White Girl In China - Architecture

My husband and I just took the most amazing trip to China on a 9-day tour with SNA Tours. (highly recommended!!)  Being a stay-at-homeschooling-mom of 3, I rarely get out for an afternoon, much less 9 days!! By the end of the 13-hour plane ride, I was already in heaven. We had been served 3 meals I didn't have to cook, and each seat had its own TV and headphones with hundreds of shows to choose from. I could have spent the remainder of vacation in the plane and done just fine! But there was so much more... this first post is an overview of our tour, then I'll write a few more about our experiences.

Admittedly, I was a little skeptical of the accommodations for our trip - after all, we had bought it on Groupon! But the entire time we stayed at Radisson hotels, which were much more elaborate than most any hotel we've been to in the States (but remember, we do have 3 kids...)

Lobby of our hotel - gorgeous!

  We spent the first few days in Shanghai, one of the largest cities in the world, with a population of around 23 million people! The skyline was overwhelming. Apartment buildings spread as far as you can see, many of them 20 stories high, and some without elevators - I quickly learned how the Chinese stay in such good shape!

Shanghai from our 21st-floor hotel suite (with elevators!)

Shanghai Skyline

Our first night we went on a cruise down the Huangpu river, which divides Shanghai in two. Beautiful!

These are two of the tallest buildings in China - left is the 88-story Jin Mao Tower which we toured, it's the only post office I've ever seen with its own hotel on top! Right is the World Financial Tower, which is the 3rd largest building in the world.

View from the top floor of Jin Mao Tower

 
We went to more museums than I can count, this one was definitely our favorite, the Shanghai Museum. I'll spare you all the museum pics, but it was amazing to learn about a culture with more than 4,000 years of history!

We also had the chance to visit Olympic park and the Olympic stadium - for tourist purposes, most of the area has been left just as it was in the 2008 Olympics.

We visited many classic tourist places, such as Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall (pics coming for that one!) Below is the City God Temple, which was built in the 15th century and is now a large tourist market.

And this is the Temple of Heaven, a beautiful temple used from 1400's- early1900's.

This concludes our portion of the TomLizLing Tour. Stay tuned for future posts on this exciting event! (Thanks for listening!!)

Disclaimer:  This is me - urban, white, and with a short attention span (above photos were taken during a tour of an amazing old building. I can't remember which building it was, just that it looked a lot like another one we had already seen...) All stories and uh... facts are told from my perspective only.