#82: Your Sign to Book a Flight to Shanghai

Superlative chicken soup; a Wong Kar Wai dining room; sweets as objet d'art.

It’s borderline embarrassing that it took me over five years to return to Shanghai—especially since my last trip, in 2019, was for work and not much else.

I feel this especially having gone back, and sampled a small slice of what the city has to offer by way of next level shopping; dough-based delicacies; palatial karaoke rooms. As with the other stops on our tour, Shanghai was condensed into an abridged itinerary over three days, but I think that we got its essence, and sucked the marrow, as best we could.

Beyond the obvious benefits of good planning, certain places tell you immediately that they are special, and that the fatigue of a long flight (or, in our case, symptoms of a week of gluttony) can be filed away for a day or two in pursuit of more pleasure. So it felt very good and right that Shanghai was our last stop, as we rallied—a noble feat, considering all we had done for the week leading up was drink, and eat, and bike and hike so we could drink and eat more. Hard work!

Around the French Concession.

The city felt immeasurably Trendier this time around, in that restaurants and shops and museums were much more branded and designed—I’d guess as a result of digitally fluent younger Chinese coming of age and starting businesses with social media squarely in mind. In the French Concession, where we stayed, it was as if one could throw a rock in any given direction and hit a coffee bar with third wave brews and canelés huddled in a glass case atop a stainless steel kitchen island. Or, a curated multi-brand store mixing Chinese labels like Uma Wang with Lemaire and The Row.

What’s come into sharper focus for me while writing is how slept on the city is for young international travellers, compared to your Tokyos and Seouls, and I’m very much here for Shanghai landing on more radars. It feels inevitable, even if you’re only weighing the critical mass of new museums, Harmays (the local beauty chain), and Pop Marts (see: Labubu soft power)—not to mention all the longstanding tea culture, cheongsam shopping, and mean line-up of some of China’s most delicious dumplings and noodles (a compliment not given lightly by a Cantonese girl). Excluding the ‘expat in China’ posting, I’m only really seeing Asian creators share Shanghai travel content on my feeds, but I’d put good money on that changing in the next year or two.

Around the Bund and People's Park.