Shanghai City Views

Shanghai is one impressive city, showing you clearly where the Chinese economy is at. On the one hand, you have many huge skyscrapers. On the other hand, you have old neighborhoods. However, many of the skyscrapers are empty, and most of them are falling apart despite being not more than 10 years old. The city is huge, and everybody tries to move and work there. Although you can find shops with the latest fashion from Europe, there are even more small shops with local design. So you will always find ultra-modern, expensive and international aspects as well as ancient places, Chinese tradition and poor quarters.

Visiting the city during the day, you will finds many buildings with UFO-shaped roofs, many being under renovation or empty. The building substance is terrible and most of them are speculative objects. Others are signposts of modern architecture and built to impress. Next to it, you will have colonial style buildings that have a grand and decorative impression (specially around the "Bund" and give the city a strange mix between European and Asian lifestyle.
You can find quiet corners of Asian style that invite to relax and right next door you can see modern bars in expensive decor that invite to stay the whole night. But since its worth doing sightseeing here, you better get up early while its not too hot yet... Please take a look at the picture of YuYuan Gardens on this site also.
The western part of the city (Pic 1) shows the strange mix of old small and newer tall buildings, and somehow missing the middle development. The eastern half of Shanghai is a constant megalomaniac construction site. Huge complexes and high buildings that make you wonder who can afford to live in them and who wants to if the building quality is so bad.
But the western part is also transforming, as can be seen here on picture 1 along the riverside. Once you get further out of the city, you see many uniform houses, where farmers live with their family to attend to a tiny rice field. In the middle between them you will see typically water towers and smoking factories.
The government wants to move all people from the small houses into larger apartment-blocks since they seems to be more economic and better for the environment. In the last two images you can see the interesting construction of the airport. They build the walls, hand cables between them with small balls on them and balanced the ceiling on them.