Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 2 Walking Tour

So we'll start with the building being built across the street, which will be the Shanghai Tower. Per WikiPedia, it will be the tallest of the group of three super-tall buildings in Pudong (which is the New District across the river for Puxi or the downtown area), the other two being the Jin Mao Tower (where Tom works) and the Shanghai World Financial Center. Upon its completion in 2014, the building will be approximately 632 meters (2,073 ft) tall and have 128 stories. It will be the tallest building in China, and the second tallest in the world, surpassed only by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. We can see this out of the windows where we catch the elevators in our building since it is on the next block up from our building.

So this is the construction site that we see from the window. We could that they are roughly around 20 floors already on the inner core, and 5 or 6 that they have been building the circular outer walls.

The buildings around the perimeter with the red roofs house offices, but also is where some of the workers live on-site (from what we are told).

As we walk around, we see (now) lots of billboards for the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party here in China. We took advantage of one of these billboards for a photo-opp for Susan.

This weekend, we did the Walking Tour #2 out of Frommers. This starts at the Jing An Temple metro stop and ends at the Bund at the Peace Hotel. They say it takes 2-3 hours although I think we did it in around 2 hours with a stop to rest in the middle.

First stop was the Shanghai Exhibition Center, which was built in 1955 with help from the Soviet Union, which I thought was very obvious by looking at the architecture. We didn't go inside, but supposedly its' pretty weak on the inside. Before 1955, this was the site of the 10.5-hectare (26-acre) Hardoon Gardens, a colonial-era fantasy estate built by millionaire Silas Hardoon.

Next was a stop at Plaza 66, which is as upscale mall that looks very much like a US high-end shopping mall. Case in point ... a live pianist plays in the glass atrium encircled while people window-shop at Hermes, Dior, Versace, and Cartier.

In the lobby, along with the pianist, was a set of Porche's that were on display and Tom decided that he would look quite good with this little flashy red one.

So this "little blue guy" you see all over town and is Haibao, the mascot of the World Expo that was held in Shanghai in 2010. Haibao means treasure of the sea and was based on the Chinese character for man or person, although some say that he looks like Gumby.

Here it talks about Haibao .... and the motto from Shanghai "Better City, Better Life".

Here we stopped at JW Marriott Hotel lobby lounge which is on the 38th floor. Here was a view from across the river. You can kinda make out the Shanghai World Financial Center, which is the tallest building, the one that looks like there is a circle missing from the top. Next to it to the left and slightly shorter is the JinMao tower where Tom works. Welcome to smog.

From the 38th floor lobby of the Marriott, you can see People's Park which joins People Square (next picture). People's Park is the city's largest downtown green area, and covers part of what used to be teh Shanghai Race Track, with People's Square on the other part. The interesting part here is, on Sunday mornings, hoards of parents camp out in the park with "ads" for their kids. They are there to meet other parents and set up their kids on dates, since supposedly the Chinese young people work too much to find dates for themselves. It is an amazing and a little freaky sight as there are thousands upon thousands. Most don't have pictures, but just text in chinese that talks about their kids ... I could tell some list how much they weight and how tall they were. We didn't stay long .... can you blame us?

This is a view of People's Square from the Marriott.

Designed by a Hungarian architect, the Park Hotel was the tallest building outside North America when it was built in 1934 and boasted the fastest elevators in Shanghai at the time.

These next 2 pictures are taken from the Bund (the riverside) and is of the Aurora building on the Pudong side of the river. As the sun was setting, the lights on the side showed pictures, and I thought they looked kinda cool.