Shanghai

Ni hao，

or ‘你好’, as the Chinese say. This post will be all about Shanghai and all the different things you can do here!

I have been living in Shanghai for about a year and a half now, and I have very much enjoyed living here. There is so much to do in Shanghai – it is a very modern and developed city with a huge population of 23 million people. That’s about five times the population of Finland… The new skyscrapers on the Pudong side and the older buildings on the Puxi side of the Bund attract hundreds of thousands of tourists annually. Shanghai is in fact the second most visited city in China, Hong Kong being first (and technically Hong Kong isn’t even a part of China). According to the report, Shanghai received 268 million domestic visitors in 2014. 7,9 million of these people were foreign. This proves that China also gets a lot of Chinese tourists who come from the countryside or the ‘inner’ land. Even though China is still considered a developing country by some people, when you walk the streets of downtown Shanghai, you won’t know that China does in fact have a lot of poverty.

Now what can you actually do in Shanghai?

The number one tourist sight is definitely the Bund. During both, the day and the night, the Shanghai Bund is always filled with tourists. From the Bund, you can admire the very beautiful, modern and in my opinion, organized skyline of Shanghai. This is where you will definitely have to get your camera out for those gorgeous pictures! Make sure to keep your children near you at all times though, because it is easy to get lost in the mass of people.

A thing that could be very interesting for teenagers especially is Mr X. Mr X basically just has a lot of mystery rooms, where you go into the room with your friends and your objective is to get out, by solving clues and codes. I did this over the weekend with 8 other friends and we had so much fun. The room we went to was a jail, and we had to find clues to crack codes and I would definitely recommend this for anyone over the age of 12, since some of the rooms are really hard and can be quite challenging. The price for this depends on the amount of people you are with, but usually the cost is around 120-200 RMB. It is pretty pricey, but in my opinion it is definitely worth the money.

The address for Mr X is 550 Jumen Road, Quxi Road, and you can find more information on www.mr-x.com.cn. The other Mr X is on Dingxi Road, Yan’an Road.

Another fun thing you can do in Shanghai is of course, shop. Shanghai offers you numerous shopping centers and streets, filled with both Asian and Western style clothing. I really enjoy shopping here. The only thing that sometimes bothers me is the fact that shoes are usually not available for bigger than 38 and clothes are also sometimes really small. This of course depends on the store, but typically Asian stores have smaller sizes because Asian people are generally more petite than Western people. But stores like H&M, Old Navy and Forever 21 still have huge selections of clothes to choose from.

This is what I typically do on a day full of shopping in Shanghai!

I would first recommend taking the metro to Jing’an temple, on metro line 2. Here you have an enormous Old Navy store.  You can also take pictures of the temple. From the Old Navy, you can walk along West Nanjing road and go admire the more ‘fancy’ stores like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, YSL and Cartier. There are also a few good lunch places along this street, like Baker and Spice and Element Fresh.

Continuing the walk down Nanjing West Road (南京西路), you will come to the more affordable stores, like Uniqlo, H&M and Marks & Spencer. This is probably one of the busiest streets with a lot of people during the day. Shopping in this area will roughly take about 2h and after this, you could either take the metro to East Nanjing Road, or if you would prefer walking, you can continue your walk down West Nanjing Road. You will go past Shanghai’s biggest fake market, where you will find a lot of different fake brands. Most of the products at the fake market are OK quality, but getting things such as hoodies, UGGs and Converse, the fake market is a good place to get them.

But enough about the fake market. Continuing your walk down West Nanjing Lu, you will soon come to the section with all the expensive cars, which is always very exciting, especially if you’re travelling with young boys. Also, fancy and cool cars can be spotted almost anywhere in downtown Shanghai, so tell your male company to keep their eyes open!

After the expensive cars, you will come to People’s square. The people’s square isn’t really that exciting in my opinion; it’s just very overcrowded and not really that special. Around the People’s square, there are several shopping malls filled with both Western and Chinese clothing and food.

From the malls around here, I typically continue walking down East Nanjing Lu all the way to the big Forever 21 that’s there. By this point, I would definitely suggest going back to your hotel/whatever place you’re staying at, because your feet will most likely be dead, since you would’ve walked for about 10km! Now it would probably be time for some nice dinner, which I will talk about in my next post J

Thank you so much for reading and remember to leave comments below on improvements and if this post helped you!

Karoliina