Shanghai

It was a very long flight from Auckland to Shanghai - 12:30 hrs. We managaed to sleep a bit - enough to not be too bothered looking around Shanghai all day after arriving at 8am. We managaed to avoid our first scam, luckily. A random taxi driver trying to charge us three times the standard as unsuspecting, tired tourists. The taxi driver we did get was a speed freak though, and we spent the next 45 mins winding in and out of lanes to avoid the surrounding vehicles.

Shanghai was prety amazing. They really know how to build skyscrapers in bulk. There were heaps of apartment buildings in clumps where there were about 20 building all the same to about 30 stories - individually the designs were pretty cool though. This photo is the view from our hotel window:
We wandered around a bit and had lunch (noodles in broth with Shanghai greens) in this random alley across from an old Chinese woman (who thought we were very odd) at the back of a bazzaar where they were trying to sell us copies of gucci/prada, etc bags, wallets, sunglasses, watches..... Everyone was trying to sell us this stuff just because we're foreign. It was all hidden away in little rooms off the street so the police couldn't find it (surprisingly). We wandered along the bund too. It's all super new skyscrapers across the river and old (Euro) along the bund - pretty odd since it's China.
Emma's friend Mariko came and showed us around in the afternoon. It was really great as we'd had a lot of trouble finding things earlier (possibly due to the lack of a decent map). She took us to the Shanghai Contemporary Urban Design Exhibition Centre. They had the hugest city model youäve ever seen - must have been about 25m wide showing all the buildings in the city. The centre outlined the history of the city and it's settlers, covered what is there now and showed their plans for the next 10 or 15 years. It's going through some serious growth, but there are a lot of new exciting projects going on.

Mariko then took us out through the People's Square and up to a nice coffee house: Kathleen's. We then went out for dinner to an authentic Chinese restaurant. Mariko ordered lots of food: shredded potato soaked then fried with capsicum, tofu and pork, shanghai dumplings, soup... We were the only white people there. We ate so much and left so much and the whole meal including 3 beers was only just over NZ$30 total.

Then we went under the river to the Jinmao tower - 340m/88 stories. We went to the top in the speedy elevator and had a look out through the cloud over Shanghai. It was pretty spectactular.


The TV tower, the colours keep changing at night:
The next morning we only had time for a quick wander around before having to take another hair-raising taxi ride back to the airport.