Asian backpacker

In 2008 during the summer Olympics, I spent 2 and a half months in Shanghai doing an internship. During that time I’ve pretty much seen most of what Shanghai had to offer. After the internship, I traveled to Beijing after the olympics to visit the historical city in China. This time I came back with the idea to visit old friends living here. But sadly, some of them had already moved back to Europe. Luckily I had another friend working in Wuxi for a few months, so I decided to hop on the train spend a few days with him.

As for Shanghai, not much has changed since the last time I was here. The Bund was still as spectacular as ever, crowded with foreign and domestic tourists sporting their (fake?) Prada, Lv and other luxury brands. And of course, they all have the latest Apple products.

The huge shopping street in Nanjing road was fully illuminated by colorful neons and LCD screens, which makes for fantastic photo ops.

  However, this time I couchsurfed with an expat working in Shanghai, who guided me to a place which I didn’t know about 4 years ago. There is an art district called m50 with tons of independent art galleries and local artists showing their works. It was quite an experience to walk through the old warehouse studios and buildings discovering local artist works and galleries. Unfortunately the day I was visiting it was raining cats and dogs, which made it quite impossible to take decent pictures of the area. And as some may know, some of these galleries don’t allow you to take pictures for obvious reasons. I do highly recommend everyone to go take a look at the area and spend a nice afternoon strolling through the inspirational neighbourhood.

In 2010 the World Expo was also held in Shanghai. I figured since I’m here, I might as well check out what it’s all about, 2 years later. I just kinda wanted to look at the pavilions and the area itself. But to my suprise, most of the buildings have been torn down already, probably making way for other high rise buildings, but the only pavilion standing was the Chinese one. Obviously…

I was a bit disappointed though, but maybe it was my fault for not knowing that buildings tend to get torn down when they’re not in use. They still had the huge Mercedes Benz stadium and a big noodle-bowl shaped building with terras on the top.