After finishing a cruise in Beijing we flew down to Shanghai on a Friday to tour the city before we started our land tour of China on Tuesday with Collette Vacations.  This gave us an opportunity to explore the city on our own. Also since we had already been in Asia for almost 3 weeks we were well adjusted to the time zone.

We were staying just outside of right downtown a, but not that far because less than a block from our hotel was the main train station.

You can see in the pictures and the video that they have a great walkway system over major intersections.  Virtually no one speaks English outside of the hotels and tourist areas.  We did use cabs (which were amazingly cheap and efficient) and the hotel would write out our destination on a card along with a hotel address card to get us back to give to the cab drivers.  The people were so friendly everywhere we went and we felt really comfortable being there even though we saw very few westerners when we were on our own in the city.