Yuyuan Garden & Pudong

I got taxi this morning to Yuyuan Garden - a famous classical garden right in the centre of Shanghai just off the Bund. It has lots of pavilions, rockeries, halls etc and would have been a nice peaceful place it it wasn't on the top 10 list of places to go for tour groups - it was packed with people and tour guides waving flags and shouting down microphones. Just outside of the garden a lot of the streets were traditional chinese temple architecture - quite possibly reconstructed to make it into a tourist attraction - and you could see where east meets west in that it was traditional alleyways and chinese style buildings yet there was even a Starbucks and a McDonalds nestling inside.

Next stop I went over to Pudong and went up the Jin Mao tower - this (my internet source tells me) is the 3rd tallest building in the world and the tallest building in China. There were some spectacular views from the top - what is interesting is that an even taller tower is being built right next to it and you could see it being pieced together. In the Jin Mao tower the lift travels at 9.1 meters per second - that means you get from the bottom to the 88th floor in just 45 seconds.

From there I crossed the road and went up the Oriental Pearl tower, this is 468 meters tall (compared to Blackpool towers 158m). The Oriental Pearl tower is the worlds third tallest TV and Radio tower.

I have the tour planned for tomorrow for the water villages of Suzhou and Zhouzhuang so I'm going to get an earlyish night.