So as the title says we now head on to our final China location: Shanghai. We arrived just after midday and met our last guide Tom (Liam and I think he looks like Jet Li, but we’re not gonna take a swing for him just in case).
We went straight to the resturant where we had our own chef cooking at the table and the food was great. After eating we headed for the city centre and had a drive about. Shanghai is very different from all of the other places we have visited even the big cities like Beijing or Xi’an, it’s all very new with the East side of the river (now half the city) just 15 years old. One of the buildings, the Shanghai World Financial Centre, is the 3rd highest building in the world (or so I read) and has the highest observation deck (100th floor), which we are hoping to visit on our free day on Friday. I think it will be a fitting way to say goodbye to China.
From the east side of the river we looked over at the famous Bund, “Shanghai’s Wall Street”. It’s a great view across the river at the mix of different design styles as France, UK and the USA have left their mark with their own architecture in the buildings. After this we took a drive to the former French Concession, which is now a collection of bars and resturants all with distictly French style facades. But it was too early to go drinking so we headed to the Yu Yuan Gardens, which is actually a giant shopping area. We did some shopping in the flea market which had all kinds of great stuff, old and new (I went around the place singing Portobello Road from Bedknobs and Broomsticks and it was quite like that to be honest).
The evening held an acrobatics performance, but really it was more of a variety show. There were bendy girls making human pyramids, blokes fliping through hoops, plate spinning and the finale was some nutters riding motorbikes around a cage at each other. It was quite odd, but very entertaining.
The next day we took a trip to the nearby city of Suzhou where we visited another beautiful garden followed by a boat cruise down the city’s canal network before climbing a hill to the Leaning Pagoda. The pagoda is over 1000 years old and has quite a pronounced lean, it’s also been struck by lightning 7 times and survived the cultural revolution while surrounding temples burned, so I hope they figure out some way to preserve it before it’s too late.
