Lady Ho Tung: Lady Ho Tung stars in Shanghai Nights

Shanghai--land of neon lights, cultural delights and construction sites. I was really impressed by this quickly changing city. Modern China is arriving full blast in the form of bulldozers and construction cranes to revamp the old Shanghai with shiny new China a la huge skyscraper and shopping mall. Seriously, there are so many sides to this city--it's full of history, and has an excellent museum to boast it, has a mixture of architecture, is set on a river, and has all the modern amenities you can expect in a developed Chinese city (maybe even a western-style toilet!). Spent lots of time wandering around looking at buildings (partly the result of travelling with an engineer?)...actually, the whole first part of my blog was mostly shot by Antoine, for those of you who prefer my usual mishmash of random people shots, art and flowers...read on... they're after the psychedelic tourist tunnel.
Bright lights : Nanjing Lu at night is a shopper's mecca. The view from the Bund--the name given to the district of Shanghai located along the Huangpu river, across from Pudong (those tall buildings you see there). The Bund is where you find the old historical European-architecture buildings set up during Shanghai's boom days. Definetly a cool area now housing many fancy (if pretentious) bars and designer stores. The four lane highway running between the Bund and the river wasn't the best planning move if you ask me--maybe they took lessons from Toronto?
Jin Mao Tower. We had a drink on the 87th floor of this very cool, very tall building. It's the largest skyscraper in mainland China and the 5th largest in the world.
Oriental Pearl Tower--the tallest tower in Asia. The design's a bit cheesy, but distinctive. Shanghai's response to the CN Tower?Model of what Shanghai is to look like in 20 years at the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. The amount of construction here is unbelievable.
Construction. Okay, you just went through the Psychedelic Tourist Trap Tunnel.....which means we're in Sarah's pictures now! Art, parks and random people:Bunch of Buddha's set in stone and displayed for your education and aesthetic enjoyment at the creatively named Shanghai Museum.

Spend some time, as usual, hanging out in local parks watching people. One thing that I love about China is how active the elderly people are. My personal favorite is seeing them taking care of their grandchildren, but you can also see them gambling (Mah Jong, Chinese chess, cards), doing tai chi, and generally just hanging out in parks everywhere.

This street was great. You can see strong European influence here in the architecture, tree-lined avenues.

The same two models that I met on the train-ride home from Guangzhou, taking coffee in lane-side cafe.

Antoine: still being cute, still being French, and still not speaking Chinese.

Beautiful traditional garden in the Old City. You can enjoy the beautifully balanced rocks and trees if you can see past the roving groups of Chinese tourists in colour-coordinated baseball caps.

This guy was trying to catch fish with his bare hands.

Lady Ho Tung finds her inner harmony.

Look closely, instead of using diapers little kids have holes in the bottom of their pants and when they have to go, parents find an appropriate place for them to go. Good thing, imagine if all the babies in China wore disposable diapers...