Shanghai

This is an official trip to Shanghai with my team and stayed close to 2 weeks in Shanghai. We reserved our sightseeing city tours in the weekends and some of our evenings to go around the downtown for some good food & shopping. The entire city of Shanghai looks so new & rich with many skyscrapers.

Bund is a riverside place decorated with beautiful lights all over. There is a cruise option and each cruise were beautifully decorated with different themes. I can compare this to River walk in San Antonio, Texas. But it’s 10 times more richer and extravagant appearance. The downtown was amazing and so many skyscrapers throughout the downtown stretch. Seattle would probably be only one fifth of Shanghai. We took a walk across the riverside and took several photos.

Weekend Sight Seeing
We reserved the Shanghai city tour through China Highlights. Esther was our English speaking tour guide who picked us pick from the hotel.Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall was our first stop of the day. This place had very good collections of the Shanghai town exhibiting the city from 1700 until now.

Silk Factory
We got a live demonstration of how silk is made at this place and every one of us got a chance to try out. It was awesome to watch the threads from cocoons that was extremely light & thin. The factory had several products for sale starting from scarves, linens to comforters of all sizes. The silk comforters keep you warm and I wanted to purchase one but didn’t have enough space to carry them back home. Janice was so nice to purchase one of those silk comforters for me back from her trip.

Our next destination was the Shanghai World Financial Center. This is the tallest observation deck in the world and the tallest building in Shanghai. The building has 100 stories and has a glass floor at the top of the observation deck.

It was so stunning to watch the city from this observation deck and different experience to watch some of the places through the glass floor.

Yuyuan Garden

The YuYuan garden was our final destination of our tour. The garden is located inside the market area and it’s one of the most popular & crowded places. I’m used to shopping in crowded places and have done several times in my home town (Chennai) 🙂 except the big difference is language here that was a blocker for me. This garden is a beautiful place that had some ancient architectures & sculptures surrounded by lovely trees, fountains & bushes.

We spent the rest of the day shopping in YuYuan and I was never tired of doing window shopping at this place :-). Some of the prices were nominal but branded ones did cost more than in United States. All of the Coach and Gucci bags were way more expensive than what you would see in a premium outlet or shopping malls in the US.