Donald's last day with me

We've had some good adventures over the past few days but have been getting home late. I'll share some more tomorrow. Here's what we did today besides sleeping in and relaxing...

Donald ordered a pair of custom shoes from a shop in my neighborhood, they're very reasonably priced. No pictures to share, somehow we forgot about that to share with you all but I'll be going back to order a pair of my own so i'll take some then.

Then it was off to Yang's Fried Dumplings for lunch, I thought Donald would like these and I was right. He walked away a happy man.

Then we set off for Pudong, Shanghai's eastern bank of the Huangpu River. This is an area that I haven't explored at all. I was there last week for about 25 mins as I completed my final interview for my residence visa. I've been meaning to share this for awhile; My friend Chris lived in Shanghai about 8 years ago and sent me a picture of Pudong when he was here. What a difference!

Then, about 2003

Now, 2011

This just shows how fast Shanghai has grown. Another way to tell is that Chris mentioned that the city was working on finishing the first 2 subway lines when he was here and now it looks like this:

ok, back to the exploring that we did today.

As soon as we exited the Metro we spotted our 2 favorite
buildings in the Pudong skyline. The one that looks like a
bottle opener, Shanghai World Financial Center and the
Jinmao Tower.

Check out the amount of people that we had to deal with today!

The Oriental Pearl TV Tower

A view of The Bund from the Riverside Promenade

 Once we walked the short distance of the Riverside Promenade, we aimed for the bottle opener. This would be the observation deck of our choice since we also wanted to have a drink at the Park Hyatt bar on the 87th floor. Between the promenade and the bottle opener we came across a western grocer so we picked up some flour, olive oil, cooking spices, cider vinegar, peanut butter and other cooking essentials that I haven't found in my neighborhood yet. Donald was so sweet to carry this around for the next few hours...i didn't exactly pick out the lighted items.

We're getting close to our destination!

 You will need to enlarge to the picture on the right. This shows the newest addition to the Pudong

city-scape, called the Shanghai Tower. This skyscraper is scheduled to be completed in 2014, 

will be the tallest building in China and second in the world upon completion. 

 Designed by famous US design firm Gensler.

We paid a pretty penny to be this high in the sky.
See the red numbers? This is the height of which
we climbed in the elevator in meters!

Our view from the 94th floor!

After leaving the observation deck we found our way to the Park Hyatt for a couple drinks. The view was almost as good but NO crowds and good whiskey made it WAY better.

Now we're home relaxing and finishing Donald's laundry so he flies home w/o too many loads of laundry to do after his 3 week trip! He's not leaving for Portland tomorrow but rather Lake Placid. Off to meet some luge dudes.