Last week I went to China. You know, that place where everyone lives. In fact I was in Shanghai, the most populous city in the world (by some definitions)  I’m kind of ashamed to say it’s the first time I’ve been to Asia. My bounding box just got a whole lot wider. I was invited there to give a talk on OpenStreetMap and the Haiti story, which was a fantastic opportunity in itself. I shall blog more on that (coming soon)  but just being in this mega-city was an amazing experience, helped along by some excellent hosting.

Buses and taxis whisked us around the brightly lit streets. I was always impressed by the neon-lit multi-level flyovers and spaghetti junctions:

We had  a trip to the Shanghai Expo. VIP access allowed us to mostly skip the gigantic queues, although amusingly we were denied this at the UK pavilion:

We had some time to take in other Shanghai sights. The night-time boat trip was particularly spectacular:

We had a look around the antique market and other shopping areas:

We had some wonderful (and sometimes weird) chinese meals:

All in all a pretty spectacular travel experience. I thought I’d put a few photos here in case you missed my usual showing off live-photo-streaming while I was out there. More pictures on flickr.This wasn’t a holiday though. As I said, I need to follow this up with some more details of the OpenStreetMap talk I gave, and thoughts from the conference.