By Tim
So this past weekend Liz, Christine and I took a trip to the big city of Shanghai, about 14 million people. We took a train out of Nanjing at 7 pm on Friday night. The train was quite nice to ride in. the seats were larger than that on an airplane with lots of leg room. The ride lasted 2.5 hours, but it seemed to just fly by. Before we knew it were in Shanghai. After getting off the train we found our way to the subway. This subway is pretty large with 5 tracks. We go on and were on our way to our hotel. At our stop we saw about 30 people just standing at the door waiting to get into the train, the doors opened and it was a giant 
shoving contest. I have never pushed through a mob of people like this before. We made our way to ground level and were just shell shocked by all the lights and happenings. There were people ever where! You try to walk and you have to follow in a crowd of 50 people. To find our hotel our travel agent told us just to ask people on the street. Well we figured this would be quite the task with the language barrier, but we gave it a shot. We asked a couple of girls that just got out of the subway. They looked at the address, discussed it for a second then said in perfect English "We are not sure, but think you need to go this way." Wow was that ever a shock after spending the past 6 weeks in a city that has next to no English. We wondered and asked about 4 people until we finally got to our hotel. We were staying at the 3 star Yangtze Hotel. 3 stars in China is really low. Most hotels are 4 and up. But this was no crummy place. The hotel was built in 1937. But for being built so long ago our hotel was still pretty nice.
We got of to a bit of a late start on Saturday, 9 am, but it was well worth the sleep in. Our first stop was Nanjing Rd, a giant street market, with thousands of people. It was hard to move in this place. Here there was knockoff Adidas, La Costa, Nike .. and the list goes on. There was also a very annoying part to this place, aside from the mass of people. Every 4 steps that you took you have a person asking you if you wanted to buy a watch, dvd, roller shoes... you name it they were selling. But these people just would not leave you alone. All you could do was shrug them off. After taking our 30 min walk down Nanjing Rd, we made it to the Bund. This is where Shanghai's most famous building, the Oriental Pearl is. It is the 4th largest tower in the world. To get to the Pearl we had to cross the Huangpu River. To do this we got to take an underwater tourist tunnel. Well it was at much fun as we could ask for. You get into this little car and it takes you through an amazing light show. Then at the end of the tunnel there was tourist exhibits to see. The first was the underwater life area. This was great place to see. We got to meet some cool turtles and fishys. My fav was the guy in the picture. The second exhibit was on sex culture. Well if seeing cool turtles wasn't enough. The whole exhibit was a display of phallic symbols from china and around the world. It was really interesting to see how past civilizations represented sex in the culture. It has always been there, it has only been until recently, couple hundred years, that sex had become taboo. 
Once across we made our way to the Pearl. We got tickets to get to the 350m ball on top and have lunch in the revolving restaurant. This tower is phenomenal. Just the location is amazing. It has the best Fengshui ever. It is surrounded by water! It is good fengshui to have your building face water (shui). And it was even more amazing to see at night. This tower was just packed with people, we had 20 min line ups to get into elevators, but the view was well worth the wait. It was really cool to get a bird¡¯s eye view of the whole city. The tower on its own though was just like CN Tower. We had lunch at the top of the tower in the revolving restaurant. The food was good. I also managed to increase my animals eaten count. I got the chance to eat goose and rabbit. I thought they were both very delicious. Just on our way out we noticed everyone crowding around the windows. We looked and saw the people out cleaning the windows. Let me tell you that you could not pay me enough to be hundreds of meters in the air cleaning windows.
After getting down from the Pearl, we headed to see the Jade Buddha. After standard Chinese taxi ride we found ourselves at Buddhist temple. This being the first temple we have ever been it was surreal. For me it was like enter the Notre Dame of China. There were giant gold Buddha¡¯s and Buddha warriors everywhere. I found out that there is more than just one Buddha. It is a lot like the gods in Hinduism. There are many Buddha for different things. The one western people are most familiar with is the big fat happy one. I thought it was every interesting how similar Buddhism is to Hinduism. The gods that they worship look very similar. We keeping on going further into the temple and found ourselves face to face with the Jade Buddha. This statue is about 4 feet tall and made out of solid jade. There are no pictures of this because you were not allowed to take them. I didn¡¯t break the rules this time to respect the people worshiping.
To end our Saturday we decided to take a night river cruise on the Huangpu River to see all the lights. We got to the waterfront and purchased our tickets. We asked the lady where we were to catch the boat. She said "follow me". So she left her booth unlocked and started to walk down the road. She took us for a 5 min walk and then put us in a van. well this was kinda sketch. We took at 5 min van ride down the road then a new lady took us down a dark ally way to the ferry loading area. This loading area felt like we were getting on a boat to be deported and really for all we knew were getting kicked out of the country. Once the doors opened up to let you on the boat everyone start to run for seats, so we ran too. We got premo seats at the front. We did notice that our boat sucked for pictures because there was glass all around, but what did we expect for paying 10$ for a ferry ride. We were on the boat for about 10 min when it swung around and docked (well just really hit the other side)on the other side of the river. We g
ot off and then were escorted to our real tour boat. The ride was very enjoyable on this boat. We were on the upper deck and got great pictures of the city scope.
The last sight that we saw in Shanghai was the City Planning Center. This is a massive building dedicated to the design and planning of Shanghai itself. This is a planning students dream. It has a 20x20 foot scale model of the whole city. I was dumb founded when I saw this. If I wouldn't have gotten in too much trouble I would have played Godzilla... take that nuclear power plant.
Over all my impressions of Shanghai were mixed. It was a great trip. The city is definitely a different Chinese place. It is heavily influenced by western society. Any of the high rise buildings that you see were not around in the 1980s. The entire area around the Bund was FLAT. And now there are dozens of buildings taller than 10 stories. You could definitely tell that this was a city built in modern times. There are way to many people in such a small spot for me and their attitudes show it. People are very arrogant there. There was very little nature in the city either. When we got back to Nanjing I was very happy and I know how lucky I am to be in a city with such a great culture.
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