The Coolest City In China

When I was in China I went to visit Shanghai a couple of times. I determined that if I were ever to live in China for an extended period of time I would like to live there. It is the largest city in China and feels a lot like NYC or Paris or with just enough randomness to remind you that you are in China.

This post is dedicated to those two feelings.

Shanghai is a newer city than Beijing with a little less history so you do not have quite as many tourist opportunities of the "let's see random temples or districts" type. One of the main places is the gardens in the middle of the city. Because it is one of the few tourist traps the vendors really flock to it. One such vendor was of the tea variety, the large tea variety.

There were those who did not need any stinking storefront to hawk their wares. All they needed was a van blasting shitty pop music to the point where you could not hear what they were actually trying to sell.

There was the most useless fire hydrant I have ever seen. How would you get to this? Not only is it embedded in the sidewalk which I am assuming came along later but there is no road near this.

There also was a restaurant I wanted to try but was not open. I heard the food was out of this world.

Since the gardens are in the middle of the city, they were a walkable attraction and we saw many interesting things on the walk there. Like a pimp in a purple fur coat. I thought I was back in the D for a second.

Or a very large statue of a baby. A lounging baby at that, just chillin'.

We also saw an ad for a camera ideally suited to taking pictures of livestock. Specifically goats. As evidenced by the little goat in the display on the camera.

Another interesting thing was the traffic. I thought Beijing had deadened me to bad traffic. I mean I had grown accustomed to cars going in reverse on the freeway and people driving on the sidewalk. The traffic in Shanghai was worse. Bikes formed little gangs and sat in lanes until there was a break or a car stopped so that they could spread over another lane. It was something to see in action, the picture leaves it kind of flat.

We also stopped at a crazy random animal market. It was almost as cool as the one in Beijing. Most of the pictures did not turn out but the one of a puppy in a trash can did. Yes you read that right. Someone had thrown a live seemingly healthy puppy away. We made enough of a scene so that someone yelled at the nearest puppy vendor (A likely culprit) who took the puppy out of the trashcan and put it back into a cage for at least the time we remained in sight.

After my awesome trips I always took the maglev train to the airport. It is the fastest train in the world and goes a top speed of 431 kph from outside Shanghai to the airport. It takes 8 minutes for what would otherwise be a 45 minute cab ride. They have put something on the windows to distort things in order to reduce the appearance of speed. The only time you get a real clue to how fast you are going is when the train going the other way passes. All in all a highly recommended method of travel.

You get there from the subway where I had the privilege of watching this woman throw up for at least 65 seconds while the train was waiting for passengers. I had time to open my bag, pull out my camera, and snap a few pictures. She was throwing up when I left. Public vomiting is AWESOME!

Here is the train at a stop when we got on.

Here it is at top speed only 4 minutes later.

And here it is back at zero 4 minutes later.