China Adventures
We are in Shanghai!!
After 24+ hours of traveling, we finally landed. We were very worried about the procedures once we landed, but everyone was very helpful. We found all of our luggae and got the pets to the Quarantine office. It took 2 vans to get us to the hotel. One was just for the luggage (2 checked and 2 carry on each). We left the dog and two cats at the quarantine office just a few moments before these pictures.
After a couple days at a nice hotel, we move to the Da Tang Sheng Shi apartments in the Pudong (means East of river) district. We are in an 18 story building with 2 apartments per floor. We have the West facing apartment on the 12th floor. We have a great view and are a couple blocks from Century park.
Here is the view from the apartment looking South West, West, North West and East (had to hang out of a window for the last one). About half of the days are hazy, but some days we have sunny skies. It is hard to believe that this is a very small fraction of Shanghai.
Views from around the apartment. The office (yes that is a LOVE sculpture); the pond extends from the pool in the foreground to the building in the background; these ladies practice with fans and traditional drums almost every morning; first day of school at the newly finished elementary school.
The girls posing in one of the garden areas around the apartment.
This bridge is the one we normally take to get to the Puxi (West of river) district. It is west of us, just past the building on the horizon in the west view picture above. The spiral ramp on the West end of the bridge takes you to a couple elevated highways to connect to other parts of Shanghai. The river is a working river with barges, freighters, and cranes lining the shores North and South of the bridge.
These views are of Shanghai's Pudong district facing East. Pudong means East of river and is the newly developed area of Shanghai. We have been told that there are roughly 18 million people in Shanghai with just a couple million in Pudong. The Puxi disctrict (as with the several other district of Shanghai) are older and are more historical. Interspersed among the older buildings, are the high-rise apartments and the modern office buildings and shopping malls. Pudong was farm land and is planned to be less densely packed.
We had arrived in Shanghai just in time to celebrate Marcie's Birthday. We saw that the local Metro store made cakes and Pam communicated the requirements. Chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate. It was big enough to feed about 50..
These must be the Chinese version of "Bob's Barricades".
After we got settled in the apartment. we made an excursion to the park. We had heard that there was a climbing wall (Marcie was going into withdrawals) and other interesting things to see in the park. There are bicycles (2 and 4 wheels) and boats to rent and quite a bit to see. About once a month there is some kind of fireworks display that we can see from the apartments. Our apartment complex is behind the apartments in the background of these pictures. Speaking of fireworks, they really know how to do that here. A couple nights ago Century Park had a display that lasted an hour. There was a 5 minutes pause when nothing was going on, but aside from that there were usually 5 to 10 explosions at a time. Except for those 5 minutes, there wasn't a moment when there wasn't some remains of a burst in the sky. There was also a lower level display going on at the same time. We couldn't see all of it, but we didn't feel that we missed much.
This page was last updated on 10/01/07.
