Shanghai: The First Hour

Our first stop in China was Shanghai, which we flew in to shortly after lunch. Besides the money that the ATM gave me, everything else was exactly(in a way) the same as Korea. The written language made little sense to me, the people all looked the same, and I still didn't understand what any of them were saying. But all that was okay, we had done our research and found that China, like Korea, is also in Asia, so we expected some similarities.

We took the Maglev(magnetically levitating train) from the airport which is an very efficient was to get in to the city. The coolest part about it was that, besides going 300 km/h, it was on a track with banked corners!

Our plan was to explore the financial center in the Pudong area and go up in the Oriental Pearl Tower(no known relation to the Oriental Pearl Restaurant). Upon exiting the subway we found the sky to be eating the tops of all the steel behemoths protruding from the earth. Rather than go up the tower to see in to the belly of the sky we headed back in to the belly of the earth and made our way to our hotel.

We were staying at The Shanghai Chungshengkan Hotel. Having booked the hotel online we were trusting that the address they provided was correct as the provided maps were different from site to site. Thankfully the locations given were all on the same street so we figured we would just stroll down and find in to problem. The hotel was located on a road perpendicular to the famous Nanjing Road(#46 of 730 Shanghai sites according to Trip Advisor) so we set off.

Given the price that we had paid we expected to be far from this road and so that is where we looked. When we finally got tired of wandering around we decided to ask for directions. Turns out that the line up on the corner for the snack stall Shendacheng was longer than the distance from Nanjing to our hotel. Fantastic location for the price!

Line up on Nanjing Road

The hotel(taken from the same place as above)

Back when I was still in Canada, a friend mentioned that if I was ever in China I should let her know, so I did. As it turns out she has connections in Shanghai and arranged for a history teacher to show us around. When I say show us around, I really mean take us in to his family because that is what he did. It was unbelievable! But more on that as I have time...