On day ten we stayed at the school with our Chinese exchange students here in Shanghai for the whole day, and in the afternoon we gave a terrible farewell presentation. But after the school day, my exchange student and I met with one of my friends and his exchange student to go to the city center of Shanghai – there, where all the skyscrapers are located. We were planning to go up the Oriental Pearl TV tower.

Here, in the center of Shanghai, are a number of the worlds tallest buildings – namely the Shanghai Tower (“the corkscrew”), which is 632m tall, the Shanghai World Financial Center (“the sewing needle”), which is 492m tall, and the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, which is 468m tall.

And I must say that there is really some insane architecture around where the British colonial port of Shanghai used to be.

And THIS is the Oriental Pearl TV Tower – one of the world’s tallest buildings.

And of course we went into the tower and looked at the city from every possible angle and altitude – up to 350m above the ground in the top floor. Here is the first impression from one of the lower floors.

From up here you can also very well see the genius traffic management concerning how pedestrians cross the roads:

Shanghai sure is a very impressive city and shows how China’s development has boomed in the past few decades.

…but the view down is also very impressive.

We also went up to the top floor at 350m and looked at the same district of skyscrapers we had seen from the ground only an hour ago.

Our hosts had booked a table in the tower’s very nice revolving restaurant, which has a very large buffet and a lot of good food. So us four sat together and enjoyed the sunset over Shanghai while having cold drinks and warm noodles. It was a very nice dinner.

After we were done eating, my friend’s exchange student and me (we both had SLR cameras) decided to go to the viewing platforms again to try to take some shots of Shanghai at night. All I can say is – this city looks even more amazing and even slightly surreal at night. What a view.

Once we were back down on the ground and re-united with our exchange students’ parents, we took a walk along the river of Shanghai and I tried to take some artsy long exposure photographs to round up the day – here are some of the results.