Day 249: Seeing Shanghai

After a bit of a sleep in and a quick breakfast in our room, we headed out to do some sightseeing around Shanghai. First up, we walked across the little bridge near the hotel and up to the famous Bund (the waterfront area in central Shanghai that is centred on a section of Zhongshan Road), where there's a wide raised walkway beside the Huangpu River with a great view over to the financial district, with all of its weird and wonderful and seriously tall buildings (and where Kate found two 100 yuan bills on the ground - the equivalent of about £20). We then headed down East Nanjing Street and into the city proper, stopping first in an incredible upmarket shopping mall – with infinity fish ponds, curved escalators, a huge video screen on the ceiling showing underwater footage and a big Lego area, which the girls fell upon like ravenous wolves on a young deer. 

 

After stopping for some dumplings and at a Cantonese-style barbecue restaurant for lunch, we continued around in a big loop, down to Fangbang Road – essentially Shanghai's old street (I think it may even have been renamed Old Street), starting at the very rustic (grimy) 'authentic' end and ending up in the rather more touristy end, where we bought a little Chinese-style dress for Sarah. Eventually, our wanderings brought us back to the Bund and then back to the hotel. 

For dinner we went to a pretty average Japanese restaurant in the food hall of another shopping mall. On the way there, I was propositioned by a woman who wanted to know if I wanted a 'friend' to join me for my meal. Afterwards, we went back to the Bund – which was heaving with people – to admire the crazy flashing lights and giant video screens on the building in the financial district. Up in the sky, we saw some odd red lights that seemed to move quickly from one place to another and then suddenly stop and hover for long periods – which we could only assume were surveillance drones of some sort. And on the ground we saw lots of young women dressed up in fancy (almost invariably auspicious-red) dresses having their photos taken with equally dressed up young men – whether photographic models or brides and grooms we weren't sure. 

Shanghai is an incredibly vibrant, busy, impressive city and I'm really glad that we visited it, but it didn't charm us in the way that Beijing did and I'm not sad that we only had two nights there.