We were there briefly last year, when the city was in a frenzy getting ready for the Expo, building the exhibition halls on both sides of the river, knocking down old districts to build new hotels and roads, upgrading other areas, digging up the streets and generally tarting the place up. We were told that China uses half of the world's production of concrete, and Shanghai must have accounted for a fair chunk of that - there was certainly a strong smell of wet cement in the air. Plus dust, the hammering of pneumatic drills, roaring trucks and diggers; and visual pollution too with scaffolding, cones and barriers - yet still, with all the large-scale machinery in operation, swarms of men with wheelbarrows and bamboo-leaf besoms.
And of course, people everywhere - as in all the other parts of China that we visited (our Silversea cruise took us only to cities - if we'd got into the country, we would have come away with quite a different impression, I'm sure). It was pretty exhausting, and though it was always interesting, and I'm glad to have been there, I wouldn't rush back again.
India was horrendously crowded too, of course, but it seemed less foreign there: in China I really felt like an alien, even - or especially - when I found myself in a familiar setting, like on the beach. This is China:
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