Shanghai Streets.

I have been slack in my Bloggings of late - this has mainly been down to two factors. The first was that I was laid out for a few weeks with a particularly vicious Flu bug, the second was that I have spent several weeks working away in Shanghai. I am the first to admit that I am not a fan of China or Shanghai. Its crowded, very crowded. It's noisy, even if you are on the 23rd floor of a hotel you can hear noise. There isn't any point in the day when you cannot hear something. Its a strange place of weird extremes, there is no graffiti or litter which implies that people are considerate of each other and their surroundings but one trip on the metro network shows that this is not true at all and people will trample you if it means getting on the train before you.

Shanghai has grown incredibly quickly in such a short space of time and I am not sure it or its people have had the time to deal with it. In the Financial district there are all these amazing buildings and Malls, but then you will find a row of houses that have been there for a hundred years. They are there purely because no one has developed that land yet, you can imagine when they were built that the area was nothing more than the beginnings of a city next to the river and now this row of moderate houses built for farm workers are within a hunted metres of the tallest building in China, and the Chinese stock exchange. 

This picture was taken in the Bund, an area of Shanghai near the river where all the newest and tallest buildings are. You can see the Pearl Tower, once the tallest building in Shanghai along with the ever increasing skyline of one of the fastest growing cities in the world. We were walking to visit the Shanghai World Financial Centre (commonly know as the Bottle Opener due to the look of the top of the building, Google it and you will see what I mean). The skyline looked cool and just for a brief and rare moment there was no traffic on the particular piece of road that was in front of us, in this rarest of moments I managed to grab the picture.