The third city I visited in China was Shanghai. Passing through the airport, there is nothing more fun then taking the meglev and traveling to middle of no-where downtown shanghai.
In English, that is 268 mph, 19 miles in about 7 minutes. This speed is maintain for about 3 minutes, during this time everyone is taking the above photo.
Zoom-zoom, passing at over 500 mph... pimp mass transit. Shanghai is a hip, cool and weird place. Below is me at the river walk.
The next photo is not a photo of a statue but a photo of foreign people (to the left, this is the weird part).
It's amazing, but you can walk for blocks around parts of Shanghai and see only foreign people. Europeans, American, there is nothing like this in Tokyo or Japan. And more so then in Japan, Shanghai has more services for foreigners, which is nice. I happen to be in town thanksgiving day, and China sells turkey.
To that point, I was also invited to the most amazing thanksgiving dinner!
Thanks to everyone. But, enough about foreigners, there is other stuff in Shanghai too. Parts of Shanghai are really trendy here on the ground floor.
Walk around, this hood is called Tianzifang, and all you see are shops, bars and restaurants. It's difficult to believe you are in a communist country with all this what seems to be free-enterprise going on.
There are even people running art shops making modern style prints. But to remind you that you are in China, as you are walking, you look up and see:
And you are forced to think to yourself, "why would you dry your underwear / clothes outside when there is so much ash in the air?" More fun, you see people doing odd-jobs all over Shanghai, this might be more of an effect of the communist country.
This guy is pulling around 100's of chairs.
I'm actually more interested in how they stacked that many chairs on two wheels. Another odd job:
If you would like to be pulled around the city while taking a nap, no problem.
Overall, Shanghai is a great place to visit, very cool city. Above is the famous river walk, people enjoying the afternoon.
Another view of the river... One more thing, I almost forgot. I was visiting friends in Shanghai and we decided to get delivery pizza (all that was left was Thanksgiving leftovers, you understand). My friend was able to pick up the phone and order pizza in English, I was shocked.
This is something I can't do in Japan. And when we open the box, check this out:
Real pizza. NYSP.
This group of people were moving around Imaike taking donations. But different from the US, the donation boxes did not really say to what origination would receive the donation, but this may have not been determined yet.
The people above are actually from a politician campaign group. The earthquake happen three days before local elections in Nagoya, this gave politicians the chance to help out while promoting there messages of change and making Nagoya better.
Above is the politician, Mrs. Higashitani, making noise and collecting donations in Imaike... But make sure you know where your donations end up.
That speaker is loud!!!
