I went to Shanghai. It was neat.

I will let this picture sum-up my feelings about Shanghai.

We were visiting Jaclyn's college roomate, Nicole, who is living in Shanghai getting an MA in design.  She lives in a very tall apartment.



It's really nice.

 I threw like 15 paper airplanes out of there.  Sorry, Gaya, I just didn't know when I'd have another chance to throw paper airplanes from 300 feet.  (Also, did you know that paper cranes are perfectly balanced and if you throw one from 300 feet it will float gently to the ground without flipping over?  Who'da thunk it?)



The view at night is cool.

 Shanghai has amazing architecture.  It feels like being in a future city.  Check out the skyline.

That mondo river is the Bund.  On one side is the future city, seen here, and directly behind is a bunch of colonial looking buildings.  The view at night is even better.



Neat

 This ranks right up there amongst the best vistas I have ever had the good fortune to behold. And I think that is saying something, I've seen a lot of vistas.  (Please forgive my braggadocio, I'm just trying to convey how spectacular it is.)  Here's another view:
 

Double neat.

 Here's one more example of some cool architecture.  There really were amazing buildings everywhere.  The place is truly an architect's wet-dream (sorry, graphic).

Can you feel the qi flowing?

But not everything was super-mod.  There was a radical garden called YuYuan with this cool bridge built on rocks and lots of excellent architecture of a more classical nature.



Garden



Building

We went to a really cool club, it was really fun.  Well, first we went to the "Obama Club," and it was empty, creepy, and (I'm pretty sure) a strip club.  And when I see empty, I mean literally empty.  They let us in just to look, then when we took a picture they kicked us out.

The poles are a dead give-away.

Then we went to another club called, "Rich Baby," which was really fun.  Can you tell by our gleeful faces?

This is Jaclyn's favorite picture.

There are also some killer dumplings in Shanghai.  We went to this place packed with locals where you could watch them cook through a steamy window.  The process is amazing, and takes way more people than you'd think.  In assembly line fashion, they cranked out, by my estimation, at least one dumpling per second.  Maybe faster even, there hands were literally a blur.  That could have been the condensation, though.

Hold still, I'm trying to take a picture.

They also have this really fast maglev train in Shanghai.  Needlessly fast really.  But it's the world's first, and it's kind of fun.  And it levitiates on magnets (hence maglev, Nicole).  Everyone was taking pictures of and filming this thing while we accelerated.

That's 268 mph.  Why does it go so fast?  Because it can.



And I'll leave you with this picture I took of a stairwell, because I think it's cool.