Thursday Doors: Xintiandi, Shanghai

Last summer I took my first trip to Asia with my family. Our itinerary was as follows: South Korea (Seoul), China (Beijing, Xi’an, Hong Kong, Shanghai), and finally Japan (Tokyo). I find travel blogging to be challenging without some guiding or organizing principle to follow, so I have been blogging about this trip periodically and showing pictures from it in my weekly photo challenge blogs, especially Thursday Doors. I don’t have any new doors this week, so I’m continuing with the trip.

These doors are from the Xintiandi area of Shanghai, an affluent car-free shopping, eating, and entertainment district.

The area used to have shikumen stone houses with rows of apartments where families lived in small spaces. It still has many of these, but some of them have been converted into upscale shops, bars, and restaurants. The remaining apartments are very expensive to live in.

We were surprised to find a German restaurant in Shanghai (we didn’t eat there, not with all the great Chinese food available):

And some of the doors were adorned with animal sculptures:

Big cat

Butterfly

Xintiandi is also the location of the site of the first congress of the Communist Party of China, and there is a museum commemorating this.

We didn’t have great weather in Shanghai, but our umbrellas worked and it wasn’t cold. After strolling around Xintiandi, we went to the Bund, which will be the subject of another Thursday Doors post.

Thursday doors is a weekly feature in which door lovers share their pictures from doors all around the world. Stop by Norm 2.0’s blog to say hello and see some of the others.