Shanghai Day 1

29th Dec08, Saturday

Our plane landed at 6:25am at Shanghai Pudong Int'l Airport. Dad and Simon came to meet us at the airport. Walking out the airport, I immediately feel the cold crispy air and this brings me back to the time when I reached Glassgow, Scotland back in 1997. We checked the temperature the night before and the gauge was about 6-17degree celcius.

We reached my cousin's apt and had a quick breakie and headed for a short rest. It was a tiring journey as our plan to get Zach to sleep close to midnight fail as he went into LaLa land while we check in. He got up when we head to the departure gate and this is how he greets me :). Looks like he knows the time to wake up for his plane ride.

So, the roller coaster ride in the plane was 3hours without much sleep for MH. Zach seems very happy and excited and refuse to sleep. Finally, he decides to stop fooling us around and he settled the last 2 hours of sleep.

So, back to Shanghai. We had about 3 hours of sleep and this keep us back refresh. We decided to head to city centre. My cousin lives 20mins away from the city by train. We decide to look for food and do some sight seeing. Just stroll and walk around the Bund and taste the local delicacies. This is Zach's 1st trip overseas (beside Msia) and we plan to take it easy. We'll play by ears and there is No Must Do or Must See list in our itinerary. We'll just got with the flow.

Here's Mh, Dad and Zach outside my cousin's apt.

Walking towards the subway station . Look at their roads, clean and neat right. :)

and here's the human trishaw power by electric/human legs.

Across the bridge to the subway station . Surprise to see unpolluted river?

We took the subway to Nanjing East station. When we came out, here's what I see. Sea of people's head and tram bus (reminds me of Melbourne Burke St) but this only operates on the pedestrian st walkway.

We continue walking heading towards Huang Pu river where the Bund is. On the way there, we stop by a shop selling fish balls, meat balls and some identified balls which I couldn't read them in Chinese. Here's a photo I took to before I chomp them down. It was served in some soup base where I skip it as I see the lady use back the soup from where she boils the balls...Verdict of this: Just like any other fish/pork ball and as from the picture you can see, it looks pretty normal to you. But to warm my stomach, it just do it right and light for me.

Finally, many flights of stairs up and down up and down we have reached The Bund. Shanghai is not a baby friendly place and bringing our super light stroller doesn't mean solves all the thousands of stairs we have to go thru.

The Bund is like another river side or similar to HK's famous esplanade walk with skylines stand beautifully along the river during the day and night. I find nothing hooha to shout about. However, it was a different story when you are on holiday where you can spend time walking or having your evening walk. Strolling and watching ppl at the river side is relaxing enough.

On the way, we pass by some stalls along the Bund selling what looks like satay to me. I'm not so adventurous on food side street and I can't tell you how they taste like. Zach had his milk before we move on to Shanghai Old Street/Yu Yuan Garden.

We pass by Yu Yuan park where we see some kids roller blading.

Then came Shanghai Old Street. Here's where we are heading for our xiao long bao (meat dumpling in soup base). I'm a fan of xiao long bao and hubby brought me to this so called very famous shop where ppl will Q for their dumplings! Thankfully, we were there early and the take away station Q was ridiculously looooong! Hubby said we should go upstairs the restaurant where there's no Q and we should be able to have our seat.

We ordered 2 baskets of xiao long bao (meat version and another meat with crab meat)3 gigantic xiao long bao comes with a straw for you to drink the soup, a plate of vege spring roll and a plate of prawn balls fried with bread crumbs that it looks too good and we chomp it down before I remember to take any photos of it.

The bill came out to RMB250+ for the 5 of us. For a light snack consider expensive however for the quality and taste, is reasonable.

We decide to walk abit around Yu yuan street and this place is very cultural. It has a temple inside here, local knicks knacks, food stalls and many locals and tourist combing this area. Sky getting dark quickly here as winter is approaching. I took this when it's about 5pm.

We headed home back the same way where we came from to see the night scene of Bund. I don't have a tripod so I took this using hubby head as a stabiliser :p