Impressions from Shanghai

Dear Steemians! Last year I had a quick trip to Shanghai as well and so please find below a few pics from there (title pic is at the famous Bund at the Huangpu river with view to Pudong). It was great, just I had bad luck with the weather, so not too much sun on the pictures.

Once you go out, sometimes it is not that easy to find your way, at least from the signs which are predominantly in Chinese.

Shanghai is a city where at any corner traditional meets modern.

Although the government likes to show off how modern and high-speed this city is (e.g. the metro is top), they still take care about their traditions. E.g. kalligraphy is still practiced in China and numerous shops offer the tools to „express human language in a tangible form“.

The Shanghai museum at the people´s square from outside – best musuem for classical art in China.

The wealth of objects was way too much to see in a few hours, of course they have tons of antique vases, e.g. this one from the early Ming dynasty (>600y old).

Also very delicate pieces were nicely displayed, like this jade object (5 dragons with interlacing rings). I have no clue how it could ever be possible to carve out those rings.

If you are in China, you have to participate in a tea tasting. The teas I tried out were amazing (it was not allowed to take pictures there but I did it nevertheless).

The Bund is a quite crowded waterfront area and nicely shows the contrast between the old Shanghai (on the left side of the Huangpu) and the new one (Pudong quarter across the river, title pic).

View from the hotel room, in the back the scycrapers of Pudong. On the left one of the many fly-over city highways.

But in secondary streets you can see, that mopeds and bicycles are also popular.

All those plastic toys and junk stuff made in China? Here you are at source.

In a science museum there was an exhibition about robots, the word stems actually from a Check novel of 1920. The plot of that first novel was already about the same that almost any book or film dealing with robots or AI since then, from Terminator to Blade Runner, is using.

You could try to compete against an archery robot (actually two, one held the bow, the other aimed and shooted). They always hit the bull's eye.

Fun fact: No joke! I accidentally forgot to take out a small expandable baton from the bottom of my bag before I left home. It went unnoticed through airport and immigration control but was discovered at a security check of an underground station only. I was quite impressed by the security level of the Shanghai metro. Wish that would be established in Europe as well, I think there it is more needed.

!steemitworldmap 31.2304 lat 121.4737 long Shanghai d3scr