Day 8 - Shanghai

The first thing we did when we got to Shanghai was to take a little boat ride down the Huangpu River to observe Pudong's (Shanghai's Manhattan) skyline. This may sound like a strange thing to say, but that boat ride was one of the most memorable moments of my trip. Many people in our group described Shanghai as the New York of the future. That is, if China's unprecedented economic growth continues at its current pace, Shanghai will not only be the cultural and financial center of China, but of the world.
Being on that boat and looking out to a horizon filled with 30 floor buildings, you get the sense that, yes, they could be right. You look at the core and all you see are dozens of ultra-modern skyscrapers, each building unique in its aesthetics, and each would stand out in any other city. Then you look around a little bit and you realize that they're not done yet. There are cranes everywhere; for each monstrous building that's been finished, 2 more are going up. Downtown Montreal could easily dissapear into a Shanghai subburb. My heart could not stop racing for a good 30 or so minutes after that boat ride. How high is the skyline? It's SHANGhai.
We got a big hotel room in Shanghai with a divider between the "lounge" and the "bedroom". By this time, I was in serious need of socks. Seeing as we were only in this city for less than 48 hours, I had to improvise some sock drying techniques. It's in Shanghai that we came across this cool DVD store that had beautiful "homemade" boxsets of all your favorite TV shows and movies. They had such tempting offerings as The Complete TNG, Ghibli, Kurosawa, and Jackie Chan. All for reasonable prices that would make it worth buying pirated stuff over downloading, burning, labelling, and making a box. Etienne and I both got Ghibli boxes. I can't wait to show Grave of the Fireflies and Princess Mononoke to others so I can watch you people cry like the babies I know you are! It was also in Shanghai that I bought a 1.50$ bottle of hard liquor and really regretted it.
The day in Shanghai was mostly a bust as it was raining all day long. We visited a cashmere store where stuff was way out of my current price range, a beautiful garden where locals were selling us umbrellas for under 1$, and 2 famous shopping districts where we had to walk around in the rain. However, the weather gave us our first look at Josee's cute hat. I really wanted to see the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium, instead I got a cool stamp with my chinese name engraved on it. Prepare to see it on every correspondance you get from me.
Lunch was at a restaurant where they put on a roller skate show (sadly, Jessica Simpson's A Public Affair wasn't playing) and had all sorts of sea-faring life for our viewing and dining pleasure including these 2 unidentified beasts. I don't think they were part of our lunch but I guess it somewhat made up for not seeing the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium.
The night's entertainment was provided by the Shanghai Acrobats. I was promised that everyone would be in tears by the end of the show because it would be SO good, but sadly that turned out to be a big lie. It was only amazingly good instead of made-me-blubber-like-a-baby good. However, I'll always remember the valley girl/hoolahoop act who stole my heart the minute she hoolahooped using her ponytail. We had hoped to go out to a fun sounding "American District" for drinks and the usual debauchery, but were told that wake up time next day was 5am. I think Shanghai represents the biggest missed opportunity of our trip, we did not spend nearly enough time there and what little we had was spent mostly outside in the rain.
Previous	Enroute - Beijing - Great Wall - Silk Street - Xi'an - Hangzhou Wuzhen - Suzhou - Shanghai - Wuhan - Maoping - Xiling Shennong - Wanxian - Chongqing - Guilin Guangzhou - Kowloon - Hong Kong - Good Bye	Next