Susan's Shanghai Blog

Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 11

This week we did a couple things: the aquarium and the tourist tunnel.

The Shanghai Ocean Aquarium (SOA) covers over 20,000 square meters and opened in 2002, and according to the website gets more than 1 million visitors every year. To me, that sounds a little low when you think that there are 20 million people who live in Shanghai .. but that's just me.

The first section you go through is a "special exhibit" which included a Deadly Aquatic Animal Exhibition as well as a section for rare fish specifically from the Yangtze River area.

These are little box fish and they really are shaped like boxes.

This is a lion fish.

I thought this little guy looked like he was posing, or mugging for the camera. So I decided to take his picture. Quite cute!

And here we said "oh look, a dead eel" but then we could see his mouth moving, so for some reason, he seemed to like to sleep upside-down.

They also had a special area called "Save our Sharks" and they had lots of different little sharks, including this one that I think was called a Zebra Shark.

They also had a couple babies in a little container that you could pet, so Susan took her turn. Luckily, she kept all 5 fingers.

Here is a whole set of baby sharks.

So I took this picture, and I was thinking "wow, big alligator", but I think he was a fake alligator!

I'm not sure why we had this guy .. he doesn't seem very aquatic to me!

Next came the penguins, and they were very fun-loving and active .. so much that it was somewhat difficult to get a picture. As well, we could never find anyplace to view them not behind glass.

These are some huge crabs, although it was weird because they were in this blue-light area. Maybe to better mimic the depths of the ocean where they live. Pictures just don't do a good job of showing how BIG these guys really were.

These are kinda cute, and they were actually on a TV program the other day as well on the National Geographic channel. They eat plankton and they come in and out of the sand to eat (or to hide from fish looking to eat them). They look like pieces of grass.

And a sea horse.

There was a section with jelly fish of all different kinds. This one is a Japanese Sea Nettle that comes from the Eastern Pacific Ocean.

This is my favorite, which is a Purple-striped Jelly Fish from off the Coast of california

And a Pacific Sea Nettle which comes from the Pacific Ocean.

This one, which hails from the Australian eastern coast, has the best name .. Jelly Blubber.

Then they had one tank that just had what seemed to be hundreds of them.

Next door, there was a tank with what seemed to be hundreds of stingrays.

We then went down an escalator that went through a fish tank, so you had fish around you, and then you went through the longest underwater tunnel in the world. It was on a belt that moved you along, so the pictures are not quite as good as I would have hoped.

This reminds me of Tom when he's hungry :-)

This is the circle in Pudong near the Superbrand Mall. I like the center that has the plans and shrubs. There is an overhead walkway that goes around in a large circle that rings that inner circle section and "roundabout" for the cars.

This is the Oriental Pearl Tower, which we'll go up into and get pictures from later. The Oriental Pearl Tower is a TV tower, located at the tip of Lujiazui in the Pudong district, by the side of Huangpu River, opposite of The Bund. Construction began in 1990 and the tower was completed in 1994. At 468 m (1,535 feet) high, it was the tallest structure in mainland China from 1994–2007, when it was surpassed by the Shanghai World Financial Center which is just down the street from it. The tower features 11 spheres, big and small. The two largest spheres, along the length of the tower, have diameters of 50 m (164 ft) for the lower and 45 m (148 ft) for the upper. They are linked by three columns, each 9 m (30 ft) in diameter. The highest sphere is 14 m (46 ft) in diameter.

Next is the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel, which is a pure tourist trap. You start by heading downstairs near the Riverside Promenade on the Pudong side or just on the North side of the Bund if on the Puxi side. They have these "Star Trek"-like capsules that you pile into, standing room only. The only cool part of the capsules is the way that they turn, which I really didn't get a good picture of.

Then comes the tunnel, which takes about 5 minutes to travel through to the other side of the river. According to one thing I read, the light show that you get through the tunnel is part Disney, part psychedelia. I has different flashing strobes, blowing tinsel, and swirling hallucinogenic images projected on the concrete walls. There are also a couple life-side puppets in the middle of the tunnel. They tend to have "themes" though, as I listened to the words that were being said during the trip. The start...

The first part was a "meteor shower" which was just white flashing strobe lights, which you can kinda get from these 2 pictures.

And then multi-colored concentric circles that you could see when you started.

I don't remember what they said for this one, but it has lots of little lights of different colors.

The red is "magma" which I guess is supposed to be like lava flows.

More pictures on the way back .. which I'll try with the iPhone, since the camera didn't do that great with taking pictures in the dark. On the Bund side, Tom decided to take a few pictures of the buildings on the Bund side of the river.

This is the Pudong side viewed from the Bund. You can see the tall round-spheres of the Oriental Pearl Tower, and then to the right-center, the "bottle-opener" top of the Shanghai World Financial Center. As normal, it was a little bit "overcast" or "smoggy" .. depending on how optimistic or pessimistic you want to be.

This is Susan in front of the Monument to the People's Heroes. This is a quite tall and abstract concrete tower, which is a memorial to those who died in the various conflicts.

Further down the Bund, we caught Tom in front of a building that had these concrete lions. There are lots of buildings with lions in front, these were the first ones that we remember that were more "art-like" lions rather than "real-looking" lions.