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?

18157152_10154727090968687_4035722811822728037_n
The only bilingual ad

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.

18010205_10154727090113687_1513311517498329176_n.jpg
Qibao old town

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.

18157527_10154727090778687_6810062929013737778_n
Super crowded!!

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! 😀

18057896_10154727123778687_6706463273228572435_n
The snack

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?

 

 

19 thoughts on “Surprising Shanghai (part 3)”

  1. Hope someday I can go there like you did. It was definitely amazing and memorable trip.

    And I guess it’s the last story you have about Shanghai, right?

  2. Belum pernah ke Shanghai.. Daerah China, baru pernah ke guangzhou doang. But anyway, kalau almarhumah nenek gua tinggal di Shanghai, i’m sure, she will do that at People’s Square LOL

      1. Guangzhou itu kota perdagangan, aku pun sering denger cerita sodara aku kalau lagi datang ke pusat perkulakan.. Pas kesana malah lagi gak ada pameran.. Tapi so far selain shenzhen, nah guangzhou ini paling deket ke hongkong kl ga salah..

  3. Ah, now I do want to visit Shanghai! Though it seems that 24 hours aren’t enough so that I cannot use the visa-free transit thing, hmmm

  4. I love how you described your experience in Shanghai. I’ve read some travel blog about Shanghai and yours is one of my favorites. ❤ I've read some that they were disappointed by their travel. I think they didn't go to the places you've been to.

    The Single's Market is really surprising. I must really check it out and maybe advertise my single friends. 😀

    Good luck on your next adventure. 🙂

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: