Shanghai or This Blog isn't Dead

Just because six months have come and gone and we have been back from Asia for quite some time now, it doesn’t mean the tale of our travels is over. It’s just that it’s harder to find both the time and the mental availability to update this blog these days. We ended up staying in Asia for one more month than the six originally planned, and aside from exploring more of Singapore, we were able to take two more trips abroad.

In late September, it was Steve’s turn not to go, this time to Shanghai. I met my parents there, who had been taking essentially the Beijing tour we’d been on back in July, except for a stop in Xi’an.

Shanghai is a very different city from Beijing. Sure, they’re both quite large and populous and undergoing and immense development, but in feel they are very apart. For all the glass and concrete skyscrapers, Beijing is still very much the stately head of the government, while Shanghai is the cosmopolitan center of business. If I had to choose one of them to live in, I wouldn’t think twice about picking Shanghai, since, at least for the time being, there is a lot more to do there, even though there are certainly less tourist attractions.

Said tourist attractions are the centered around the European-influenced Bund and French Concession, the Yu Yuan Gardens, a (then) privately-owned and more sensibly sized version of the Summer Palace, the Jade Buddha temple, and the new developments around the city, namely the Pudong.

Besides these must-see places, Shanghai is a fine place just to walk around, admiring the European and industrial-type architectures, or shopping for great bargains at a thousand little boutiques that seem to sprout like mushrooms. It’s also the original place of Dim Sum and therefore a great city to indulge your palate, not just in Chinese cuisine, but in many other types of food you’ll find in all sorts of restaurants. At night, there are several bars and shows to choose from, as well as the more traditional option of attending an acrobatics show (apparently, the acrobats are more a tradition of Shanghai than Beijing, which surprised me.)

Interestingly enough, despite a having a great number of expats and a generally international feel, it’s hard to find anyone in Shanghai—except in hotels—that will speak other languages than Mandarin. In my next posts I will go into more detail about the places we visited and the things we did. Also, I have videos.