Shanghai

Shanghai amazed us with its clean modern skyline, its elegant new museum, and its overwhelming size. Almost all of China's 1.4 billion people live in cities. Many of them live here. There are miles and miles of high-rise apartment buildings extending out to the horizon. The banks and other commercial buildings in the city center are new, glossy, and expensive. I was especially impressed with the lovely museum, especially its thoughtful collection of calligraphy and art. However, there are also collections of clothing, ceramics, weapons--just about anything related to Chinese history. One can easily see why Shanghai has for a century been known as China's door to the outside world.

To give you an idea of how crowded Shanghai is let me put it in perspective. Los Angeles is 4 times larger geographically than Shanghai. The population of LA is 6 million. The population of Shanghai is 26 million. As far as the eye can see, there are high rise apartments for many, many miles in every direction. Imagine how a city looks from the air. One sees thousands of houses and buildings on the ground below. Now, make every building a skyscraper and you have an idea of where the 26 million residents of Shanghai live. You have a circle with a diameter of 60 miles with little but skyscraping offices and apartments. That’s Shanghai. Rush hour is quite impossible and there are hundreds of thousands of bicycles and scooters amongst all the cars. I can’t imagine what it would be like if everyone owned a car. Public transportation is abundant both with busses and high speed trains.

And yet with all those people, I never felt swept away by a sea of people. Parks were well maintained and lovely. The temperature both days hovered at about 50 when we were out but was rather cold when we began our days bundled up for the lows of 32.

Day one we visited the Shanghai Museum, the People’s Park and the Bund, a public parkway along the river. The government is omnipresent. Getting through immigration was a lengthy process but we all made it through. We saw cameras and police everywhere. Cameras were at every intersection, on vans and busses driving the streets and parked along the streets and parks. There was a policeman every 50 feet or so. Kathy and I went to an ATM to get cash and two guards and one policeman were right behind them the whole time. Once a tourist stepped on the grassy area at the Bund and within 2 seconds a policeman was blowing his whistle and ordering him off of the grass.

The people were kind and many spoke some English. I was able to assist a bit in helping shipmates to translate signs and find bathrooms. The toilets are your standard Asian ones with a hole in the floor and you must bring your own tissue.

The Shanghai Museum was wonderful and we could have spent days there but after 2 hours we were off to the People’s Park where folks gather to feed pigeons and enjoy the grass. After that we walked along the river shore walkway before we returned to the ship that afternoon for a very late lunch.

That evening we attended the christening of the Viking Sun amid a glowing skyline and a dazzling light show.Read more