Shanghai

Shanghai is very interesting, it has this really amazing cutting edge and modern technology, and then super old-school. The incredibly rich and the very poor.  Any country has this but maybe because Shanghai has grown so quickly it's more apparent here.  So far I really like it here, Shanghai is really easy to get around in.  Walking to different places on foot would take all day because the city is really HUGE.  But taxis are plentiful and super cheap, like $2 to go all the way across town.  So if you don't speak chinese all you really need to get around is a map to show the driver where to take you.  The driving here is pretty crazy.  There will be 4 lanes painted onto the road yet somehow there are 7 lanes of traffic.  Nobody drives in the lines, everybody is darting in and out of traffic I don't know there aren't TONS of accidents, I'm sure there are.  Bikes and scooters and pedestrians are all doing whatever the heck they want,  and I am pretty sure the red light here is just a suggestion.  It's best to just not look ahead. 

 

I felt like we spent a lot of money today, the exchange of yuan to dollar is about 6.5 to one, for dinner last night we spent 91 yuan.  It was a really nice place and we ordered a ton of food. Drinks, appetizers, the works.  It probably would have been 91 dollars at home, but you figure out the exchange and it was about $14 USD.  That is awesome, and come to find out that was a pretty "expensive" restaurant and usually you can find a good meal for about $2 a person.

 

 I don't know what it is but several times here already, people have come up to us and asked if they could take a photo with us.  I was taking this picture of the two of us and I see this group of chinese girls standing about 10 feet away and just staring at us and whispering and giggling.   There really aren't very many non-chinese people here.  Even in Shanghai, you would expect to see more but we stand out like a sore thumb, this place where we took the photo (Pu Dong) is the most touristy part of Shanghai and there were a few European people there, but everybody else was chinese.  In other parts of the city we didn't see any non-chinese.  It's weird to be such an oddity here, America has almost every culture and people group you could imagine. Here we seem to be some sort of novelty.

 

This part of Shanghai really is beautiful, you have on the Bund side, very European architecture. (it was originally settled as a European colony I believe, so that makes sense)  Then across the river you have Pudong, the huge metropolis of skyscrapers and bright lights it's hard to imagine that only about 20 years ago, Pudong area was so small.

So anyway, Shanghai was really awesome, if you want to see more pictures you can look at the albums on facebook - I didn't want to bog the blog with tons of pictures.  Hopefully we should get our 4th bag back soon that was lost on the flight.  Hmmm.  On the other hand it is nice to not have it while we are traveling.  We have to get on the train tomorrow with all of our luggage and it is going to be a challenge.