Shanghai

Week two of my trip was spent in Shanghai. The pollution was a bit better. The city was far more westernized so the food was also more western and there for not as enjoyable and exciting in my mind. BUT, there were people who spoke some English, which I greatly appreciated because it is hard for me to not be able to chat up strangers. Should have mastered Mandarin before I went...



These are all photos of the Shanghai skyline during the day and at night. It was very lovely. And I couldn't help but photograph the bikes. I wish I could have gotten the Louis Vuitton in the background to show the stark contrasts in Chinese Society.



One of our cultural experiences was visiting the Temple of the City Gods. It is a Taoist temple with many alters where you can go and make offerings to many different Gods for wealth or health or whatever else one needs. All of the red ribbons were offered by people to the God that corresponds to their



Another attraction in Shanghai is the World Financial Center. I want to say it is the third tallest building in the world. There was an amazing view, though the glass floor hundreds of feet up freaked me out. It is a place of business but it also has an elevator for tourists that reminded me of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory, though we didn't break through the roof and they didn't seem to take kindly to licking the wallpaper...



I even found a Catholic Church in Shanghai! So, of course, I went to mass. Thankfully, you don't actually have to speak the language to know what to do in a Catholic Mass. And I met an English speaker from Brazil who is studying Mandarin in Shanghai who was sad that I was only there for a few days as she said she hadn't found many people who spoke English or Portuguese with which to socialize.

Just in case I had forgotten what a small world it truly is, I 'ran into' my friend James from Oregon while in Shanghai and we spent my day off sight seeing. The Yu Yuan Gardens, pictured below, were AMAZING! We also took the scenic route to the Bund - the ritz-ee waterfront district and got to see some of the back ally's and the normal everyday people that lived there. Our adventure ended with an interesting foot massage - something I was told I had to have done in China. It was only interesting because the guy in the chair next to me seemed to have some sort of ingrown toenail issue and the process of addressing that left him hold a pillow for dear life and writhing in pain. Needless to say, neither James nor I let them near our toenails :)


Other than a day trip to Wuxi - another Chinese town where lots of multinational tech companies are based - the only other adventure I had in Shanghai was visiting the sight of the 2010 world expo. There was not a lot of stuff left behind to see at the world expo grounds but the few buildings remaining were amazing, architecturally. And I encountered the most persistent hawkers of anywhere we had gone. I heard "lady, lady, I give you good price" more than at any other attraction and had a number of people grab my arm to try and stop me. More on the joys of shopping in China later...





I leave my Shanghai portion with a few amusing signs from my trip. Most of these were actually in Beijing, but I didn't want to bore you too much and that post was longer :) It really makes me worry what signs in the US say that have been translated into other languages since English is one of the most commonly used languages, I can't imagine what we do to Mandarin.