The View from Shanghai

After a fair bit of nagging encouraging, Evan finally got me some photos of his current business trip to China.  Sometimes he forgets that I'm really interested in seeing what he's up to on an ordinary day over there, since even that is so much different than what I'm used to seeing and experiencing here.  So, here we go!  (Captions are all Evan's)

 The first two pictures are of Shanghai at night.  This is when I was leaving Zapata’s (restaurant where apparantly the servers have no idea what the heck they're doing) that night.  The second picture is of Zapata’s. 

 The third and fourth pictures are the view out of my hotel window.  There are many skyscrapers and hotels.  It is in the downtown Shanghai area. 

 This picture is of the elephant statues in front of the second hotel we stayed at in the suburbs of Shanghai.  I thought it looked pretty cool.

 These pictures are of a real elephant tusk in the lobby of the hotel.  In the second picture you can see it has monkeys, elephants and other animals carved into the tusk.  Very cool, but very illegal to have in the States. 

(I'm guessing that isn't the gift he's bringing me back this time.)

These two are pictures from my 2nd hotel room window in Shanghai. Not exactly as nice as the one downtown (the view, the room itself was a little nicer). You can see in the last picture all of the apartment buildings. They build them everywhere.

There are just so many people there. It’s insane. Real houses are insanely expensive here. Last night Nathan told me that a house on the lake in Hangzhou (the city Nixon visited) costs about 8,000 RMB (about $1200) per SQUARE METER. To give you perspective, that’s about 40 times more expensive than our house (would make our house worth $5.797 million). But you have to realize owning property on the lake in Hangzhou is like owning a house overlooking Central Park in New York City.

Isn't is crazy how different these two "worlds" can be?  The best news of all today is that Evan is currently on a plane heading back home!!  After 12 days without my man and 7 days without my kids, I'm so anxious to get my family back together!