Shanghaied for Spring Festival!

Busy Bund

A joke which no-one in Shanghai actually seemed to find funny, but I still used at every possible oppertunity.

However, the rainy season has started and I am awake horribly early so I figured I should probebly get round to updating this trip/holiday/living in China blog thing. I apologise it has taken so long but I have been busy, not necessarily true I have been busy enough to have forgotten all about Shanghai updates. Better late than never I suppose!
Spring festival (Chinese new year) seems like a really bloody long time ago now, loads and loads has happened since then and yet I woke up the other day and nearly had a heart attack when I realised it was May already.
 
 
 
 

Finance Center

My trip to Shanghai was a little welcome break from China and the craziness that is Chinese New Year. I have heard it is the biggest human migration on the planet with millions and millions of people desperately trying to get themselves, their grandparents and a box of fruit onto trains and planes. It is chaos! No other word comes close. I flew the day before New Year itself and I think the whole of Kunming was in the departures lounge with me! It is a 3-hour flight from Kunming to Shanghai (just to give you some scale, that covers about two thirds of the country. China is a just little bigger than England) and I landed a little after eight in the afternoon. I soon discovered Shanghai has one of the simplest underground metro systems I have encountered and before I knew it I was in my hostel. A beautiful new building hidden down a little alleyway in a busy part of town, a 5 minute walk to the subway and then 4 stops to the Bund. Fairly central and amazing!



Most people I met in the hostel were in a similar situation to mine, living in china and in desperate need of some home comforts and a break from the China norm. I met people who were living all over the country so we swapped noted on where was a good place to live and where was hell on earth. I also added several places to my “want to visit eventually” list, which is not getting any shorted the longer I live outside on England.

World's highest observation platform

The city itself is a huge modern metropolis where absolutely everything has a record for something; tallest building, tallest viewing platform, biggest indoor market, longest shopping street, longest underwater tunnel, fastest train and so on. I began forgetting them and getting them confused on about the second day in the city. It is amazing but unfortunately, the novelty of records wore off fairly quickly when standing in the fourth queue of the day. Regardless, the vast majority of Shanghai is spectacular!

In total I spent 6 days in Shanghai and 3 in Nanjing (which I will come back to), which was enough time for me to realise I really love the city. Maybe not as much as Beijing, which has a nice mix of new and old, but still I had a great holiday. Some of the highlights were the insane market from which all presents were bought at rock bottom prices and the Shanghai World Finance Center, which is not the tallest building in the world but is home to the highest observation deck in the world standing at a stomach churning 475 meters. To ensure you don’t eat from some time the designers put a glass panel (like the one in the spinnaker tower, Portsmouth) in the floor so you can look past your feet to the ground hundreds of meters below. The lift travels at a whopping 25 miles per hour to get you to the 100^th floor in a little under 20 seconds. My ears popped twice!

When not doing battle in the busy markets, I would just wander off and see what I could find. It was almost impossible to get lost as subway stations appear when you desperately need to get back or you think you are so lost it would be impossible to ever find your way home and it turns out you are two stops from where you are staying. An amazing city! The home comforts were everywhere, Marks and Spencers, bookshops, H & M, bread that does not taste like cake and a decent club sandwich in the hostel. I left with my batteries fully charged and ready to take on China for another year (6 months at least).

During my stay in Shanghai, I met many people who raved about nearby Nanjing so I did some research and discovered a bullet train (300 km/h) could get me there in three hours. So I booked and jumped on a train the next day.