Day 4 - Morning and afternoon of Friday 19 November 2010

I was awake before the wake up call came at 7am and rather than a shower I tried out the separate freestanding bath tub in the glass walled bathroom. I really liked the automatic blind which is controlled inside the bathroom near the tub. It was nice to be able to watch the television in the lounge area through the glass window while relaxing in the hot tub and not just hear it. I ventured down to the restaurant for breakfast at 7.45am. The breakfast buffet provided a large choice of juices, cereals, fruits, cold station, breads, egg station, hot station, pancakes and waffles, dimsum, Japanese and Chinese stations.

We boarded the mini-bus at 8.15am and once again drove the short distance under the Huangpu River to the China International Travel Mart 2010. I rushed into the Mart as soon as I arrived to make the most of the day. I still had three and a half huge halls to cover by our departure time of 1.30pm. I had my running shoe on as I explored the various tourism booths. The quality of the tourism booths was outstanding. Once again there were entertainment performances to see and food to sample. At one of the booths I joined the long queue of people to have my face profile cut from a piece of black paper with scissors. I was ushered to the front of the queue and the clever man cut my face silhouette in 20 seconds. I skipped lunch at the cafeteria again today as I wanted to see as many of the display booths that I could,

I had noticed all the tall cranes next to the Shanghai New International Expo Centre and thought that it was a construction site. I enquired and found out that it was the next exhibition being set up showcasing advances in the construction industry. “Bauma China 2010”, the 5th International Trade Fair for Construction Machinery, Building Material Machines, and Construction Vehicles and Equipment, would be open from 23-26 November in nine of the halls. I also noticed the long line up of trucks with their drivers parked along a major road for several kilometres leading to the Expo Centre. I found out that these had been parked for several days waiting to unload their goods, as there was not enough parking space at the Expo Centre. I read that more than 150,000 visitors from 165 countries attended this year’s Bauma China Exhibition. After China, the top ten countries of origin among the visitors were Korea, India, Japan, Russia, Malaysia, Brazil, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia – in that order.

Attending the Travel Mart and seeing preparations for the Construction Exhibition showed me the two new development areas of China’s rapidly expanding economy in the future – tourism and construction.

As it turned out I was the only person at the mini-bus at 1.30pm for the afternoon tour of Shanghai, as the others from our group had made other arrangements for the afternoon. I was privileged to have Daniel as my own personal tourist guide

We drove to the area of Shanghai known as The French Concession. This area was designated as a home for French traders and business people from 1849 until 1946. It is now an extremely popular busy shopping and dining area for tourists. The tree-lined avenues and their many Tudor mansions in the area still retain an air of the "Paris of the East". The area has unique architecture; which blends European and Chinese style.

Daniel walked with me around many of the areas streets and winding alleys amongst the classical old buildings, art galleries, designer clothing boutiques and trendy cafes. I saw that it is a unique mix of western and eastern, old and new, rich and very rich. We ventured into an old market stall building where the locals come to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and seafood. Much of the seafood was live in tanks. The snakes and eels were still slithering in their tanks. It was interesting to see that scaffolding on building construction and renovation projects was made from bamboo, not steel. After a delightful stroll around the French Concession area it was time once again to board the mini-bus to continue my personalised tour of Shanghai.