AnneMarie and Andrew

Annemarie and Andrew – Trekking Asia

Shanghai

Shanghai


Posted on Jun 13, 2014

Day 1 We took the overnight train to Shanghai from Hong Kong arriving around 10am. Shanghai has a large metro system and we’d picked a hostel a few hundred metres from a metro station so we had almost no distance to walk (experience has taught us never to trust taxi drivers so we do our best to book hostels near a station). With very little effort or hassle we were in the hostel. It was almost midday so we immediately went back out. And where in Shanghai is the first place to visit? The Bund of course! We stood on the ‘viewing deck’ looking over the Huangpu River and towards the famous skyline of Pudong District. Pudong is the district where the financial area is located and contains the skyscrapers which makes up the Shanghai skyline. Standing there it was obvious what to do first. Go up a skyscraper! In Shanghai there’s plenty of choice for skyscrapers. We could go up the instantly recognisable Oriental Pearl Tower, or the Jin Mao Building (ex 5th highest tower in the world) or the Shanghai World Financial Center currently the 6th tallest skyscraper in the world and containing an observation deck on the 100th floor. We chose the latter and grabbed a sandwich on the way there. There’s a tunnel containing a footpath linking The Bund with the skyscraper area, costing 50 RMB (£5). That’s a bit of a ripoff in my opinion, the metro is 2 RMB (20p) for a short journey and only 4 RMB (40p) to cover a long distance! And that includes a train to get you from A to B! 25 times the price and you have to walk too! Nah, we walked a few streets back and got on the metro under the river. We paid the 180 RMB (£17) each to go to the 94th, 97th and 100th floor. A false choice is provided of going to all three or just the 94th floor. After a short propaganda video we were shown into the lift and were blasting our way straight up the the 97th floor at a rate of 2 floors per second! At the 97th floor there’s a small observation deck but the windows weren’t very clean and there was a lot of glare in the glass making it very difficult to get any decent photos. So we got in another lift to take us up to the 100th floor. When you look at the tower from street level there is a quirky design, a ‘hole’ about 3 floors high. Annemarie says the building looks like a bottle opener! The 100th floor is...

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