Shanghai - Day 1WE HAD A SUNNY DAY. Of course, it was pretty smoggy and polluted but, hey, you can't have everything. The hotel check-in last night did not go according to plan - they didn't have the room we reserved - but after numerous tries we are in a great room today. [CC note: Thanks to Peter's engaging persistence with a trio of helpful and gracious staff members, we have what has to be the room with the best view in all Shanghai.]
Our first stop was the Bund (Indian for muddy water) where we saw the skyline of the old and new Shanghai. The new Shanghai is what all of you have seen on the postcards, but pictures of it in the morning were not good as the sun was directly in the lens. We returned in the afternoon to get the same shot with the sun behind us.
We then visited a reconstructed "Old Shanghai" which is some decades old  having been reconstructed after WWII. It's basically a tourist trap centered around a four hundred year old Chinese nobleman's garden. The garden is close to another relic of old China, a teahouse approached by a zig-zag bridge because the Chinese believe that evil spirits can only travel in a straight line. Interestingly, the Chinese have lots of superstitions, signs, symbols, and sayings which can be boiled down to wishes for long life, happiness, luck, and money, not necessarily in that order.  Inside the garden area are structures with typical Chinese architecture surrounded by water, rocks and plants. Each part of the garden has a special meaning. Passageway gates from one section of the garden to another are all different shapes and sizes, including some gates that look like vases. In one part of the garden were two parallel walkways, one for men and the other for women. One garden feature we hadn't seen in any other garden so far was a marvelous dragon wall. The dragon head is huge, and the body follows the scalloped contours of the wall.
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Yangtze River 1 | Yangtze River 2 | Yangtze River 3 | Shanghai 1 | Shanghai 2 | Shanghai 3
Observations