Next: Tianmenshan
First stop in China.
Flight over was interesting. Escorted by a russian fighter jet over siberia, endless oil fields, mountains in mongolia, and the cityscpe of the chinese heartland.
Shanghai is the biggest city I have been to.
Word of the Day
Shuǐ 水 - Water
We took the metro in from the airport early in the morning after flying all night. We were heading to the center, near to the Yu Gardens, when at our first metro transfer I noticed we were right underneath where the super tall buildings were.
A quick walk out the station, and theres no really explaining just how tall these buildings are in person. It doesn’t really make much sense.
The center of shanghai is home to a trio of supertall buildings, along with the pearl tower.
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Even the pearl tower, the shortest of the bunch, was still much taller than I thought. If you look closely at the picture, you can see tiny people walking around way up there.
There is a bridge structure in the middle of downtown that leads to the river.
I was surprised to see what was clearly European architecture on the other side.
Kai explained that it’s leftover from when westerners occupied large amounts of the city in colonial times.
There is the Yu Garden next to where we were staying. We will go there tomorrow, but for tonight there was a festival for the chinese new year in the village surrounding it. It was the year of the snake.
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We met up with one of Kai’s friends and went to the bund, the famous riverside walk with that one view of shanghai everyone has seen a picture of.
The next day we woke up early and went to Yu Garden.
It is a classic example of a traditional chinese garden.
Afterwards, we met a group of Kai’s old friends for some hotpot, and then later went to the top of the shanghai tower.
It was very high up - the highest occupied floor of any building in the world.
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The Shanghai Financial Center was one of my favorite building designs when I was younger, so it was unerving to see it in person from above.
It was also the first time we got a good glimpse of one of the not so nice things about china - the air pollution.
Later we would find out that shanghai actually has some of the cleaner air.
The next day we wandered around the center of shanghai before our flight to Tianmenshan
Journal Entry
On our third day in Shanghai, we didn’t have much of a plan.
We decided to go to the people’s square in the center.
The air was now very polluted. It hurt my throat and my eyes. I ended up needing to buy a mask, which helped a bit.
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We walked over to the “old city”, which was part of the French concession - an area of Shanghai that the French colonials occupied.
There were some notable historical sites along the walk.
The most interesting of which was the house of Sun Yat-sen, who was a very important leader of the National party who fought against the communist party in the Revolution.
Another was the house of Zhoa En Lai, who Kai said was the administrator under Mao who did the work and who was left to die of cancer needlessly.
The old city ended up being a bit of a tourist trap, kind of like the Yu Gardens village. Kai got a paper cutout of us that ended up not looking anything like us 😂
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We went to a huge Buddhist temple (Jing’an Temple) in the city. It had gold roofs and very classic temple aesthetics.
We then had to rush to the airport. We got to take a maglev train that went 300kph and got us from the city to the airport in only 6 minutes. We are now flying to zhangjiejia
