Wandering Shanghai: The Old City and The French Concession

We must have walked 10 miles today, while getting our money's worth out of our newly-purchased three-day subway passes. Between those and the round-trip MAGLEV tickets we bought on arrival, our transportation should be in good shape.

First up today, we walked around a portion of the Old City, which resembles North American Chinatowns to some extent. It was the area of old Shanghai to which the Chinese were largely confined, a sad history.

From there we made our way to the French Concession, still clearly an upscale part of the city. We strolled along streets that looked more European than much of Europe, capping that off with a visit to a park in which some locals were singing opera, others were doing Tai Chi exercises, and one enthusiastic trio was practicing ballroom dancing - the Tango perhaps? Overseeing it were Marx and Engels, chiseled out in a heroic Soviet-style statue.

All that walking whetted our appetites for lunch, and we headed for a branch of Din Tai Fung not far from our hotel and our favorite chain restaurant in the entire world. That lunch deserves its own post, however.