Missing in Action

My blog has gotten away from me the last few weeks.  We've been doing much more than I have had the energy to write about.  I know I will regret not chronicling everything, so I'm back at it today (with a little nudge from my friends).

I didn't take this picture of Nanjing Rd, but I love it.

Our kids are all coming to spend the holidays with us next month, and they're all flying into Shanghai.  So Brad and I decided we'd better do a reconnaissance mission to Shanghai so it won't be the blind leading the blind.  We hopped on a high-speed train on Friday morning and arrived in Shanghai in less than two hours.  We now know how to buy train tickets and navigate the train stations.  Our next task was figuring out the Shanghai metro system.  With 10 different lines (we only have two in Nanjing), we were a little nervous, but it was really easy.  Line 2 goes from the Hongqiao Rail Station on the east side of the city all the way to the Pudong International Airport on the west.  It passes through all the major city sites and crosses from the old part of the city to the new.

I had investigated the major sites we would want to see in a day and half, and we set out to find them.  We spent the day urban hiking.  What a great city!  Shanghai combines old China with the influences of foreign cultures (German, British and French) to become a major, sophisticated, modern commercial center.  It's the largest city in China, with 23 million residents.

Walking along the Huangpu River, looking at the Bund.  Beautiful!

Starting at People's Park, we walked down East Nanjing Road, Shanghai's main shopping street. It is a pedestrian mall with huge marquee signs, hundreds of large department stores and small shops--and even more people.  The street stretches all the way to the Huangpu River and the famous Bund.  We decided to take a detour to the hotel we have reserved for the holidays, to make sure it was okay.  The internet is great, but seeing a hotel in person gave us a little peace of mind. The hotel is right next to Yu Gardens, another site on my list, so we decided to resume our hike there.  A woman at the door of the hotel directed us to a short cut to the gardens, which turned into another adventure.  We walked through some great alleyways and small streets, not exactly in my tour book, but opened our eyes to another part of the city.

Yu Garden area with yours truly peaking out of the crowd.

The Yu Garden area is filled with shops.  Brad and I have started calling this experience "running the gauntlet."  Every site in China is lined with merchants and food shops to entice the visiting public.  While haggling is a full time, contact sport in China, you can only buy so much.  From the garden, we walked over to the river and found the walkway leading back to the Bund.  I had to look up what "Bund" means, and it's literally an embankment on a river, and in Shanghai is was the center of commerce during the 19th and 20th centuries.  The old buildings are spectacular and stand in sharp contrast to the modern high-rise buildings across the river in Pudong.

One of the big highlights of this trip was meeting up with Tami and Steve Dyer from Ann Arbor.  Their family has lived in Shanghai for almost nine years.  Steve works for a major international consulting firm, and he and Tami have definitely made the city home. They invited us to stay with them and we had a great time seeing the city through their eyes.  They both speak Mandarin like natives (Tami is originally from Taiwan), and, even more important, they understand the Chinese culture.  Their home was a wonderful retreat from a long day of sightseeing.

Tami had sent me a list of things not to miss in Shanghai, so we continued our hike on day two, not quite as ambitious as day one.  Steve dropped us off in the Pudong financial center, where we did some more scouting things to do next month, which definitely includes a trip to the top of Shanghai World Financial Center (SWFC).  It was the tallest building in China, but it's about to be dwarfed by the Shanghai Tower next year .  We did walk over to the river again and found the ferry that crossed back over to the old part of the city.  Tami suggested an area call Xintiandi, which has amazing shopping and a Taiwanese restaurant, where we would meet them for lunch.  The food was delicious (we let Tami do all the ordering).  The lunch ended with an amazing peanut ice cream-like dessert.  This will definitely be on the list when we come back.

Looking across the river at Pudong--Oriental Pearl Tower (l) SWFC (r)

 Coming back next month will give us a chance to visit some of these places at night, which I know will add another dimension to what is a great city.

We found our way back to the railroad station, hopped on another high-speed train that had us back in Nanjing in just over an hour.  Another vacation we need a vacation to recover from!

Our own light show on the Pudong.