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Shanghai's a really interesting city. The first few photos below were taken along the Bund, an area of prime riverfront real estate that Europeans managed to get their hands on back in the 1930s. It's pretty obvious in some of the architecture, which looks oddly out-of-place in this big Chinese city, but remains most impressive. The ultra-modern buildings, including that wacky bulbous tower, are in the new Pudong business district, recently developed right across the river from the Bund. The night shots feature both sides of the river; they're taken from a touristy little cruise boat. There are some other shots of traditional buildings in Chinese parts of town, one picture of the city's national museum, several shots of everyday sights & people (check out the "no spitting" sign in the last row!), a few from the city's botanical gardens (they had literally thousands of amazing bonsai there), and the last four are from the Jade Buddha Temple--too bad we arrived after the actual shrine with the Jade Buddha closed for the night. When you're viewing the large versions of the photos below, look for the navigation arrows in the upper right corner, which can take you to the previous or next pictures (the left and right arrows) or back to this page (the arrow pointing up). |
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random notes: Hmmm, what else to tell you about Shanghai? The food was great, Shanghai cuisine is heavy on the sugar, very dissimilar to other Chinese food we've had, but generally delicious. Truth be told, we ate Chinese food for less than half our meals there, since after months of almost nothing but Korean food, we were really thrilled to see that Shanghai had such a huge variety of good, reasonably priced international food... so we gorged ourselves on Mexican, American, German, and various other treats there. Other stuff... well, the pollution really is pretty awful there. The haze over the city most every day makes even Seoul's barely-breathable air seem clean. People didn't seem terribly friendly, but not outright hostile either. We observed a very amusing trend of people wearing pajamas as street clothes, especially in the hot & sweaty evenings; not sure if that's a Shanghai thing or if that happens elsewhere in China. Uh, what else? Oh, yeah, did lots of shopping on our last day there; great deals on crappy-to-mediocre-quality clothes and all kinds of stuff are everywhere. Anyway, overall, it's filthy but fun and well worth a visit if you're in the neighborhood. |
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Oh, yeah, one more thing... check out this cool lute-like instrument that Rob picked up in Shanghai before they left. It's called a pipa, and it's really fun to play, although Rob can't seem to make it sound authentically Chinese yet... sounds like a banjo in his clumsy hands... |
Now, continue on to Suzhou...
...jump ahead to Hangzhou...
...go back to the main page for this trip...
...or return to the Kwangju Chronicles.