Shanghai

Shanghai is a beautiful city that twinkles, sparkles, and flashes. It looks like a magnificent and stunning and powerful Disney World - which is a little strange for a city that is striving to look like a powerful financial center. The photos below are taken from out window or our deck. We are docked right in the center of the city and are an easy walk to places of dramatic interest. We're sort of amazed and don't want to close the curtains when we go to sleep.

Shanghai has a lot of bonsai, a lot of plum and cherry blossoms, a lot of BIG buildings, like Shanghai Tower and Jin Mao, and a lot of banks. I stopped counting the bank names (e.g. Bank of China, HSBC, Agricultural bank of China when I got to 30 - and those were just the ones with names in English. It seems as though Shanghai has given up retail sales/shops and becoming wall to wall banks and restaurants. Shanghai has beautiful tree lined avenues and gracious parks. It also has the worst conglomerations of electric wires wound around poles and trees and buildings. Apartment terraces are filled with clothes on racks; apartments without terraces string their clothes on poles that stick out from the building. In streets of small apartments, clothes are hung on lamp posts and telephone poles. Everyone hangs clothes outside (to dry maybe?).