Day and night in the City of Lights (of the east)

Shanghai is often compared with Paris, and it's not hard to see why:
the Pujong riverfront is home to the Bund, a legacy of colonialism and
forced Western trade deals after the Opium Wars. That side of the
river features the columned facades you'd encounter in many European
cities (or wannabes). The other bank, pictured here, expresses more of
Shanghai's distinctiveness: from the unfathomable pace of development
(the area was farmland in 1990, but now makes Minneapolis' downtown
look like a model train set, with not one but three of the world's
tallest buildings (the last of which is still under construction), to
the range of utilitarian and outrageous pleasure craft plying the
Pujong's waters, to the ever-present smog that results, to the
cacophony of eye-catching lights and signs. (It's worth mentioning
that one of those giant buildings bears more than a passing
resemblance to the Eiffel Tower, and it too is an antenna for wireless
communication.)

Any concerns I had about being able to communicate with the locals
have been completely allayed, at least while I'm here. Every hundredth
or so person you meet (there are 20 million here during the day, so it
happens often) speaks English at least as well as I do, and yet is
eager to continue practicing, and so will strike up a conversation
with, "welcome! Where are you from?" This morning, after having my
morning tea in a bamboo grove with many shirtless, smoking, conversing
old men (yeah, there's more to that story), I was greeted by a tiny
elderly woman with a smile as big as her face, who stepped away from
her ballroom dancing (one variant of the prevalent morning tai chi
sessions) to meet me, then personally escorted me blocks and blocks to
show me her favorite area nearby to get Chinese-style breakfast (which
turned out to be an open-air market blocks long in which it's quite
possible I was the only whitey).

Not an hour later, sitting in a park preparing for a plunge into
museum-land, I met three students from Qingdao (home of the
eponymous but poorly transliterated Tsingtao beer). Park
conversation led to tea, which led to lunch, with led to a day-long
adventure criss-crossing the city with the most gracious tour guides
cum new friends you could ever want to meet.

Suffice it to say, the place is enchanting, the people are charming
and my feet are killing me. Just what I'd hoped.