For those of you who might be interested in typical Shanghai scenery I took a few pics from my taxi along the way home today from getting my haircut.
As we made our way through an intersection I snapped this pic of another taxi. The most popular (by far) model of taxi is made by VW. These VW’s are made in China as VW has had a (joint venture?) plant here for a long time. Taxi’s in Shanghai are usually pretty clean and quite cheap.
This is a pic of the backside of what is now an exhibition center. You can see the Chinese flag flying above the building.
The bus is a very popular form of mass transit here. I haven’t ridden one in Shanghai but they look pretty good and I know they are relatively cheap. Some are air-conditioned (some not).
The black car parked on the street is a Buick. Like the VW this is actually made right here in China. This style of car is very popular as a company car and a lot of business people use them and have a driver. Having a car and driver is certainly more expensive than driving yourself, but still a lot a cheaper relatively speaking than it would be in many western countries.
This is what I would call a typical local storefront. Some boxes on the street. A little disorganized looking. But the prices will certainly be lower than if you went shopping for the same kind of stuff at a western style supermarket.
The trip home took about 15 minutes (not much traffic today) and cost about 15 RMB. That’s about US $2.