Saturday Tour of Shanghai

This post will be dedicated to the tour we took as a large group to Shanghai's downtown area.  First, we went to the Yuyuan Gardens and the surrounding shopping area, which is a more traditional Chinese area.  Next, we went to the top of the World Financial Center, the tallest building in Shanghai.  After this, we went to Nanjing road, where my group went into the Shanghai First Foodhall.  At night, we went on a boat cruise down the Huangpu river.  Exciting, eventful, tiring, and (naturally) delicious day.

Yuyuan Gardens:

Pretty cool, and hard to describe in words.  I don't have a lot of words, but I do have pictures, and those are supposed to be worth 1000 words, right?

Furniture made out of the roots of ancient trees. 

After this, we went to the shops nearby, and we were hungry, so we went to not one, but two restaurants.  The first was a famous restaurant for steamed buns in Shanghai.  Steamed buns is a dish that Shanghai is very famous for.  As opposed to meat or vegetables, these steamed buns are filled completely with soup.  You literally take a straw, puncture the bun in the center, drink, and it's delicious.

Next, we went to a Japanese style sushi place.  They had a ton of little dishes rotating around the restaurant on a conveyor belt.  Most of the dishes were either sushi or desserts.  I was careful about raw or shellfish because of sanitary reasons, which made it difficult.  Good thing I like dessert.  I tried some new kind of dessert.  Hard to describe and I did not think to take a picture of it, but it's like a jelly like bun, and when you bite into it, there is ice cream inside.  The outside, however, is like a gelatinous dough.  I laughed at it because it was unlike anything I'd ever tasted, but it was great.

World Financial Center:

We zig zagged across town to get here.  Literally, since the bus driver was new to Shanghai, and decided to play guessing games with directions.  He did not know what direction to go in to get to the tallest building in the city.  Anyways, we finally arrived at the World Financial Center (WFC), and it towers everything else.  Some of the buildings around it are really tall as well, but the WFC is big, it's wide, and it fills the space.  The building looks like a bottle opener.  Interestingly enough, the original design had the rectangle at the top as a circle.  The design firm was Japanese, and given the history between the Japanese and Chinese, the design was changed so that it did not look like a Japanese flag at the top of the tallest building in Shanghai.

We went down into the basement, where we were grouped into a kind of hurry up and wait ordeal for a little while before getting into the elevator and going to the bottom of the observation center, which is at the bottom of the hole at the top.  from there, we took an escalator and elevator to get all the way to the observation deck, right at the top of the opening.  I had to swallow consistently going up the first elevator since it moved so fast and the pressure changed quickly.

Pictures?  Pictures:

From this Picture, you can get a sense of the size of Shanghai before it fades into the haze.  Well, at least half of it.

Construction next to the WFC, slated to take over as Shanghai's tallest building in 2014

Row after row of blue apartment buildings

Proof that I made it with the Pearl tower in the background

Proof that I almost fell off.  Or that I was having too much fun.

View through the glass panels on the floor of the observation deck.

Bottom Left: Once the Tallest Building in Shanghai.  Right: World Financial Center, the current tallest building in Shanghai. Top Left: Shanghai Tower under construction, which will be the 2nd tallest building in the world upon completion.

After leaving the behemoth building district, we headed over towards the China Expo from the World's fair in  2010.  Unfortunately, the museum closed 5 minutes before we arrived (our bus driver got lost again).  Just for kicks here is a picture from the outside:

Nanjing Road:

After we were rejected from the China Expo, we headed to Nanjing Road for dinner, where we went to the Shanghai First Foodhall.  It was kind of like a mall dedicated only to food.  In other words, heaven.  We went to a restaurant on the third floor for noodles and dumplings, and afterwards went to an ice cream place and then downstairs to the markets, where I bought a very curious looking candy.

Your photogenic food picture of the day.

More steamed buns, what Shanghai is famous for.  These are small than the one above, and are filled with soup and meat.  You pick them up with chopsticks, take a tiny bite in the dough, suck out the soup, then eat the rest.

Green Tea Ice Cream

Nope, not bb gun pellets.  These are candy.  I shared them with the rest of the group.  Inappropriate balls jokes ensued.

After Nanjing Road, we made a bee line (again, sort of) for the Huangpu River where we were able had our boat cruise.  We were able to see both sides of the river lit up.  Unfortunately it was around this point where the battery in my camera ran out.  Fortunately, I've made friends.  Proof?  Proof:

The Pudong area with the Oriental Pearl Tower behind me while I am on the boat cruise.
Yes, I also realize that I am trying to prove that I have friends by showing a photo of myself alone.

All in all, it was a 14 hour tour of the city.  Some people also went clubbing also.  In keeping with the proving things theme of this post, I proved that I was human and decided to go back and go to back to campus and to bed instead.  There will be plenty of time for nightlife fun.

OT (Off topic): Jabrill Peppers, the #2 ranked football prospect in the country who is being compared to Charles Woodson is set to announce his college choice at 5:15 today and it is airing on ESPNU.  A lot of "experts" are predicting he will choose Michigan, but who knows.  Something to look out for today and GO BLUE!

That's all.  Someone asked me for more pictures. Happy now?