An early arrival in this large city, but we were lucky with the hotel this time and the weather was perfect, a great start to explore the city.

At 4:40 a.m. our train arrived in Shanghai, which was still a bit too early to take the subway to the city. So we had to wait for a bit, but sure enough at 5:30 we took the first metro to the center. The first thing we did was to go to the hotel to ask if we could leave our luggage there. Luckily that was not a problem, unlike any other experiences I had with hotels in China. It seemed like we were lucky with this one.

Our next stop was McDonald's to drink some coffee and to eat breakfast, not many other restaurants were open at that time. I think we sat there for about two hours before we decided where to go next. The first thing we went to was the park in the city center, People's Park near People's Square. It was interesting that there are many old people sitting on the ground with one or more umbrellas in front of them. We had no idea what that was for, they were not for sale because they were pretty old. Every one of them had a piece of paper on it with some text, a name and a date in the past. We thought that it might be for people who are missing, but there were like hundreds of them and that would be very bad. Later we found out that old people do that for their grown up children who're still single. So this umbrella contains information about their child and then I guess you can take the umbrella and contact this person. That's something.

The park is next to the large shopping street with many shopping centers. We were walking through that street for some time and then we went to the riverside from where it was possible to see the skyscrapers and the skyline of Shanghai, that's where this photo is taken. One thing I noticed is that it isn't as busy as I expected. Compared to Jinan or Qingdao it is a lot more quite, not that many people in one place and not much traffic. I thought that in the biggest city of the world it would be crazy, but it was really the opposite. It also doesn't look like a Chinese city; there are a lot of European style buildings. Another thing that I liked was that nobody was taking photos of us, not a single photo of us was taken today. Probably because there are so many international people that it became normal and people don't see Western people as extraordinary.

Close to the city center of Shanghai is the old city, which looks really nice. It is all restored and renewed so that people can see how it used to be. I liked that part of the city a lot; it has narrow streets, many places to buy food and lots of people. In the old center was also a large park, which is a bit like the spring park in Jinan, but then without springs and not in Jinan. I've posted some photos on my blog, so you can check it out for yourself.

In the evening we went back to the riverside to see the lights and the skyline when it's dark. I think it looks even better in the night than during the day. All the tall buildings are enlightened and many boats have lights too. We also went to the other side of the river by special metro. It was made of class and the tunnel had different kinds of lights, it was alright, not too special.

All in all it was a good and also long day in Shanghai. It is time to go to bed and then we'll see what to do tomorrow morning. The meeting with the Finnish companies is on Tuesday so we have another free day tomorrow.