Shanghai gestures

Shanghai has the most charm of any China city we visited in two weeks in March-April. Five days on land, ten on a Crystal cruise. In Shanghai we took three bus tours arranged by the ship, and walked around the Bund (east side of the river) on our own.

Comments: bus tours are often bad. Here in Shanghai, when it's rainy or foggy, on your own is better. If your bus tour is scheduled to take you up a tall building for the view, and it's misty or foggy, cancel! You can't see anything at all. Better to take the free shuttle (in our case) to the Bund and visit the fancy old Brit hotels for a drink or tea, and shop in the area. Even if you don't want to buy anything. The two bus trips we did enjoy were a ride on the bullet train, 250 mph from town to the airport, and back. It's just 7 minutes each way but the ride was quite smooth. Mag-Lev technology. And the best trip was a bus tour and walk about with Patrick Cranley, billed as "The Architecture of Shanghai." He's an American long term resident of Shanghai who walked us through the lanes and neighborhoods for the eight of us. This was a bit pricey compared to the bigger bus tours, but the best tour of our two weeks in China. This was a ship's tour and I don't have contact information.

We were in Shanghai for four days back in September 2012. The air pollution was terrible, as it was most everywhere we went in China. We could still make out a lot of the skyscrapers.

We loved the museum in Shanghai.

The Bund is actually on the west side of the river.

We were in Shanghai in May 2014 (land tour) and in March 2015 (cruise on Ponant's L'Austral). You are right, it is a remarkable Chinese city with amazing architecture. The weather was nice enough both times to enjoy the view from the Pearl Tower. Since we did Yu Gardens and the silk factory on our land tour and crisscrossed Shanghai by subway and on foot on our own in May, we opted for a tour to a water village and to Suzhou this time, both enjoyable but crowded and far out by bus.

Our small ship ( ~ 200 passengers) docked very close to the Bund, just 10 - 15 minutes walk.

For those who like to read up on a place before or during a trip, I enjoy Qiu Xialong's mystery novels set in Shanghai. The author writes in English. He gives lots of insight into Shanghai and China in general.