Helen & Bill from Gibson Hill

French Concession

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Shanghai, Nanjing RoadShanghai buildingsShanghai overpassShanghai alley Shanghai treesShanghai BreweryWe wandered over to Hengshan Road in the French Concession yesterday, mostly because it’s home to the Shanghai Brewery. It was a long walk, through many types of neighborhoods. First past People’s Park near our hotel, then down Nanjing Road which is a big shopping district. We were confronted quite a few times by several people wanting to sell us watches or other goods, shoving a piece of paper with photos in our face. Quite aggressive in spite of our best NYC-don’t-even-think-of-messing-with-me faces.

We decided to get out of the shopping area and headed south on a road full of construction, walled on both sides, but with the contrast of old red brick buildings in disrepair.

We passed by several major highways, and at one there was a pedestrian overpass which afforded a good view of the surrounding area.

There are fascinating alleyways that we glimpse, of a wholly different type of activity than that on the streets we walk down. Like a different world just around the corner.

There is a particular tree we see on many of the streets, which I believe to be Plane trees. There is no foliage at the moment, just the papery bark. There are so many and at such regular intervals they must have special meaning.

We walked along Fuxing Road for a long time until we reached the French Concession, a very European area.

We finally arrived at the corner of Hengshan Road and Dong Ping Road, home of the brewery around 3pm. We had to wander around a couple of hours because it didn’t open until 5pm. We stopped in the gloLondon cafe for a lunch special, Y58 each. We have to mentally calculate the conversion each time, the numbers are so large they seem unreal.

We finally get to the Shanghai Brewery, sit at the bar and order a Northstar IPA, but they were out of IPA. There really wasn’t anything else we wanted to try, so we left. Now what? We got back to Fuxing Road, not sure we were up to the long walk back, but took it one block at a time. We found the Boxing Cat Brewery and stayed for a pint, a very nice TKO IPA, reminiscent of our long time favorite Smuttynose IPA.

After relaxing a bit, we started walking again and found that we were closer to the hotel than we realized. When we got back, we’d been out walking around for about 8 hours. It was good to sit down.