The Shanghai Financial Center contains the world’s highest observatory. The building is nearly 500 meters tall with an elevator that rockets you up to about 440 meters in just over 60 seconds. There are two observatories – one at the 94th floor and one at the 100th floor. Both afford spectacular views of skyscrapers in all directions. Shanghai is a major International financial player and this building is one of the city’s proudest accomplishments.

Visitor’s walk through a patriotic presentation highlighting Shanghai versus NYC and Tokyo on the first floor. The amount of window glass used in this building is equal to a quarter of Japan’s entire output in a year. 91 elevators are in the building – the foundation goes into the earth about 250 feet…and lots of other fun facts!

The Bund is beautiful at night highlighting both Western architecture, Eastern as well as modern. This walkway along the river is insanely crowded at night! I spent 30 minutes trying to take a photo of the massive impressive looking copper bull because of crowds gathered around (same artist as created the Wall Street icon). Finally we got that perfect shot!

Stopped by a health club for massage. Turned into an hour of Chinese torture – all thumbs, with intense amounts of pressure radiated. Screamed out several times, massage therapist just laughed.

….off for more exploring today!

OH and hows this for perspective on Shanghai’s air quality – these photos were taken of the same two buildings approximately the same distance away on successive days (one zoomed in a bit more). One shows amazing (for Shanghai) air quality and the other shows “average” air quality. I hate to see what a “bad” air quality day looks and feels like. During the Shanghai Expo last year when factories were shut down the air quality was much improved for the duration of that event.

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Mr. Chen, the founder of TourBoarding.com recently wrote us and I would like to take this opportunity to spotlight his company. As I recently returned from Beijing I could tell there was a big marketing effort for this expo both in Beijing and in Shanghai. Due to the demand of the expo hotels are bound to be somewhat full during these months.

TourBoarding is as taken from their site: “Tourboarding.com offers a new, à la carte, self-design travel model for exploring and experiencing China at very low to no cost. By becoming a free or VIP member of Tourboarding.com, you can receive free room and board all over China and a variety of free services such as Chinese language instruction, tour guiding, and cultural immersion activities such as Chinese cooking, painting, calligraphy and music in exchange for speaking fluent English or other in-demand languages for two hours a day to local host families.”

Sounds like a creative idea – I might have the opportunity to visit Shanghai later this summer before the end of the expo and will def try their services.