Shanghai Zhan - Shanghai's new train station where Katia and I arrived around 7 AM, Friday morning. Always a lot of people - everywhere!
Birds kept in close quarters at a "plant & animal" market we visited (near the expensive souvenir market we walked through first).
Fighting crickets that fetch high prices. Old men fight their crickets for money.
Saturday night we walked to the Pudong district, the very modern part of the city which is on the other side of the river from the famous "Bund," what was once "Shanghai's Wall Street," with many Western-looking buildings from the turn of the century (1930s...). In Pudong we went to the 88th floor of JinMao - the tallest tower in China and the 4th tallest in the world at 420.5 m, according to my Lonely Planet.
Views of the Bund (across the river) at night with the funky-looking TV tower to the right of the picture.
A better view of the Bund.
There's a viewing booth on the 88th floor which allows visitors to look down more than 30 floors to see the Grand Hyatt's cafe in their entrance hall on the 54th floor.
Of course, such spectacular views calls for a picture from "up top" - where it's in fact impossible to get a picture of both us and the view. :-)
The Bund during the day. As you can see, it's a beautiful day, but smog makes it look not so beautiful...
A view of the TV tower in the Pudong district across the river.
There are lots of different types of boats holding various functions that run along the Huangpu River in Shanghai.
Nanjing Donglu - Shanghai's Wangfujing (which is in Beijing). This is the flashy rather than ritzy pedestrian shopping street. Lots of shops with neon lights.
View of a modern tower behind an old clock tower, taken from a park we sat down in.
Modern Shanghai - a picture taken during a walk around the train station on our first day in Shanghai.
Run-down old residences in front of newly-built futuristic-looking apartment buildings. We actually walked along the dirty backstreets that ran through the old residences as we waited for Rita's train to come in (Rita is Katia's classmate who was in Shanghai to take an exam).
Our hotel room. It was cheap considering Shanghai's prices. Our Lonely Planet writes that "apart from a couple of dormitories, the cheapest double room will cost at least Y250." Here we had a double room with our own private bathroom (bathtub included and hot water when we wanted) for Y180, which is about $30 Cdn per night, to be shared between two people.
The morning we arrived we phoned a few of the "dormitories" listed in our Lonely Planet where a bed in a room of 8 or 10 would cost us Y100 each - everything was booked. A man came up to us and offered us a better price for a hotel "five minutes away." It ended up being on the other side of the train tracks, which meant finding a tunnel or bridge of some sort that would take us to the other side. This took at least 15 or 20 minutes in one direction, and another 15 or 20 minutes in the other...but this way we got to see another part of the city we would never have visited otherwise.
In the "old" Shanghai there's a very famous "Yuyuan" - Yu garden. It was very beautiful and very relaxing. We stayed there at least two hours.
The gardens provided a couple high-school students as free tour guides. It's a great idea - the high school students get to learn about their city's history and practice their English, while tourists get a free guide! We really enjoyed these tour guides (shown in the picture), but half-way through our tour guides were too flustered and didn't want to speak English anymore, so we got more serious students who weren't as fun.
These are some really nice views of the garden.
A little girl fed some fish her lunch while her mother looked on.
A famous "dragon wall" found in Yuyuan.
We went to the bathroom in a supermarket and fell upon these tea jugs - what must belong to the employees of the store. They bring their tea to work and keep it here, labelled with their employee number (or name).
An old Church we found by chance near Sun Yat Sen's old residence (which we visited for Y30 - around $5 Cdn).
A park we also found by chance and which displayed a "cow" exhibition that Katia had seen in Geneva and Moscow totally randomly. She was dumbfounded to find the same exhibition completely by chance in Shanghai. What a coincidence! She lives next to Geneva and spends her summers in Moscow (her mother is Russian).
The destruction of a building near the train station in Shanghai. It looked like a monster eating at it. It was pretty scary and quite a few people had gathered to watch.
A colourful shopwindow in "old" Shanghai - a touristy shopping bonanza district.
On Saturday we went to a well-known antique/souvenir market that was quite quiet, although the few people we did see there who weren't shop keepers were white-skinned foreigners. The prices for everything were outlandishly high and the shop keepers weren't willing to go down because they knew they'd find tourists careless enough to buy at their asking price. As a result, we didn't buy anything - no point wasting money on stuff we could most likely find in Beijing!
OK, so you see a Chinese woman in the foreground, but you can bet she's just passing through. It's better if you click on the pictures to make them bigger. It's hard to see clearly when the picture's so small.
To give you an example of the prices, Katia wanted to buy a beaded bracelet with a large stone in the middle. The asking price was 80 yuan. Katia would buy it for 20, maybe even 30 (crazy!). The lady went down to 60 yuan and wouldn't budge from there. Everybody was asking for 80 yuan for their bracelets. And another lady asked for 30 yuan for 16 postcards that we could buy in Beijing for 20 (and even then it's a rip-off!).
I loved Shanghai for its hanging clothes - they're everywhere. Makes the dull brown streets colourful. The blue-suited people were loud. When we passed they were yelling at each other for who knows what reason.
A sampling of what was offered at this market. There were also some beautiful wooden boxes.
The chinese enjoy their birds. You'll see old men slowly walking in parks, holding their precious bird cage and listening to their bird's song. Or the men will have sat down to play a game of Chinese chess, with their birds floating in a nearby tree. There are at least five cages in this picture...
On to a completely different part of town - the "old" part, the "original" Shanghai, which is actually an extremely touristy (and therefore newly restored and "re-fabricated") part of town. This part of town is always crowded. There are a great number of tourist shops along all the streets diverging from this "centre." What caught my eye for this photo was the mural of Chinese women on the wall in the foreground. And the man's head in the corner is an unanticipated bonus.
A classic advertising poster on one of the "old" buildings of Shanghai.
A shopping street in "old' Shanghai.
Starbucks and a bicycle in "old" Shanghai. It seemed like there were a lot more Starbucks coffee shops in Shanghai than in Beijing. Shanghai's a lot more Westernized.
Katia (in green) and Rita, one of her classmates who speaks English. Rita's actually the one who spurred Katia to go to Shanghai, since she was going to be there for an exam on Sunday. We ended up only spending Friday morning together, since we didn't take the same train, Katia and I slept in a hotel while Rita stayed with family, and we didn't see her after we separated early Friday afternoon... Rita went to Nanjing for a few days before returning to Beijing yesterday (Wednesday)! They're in a shopping street running east of the "old district" and towards the Bund - the famous walkway by the river.
More typical Shanghai architecture. This photo was taken not far from our hotel. Those bicycle carts (you can see one in the foreground) are so typical in China!!! You see many of them (and in worse condition!) in Beijing.
Old and new mashed together.
Wandering sellers set up shop pretty much anywhere and everywhere along the street. Katia bought two pairs of socks at this intersection. We later used the socks on our hands to keep us warm in the evening...
If you zoom in you can see the beginning of a neat little street in the centre of the picture - opens up a whole new world that may depict the "real" Shanghai.
However "westernized" Shanghai pretends to be, you'd never see somebody carrying a plastic bag like that on their shoulder in North America, nor a man pulling a wooden cart... If you look closely, you'll see there's a white wedding car to the left. A couple men lit super loud firecrackers that blew up high in the air right beside where Katia and I were buying socks. We soon realised it was for a wedding, since a groom came running out carrying his bride in his arms (she was wearing red slippers!). He brought her to the car, where a few photographers took pictures (I didn't have time to take out my camera!) and then off they went amid a crowd of well-wishers. It was totally out of the blue - we had walked into a not-at-all touristy neighbourhood where we were the only whites around.
Another street picture, with the possibility of zooming in to see some "back-alley" material.
Poverty is picturesque.
The constant reminder of how close progress and stagnation stand side-by-side in Shanghai. SUVs parked in a parking lot across the street from run-down apartment buildings with modern-looking towers in the background. The parking lot is for a hotel called "The Magnificent." How funny!
