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4 Days in Shanghai

Challis Hackley
Oct 16, 2017
7 min read

I'm going to to start by going over a quick guide to Shanghai, how I got there, where I stayed, what I saw, where I ate. If you just want to read my adventures then you can skip the first part. If you just want to know experiences and what I recommend then you can skip the last part, although I wouldn't recommend that because I've got some pretty great stories in that second half.

Quick Reference

Travel

We booked our train tickets through Ctrip and picked them up at the station. We used the subway/metro lines to get from our home to the Nanjing train station and the Shanghai metro to get from the metro to our hostel. While we were out seeing the city we used to metro to get to all of our destinations. Metro and walking, and one small bus trip to get from the metro stop to the wild animal park. So, train tickets to get form one city to another and metro to get around the city. We used the MetroMan app and it works in all the big cities in China that have metro system. I suggest getting it before you travel to any major city in China unless you have a personal driver to chauffeur you around.

Accommodations

We stayed at the Shanghai Hidden Garden Youth Hostel in the Pudong New District in Shanghai. If you're looking at the City skyline from across the river at the Bund then we're behind that. It was about a ten minute walk from the nearest metro stop in a not so great part of town, so the location isn't idea but the hostel itself was awesome. You walk to the end of this dank and dingy alley and turn a corner and it's like you walk into a Grecian courtyard. Everything is whitewashed and clean. There are rock garden and picnic tables surrounded by garden boxes brimming with plants. The rooms are clean and they have a toilet, shower, sink and lockers already in them. Our room could hold up to eight people, in four bunk-beds and there were seven of us, so we didn't end up rooming with any strangers. The mattresses, pillows, and comforters were actually better then what I have in my room in Nanjing. I might have briefly fantasized about stealing them but I didn't know how I would bring a mattress onto the metro.

I haven't stayed at many hostels, so I don't have a lot to compare it to but the whole atmosphere was great too. Everyone there was very open and sociable. The staff spoke awesome English and were very helpful. Great place to stay, totally recommend it.

Activities

Shanghai Disneyland, Sightseeing, the Bund, Wild Animal Park, Shanghai Museum, and the Pearl Market

Food

I ate my breakfasts at the hostel I bought it for 28 CNY, which, for those of you keeping track back home, is about $4.25 USD and it was a great American breakfast. Lunch times were usually spent in the parks (Disneyland and the Wild Animal Park) so we usually just got snacks there or coming off of the metro lines). Dinner was good though. We ate a couple of our meals on Nanjing Road in Shanghai, which some awesome shopping. I recommend checking it out, even if you don't want great food at a good price.

What I Did

Cool, now that I've got all that out of the way let's get started, here's how it went.

Thursday

After I was done teaching my classes, I went home and rounded up my stuff and we left. It was about an hour ride on the metro to get to the train station but when you get off it's just right there. We picked up our tickets, went through security, and found our gate with really no issues. The train station was massive and had the same feel as an airport in the U.S. They check your tickets and I.D. Your luggage goes through an X-ray and you go through a metal detector. You wait for boarding. We boarded , no problem and I was off on my first Chinese train ride. It was a bullet train so it only took an hour to get to Shanghai but it didn’t feel like we were going that fast. The views are nice though. Got off at our stop and rode the metro to our hostel. Checked in and just hung out for the rest of the night. The hostel provided us with sheets, we didn't have to bring our own and there was some tearing of fabric before we realized that the cover was supposed to go over our comforter and not our mattress. The mattress, sheets, and pillow, were actually really nice and we slept well that night.

Friday

We went Disneyland on Friday and it was such a great time. You can read all about it in my post next week.

Saturday

We decided to sleep in on Saturday because Friday had been kind of long and tiring. So we enjoyed our sleep and our morning meal before heading out on the town to see the city. We went to Yuyuan Old Street where there is a lot of cool architecture and shops that we explored. Some of the shops you can barter at and some of them you can't so it was a weird mix trying to buy things there. We planned on going in the the Yu Garden but we hadn't realized there was an entrance fee, so we opted out and kept exploring, going to a pubic park instead. Afterwards we went to the Bund, the European (mainly German if I'm not mistaken) section of the city. It was like I had walked halfway across the world. The only way you could tell that you weren't in Europe was the Chinese flags posted on the buildings. It was beautiful and it had an astounding view of the Shanghai skyline across the Huangpu River. We stayed there for a while, taking pictures and just hanging out until dusk, and watched the city lights come alive. Never did I think that I would be sitting on the side of the river, watching the Shanghai city light up around me.

After the Bund we followed the packed crowds to Nanjing Road. It's a great shopping district and we found some great street food and restaurant after some light shopping.

Sunday

We took the metro to the Shanghai Wild Animal Park in the morning. If your not sensing a theme here let me tell you: the metro is your best friend! When we got off we were immediately approached by some half-dozen cab drivers. My tip for that: just ignore the taxi drivers. Walk down the steps and wait for the public bus. The taxi rates are not nearly good enough to compete with the public bus so you’d just be paying five times as much for your own private transportation. The bus took us straight to the park, it was the first stop. If your a student of any kind, make sure to bring an ID to the park because the tickets are half-off.

This was another all-day event, and it was a really cool zoo in a couple ways, a little weird in others. The animals seemed a lot more active than I was used to. The exhibits didn't seem any larger but a lot of them didn't have enough fortifications to completely keep in the animals or keep out the humans. You could have totally hopped hip-high fence to jump with the kangaroos and none of the monkeys were in cages, although they had plenty of branched trees spreading out over the walls. It was cool but there were totally drawbacks. A lot of the people there fed the animals so they acted more domesticated, less wild, kind of sad.

But the main reason we came to the Wild Animal Park was to ride elephants, and that we did. It was seriously so cool and the elephants actually seemed pretty happy. As I was waiting in line, I watched the elephants frolic in the stream of a hose before coming over to get saddled up, which was really just a light blanket and a half-metal, half rope deal that they tie around so you can hold on. They walk for about a half-an-hour and they get carrots the whole time. It was such a cool time. The way the elephant moves it different from anything else. It's gait rolls and sidles. Their skin is so rough and they're covered in course hair. I loved it.

Hanging out with the cage-less ring-tailed lemurs was pretty cool too. They just walk around, sometimes their tail brushes up against you. The whole park was great and I really liked it.

After the animal park we went back to Nanjing Road to find some food. We decided on Hot Pot, where you order broth, veggies, and meat and cook your own food at the table. The restaurant had an English menu so we decided to split the bill and ordered together. We thought we were getting beef but when the food arrived it did not look like that. It was gray and bumpy. I thought it was squid and none of us were planning on trying it until one of the workers came over to our table, cooked it for us, and put it on out plates. Doused in peanut sauce, it wasn't too bad and I ate a bit more because I was hungry.

Monday

So, the morning rolled around and one of the girls in our group sent a picture of the previous night's food to her parents. It turns out that we did order beef...of a sort. It turns out that we had beef tripe the night before. Now if you don't know what that is let me enlighten you. We ate cow stomach and peanut sauce, beef stomach... and it wasn't too bad. I guess at this point I could eat anything.

Our group split up on Monday because some of us wanted to go to a museum while we were there and others were up for a whole day of shopping at the Pearl Market. So me and a few others headed to the Shanghai Museum because it was free and open on Monday.

The museum was seriously amazing. I could have spent the entire day there gazing at elegant lines of calligraphy on the colorful glazes of pottery. But, we had agreed to meet up with the rest of our group at 2:30 so we left the museum at 2:00 pm, breezing through a few of the last exhibits on furniture, clothing, and signets, and took the metro to catch up with the rest of our group at the Pearl Market. It was awesome there. I am still honing my skills at bartering, so I probably didn’t get the best deals possible but it was great and I got some great souvenirs for me and my family.