This page is for general "living in Shanghai" stuff.
This is currently the tallest building in Shanghai, the 88 story, JinMao building. Now there is another building being built right next to this one that will be 101 stories high and supposed to be the worlds tallest building. Jing Mao building is in the center of the financial district and from the top you can get a wonderful view of Shanghai. Here is the Jin Mao, by night and by day.
Shanghai now is the worlds largest financial city with a population of around 18 million people. It is amazing to think that this is actually the fifth city in China with around 12 million or more people ..... Construction is everywhere, and below is a typical site, where a new series of apartments is going up. I think in this picture alone you can count 8 cranes, this is the new skyline of Shanghai.
The HuangPu (Yellow River) is a big, big river and runs through the center of the city and is a major shipping port. From my office window I can just see the ships passing on the river by so when I am in a "stare out the window" mood, there is always something going on. There are two main freeway systems with inner and outer ring roads encircling Shanghai. We live just outside the outer ring road in QingPu district in the western corner of Shanghai and my office is downtown near the river. QingPu district has a number of new housing developments and ours is one of the few areas with more houses than apartment towers so we have nice garden and plenty of trees around. Five bridges and two tunnels join up the ring road system with the east and west banks of the HuangPu river. Each bridge is 8~10 lanes wide so traffic is not so jammed up yet. The new airport was opened in PuDong in 2001 but the old airport in HongQiao still runs domestic flights, so we have 2 airports running. These two airports are about one hour freeway driving apart from each other, just to give you an impression of the size of the city West ~ East. So far, I have only arrived once at the wrong airport expecting to take a flight. A new magnetic high speed train has just begun service from the PuDong airport and it is supposed to travel around 380 km/hr and take around 8 minutes to get from the airport to downtown Shanghai. By highway the same journey takes 45 minutes. This is a big city !
About 10 ~ 15 minutes outside Shanghai and more traditional housing set amongst the rice fields persists, but is rapidly falling victim to the bulldozer as Shanghai grows and consumes all available space around it.
Traveling outside Shanghai can be fun, and the three kids are always a source of curiosity for the local rural children. You can see from this photo of Mathew in the car last year.
During the summer Shanghai tends to be quite hot, running up to mid 30's and humid with it. Our housing compound has a nice big swimming pool, so we are well catered to survive the summer which runs from May / June through to August / September. Winter, well you can see from the web page, occasionally we get a snow fall but it rarely stays on the ground. Normally, the weather is drizzly and quite wet & cold. I would say, the weather pattern is similar to Sydney or Auckland, only a few degrees more extreme at both ends of the scale.
Now, there are more and more places opening up for entertainment and the favorites for the kids are either of the 2 aquariums, the zoo, the drive through zoo (like Orana Park), the insect museum or natural history museum. Now there is also government policy to increase the "green" areas in Shanghai. This is one of the positive benefits of China's inclusion into WTO that these things need to be catered for in city development plans. So we now have a lot of parks and walkways to get out when it is not too hot or too cold.
As I mentioned our house is located in QingPu district with nice green areas and plenty of other children about. We have swimming pool, tennis courts and basketball courts in the compound which contains about 100 houses. School buses shuttle back and forth in the mornings but I take the kids to school each day and then they come home by school bus each afternoon. There is a small restaurant and shop with daily things so I guess we are quite well catered for. At home we have a nice garden with mixtures of mandarin, peach and pine trees, surrounded by a hedge (which has subsequently been dog proofed). The back lawn is quite large, so we have enough space to run around with dog in hot persuit. The photo below shows our house and the backyard before I filled in the fish pond in the back of the photo, now it is all lawn.
So, that's an update, hope you enjoy our website and sorry for the photo's taking so long to download but I am still learning the ropes with this web design business.
Back to Top