ISpyShanghai

Since I’m inevitably sliding away from film and into digital, and the smallest available memory cards now being 4 Gigabytes apparently (I remember when my computer only had 48Kb), I’ve got a lot of photos that I don’t post.

Including some photos that illustrate what a couple of you have been mentioning in the comments. First up:

If I remember rightly the glass covered hole looking down is way smaller the atrium itself, you know … so you are looking down from close to the centre and you see a spiral as the balconies have these sort of indented parts that are staggered.

Andy

It's a long way down

you’re not wrong Andy- here’s the spiral in question. I’m not a big fan of this kind of sheer drop, if there wasn’t a piece of perspex in the way I’d have lost my camera and lunch.

The bit at the bottom is where you check-in to the world’s second highest hotel (beaten by the new boy next door), the circles are the guest room floors.

By the way it costs around 2,500RMB a night to stay in the Hyatt in the Jin Mao, and around 3,600RMB a night to stay in the Hyatt in the SWFC. (Alternatively, I’ll let you have the broken bed in my spare room for 2 bottles of Tsing Tao and a copy of Viz). 

Next up, our old good friend WoAi who says

That park [People's Park] is packed with older people trying to find husbands and wives for their younger relatives every weekend.

WoAi

Shopping for love

CV for a BF

He’s right you know- every weekend there are people trying to pimp out their grandkids, kids and clients. Full translation of the advert above here, and to read what I already wrote about this here market, try here.

(btw I think it’s polite if we assume that WoAi hasn’t been trawling the trees himself, and instead just happened to notice the signs as he strolled from one designer boutique to the next)

Any other photo requests?

She’s been wanting to do it for ever and last weekend Emma finally managed to take me up the Jin Mao tower.

Jin Mao 1 - SWFC 0

The Jin Mao is a very tall building- 88 floors from toe to tip, and has been a favourite spot for tourists for years who go to marvel at the Highest Post Office In The World at the top (relax though, it’s just a little counter with some woman selling post cards), the views onto the city below (better views from the bar at the Shangri-La I reckon, but it’s a matter of taste).

Recently the Jin Mao has been eclipsed by Sheffield Wednesday FC (AKA the Shanghai World Financial Centre)- with queues aroudn the block of the new boy, and hardly anyone bothering with its next door neighbour. Ah how fickle the people can be. 

Admittedly the SWFC is slightly taller, and has a glass floor at the top which sounds pretty cool/scary (I once spent 15 minutes stood next to the glass floor of the CN tower in Toronto, building up the courage to stand on it, whilst schoolchildren lay face down and hammered the glass with their sticky fists). Compared to the elegant art deco design of the Jin Mao however, the SWFC is just a square, ugly, bottle-opener-looking freak of a building.

So chose class over glass I say, the Jin Mao is still Shanghai’s number 1 skyscraper in my book. And not just because it costs less than half the price to get in.

Jade on 36 is one of the ritziest restaurants in town, last night I went there and ate probably the best meal of my life.

To celebrate my anniversary with Emma (3 whole weeks- and they said we wouldn’t last), she picked me up from the airport, I got dressed in the toilets and we went to the Shangri-La hotel in Pudong.

The view from the top floor of the Shangri-La is incredible- you can watch boats slipping up and down the river, the full sweep of the Bund, fairy lights on the flying roofs of the old town, the lipstick towers of XJH , back to Plaza66, and the main ‘Pearl’ of the Pearl Tower up close and personal. Forget the Jin Mao, this is the view of the city.

If you’ve lived in Shanghai for a while you’re bound to have heard about the restaurant there too- it does the kind of “Molecular gastronomy” that all the cool chefs are trying these days; noodles made out of cuttle fish, chalk made out of cheese, Boxer Rebellion flavoured ice-cream, that kind of thing.

Here’s an example:

Duck a l’orange Sunny Side-Up

It’s duck a l’orange with the Orange juice in a little pouch on a bed of cocunut something or other, with the whole thing made to look like a full english breakfast.

Pretenious? Bien feckin’ Sûr- but it’s also kind of funny, and face-meltingly delicious.

The whole menu is like that, one course was a long strip of raw tuna with a 30cm french fry alongside it- “Aha!” you think “What a witty, po-mo take on fish’n'chips! He is playing with a sense of scale and, and, oh Christ that tastes good”

There were a million great points about the meal, (with 803,400 of them being the “Truffle Burnt Soup Bread” which was, just ahhh- oh I give up. Good.)

Apart from the bit where the waiter filled my wine glass with water (which when the water costs 150RMB and the wine 400RMB was a doubly pricey waste of both), it was pretty much perfect. By the end I had to lie down in the taxi because my taste buds were worn through.

Jade of Jade XL menu @ Jade on 36- 1034RMB (+ drinks. It’s only one a year eh?)

Update 17 July: Apparently it was only 68RMB for the ticket to climb the bridge. I made Craig pay 85 though. Another victory for Yorkshire!

Like most cities, there’s a river running through Shanghai- it separates the East from the West, or less prosaically (check me out!) the old town from the new, the urbanite hipster from the nuclear families, the hot clubs from the good schools. Spanning this river are a few bridges including the longest arch bridge in the world, Lupu Bridge which I climbed up on Sunday.

On either side of the gleaming arch are steps leading up to a viewing platform at the top, 100 metres above the river. Anyone can visit once they fork over the 85RMB (about 7 quid) and go through the metal detector- which went off for every single one of us as they waved us through- you even get a tour guide to make sure you don’t throw any hammers over the edge.

Craig, Emma and Liam- check out those blue skies!

The climb isn’t exactly arduous and there are big railings on either side so you don’t even get vertigo – so the views from the top are definitely worth the trouble, especially on a crystal clear day like we had. The address for the visitors center is 909 Luban Lu, past the camera mall to the bus station on the Puxi side of the water (that little nugget of information would have saved us about an hour of messing around with taxi drivers who just didn’t believe it was possible to climb the thing).

Emma surveys her manor

We spent maybe an hour there in total, most of which time was spent gazing across both sides of the city- the beige expanse of Pudong the towers of Puxi that I’m starting to recognise now- Marriot Tomorrow’s Square ball-trapped-in-a-christmas-cracker, the Bank Of China’s golden daisy roof, the twin lipsticks of the XJH Grand Gateway and the two tallest skyscrapers- the Jin Mao and the new financial centre which seems to be just creeping past en route to being the pinnacle of the city.

A grand day out, up there in pure tourist terms with the gardens at Yu Yuan and taking the ferry from the Bund to Pudong and back again, although you can’t spit off the side into the water on the bridge.