Shanghai

上海

Shanghai

One of the great draws of choosing Principal School to work at was the promise of holidays for both summer and Chinese New Year, giving me the great opportunity to travel a little around Asia! My friend Eliza had an expensive and unused Chinese visa leftover from her since abandoned plans to be an English teacher in Shanghai, so we decided we'd make China our first travel destination.

Visiting China during Chinese New Year is not highly recommended by many, with many travel sites suggesting to avoid travelling altogether in the mainland during this time. Over the course of the lunar new year, there are approximately 3.6 billion passenger trips throughout the country, in "the largest human migration in the world." Resultantly, getting around the country by any transport other than airplane is discouraged at best, if not entirely impossible altogether. With this in mind, we decided we'd stick to the big cities, which would allow us to remain in pretty self contained areas and keep us far away from the craziness enveloping China's public transportation system.

Our first stop was Shanghai, China's wealthiest, most cosmopolitan city, home to over 24 million people and a short 90 minute's plane journey away. Upon arriving in Shanghai, the scale of the city in comparison to Taipei became immediately obvious. The subway system contains 14 lines (in comparison to Taipei's paltry 5) and even within the stations themselves, it would frequently take ten to fifteen minutes to change line. The streets were wider, the crowds were bigger and the skyline was littered with skyscrapers (though admittedly none of them rising above Taipei's own Taipei 101).

We'd booked a dorm in a hostel conveniently located just a short walk from both East Nanjing Road, Shanghai's largest shopping area and the Bund, a waterfront holding a number of attractive early 20th century buildings, facing onto the more modern skyline across the river.

I arrived in mid afternoon and on our first night there, we decided to go into full-tourist mode and visit one of the many acrobat shows which have become legendary within China. I couldn't take any pictures inside the theatre, but the show treated us to a number of performances including a contortionist, acrobats gliding through the air on long strips of silk and a finale consisting of seven or eight motor cycle drivers flirting with death as they navigated a tiny the sides and tops of a small spherical cage at high speeds. All in all, the show was a lot of fun!

The next day, we decided to visit Yuyuan gardens a huge and elaborate garden constructed in the 16th century. The garden itself was surrounded by a bazaar which was filled with reconstructions of traditional Chinese architecture containing touristy shops and restaurants.

The garden felt very typically Chinese, containing a lot of traditional style buildings, large pools of water and very intricate looking rock formations throughout.

The garden was full of many old buildings, many of which were dimly lit and inaccessible to the public, although they were open for us to see from the outside, sometimes with small pieces of information about their original purpose.

Here is a picture of the huge bazaar outside the gardens. Though none of the buildings in the bazaar are original, they still gave the area an interesting feel, and with Chinese New Year being just a few days away, they were fully decked out in both sheep and goat decorations!


After we'd finished with Yu gardens, we walked down to the river in order to get a ferry tour, allowing us to have better views of both the Bund and the Shanghai skyline.

A few of the buildings on the Bund. It's distinct architecture made the Bund one of my favourite parts of the city to walk along (although the area itself was fairly devoid of life, allegedly due to new restrictions imposed by the government after a recent stampede during (solar) New Year's Eve).

Shanghai's monument to the people's heroes. Though not the most beautiful of monuments, the scale of it was pretty impressive!

A view of the river and Shanghai's skyscrapers. Pay special attention to the smog which fills the air of China's cities on most days!

Behind me is a spaceship Shanghai's Pearl Tower, said to resemble three pearls falling onto a jade plate.

In the evening, we decided to explore the French Concession, a district within Shanghai once occupied by the French, full of attractive buildings and trendy shops and restaurants. In particular, the French Concession is known to tourists for an alley known as Tian Zi Fang, home to lots of international restaurants, shops and galleries. Shanghai, being a very southern city, has very similar food options to Taipei, so we decided we'd take advantage of the large number of western restaurants here and treated ourselves to pizza, gelato and mulled wine!

A home-made candy shop where you could see the candy being made in the windows.

Tian Zi Fang

The next morning, we headed down to a very interesting museum known as the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre. The museum contained hundreds of Maoist propaganda posters which had previously plastered the streets of China, but since largely been destroyed. The museum gave a really interesting perspective of Maoist China and I treated myself to some posters as well as a book holding pictures of all the posters.

A poster I bought now hanging in my room. It reads "Oppressed people unite to oppose US imperialism" (I know this from my book and not from an advanced understanding of Chinese!). One particularly interesting aspect to a lot of their posters was their general support for any anti-establishment movements happening in western countries, and especially a vocal support of the American Civil Right's movement.

"Long live Maoism, Marxism and Mao Zedong thought" The red sun is supposedly meant to be Mao.

After this, we headed to the area around People's Park to visit the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art to check out a cool exhibition consisting of incredibly closeup photos of Chinese money and some interesting short films.

Some art on the side of the road when walking around the city.

After the museums, we found a great and cheap local restaurant near our hostel before heading home for an early night in anticipation of a very early train journey for a day trip we had planned the next morning.

Nanjing Road, one of Shanghai's biggest shopping districts and the nearest area to our hostel.

The next morning we got up bright and early for a day trip to a smaller city (with a minuscule population of only 8.7 million people) a little bit out of Shanghai, famous for it's West Lake, which allegedly was a favourite topic amongst Ancient Chinese poets.

Unfortunately, the landscape of China has changed slightly since those times and we arrived on an especially smoggy day, which really obscured our views of the lake, so we could only just see the shrouds of the (supposedly beautiful) hills across from it.

Our obscured views from across the lake.

After walking along the lake for about 45 minutes, we decided that we'd rather do something else in Hangzhou as the air pollution made it hard to enjoy the scenery! We tried to go along a hiking path in the area near the lake, but this seemed to lead to nowhere, so we eventually gave up on the whole thing and headed back to the city. We found a large pedestrian road filled with shops which we walked along for a bit, before heading home, feeling a little cheated of our day.

Some funny statues in celebration of Chinese New Year.

One of the streams coming off to the lake on the walk back.

The area definitely seemed to me like it could have been really beautiful on a better day...

 We stopped for a snack at this restaurant where we had some pretty good soup consisting of soft tofu and various herbs as well as a Chinese variant of fried dough, covered in icing sugar (delicious of course!). Luckily for me, I didn't notice the small black eyes of the baby shrimp in the soup until I'd already finished my bowl! As you can see, the man outside the restaurant was very enthusiastic to strike a pose while I took my picture...


When we got back to the station, the legendary exodus of Shanghai locals became immediately apparent, with huge crowds of people standing at the station, preparing to go home for Chinese New Year. There was already a pretty obvious heavy police presence in China prior to this point (before getting on the subway, you would always have to scan any bags you had on you and walk through a medical detector). However, the police were really out in full force at the train station!

We ended the day by going back to the Bund to get a view of Shanghai's skyline when lit up at night. 

We found a very nice cocktail bar on the side of the river with a nice view of the city and enjoyed our last drink before saying goodbye to Shanghai.

Eliza with a mango martini and the People's monument in the background.

And so my ended my visit to Shanghai! The next morning, I got up early and headed down to the airport in preparation for my flight up north to China's capital and second biggest city, Beijing!

Stay tuned for more...