Shanghai to be exact. This city is like a showcase for the future – almost everything is brand new. From the airport we took a mag-lev train to the city. The top speed was 186 mph and the suburbs just whizzed past. By the time we found our hostel it was pretty late so Sara and I decided to eat there. After two meals and drinks the total bill was only $15 (I could get used to this)! The hostel was in Old Town and had many of the expected amenities other than weak plumbing that required all paper be thrown in the trash and only provided hot water during set hours.

On Saturday we started exploring the city. We were thankful to find that most road signs were translated. While walking to the Yuyuan Gardens, a couple girls asked me to take their picture. They said they were students from Beijing on holiday and started chatting with us. They gave us a few ideas for places to check out. After 5 minutes of talking, suddenly one of the girls looked at her phone, mumbled something in Chinese, then all three took off running. We thought they were trying to catch a bus but they ran into a park and disappeared. Sara and I were speechless, but we weren’t missing anything so we just broke out laughing.

The Yuyuan Gardens was a beautiful old school oasis in the heart of the modern city. I’ll let the pictures speak for me:

After the gardens, we found some local food to eat then walked towards the river front. While leaving Old Town, we passed a 3 city block area under construction with multiple new building rising from the ground. It was unreal to see the amount of growth throughout this city. The west river front (The Bund) was an area packed with people enjoying the spectacular views of downtown Shanghai. We decided to make our way to the heart of downtown so we could go to the top of a skyscraper. We tried to cross the river through the pedestrian tunnel, but that turned out to be some strange tourist trap ride. We back tracked a few streets to take the metro across and it was packed. Actually, the trains were always packed – no matter the time of day, the line or location, we were always standing shoulder to shoulder. Once we made our way downtown, we learned the the tallest building (Shanghai Tower) was still under construction, so we had to settle for the second tallest building (SWFC which was the tallest in the world in 2008). At the top we had some spectacular views of the downtown area, but we couldn’t see much further because the smog was so thick!

We heard that on Sunday morning lots of people gather in the park and create what I imagine as a real life dating website. Along the pathways are rows and rows of dating profiles. It looked to me like there were some parents trying to setup their kids as well as some professional matchmakers. It was a beautiful setting – we should do that in the states!

In the afternoon we decided to hunt for a local brewery and some dumplings. Along the way, we walked through a park where everybody was outside enjoying life! Google is blocked in China so we had to use other resources – all of them did a poor job because none of the locations on their maps were exactly correct so we had to walk around several blocks each time we tried to find a restaurant. The dumplings we found were fantastic! We ate at Din Tai Fung which is actually a chain with a couple locations in the US. The Shanghai Brewery was also surprisingly good – I think that is because they had an American brewmaster.

Monday morning we quickly visited the Shanghai Museum before heading back to the airport because our 72hr travel visa was expiring and it was time to go to Malaysia!