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.
Very impressive as I have not been to Shanghai. See you latest on Monday…
That’s one impressive bounding box! What makes it so high, Canada or Russia?
Welcome to shanghai,and thanks !
Always wondered what ‘real’ chinese food would taste like. Sounds like ‘weird’ may have been a good description for some unknown delicacies…
@gregory. Actually I didn’t do Northern edge of my bbox correctly. I think the highest latitude I’ve been to is somewhere on the Shetland Isles when I was a kid.
@goalkeeper – Yeah I’ve added some descriptions on those photos if you click. Another weird thing was that they never served much rice with any of the food. Lots of gloopiness. I started having a craving for fresh salad after a few days.
Shanghai is a great city but a little overcrowded though. You should make some time to visit Macau if you ever get the opportunity.
I’ve never been to China but this post has got me thinking of taking the plunge one of these days. It looks so impressive and must be an incredible experience. Thanks for the great images too.:)