good. I see why everyone else brought their own food. Also apparently you can order food from an upcoming station via the QR code too and they'll send someone down to the train with your food when it pulls into the station. I did not figure out how to use it until after I'd already eaten, but that's a genuinely neat feature.



I discovered the Beijing Subway now also takes NFC tap-to-pay with foreign credit cards. Up until now I'd been using Alipay on Chinese public transit.



My hotel here would be the JW Marriott Beijing Central, again the cheaper of the two JW Marriotts.



The room was still perfectly comfortable.





They have a pillow menu, like the JW in Hong Kong.





Another respectable breakfast spread.



Dinner in the lounge was fine. Nothing too special.



I'm fascinated at the chicken soup needs a sign warning that it contains chicken, but the potato and bacon soup is completely okay. What dietary restriction bans chicken but not pork?





And with that, I checked out to head over to my last stop in Mainland China, Tianjin.

I figured out how to make an account with 12306, the official train ticket platform in China (up until now I'd been booking tickets from Trip.com). Turns out I couldn't use the little applet inside Alipay; I needed to download the full app from the app store. The applet wouldn't let me make an account as a foreigner, but the app does. With the app, I not only could book trains 15 minutes before departure (Trip.com only does 45 minutes), and not only do I save a few bucks on the booking fee that Trip.com charges, but also you get one free time change per ticket booked direct with the train company, so when I showed up at the station 30 minutes early, I was able to change onto the earlier leaving train 2 minutes before they stopped boarding (which is 3 minutes before the scheduled departure time - they won't let you just run up onto the train platform at the last second).



This has been the first time I got a window seat on a train this trip. Here's a random tower thing I spotted.

My home base in Tianjin would be the St. Regis, which I've heard described here on Flyertalk as the worst St. Regis in the world.



I will say the process of hauling my bag there from the nearest Metro station is certainly horrendous, as a curb cut seems to be a luxury these roads have not implemented.



That is a very big square.



There are a lot of stairs in front of the hotel.



You, like me, might think that oh, that must be a ramp to the right of the fountain.



No that's a dead end.



I had to haul my bag up around the side of the fountain to the top of the hill, to discover not only a car parked in the middle of my path, but yet another curb that is not cut.

I get that most people probably arrive by car, but this feels almost comical.



Anyways, minus the random pair of scissors sitting on the floor of the elevator, the checkin experience was otherwise pleasant.




The room was comfortable, except for how hot it was. It was easily 85 degrees (30 Celcius) when I first walked in, and even after running the AC on full blast for 8 hours, when I got back that evening, it was still over 75 (24 Celcius).



My upgraded river view was pretty nice.



And it was even better at night.




The exterior of the hotel, both front and back, also light up at night.

Unfortunately, this is the only five star hotel I've ever slept in that didn't have full blackout curtains. Even with the curtains fully drawn, light bleeds through not just the top and bottom, but straight through the fabric of the curtains in the morning.




I'd consider Tianjin to be the breakfast food capital of China, and the hotel certainly leans into that, with plenty of local options.



They were acceptably authentic. The fried dough sticks are still not as crispy as the stuff you get from street stalls, but to be fair to the hotel it's probably also less likely to give you food poisoning.

Strangely, this hotel did not have decaf coffee at breakfast. Can't remember ever seeing that before.



Also, this is totally just the Ikea Fargrik, right? The cheapest mug that Ikea sells? I'd know because I own a ton of these at home. It's a perfectly good mug, but it doesn't feel very luxurious when I know that I bought these things for $1.49 a pop.

I don't want to rag on this hotel too much - with rock bottom expectations going in, I ultimately still had a good enough stay for the cheap prices I paid. It just certainly doesn't feel like it lives up to the St. Regis name, even considering some of the other rather disappointing St. Regis properties I've stayed in (by which I just mean Chicago).

Anyways, that sums up the hotels I stayed in during my week in China. I'll try to post a few pictures of touristy things from the week too if I get the time, but otherwise, next stop, Tokyo.