Nanjing Road is Shanghai’s most famous shopping street. Here are all the famous brands, and all the unknown as well, everything you can imagine. All the neon signs make it look really cool at night. The prices here are obviously higher than in other places but it’s nice to just walk around and look at things and people.

Shanghai Old Town

Old Town in Shanghai is also known as Yuyuan Market and is the best place for shopping in Shanghai. There are a lot of small shops that sell a lot of various things, such as Chinese traditional ornaments, Chinese traditional medicine, fans, silk in various forms, bamboo furniture, pots and so on. There were also much food we could test, and some local specialties were actually really good.

The Bund is probably Shanghai’s most famous tourist attraction. The Bund is only a piece of street along the western shore of Huangpu river. The houses located along the Bund are of European new classic style and it doesn’t look like China, maybe with the exception of the colorful lights that decorate the buildings at night. You can walk along the water and it is extremely popular among both Chinese and foreign visitors to stroll around there, especially in the evening when all the lights on the buildings are turned on.

Sales people

There are also hundreds of vendors on the Bund. When we were there at the end of April 2008, they sold mainly three things. 1) Kites. You can always find kite sellers in China. 2) Roller skate “add-ons” for ordinary shoes; the sales people rolled around on their skates and asked, “skates?”. I heard that questions about twenty five thousand times a day. I never asked how much it cost, though. 3) A kind of plastic ball that was spinning on the ground while glowing in different colors. Unbelievably exciting for everyone of age 5 or less I guess. What surprised me was that most of the vendors that were selling the same toys were all gathered in the same place.

Food

Up on the walk, there were no restaurants, only small mobile street stalls, where they sold everything from sugar cane, barbecued corn, different kinds of fruit, to barbecued squid (three skewers cost 10 RMB).

Below the walk, towards the street, there are several restaurants, ranging from small independent Chinese to American chains like KFC and others.
KFC is everywhere by the way; sometimes you can see two at once.

There are three levels of the tower that visitors can reach. The lowest lookout is in the biggest sphere of the tower, at 90 meters up. The next level is in the middle-sized sphere, 263 meters above the ground level. The highest level you can reach as a visitor is the smallest ball at the top which is at an altitude of 350 meters. As a visitor, you cannot come up any further. Left is only the antenna that extends another 118 meters up in the air.

Hotel and Rotating Restaurant

In the second sphere, there is a restaurant that rotates around the tower’s center axis. You can sit, eat and have an overview of the city at the same time. Between the pillars of the two larger spheres, there is actually a hotel with 20 rooms.

Security check

Before you go into the tower you must go through a ridiculous security check. It looks like the same as at an airport, with X-ray machine, metal detector and security guards with harsh appearance.

The only rule, however, is to check if you have liquids with you. Water bottles are absolutely forbidden!

They did not look for anything else at all. I had my big camera around my neck, and wallet and keys in my pocket when I went through the metal detector. It was beeping like crazy but no one cared about checking me or anyone else who made the detector beep. Instead they screamed at my empty water bottle and wanted me to throw it before I could come in. Oh well.

I was there on a Sunday and it was a big crowd. It took about 20 minutes to get through the security check and then another 20 minutes in the long queue to the elevators.

Boring job

In each elevator there was a girl who spoke more like a robot. Her job was to press the right button and then tell us a little about the elevator while going up, including how fast the elevator was traveling up and at what altitude we were. She spoke both in Chinese and English. It seemed to be an incredibly boring job and it must be purely painful for her to stand there all day and read the same line all the time.

The eternal haze

In China’s large cities, it is usually always very foggy. There are few days that the sky is really blue and you can see far. The day when I was up in the tower, was foggy as usual and visibility was at most a few kilometers. If it is clear, one can definitely see really far from 350 meters up.

Expensive

It was expensive to go up to the top sphere, it cost 150 RMB per person, but I think that it would feel foolish to be at such a high building and not go up to the top. To go only to the first level is cheaper.

Shanghai is China’s largest city and also one of the largest cities in the world. About 18 million people live in Shanghai, if you include all the suburbs, and 10 million if you only count the city itself.

Shanghai is large, that is for sure. If you go by car from the center and out, it feels like the city will never end. And there are high-rises everywhere.

Shanghai is different from Beijing. In Shanghai there is really not so many cultural attractions to see. Beijing has a lot of those, a lot of old temples and palaces. In Shanghai, they have much less of that.

Shanghai is usually called the economical capital of China, while Beijing is the political capital.

To do in Shanghai

There is still a lot to do in Shanghai. They have a lot of interesting attractions that are well worth a visit. Here are a few examples:

Oriental Pearl – the TV tower in Shanghai

The world’s third highest TV tower, 468 meters (1535 feet) high, and as a tourist you can reach the highest observation deck at 350 meter (1148 feet) called the Space Module. The view from there is great!

The Bund

An entire street of houses in European-style along the Huangpu River. You can walk along the river and have a very nice view of the skyscrapers on the other side.

Shopping in Shanghai

Yuyuan Market, or Shanghai Old Town. A paradise for those who love shopping. But do not forget to bargain!

Prices in Shanghai

Shanghai is about as expensive / cheap as Beijing, but for those who live there, it is actually a bit more expensive. Apartments cost more, and a cheap one can be 3000 RMB per month (and then the condition of the building is… not so good)

Rich and poor

There is an extremely large difference between the rich and the poor in China, not only in Shanghai. In the west you can in many cases be a simple factory worker and still afford to have a car and a descent house. In China, that would be impossible. But the managers probably make as much money as their colleagues in west.

There are plenty of extremely wealthy, and they really like to show others how rich they are. For the luxurious restaurants you can find dishes that cost 10,000 per serving and even more than that. Such restaurants are rare in the west; there is simply no market for such extreme luxury here.

That is also the reason why a good apartment in Shanghai can cost as much as a good one in New York.