Shanghai Urban Planning Museum

As a resident of a city, people tend to miss visiting the tourist attractions. As temporary residents, we piled on the attractions for the first few months. But as we began to settle in, fall into a routine, and make friends within our neighborhood, our touristing slowed down dramatically. These days, we're more likely to spend a morning playing with friends or to spend an afternoon at the playground or the pool.

This morning, the weather predicted a typhoon. Supposed to hit Shanghai last night by 6:00pm, we were expecting forbidding weather all day today. The wind is wild enough that we've emptied our balconies, but we've not seen a drop of rain today. Still, in anticipation of the bad weather, we decided to spend the day indoors. And what better way to entertain a family indoors than to head toward a museum?

We sent my parents to the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum while they were in town, and they reported that it was probably more interesting to residents of the city. No doubt this is true.

The first floor showed a model of the Bund - one of Shanghai's most vaunted tourist sites, the city plans to spruce up the walkways and parkland. As people who have walked and watched the Bund regularly, seeing the planned changes was interesting.

The second floor was devoted to Expo 2010. They displayed models of key buildings, all unique and fun to see. The captions were entirely in Chinese, so we breezed through this section, stopping only at the promotional video. But this I loved. A 5 minute video displaying the most beautiful sites in China, alonside our well-known sites in Shanghai accompanied by children singing and dancing. I'm a sucker for dramatic music and this video made me itch to travel more through this striking country.

The third floor was why we went, though. A huge model of a large swath of the city lie in the center of the room. A raised path circled the entire model, which our girls loved to wander and climb, leaving Dave and I plenty of time to figure out what changes Shanghai has planned for our neighborhood and how the twisting river lays out in this city. The model is impressive, although certainly moreso for people who can identify many landmarks. Along the walls was a display on Lujiazui - our neighborhood in Pudong. Pudong is essentially the portion of the city of Shanghai that lies east of the river, and nearly all development here has happened since 1990. The museum posted a series of pictures taken from the Pearl Tower, one each year since 1991. The changes were dramatic, and rather mind-boggling.

We found the museum quite interesting, and well worth the 30RMB entrance fee. Our children loved the open spaces, the stairs around the models, and pushing buttons which made things light-up.