Bonsai: I'd love to visit Shanghai someday. Thanks for the travel tips.
I like Shanghai. I don't know your travel budgets, mine are rather low, so if you're's are like mine, you may like some shared tips.
I usually stay in a mid priced hotel in what could be called the centre of Shanghai. Its in Nanjing Lu, a long pedestrian street. Its good for transport as its 5 minutes walk from People square subway station, which is at the intersection of subway lines 1 and 2.
So if you travel in the low cost range, you can catch the Maglev train (about 400km/hr) from Pudong airport to its terminus at Longyang station on subway line 2 and then to People's Square. But if there are two of you, its not much cheaper than a taxi from the airport.
This hotel is the low end of 3 star. Its quite clean, secure and safe.
Its also next door to Shanghai No 1 food store with a good mix of Chinese and western food. You can buy a variety of dried mushrooms, ginseng and sea cucumber, as well as more tempting snacks including fresh fruit, western cakes, asian cakes and sweets, sunflower seeds, nuts, dried fruit, moon cakes and tea, etc. There's a Macdonalds, if you fear asian food (which I'm sure you don't), and up higher there are all sorts of restaurants, and in the side streets you can still buy traditional breakfast foods very cheap.
If you want to just explore Shanghai, the subway network is not quite as large as Tokyo's. but its extensive and getting bigger all the time. And if you want to, you can easily do day train trips to other cities like Suzhou (26 minutes by VFT) and Hangzhou (about 1 hour by VFT) and come back the same day, if you want.
Train timetable Shanghai to Hangzhou - as you can see at certain peak times there is a VFT about every 5-10 minutes that will whisk you the 150 km distance in about 1 hour.
Personally, I think HZ is worth a few days, just sitting around West lake - a very large lake that is now almost surrounded by parklands - and 'people watching is entertaining.' When Marco Polo visited HZ, he described it as the most beautiful city in the world. It suffered during the 100 year Chinese decline, but is now surging back. And Suzhou has many beautiful gardens and a great museum, that includes a palace used by the Taiping Christians during their nearly successful rebellion against the Qing.
Nanjing is a 2 hour trip by VFT, so stay there a couple of nights, if you want to see it
If you decide to make that trip, hope you have a great time!
