I had not planned on liking Shanghai. Friends had warned me it was the Chinese city that had given up on being Chinese, just glass towers and Starbucks and lanes built for cars. I went anyway because my flight landed there and the maglev was supposed to be worth the trip on its own. Seven days later I left having eaten my opinion in stages, mostly at street level, mostly through my feet.
Day 1: The Maglev Was Faster Than I Could Read the Signs
The maglev from Pudong airport hits 300 kilometres an hour and then keeps climbing. I had read about it for years and still was not ready for the moment the train passing in the other direction blew past in what felt like a quarter of a second, just a streak of white and a thump of pressure on the windows. The whole ride is seven minutes and twenty seconds. By the time I had figured out how the digital speed indicator at the front of the carriage worked, we were already braking into Longyang Road station.
I had also not figured out the rest of the city. I stood on the metro platform for ten minutes trying to work out whether the line I needed was the green one or the yellow one, because the signs alternated languages on a cycle I could not predict. A teenager eventually pointed me at the right turnstile without saying anything. I bowed at him like an idiot.
My hotel was in the old French Concession because that is where everyone tells you to stay if it is your first time. They are right. I dropped my bag and went straight out for noodles at a place two blocks away that had no English sign and a queue of locals at 8pm. I pointed at what the man in front of me was eating. It arrived ten minutes later, soup with thin wheat noodles and pickled vegetables and a soft egg, eighteen yuan. I ate it on a plastic stool on the pavement. That was the moment Shanghai started winning me over.
Day 2: The Bund at Dusk and the Crowd I Did Not Mind
I had been told the Bund was a tourist trap. I went anyway because I wanted to see the Pudong skyline at the moment the lights snapped on, and there is only one place to see it from. I got there at 5:40pm, which turned out to be exactly forty minutes too late for a clear spot at the river wall.
The crowd ran six or seven deep. Tour group flags, selfie sticks, a woman with a portable karaoke speaker doing a Faye Wong cover. I gave up on a front-row view and walked north along the promenade until the wall thinned out near the Garden Bridge. From there the Oriental Pearl Tower looked smaller and the river looked wider, and at 6:18pm the entire Pudong wall of buildings went on at once, like a switch being flipped. I had not realised it happened all at the same time. The crowd around me made a low sound, half a laugh and half a sigh.
I walked back south for dinner at a small Shanghainese place in Huangpu that a hostel guy had circled on a paper map for me. Three small dishes, a beer, ninety yuan total. The lion head meatball was bigger than my fist. I paid with WeChat Pay because that is how everyone pays here now — if you have not already set it up, I would do it before you land. The full setup logic is in my WeChat Pay and Alipay guide and it saved me from the kind of frozen-at-the-counter moment that ruins a meal.
Day 3: Getting Properly Lost in Tianzifang
Tianzifang is what happens when an old shikumen lane neighbourhood gets handed over to small shops and cafes. I expected it to feel staged. It did, in some of the wider lanes. But the alleys branch and re-branch and within ten minutes I was on a side passage barely wide enough for one person, between two whitewashed walls and a clothesline draped with someone’s bedsheets two floors up.
I bought a cold osmanthus tea from a tiny shopfront where the woman pulled it out of a glass jug full of ice and small white flowers. She did not speak English and I did not speak Mandarin. She held up four fingers, I held up my phone, she scanned the QR code, the payment cleared in two seconds, and she handed me the tea. The whole exchange took less time than ordering a coffee at home.
I spent another hour wandering. Found a print shop run by an older man who was inking blocks by hand, a vintage Polaroid camera repair counter the size of a wardrobe, a cat sleeping on top of a stack of incense boxes. I did not buy anything. I walked back out onto Taikang Road in late afternoon light a little dazed, the way you get from too much looking.
For dinner I crossed the river to a hotpot place in Pudong that a colleague had told me about. Mistake number one: it was a Saturday. Mistake number two: I had not booked. I waited an hour and twenty minutes on a plastic stool by the door, getting handed a small cup of warm soy milk every fifteen minutes by a server who clearly felt sorry for me. The hotpot itself was very good. I would still rather have eaten in the French Concession.
Day 4: The Day Trip to Suzhou That Almost Was Not
Suzhou is twenty-three minutes from Shanghai Hongqiao on the high-speed train. I had bought my ticket the night before through a WeChat mini-program after watching three YouTube tutorials, because the official 12306 site refused my foreign card. I made the 8:42am train with seven minutes to spare and then could not find my carriage because the platform number on my ticket did not match what was on the gate board. A station attendant pointed me at a different platform two flights of stairs away. I made it onto the train as the doors were closing, sweating through my shirt.
Suzhou is gardens and canals and the slowest pace of anything I had felt all week. I went straight to the Humble Administrator’s Garden because that is the famous one. It was already crowded by 10am. I paid the eighty yuan, walked in, and within twenty minutes wished I had picked a smaller garden. The Master of the Nets Garden, which I went to in the afternoon, was a quarter the size and twice as good — fewer tour groups, narrower passages, a teahouse on a wooden platform over a koi pond where I sat for an hour drinking biluochun tea and not doing anything.
I walked the Pingjiang Road canal area before heading back. Stone bridges, willows, a few real residents and several thousand tourists. I ate small grilled fish on skewers from a stall, three yuan each. The train back to Shanghai pulled in late because of weather somewhere up the line. I got back to the hotel at 9pm with sore feet and a clearer sense of why locals say Shanghai for energy, Suzhou for breathing.
Day 5: Yu Garden, Xintiandi, and a Slightly Bad Decision About Coffee
I had saved Yu Garden for a Tuesday because I had read it was quieter midweek. It was not. The classical Ming-era garden in the heart of the old town was packed by the time I got there at 10:30am, and the surrounding bazaar was already moving at peak speed. I went in anyway. The rockeries and zigzag bridges are worth it even with crowds, and there is one quiet courtyard at the back, near the Hall of Heralding Spring, where I sat on a stone bench for twenty minutes and almost nobody else passed through.
The bazaar outside Yu Garden is the most aggressive tourist commerce I encountered in Shanghai. Soup dumplings at Nanxiang Mantou Dian, the famous xiaolongbao place, had a queue of forty minutes. I went around the corner instead to a smaller shop with no English signage and got eight dumplings for thirty-eight yuan. They were excellent. Whether they were as good as the famous place I will never know.
In the afternoon I walked to Xintiandi, which is the polished version of a shikumen lane neighbourhood — designer shops, wine bars, the kind of place where a flat white costs more than a noodle lunch. I had a flat white anyway because I was tired. It cost forty-eight yuan. That was the only time on the trip I felt the city had taken something from me without giving anything back.
Evening I walked the Wukang Road area in the French Concession. Plane trees, art deco apartment blocks, small bars with door curtains and good music spilling out. Found a place with no name above the door that served Sichuan-style cold noodles and natural wine. Sat at the bar for two hours. Two locals beside me were arguing about real estate prices. I caught about one word in twenty.
Day 6: The Maglev Again, the Wrong Way
I had intended to spend the day at the M50 art district in Putuo. I ended up taking the maglev back out toward Pudong airport by mistake because I had got on the wrong train at Longyang Road and only realised three stations later. The conductor laughed when I showed her my Metro ticket. I got off, crossed the platform, took the maglev one stop the other way (forty yuan for what I had paid eight yuan for two days earlier), and spent the afternoon wandering Pudong on foot instead of going to the art district.
Pudong on foot is strange. The blocks are enormous, designed for cars and corporate lobbies. I walked from Lujiazui along the Riverside Avenue promenade for about three kilometres looking across at the Bund from the opposite side. It is the better view, actually. The Bund from Pudong looks like a row of old European banks, which is what it is. The Pudong skyline from the Bund looks like a movie poster, which is also what it is. From Pudong you can see both at once.
Got back across the river late afternoon via the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel, which is an absurd four-minute light show on rails costing fifty yuan. Worth doing once. Worth never doing twice. Walked along the Bund toward the Rockbund area in the north, which felt completely different — quieter, more art galleries, fewer tour groups. Had Shanghainese pickle and pork chop rice at a place near the old British Consulate for sixty-five yuan. By that point my feet had decided to stop cooperating, so I took a Didi back to the hotel for twenty-eight yuan. Google Maps did not work for the navigation; I had been using Amap the whole trip, which is the workaround I cover in the China navigation apps guide.
Day 7: West Bund Galleries and the Last Plate of Xiaolongbao
I had planned a slow last day. I went to the West Bund art district along the Huangpu south of Xuhui in the morning — the Long Museum and the Yuz Museum are both there, big industrial spaces converted into art venues. The Long Museum had a Chinese contemporary photography show that I had not heard of and ended up spending two hours inside. Tickets were sixty yuan.
Lunch was at a small Yangzhou-style place near Hengshan Road. Xiaolongbao, twelve to a steamer for thirty-eight yuan, soup bursting in the spoon the way the videos always show but mine rarely do. I asked the woman behind the counter how long the place had been open. She said since 1992. I asked who taught her to make them. She said her grandmother. I asked if her grandmother was still alive. She said no, but the recipe was. I paid, finished my tea, walked out into the afternoon light feeling like the trip had landed somewhere proper.
Late afternoon I went back to the French Concession just to walk the streets I had walked on the first night, in the opposite direction. Plane trees, low-rise apartments, a man playing erhu under a streetlight that had come on early. I sat at the same noodle place as night one and ordered the same dish. Different cook this time. Still good.
Logistics for a 7-Day Shanghai Trip
- Best base: French Concession (former French settlement around Xuhui and Huangpu districts) for walkability and food density. Avoid Pudong unless you specifically want skyscraper views.
- Metro: Buy a transport card at any station counter. Around 20 yuan deposit, refundable. Saves you from fumbling with the ticket machines every trip.
- Maglev: Worth doing once. Single ticket is 50 yuan or 40 yuan if you show your same-day flight ticket. Round trip 80 yuan. Faster than the metro to the airport but more expensive.
- Day trip to Suzhou: 23 minutes on the G-class high-speed train from Hongqiao. Tickets 40-50 yuan one way. Book through the WeChat 12306 mini-program — the official website does not always accept foreign cards.
- Connectivity: Get a Chinese eSIM before you fly and have a VPN ready for the apps you actually use. I run both — the full setup is in my eSIM and VPN guide for China. Without it, Gmail, Maps, and most Western apps will not load.
I left Shanghai on the 6:40am maglev back to Pudong, this time on the right train. The carriage was almost empty at that hour. The speed indicator at the front of the carriage hit 301 kilometres an hour and held there for about thirty seconds before we started braking for the airport. I watched the city flatten into low warehouses and then into fields and then into runways, and I thought about how much of the place I had not seen, which is the only kind of goodbye to a Chinese megacity that makes sense.
Photos courtesy of Unsplash
