It was a glorious Sunday in Shanghai yesterday so me and her took the metro to nanjing dong lu and walked down to the new bund which opened yesterday.

Unfortunately half of Shanghai had the same idea…

Getting close to the waterfront was nigh on impossible, but we persevered and eventually fought our way through. Actually we were helped by a police helicopter flying overhead, most people stopped for several minutes, all open mouthed and pointy fingered allowing us to sneak through to the front. Thiking about it, when was the last time I saw a helicopter in China, I really can’t remember seeing one before at all..

There were so many people that at first it was difficult to work out what had actually changed, but as we made it further away from nanjing dong lu it became more apparent, but first let’s look how things used to be:

To be honest I really didn’t appreciate the scale of the change until I saw this pic on the net (sorry pic owner, I lost the link!!). There used to be an 11 lane highway splitting the building fronts from the waterfront itself, with subway crossings to get over from the buildings to the waterfront. The area between the waterfront and the road was pretty much blocked up with trees etc, essentially cutting off the buildings visually from the waterfront on large sections of the bund (you’d either walk in front of the buildings or along the water, you couldn’t really enjoy both).

Now:

4 or 5 lanes of stop/start traffic with pedestrian crossings at every corner.

All that greenery has been ripped out and the road narrowed, leaving large open spaces, the bund now seems to be unified and MUCH more accessible, a little more grand than it used to be.

One of the many new pedestrian crossings

A team of sweepers.

Fancy auto-watering thingammyjig on some of the grassy areas, they’ll have packed in within a month or two..

Stage for the big show on Tuesday.

Sticky tape on the bund, presumably there’s going to be some big song and dance palavah.

Once we’d passed the big stage we were pretty much done with the bund (just like the old days), it gets quickly tiring fighting through the crowds and we headed off down fuzhou lu to look around the back streets. Inevitably we ended up at the World of Crap at Yu Gardens (upgraded from House of Crap after complaints from Nicola) and finally made it home mid-afternoon with a couple of bagfulls of tat!