shanghai – jingmao tower, people’s square and others

if i’m not wrong, the oriental pearl tv tower isnt the highest in shanghai, but the jingmao tower is. but either way, we went up jingmao tower so that we could see the oriental pearl, as the jingmao tower isnt as architecturally interesting as the other.

near the tower is another buliding that looks quite cool:

ok and now i’m stealing pictures again, but here’s a sample of the view from the tower:

(well, the above is outside the hilton hotel)

shanghai is quite pretty at night.. and look at how many high rise buildings there are around the tower!

the top of the cool building above:

and these are my pics again:

the hotel atrium from atop the tower – the hyatt hotel is in the building itself, and it starts from the 38th storey or something like that:

here’s the accompanying text:

can you spot the spelling mistake on this bag?:

ooh we were at the french concession – the gentrified part of shanghai where there’re quite a few european looking buildings – and we saw this:

there’s coffee bean and tea leaf in shanghai too! i was very happy to be there:

close up of my black forest:

shanghai’s hosting the expo next year, although i think they’re cutting it a bit tight with regard to the construction:

dont you think the mascot is rather ugly? yet there were so many peddlers trying to sell the stuffed toy version of it..

here’s the shanghai national museum. the building is meant to represent heaven (the circular part) and earth (the square part)

the flag-lined boulevard – some of the key municipal buildings are in this area:

the shanghai national theatre – it’s very interesting!

here’s the government building whose name i’ve forgotten. but there were 2 guards standing on duty outside:

shanghai part 2 – Yu Garden (YuYuan)

this is a famous garden in shanghai, and the area around it looks like it came from a chinese period drama, sort of.

there’re many food stalls and souvenir stalls in the bazaar surrounding the garden, and lots of touts trying to get you to go with them to see fake branded bags, sunglasses and shoes. it’s weird cos it’s so obvious that they’re trying to cheat you, yet there’re so many of them about that we wondered who actually goes along with them. i mean, it’s cos there are gullible tourists who do go along with them that they’re all congregating there right?

anyway, the garden is quite big, and i think it’s quite pretty too!

here are some pictures of it:

 

there’re lots of broad scenes like these two as the garden is very big

check out the size of this roof..

i like this pic (it wasnt taken by me, and neither were the 3 above, but i’m shamelessly stealing them!):

one part of yuyuan that i liked were the dragons that lined the walls. can you see the dragon head on the right and the body extending all the way to the left? notice also the deer-like animal atop a structure on the left:

the dragon up close:

rock installations are also a key feature of the garden. these are extremely popular in all the other gardens that i’d been to also, and i think they’re meant to be miniature representations of landscape? to be honest i’m not sure of the significance that they play in chinese gardens, and am a bit ashamed to admit that cos i went to quite a few gardens in my time there..

look at how big the rock structure is:

what i really liked were also the figures on the roofs – there were many many of them!:

there were also lots of koi in the pond!:

some other visitors had bought fish food and were feeding them, and the koi were fighting so hard to get food and one of them actually propelled itself up onto the stone walkway next to the pond!

a few more pictures of the garden:

outside the garden, we saw this creature, and i was trying to be poser the way china tourists are when taking photos..

lunch was some dimsum at this rather posh looking restaurant:

we also ordered some jasmine tea, but check out how ugly the flower is:

shanghai – part 1 (and day 1 in china)

first stop was in shanghai – dont have too many pictures of the sights here, partly cos there werent that many pretty ones, and also i was lazzzzy as usual :P

one way you can leave the airport for the city is to take the MagLev:

it’s not as cheap as the other options, but it’s really fast. it can apparently go faster than a bullet train, but this was a very short journey and the fastest speed it clocked was this:

301km/hr! frankly i’m not sure if that’s meant to be fast or not, but it was quite shiok sitting in it and zooming extremely smoothly across the land :)

saw this in the taxi:

it’s quite crap though, cos taxi drivers in china are absolutely useless. they usually dont know the road that you want to go to, and it’s quite difficult to communicate with them. maybe if you dont speak chinese you have less problem cos they might be nicer, but sitting in cabs wasnt always pleasant. we took taxi lots though, cos it’s not too expensive and subways arent always convenient. and oh, cab drivers are usually rude! and a lot of them suffer from road rage.

in shanghai, there was this driver who kept honking at no one in particular, wove in and out of traffic for no apparent reason and had jerky driving. in hangzhou, this driver wasnt sure where our hostel was so we directed him, yet he didnt believe us and kept questioning our directions. wtfh lor. in suzhou, we got in and told the driver to go to this particular place, and he didnt even grunt to acknowledge that he heard. then when i tried asking him if he knew some location, he cut me off with a “dunno” at “excuse me..”. sigh. and in beijing, none of the drivers seemed to know the main street we were near to even though it leads off tiananmen square.. which is unfathomable.

the mrt stations in shanghai are really nice. the newer ones look like the northeast line back home:

the trains all have tv screens too, which show news and entertainment clippets. unless things have changed since i’ve been home, that’s way better than singapore’s mrts. sorry, but so much more can be done regarding the crap stuff shown on the screens in the mrts back home!

and i thought that this was funny, as it seemed odd that you have to forbid people from trying to get themselves killed:

met up with e. and b.t. in shanghai, which was really nice cos i got to speak lots and lots of singlish! my first meal in china was xiao long bao:

check out the price for one long:

so cheap – that’s less than SGD1! food in china is very cheap. i ate too much while i was there!

it was rainy on the first day – and for the next few days too, actually. it rained a lot when i was in china, which wasnt very pleasant. but we went walking around, and saw this shop using mickey and minnie mouse to advertise their opening:

the mice have no relation to the shop – it’s a bakery cum cafe sort of place – but everyone seemed to love it. apparently, in china a lot of shops use well known icons to advertise their products, precisely because those icons are already recognised and familiar among the people.

some views of the street in the old town, near the Yu Garden :

of course, we had to look at the oriental pearl tv tower:

it’s very nice at night hor?

however, it looks quite crap in the day:

here are more shots of the city at night, on the Pudong side and looking over at the Bund: