Lan Tian Hotel

We stayed for one night during an organised trip round China and then returned a few nights later for our last night in China. The location was OK – it was a few minutes’ walk away from Wujiaochang on Line 10 of the Metro which is only a few of stops down to East Nanjing Road. There were big shopping malls underneath and round the other side of a big roundabout 2 minutes’ away from the hotel, but they were quite expensive. There seemed to be plenty of restaurants in the area on the other side of the roundabout but we never got to use them because we went into the centre of Shanghai in the evening. The lobby and reception area is huge and check-in was fairly efficient by Chinese hotel standards. Few staff in the hotel can speak any English but we managed to make ourselves understood when necessary. Bedrooms are large and comfortable. The showers were excellent but I was the only one in our group who worked out how to turn them on – you need to divert the water from the bath taps by screwing a knob downwards and then turn a second knob further up round to divert the water from the hand-held shower to the big shower head. There’s a glass partition between the bedroom and bathroom, but if you don’t want to watch your partner’s ablutions, there is a blind. As is common with many decent Chinese hotels, toiletries were abundant, and there were also bath robes and slippers, an iron and ironing board and an electric kettle with coffee and tea. There’s an LCD TV with about 50 Chinese stations to choose from, and one English language news channel, CCTV News. Plenty of Chinese/Australian and European type plug sockets. Beds are big and comfortable. Breakfast was a good selection of international and Chinese dishes with plenty of choices of fruit. It was probably the best breakfast we had in our three weeks in China. We didn’t use the restaurant otherwise. There’s a large bar on the ground floor and it closed fairly early (about 11pm), they don't do cocktails but they did do large pots of Pu-er tea which went down well. Language was a bit of an issue, but not insurmountable.