Slept quite late today. Got up and took subway to Peoples’ Square. From there, started the walk down Nanjing Rd, one of the more famous shopping areas in Shanghai. NanjingLu is closed to vehicle traffic, so you can be pretty carefree, except for some little tourist trains that drive up and down all the time.
I suspect it would look very amazing at night. We’ll have to get back there for a night walk down Nanjing and the Bund.
Lots of expensive watches (real), and cheap watches (counterfeit). Lots of jewellry stores, which always draw Sabrina like a magnet.
Saw some very impressive jade carvings. I admire those, though I don’t really understand jade. I can’t understand why some jade is so expensive. One store, kind of a supply house for artists, had rough jade rocks for over $1000. It looks like any ordinary rock to me. Some jade is fantistically expensive, and some cheap, but it all looks the same to me.
Another store had tons of gold jewellry. And strangely some gold bars too. I’m not sure why anybody would buy gold bars. Saw a 1kg gold bar. Hate to imagine the price of that.
Another store sold Chinese traditional medicines. I saw some Ginseng roots that were priced at over $10000. It’s very weird-looking alien stuff.
Stopped for lunch at a Japanese noodle house. I had spicy beef noodles, and Sabrina had curry noodles. And a small bottle of sake to share. It was all delicious. This restaurant makes you pay ¥1 for napkins, but at least they come in a small plastic pack of 20 or so, convenient to tuck into a purse and take with you.
Walked from there down to the Bund, the west bank of the YangPu river. Took a bunch of photos here, including a couple hand-held attempts at panoramae to stich together later. Beggars and hawkers congregate here. Decided to take a boat tour, then head over to the Oriental Pearl tower revolving restaurant for dinner.
Getting tickets was easy enough, but then had quite a struggle to find the boat. And constantly being harrassed by people hawking counterfeit watches, postcards, plastic models of the Oriental Pearl, and especially some cheesy lighted wheels to clamp on to shoes, which were being peddled by hundreds of people. If I didn’t buy the stupid wheels from the first 50 people, I am not going to buy them from you! Somewhere in Shanghai, there’s some factory cranking these things out by the millions. I’d like to find that place, and burn it down.
There was also a pair of young children busking with a contortionist trick to creepy to describe. I felt sorry for them, suspect they are probably forced to do this.
Eventually we found the boat. It was very large. Had some richly-appointed rooms on the middle decks that I guess could be reserved for weddings and things like that. We went to the top deck. It was mostly an open deck with a few deck chairs around the edges that were all full. There was also a small roped off area at the side with tables and snacks, that you could get into for a small extra fee. We went there.
After we were aboard, seemed like hundreds more came aboard after us. The middle open area of the deck was packed by the end, with a lot of people who had no chance of a view of anything but the backs of other peoples’ heads, and probably wondering what the hell they were paying for.
Naturally, there was not a single lifeboat anywhere.
The boat got underway a little after dusk. Sailed up the YangPu on one bank, and then back down the other, taking about an hour. With all the lights on in Shanghai, it was quite a nice view. Hard to photograph, though, in the dark. I had better luck with my fast 50mm/f1.4, but at an effective 80mm length, my options for framing shots were quite limited. I need a wider fast lens.
The Pudong (east of the river) side is where all the really big buildings and lights are. And the Oriental Pearl TV tower, which looks either like a 50’s-era conception of a rocket ship, or a gigantic syringe. It’s unbelievable that in 1990, the Pudong area was mostly wet farmland.
Coke cans here still use the old-style pull-off tabs that we haven’t had in Canada since the late 70s.. But Coke tastes just the same.
After the boat docked, we headed to the Oriental Pearl tower for dinner. It was on the Pudong side of the river. I had read about a tourist train that goes through an underwater tunnel. Sabrina had never taken it, so we decided to give it a try. It was pretty silly, really. The whole tunnel is lined with a fancy laser light show, all flashy, but without meaning. Not much photography here, the dim light making it pretty futile.
On the other side, we found our way to the base of the Oriental Pearl a short walk away. Turned out the restaurant was closed for the day. So we decided to return to the Pearl another time. Instead we would make our way to the Jinmao building, the tallest buidling in China, fourth tallest in the world. I had read there was a bar or cafe or something on the 87th floor. It affords views almost as good as the observation deck one floor up, but you can get drinks or food instead of just admission alone.
It looked very close, but we were going to take a taxi anyway, because distances to large buildings can be deceptive. But we found the police appeared to have closed off the roads in the area for some reason. There was hardly any traffic at all, and no taxis to be had, so we had to walk.
It turned out to be a pretty short walk after all, but when we got there we were on the wrong side of a major busy road with no pedestrian crossings in sight. We ended up continuing to walk another 20 minutes before we found the necessary combination of pedestrian crossings to get us across all the roads. That was all very frustrating.
Taking the elevator up is an ear-popping experience. You pass through a hotel on the upper floors, which must have some spectacular views, and probably rates to match (starting at US$250/night according to my guidebook). Have to take three different elevators to get to the top.
We waited a short while for a table with a nice view. There were no meals available, but some very nice snacks. We had a combination platter of satay beef skewers, lamb, chicken wings, and some kind of roll I couldn’t identify. Drinks were expensive, at about CDN$10. I had a dry martini (shaken, stirred… whatever). Sabrina had a Shiraz. No good photo ops here, really.
Taxi home, sleep.