We are back from Shanghai!!

We're back! Shanghai was amazing! It was the boys and my first time in China, and Shanghai was just mind blowing in so many ways. First, the immense scale of everything, from the airport, to the highways, the train station, the endless skyscrappers and city-scape, the people everywhere, always busy traffic, shopping of every kind that stays open till past 10pm everyday, the city lights at night, what a buzz! Being in China is a unique experience for us, there's a certain home-coming feeling, where everyone speaks our 'mother-tongue' - chinese/mandarin, which we can speak and understand fairly well (the boys to a lesser extent), everyone we met were very happy to find that we are Singaporean chinese (even though we are usually speaking in english to each other) and we felt a closeness and very welcome!
Shanghai is very modern and a far bigger city than Singapore, and we found its old world charm delightful - the grand european architecture/buildings, mixed with the chinese style buildings and quaint shikumen homes and alleys, all a wonderful and fascinating mix.We loved wandering the streets and felt quite at home, the only main difference being the noise level was a lot higher as there were always so many people around and so much traffic! Although we travelled on our own, we had a fair share of tourist trap attractions and authentic local experiences, and enjoyed them all!
We also visited the nieghbouring Suzhou and Hangzhou famed for their beautiful gardens and lake, and of course had a fascinating time at the World Expo. For the 3 days we visited the Expo - an average of 400,000 people did too, making the average waiting time at popular countries' pavillions 3-4 hours long (Japan and Germany's pavillions was 5 hours wait on one of the days!!), so we decided to skip the countries that we've ever visited, or will likely have a chance to visit, and went to those pavillions of countries that we may never get to visit in real life. That brought us to fascinating North Korea, Iran, Morocco, Turkey, Iceland, some of the South Pacific islands, some of the Africa nations, middle east nations and so on - totally awesome experience!! Well I'd be scrapping all of these photos soon, but for now, a summary layout of highlights from our trip :

It was hard to have to go back to work and school respectively right after the holiday, it's only been a week since we're back, but seems a lot longer now! I had completed two more layouts from Hokkaido trip, will continue to work on these before I start with the rest of Shanghai photos.

This one is when we visited the morning market in Hakodate - you'd never see fresher seafood! There was this tub where squids were swimming around, and if you ordered, they cut them up (raw) (still alive I think- yikes!) and serve it up to you then and there. We passed.

Credits: fish by Dianne Rigdon, alpha by Kristin Aagard

And this layout is just of the many photos we took just strolling the snow-covered streets - totally fascinating to us, awesome really, never seen that much snow, that first day was so joyful, like the first time in Disneyland!

 

Credits: Background papers by Wild Dandelions, string an mittens by Cinnamondesigns,winter word by Dani Mogstad

This template is now available as a set in the store HERE