Chinese Adventure! Final Installment: Shanghai

Our last city on our tour of China was Shanghai, and we spent about a day and a half there. Driving into the city was awesome -- even the poorest areas didn't appear very poor at all. Everywhere more skyscrapers were popping up before our eyes, and Yoko told us that wasn't much of an exaggeration; most of the city was built up from rice patties in the last twenty years.

Bottle Opener from the ground

Our first stop was the World Financial Center, also known as the Bottle Opener. It's the second tallest building in the world, measuring an impressive 492 meters high, and we traveled to the 100th floor (out of 101) for a bird's eye view of Shanghai. We began in a room with 5 or 6 feet tall digital numbers on the ceiling, counting down something that we were never informed of.

Next we traveled 435 meters high in a large elevator with a light show that made me wonder if we were being brainwashed.  

 We then took a very steep escalator up to a stark white floor (where I expected to see a mad scientist walk out in an equally-white lab coat) whose only apparent purpose was to hold tourists waiting to take the next elevator, smaller this time, to our final destination. The 100th floor is 474 meters high and is made completely of glass, giving an excellent view of the city and miles (and miles) beyond.

Looking out at the city made me feel like we were playing Monopoly -- huge sections of building, what appeared to me like apartment complexes, looked identical from the sky, and it felt like we should be able to pick them up and move them to Boardwalk to win the whole game. We could see how the city has grown up around the rivers, and how the skyscrapers have taken over a large portion of the riverbank. Because the floor is made of glass, we could also see straight down; the 100th floor sits right on top of the "bottle opener" opening, so we had an excellent view of the streets and buildings right below us.

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Looking through the floor

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My favorite picture from the Bottle Opener

Monopoly Time!

 My favorite picture was one I took as a reflection. The ceiling had an excellent reflection, so I was able to get a picture of me (taking the picture, at the bottom of the frame) and the buildings behind/below us.

A TV Station

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Shanghai seemed much more influenced by Western countries, which makes sense considering its history with both import and export trade. We saw many more signs of home, including 7 Eleven and the YMCA.

 As the daughter of a retired Department of Transportation employee, I was very impressed with their highway system. In some places, there were 5 levels of highway stacked on top of each other.

 

Karaoke!

That afternoon, we spent a bit of time at a local karaoke; it was very different than karaoke here at home. We rented the entire room, complete with the microphones and TV showing the music videos and lyrics. We had quite the time, and my kids were quite surprised by the number of songs I knew, too.
















After another traditional dinner on the lazy susan, we attended the Shanghai Acrobatics Performance. The acrobats were amazing -- some balanced items, others balanced themselves; some threw items, others were thrown. Some were even contortionists, and they were able to create images that none of us could believe were actually happening.

The next day -- our final day in China -- held only a few sites for us but much shopping. First we visited the Jade Buddha Temple, where we took in the beautiful art and witnessed more people practicing their faith.

View from the Temple

One of the Temple buildings

Silkworms

 We then took a tour of a silk factory, where we watched women carefully separating silkworm cocoons and weaving them together to create strands and, in the end, beautiful pillows, blankets, handkerchiefs, and more.

Nan Jing Road

Seafood bowl & "Green" Tea

 We then traveled to Nan Jing Road, which made me think of Chicago's Magnificent Mile. For blocks, expensive brand-name stores lined the streets, and every now and then a cheaper store would fill a nook or cranny. Paul and I chose our lunch restaurant because it offered a seafood bowl, which we sought out since we were on the river's delta. I thought I ordered a milk tea, but something tells me that the green drink that tasted like vegetables (very spinach-like) wasn't really what I had wanted. The seafood, though, was amazing -- excellent flavor and incredibly tender, not like the chewy type we get here in the Midwest.







Our next stop was the Yuyuan Garden, created by a government official for his parents over 450 years ago. The architecture is beautiful; the fish ponds and landscaping are absolutely tranquil. Once inside, one might never guess she is smack dab in the middle of one of the most populated cities in the world.  

Dragon Statue

The Yuyuan Market

Just outside the garden wall is the Yuyuan Bazaar, which is a market with countless shops and an unbelievable spectrum of types of goods for sale. Jackie, our tour guide, made sure that we understood that we would get what we paid for -- if an item's price seemed too good to be true, the item probably had very little value to begin with. He encouraged us to bargain (haggle, if you will) for everything in the market, beginning at no more than half the original price. My students had a ball with this; my two girls especially loved working the price down and bragging about their wonderful skills. I was able to purchase single tea cups from a reputiable tea house for an excellent price because they were extras left over from sets already sold. As our sales clerk wrapped them for me, Paul and I realized the paper she was using had math problems on it, so we stopped her for a moment to see what she was using. We were astonished to see that she was ripping out pages from an American SAT prep book, and she'd simply reached the math section of the text. Paul and I, in true math-teacher fashion, calculated the answers on one page while she finished ringing me up, and thankfully our answers were correct when we checked them with the answer key. The sales clerk thought we were rather humorous, and she gave me an extra sheet from the book as a keepsake. Paul, one of our students, and I then continued to meander throughout the Bazaar, walking within crowds of people and fending off sales clerks who were always ready to convince you that the item you just picked up -- even the item you merely glanced at -- would make all of your dreams come true. I was able to purchase two beautiful bracelets, bargained down to just less than half of their original price simply by repeatedly insisting that I didn't really need or want the piece. While it was true that I didn't need the pieces, I did in fact want them because I'd seen many Chinese women wearing ones just like them, so I apparently have a better poker face than I once thought.

The three of us ended our trip to the Bazaar with a purchase at the Dairy Queen; I had a chocolate dipped ice cream cone. Now, I've found that telling some people back here at home this detail just produces a look that says, "You went all the way to Shanghai and ate at a DQ?" My response is this: YES! You see, having grown up in SmallTown, USA, Dairy Queen was the only fast food restaurant in my hometown until about the year 2000. To be able to go from that SmallTown and travel to the other side of the world and have the same chocolate dipped cone that I once had as a 7 year old -- it represents so much. On one hand, it was a cheesy connection, a way of saying that some things transcend cultural boundaries and the Pacific. But on the other, it was a sign of how far I've come; the 7-year-old me would have never dreamed of going to China, of standing -- no, hiking -- the Great Wall, had never even heard of the Terra Cotta Warriors, and had no idea fortune cookies were an American construct. But twenty years later, there I stood, eating the same ice cream cone, and doing all those wonderfully not-so-impossible things. I can think of no better way to celebrate our last day in China.

Seeing Pudong

We ended our afternoon with a trip to the Bund to take in the beautiful Shanghai skyline along the river. On the east side, the most recent skyscrapers, including the Bottle Opener, dominated the horizon; on the west stood buildings created by Western foreigners as a result of the Opium Wars in the late nineteenth century. Yet again, an unbelievable juxtaposition -- old versus new, modern versus traditional. We stood on the west side, known as Puxi (literally, "West of the Huangpu River" and pronounced Pooshi), looking across the water to Pudong ("East of the Huangpu River"), next to the Monument to the People's Heroes. (Yes, it's the same name as a monument in Tiananmen Square.)

Monument

The Puxi side -- clear Western influence

After our final dinner in China -- crusted beef, scrambled eggs, noodles, a fish that was wholly in tact, and many other standard dishes of meat in sauce, rice, and veggies -- we prepared for our final excursion: a night cruise along the Huangpu River. While Jackie collected our tickets, we stood on the sidewalk, huddled together as more and more street vendors literally circled around us, shouting not-so-persuasive calls to buy their goods. Paul dubbed these vendors the piranhas, but we were glad to see these piranhas had an attention problem; once they realized none of us were buying, they quickly dispersed. Then it was onto the cruise boat, to see the city all lit up. Jackie told us several times that day that the view would be, "red hot," and it was exactly that. All of the buildings, in both Pudong and Puxi, gave a spectacular lights display of all colors and designs. I stood on the second story of the cruise ship to take pictures as we traveled toward the ocean before moving inside to the sitting room as we traveled back up the river.

Pudong

A bit of home...

Puxi

Puxi

Old Puxi (left) & new Pudong (right)

The Staircase of the Cruise Ship

The ship's sitting room

Click to see full panoramic

 The cruise was a fantastic way to finish the trip -- calm, beautiful, and yet another excellent juxtaposition of all the facets of China, its culture, and its people.

And with that, our tour of China was over. We packed up, left our beautiful hotel early the next morning, and caught our 14 hour flight back to Detroit. The five of us sat in Detroit for over six hours waiting for our flight to Chicago, over two hours longer than we'd originally anticipated. It felt ironic that we were so very close to home compared to where we'd been, and yet we had no way of just going home. We slept off and on at the gate, and our first meal back in the States was a huge cheeseburger at Fudruckers. It seemed apropos at the time. By the time we finally made it to my doorstep at 11:30 that night, we'd had a 36-hour day. The next day I spent hours telling my family all about the trip and showing them the 1300+ pictures, and it took me more days that I'd like to admit to get over the jet lag.

All in all, it was an amazing, fantastic trip, one I will never forget and one that I love telling people about.