Surprising Shanghai (part 3)

Hello and welcome back to my Surprising Shanghai series. Before we start, have you read part 1 and part 2 of this series? Do have a read if you haven’t! 😉

So, at the end of part 2, I ended my third day in Shanghai by walking around East Nanjing Road. I was so tired from going out all day so I decided not to wake up too early the next day, which was happen to be my last full day in Shanghai.

I took some time to hang out at the hostel and had breakfast with my fellow dorm mates. It was interesting because they all came from other parts of China and it was their first time to meet an Indonesian. Wooot! Somehow I felt like I was a tourism ambassador because they seemed to be interested to hear my stories about Bali :). I guess that’s one of the perks of staying in a hostel – you got to meet new people and exchange interesting stories.

Shortly after 10 I left my hostel and went to my first destination of the day, People’s Square. I went there specifically to see the Single’s Market. Now, what’s that? So, every Sunday parents would gather in People’s Square and laid out posters to advertise their single child! How interesting!

As you can see in the pictures, the parents just hang out at the park and sort of advertise their single child to fellow parents, or anyone who is passing by. Too bad I don’t speak the language so I could not talk to the parents. I mean I am interested to find out more about how it works and the success rate. However, there is one ad with a bilingual text, which portrays a pretty decent girl, I should say. Anyone?

Next destination was Qibao old town. I read that it’s a tourist destination, that may be get crowded but still, I decided to go. To get there, I took the subway line 9 and got off at Qibao station. As predicted, the area looked crowded when I got there, but turned out I haven’t seen everything yet.

So I walked around, checked out the small shops in the area, bought some snacks, and went to see the old town. Oh my! it was super crowded! Seriously I don’t think I’ve seen that many people in a tourist spot as small before. Basically, the water town consists of remains of old houses next to a river, which has transformed into small food/souvenir stalls. Not that interesting to me, especially because I don’t eat pork and I believe most of the food contains pork.

However, I did manage to do some people watching and take some interesting shots, so my trip was not that wasteful at all.

Last but not least, my agenda for that day was to visit Yuyuan Garden. Unfortunately, I did not do careful planning because the garden was closed already when I arrived there. Instead, I took some time to wander around the area, because again, the area was full of food stalls and souvenir shops. There is one food stall that really caught my attention as it was so packed and people were queuing, so I decided to join the queue as well. To this day I still don’t know the name of the food, but it something like a deep fried giant batter with some vegetables. It’s good, but definitely interesting as the size is huge! 😀

And that concludes my trip to Shanghai. It was definitely memorable, I have to say that I love the city. For someone who’s never been to China before, Shanghai successfully gave me a sneak peek of what China is all about. I got to see a little bit of the traditional culture and aspects of modernization, and somehow it made me curious to see other parts of China. Perhaps if I got another chance, I’ll be back to Shanghai just to re-visit Disneyland with my loved ones and explore other cities of China.

Have you been to Shanghai, or China in general? What do you think about it?