Day 2: Oriental Pearl Tower and Chenghuang Temple

First off, a picture for Helen--the mini bar at the Indigo had waaaay  more than tea, I just thought the tea aspect was more unusual so I took of picture of that instead :)

Day 2 was spent in Shanghai, soaking up food, culture, and atmosphere. Our hotel is located on “The Bund,” a bizarre word which means the outer shore, or the riverfront. The etymology of this word is quite interesting, as explained by Wikipedia: It’s from the Hindi-Urdu word, “band,” which means embankment or levee. We had a good bird’s eye view of everything by ascending 468 meters up the Oriental Pearl Tower, an eye-catching structure comprised of three spheres, or “pearls” that shoot up into the sky, signaling to tourists from New York City that they’ve at last arrived in Shanghai.  There was a glass-floor that was even more terrifying than the version in the CN Tower in Toronto, but I was too chicken to go on it. Let’s face it, the Chinese aren’t exactly renowned for craftsmanship J Better not to risk it! After leaving the tower, we stopped at the river front and ran around taking pictures of everything: the Baidu bridge, the former He Ping Hotel (former haunt of the Shanghai Triad), and strolled through a park outside the former Foreign Concession, where you can still see a sign that prohibits entrance to dogs and Chinese.  

We then made our way to Chenghuang Temple, an older, walled section of the city where one can still view traditional Chinese architecture. The temple is at least 700 years old, an ancient building originally built to house the city’s deities, who protected it against calamity. Today, it still has the beautiful sloping roofs and ornate woodwork, but is now mostly a center for shopping and eating. Shanghai is an expensive city, but the food is still comparably cheap and so delicious. We had our first taste of Shanghai’s famed soup buns here. They were better than anything I’ve ever had in New York: hot, juicy, and melts in your mouth kind of yum.

Pictures

View of Shanghai skyline from the breakfast room of the Indigo.

Turnip crisps

Various Shanghai delicacies (lao you tiao on the left was my favorite)

Infamous Shanghai soup dumplings!!!!